Knockouts High and Low

Without self-restraint, we slip toward barbarism. 

By Mark Steyn

On November 22, 1963, two other notable men died, and got relegated to the foot of page 37 — the British authors C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Lewis endures because of the Narnia books (and films), but there’s a lot more in the back of his wardrobe. In his book The Abolition of Man, he writes of “men without chests” — the chest being “the indispensable liaison” between the head and the gut, between “cerebral man” and “visceral man.” In the chest beat what Lewis calls “the trained emotions.” Without them there is no honor or virtue, but only “intellect” and/or “appetite.”

Speaking of appetite, have you played the “Knockout” game yet? Groups of black youths roam the streets looking for a solitary pedestrian, preferably white (hence the alternate name “polar-bearing”) but Asian or Hispanic will do. The trick is to knock him to the ground with a single punch. There’s a virtually limitless supply of targets: In New York, a 78-year-old woman was selected, and went down nice and easy, as near-octogenarian biddies tend to when sucker-punched. But, when you’re really rockin’, you can not only floor the unsuspecting sucker but kill him: That’s what happened to 46-year-old Ralph Santiago of Hoboken, N.J., whose head was slammed into an iron fence, whereupon he slumped to the sidewalk with his neck broken. And anyway the one-punch rule is flexible: In upstate New York, a 13-year-old boy socked 51-year-old Michael Daniels but with insufficient juice to down him. So his buddy threw a bonus punch, and the guy died from cerebral bleeding. Widely available video exists of almost all Knockout incidents, since the really cool thing is to have your buddies film it and upload it to YouTube. And it’s so simple to do in an age when every moronic savage has his own “smart phone.”

There’s no economic motive. The 78-year-old in New York was laden with bags from department stores, but none were touched. You slug an elderly widow not for the 50 bucks in her purse but for the satisfaction of seeing her hit the pavement. In response, some commentators are calling for these attacks to be recategorized: As things stand, if white youths target a black guy it’s a hate crime, but vice versa is merely common assault. I doubt this would make very much difference. “No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous,” wrote Lewis — and, likewise, no law can prevent a thug punching an old lady to the ground if the thug is minded to. “A society’s first line of defense is not the law but customs, traditions, and moral values,” wrote Professor Walter Williams a few years ago. “They include important thou-shalt-nots such as shalt not murder, shalt not steal, shalt not lie and cheat, but they also include all those courtesies one might call ladylike and gentlemanly conduct. Policemen and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct.”

Restraint is an unfashionable concept these day, but it is the indispensable feature of civilized society. To paraphrase my compatriot George Jonas, punching a spinster’s lights out isn’t wrong because it’s illegal, it’s illegal because it’s wrong. But, in a world without restraints, what’s to stop you? If a certain percentage of your population feels no moral revulsion at randomly pulverizing fellow citizens for sport, a million laws will avail you naught: The societal safety lock is off.

That’s “visceral man.” What about Lewis’s “cerebral man”? In free nations, self-restraint is required not only of the underclass but of the rulers, too. Harry Reid is an unlikely gang leader, but, for a furtive little rodent, he landed a knockout punch on America’s governing norms. Like the lil’ old lady, Mitch McConnell never saw it coming. One minute, the time-honored practice that judicial appointments required supermajorities was there; the next, it was lying on the ground dead. Yes, yes, I know Senate procedural rules aren’t quite as gripping as “polar-bearing.” But, as I said, a free society requires self-restraint at all levels. Forget the merits of Reid’s move to simple majority rule, and simply consider how he did it.

As a “continuing body” the Senate’s procedures are supposed to remain in force unless a two-thirds supermajority votes to change them. In this case, a 52–48 all-Democrat majority voted to change the rules, and so the rules have been changed. After all, who’s gonna stop Harry Reid? The Senate pageboys? Legislative majorities are here today and gone tomorrow, but legislative mechanisms are supposed to be here today and here tomorrow and here next year. If a transient party majority can change the rules on a single, sudden, party-line vote, then there are no rules. The rules are simply what today’s rulers say they are. After all, banana republics and dictatorships pass their own rules, too — to deny opposition politicians access to airtime, or extend their terms by another two or three years, or whatever takes their fancy.

As noted last week, the president knows no restraints either. He has always indicated a certain impatience with the “checks and balances” — “I’m not going to wait for Congress” has long been a routine applause line on the Obama ’prompter. From unilaterally suspending the laws of others (such as immigration), he has advanced to unilaterally suspending his own. So, for passing political convenience, he issued his proclamation of temporary amnesty for the millions of health plans he himself rendered illegal. The law is applied according to whim, which means there is no law. Four years ago, polls showed no popular support for anything as transformative as Obamacare. But, through procedural flimflam, lameduck-session legerdemain, threats to “deem” it to have already passed, and votes for a law whose final version was not only unread by legislators but was literally unreadable (in the sense that it had not yet rolled off the photocopier), through all that and more, the Democrats rammed it down the throats of the American people anyway: Yes, we can! Brazen and unrestrained, Obama and Reid are also, in Lewis’s phrase, “men without chests.” Cleverness, unmoored from Lewis’s chestly virtue of honor, has reduced them to mere tricksters and deceivers. So the president lied about his law for four years, and now lies about his lies.

A government that lies to its own citizens should command no respect. To accord them any is to make oneself complicit in their lies, which is unbecoming to a free people.

Which brings us to that other death of November 22: Aldous Huxley. “Don’t you want to be free and men?” rages a dissenting voice. “Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?” Gee, he sounds like a talk-radio guy demanding to know where the outrage is. Written in 1931, Brave New World isn’t as famous a dystopia as Orwell’s 1984 — because it posits tyranny not as “a boot stamping on a human face” but as a soft, beguiling caress of a human face, a land in which enslavement takes the form of round-the-clock sensory gratification: drugs, sex without love, consumer trinkets, sensory distractions . . . Crazy, huh? Like that’d ever happen.

One final anniversary thought: In his novel That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis gives his fictional bureaucracy the acronym NICE — the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments. A few years ago, the British government dusted it off for real — the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. It performs cost-benefit analyses of medical treatment and patient care — i.e., NICE is a euphemism for “death panel.” After January 1, when his victims start getting turned away from pharmacies and doctors, maybe Obama could relaunch the website as Nice.gov.

SoRo's Blue Period

Harry Reid’s Nuclear Hypocrisy

By Roger Pilon

Harry Reid is set to “go nuclear.” He wants to end the filibuster as it applies to appellate court nominations — not by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, as Senate rules require, but by a simple majority. And given the short memories now in evidence, he may just succeed.

On Monday, for the third time in less than a month, Senate Republicans filibustered an Obama nominee to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. That’s the court that’s checked the president more than once, as when it said he couldn’t make “recess appointments” when the Senate wasn’t in recess. So in a Tuesday closed-door lunch, Reid moved closer to ending the practice, and it’s reported he picked up crucial support from California Democratic senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer along with Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy among others.

The hypocrisy here should not go unnoticed. Although the filibuster for legislation has a long history, prior to 2003 it was seldom used to block executive-branch nominations — and appellate-court nominees in particular. In fact, Democrats themselves began using it this way in the 108th Congress, after they lost the Senate in the 2002 midterm elections. Here’s the backstory.

Start with Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court’s December 2000 decision that effectively decided the presidential outcome, creating a firestorm among Democrats, especially among the legal professoriate. On January 13, 2001, for example, 554 professors from 120 law schools took out a full-page ad in the New York Times condemning the Court’s majority for having acted not as judges but as “political proponents for candidate Bush.” And at a Democratic retreat a month later Yale’s Bruce Ackerman urged members not to confirm a single Bush nominee for the Supreme Court until after the 2004 elections.

Democrats got their break in May when Vermont senator James Jeffords left the Republican party. That switched control of the Senate to the Democrats, who immediately turned their attention to the eleven appellate court nominees then before the Senate Judiciary Committee, two of them Democrats — a gesture from Bush. Those two were immediately confirmed. The rest would not even get hearings. Instead, Democrats began calling for “litmus tests” — explicit demands that nominees state their views on everything from abortion to affirmative action to Congress’s unquestioned power to regulate anything and everything.

But the near lock-down on appellate-court nominations did not end with the 2002 midterm elections, which switched control of the Senate back to the Republicans. It was then that Senate Democrats began the unprecedented filibustering of appellate-court nominations. The most egregious case was that of Miguel Estrada, whose life story was pure American dream. First nominated by President Bush in May 2001, Estrada finally withdrew his name from further consideration some 27 months later, after seven failed cloture votes in the next, 108th Congress.

Things came to a head early in the 109th Congress when Republicans themselves, still in control of the Senate, threatened finally to “go nuclear” — to end the appellate-court filibusters Democrats had introduced only in the previous Congress. That was headed off when the bipartisan “Gang of 14” reached a compromise: Democrats would filibuster nominees only in “extraordinary circumstances,” they agreed, and Republicans would not use the nuclear option. That compromise held for the rest of the 109th Congress — though not without difficulties — but it became moot after Democrats regained control of the Senate following the 2006 midterm elections since they no longer needed to filibuster Bush nominees.

In sum, after the 2000 election was decided, Senate Democrats sat on their hands for two years as Bush appellate-court nominees twisted in the wind. In the minority after the 2002 elections, those Democrats then initiated the filibuster for many of Bush’s nominees. Only after the 2005 Gang of 14 compromise was imposed did things settle down. And after the 2006 elections, Democrats no longer needed to filibuster.

So is the Republican use of the filibuster today simply fair turn-around — with Democrats in no position to complain when Republicans use tactics they themselves introduced? If so, that would be enough to illustrate the hypocrisy of today’s Democratic protests. But that’s not what’s at issue here. In the D.C. Circuit matter, which has driven Senator Reid to the nuclear option, Republicans are not raising ideological objections to Obama’s nominees — as Democrats did when they filibustered Bush’s picks. Their objection, rather, is that these judges are not needed, because the workload of the court is so light. In fact, speaking of hypocrisy, Democrats, in the minority in the 109th Congress, used that very rationale to urge Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter in a July 2006 letter not to confirm any additional Bush nominees to the D.C. Circuit — and none was confirmed after that letter from Senators Leahy, Feinstein, Schumer, and Durbin was sent, all of whom are still on the committee. Yet now, when the court’s workload is even lighter, Democrats cry foul when Republicans point that out.

In fact, look at the numbers from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. In 2006, written decisions per active judge had declined by 17 percent since 1997. Since 2006 they have declined another 27 percent. In 2006, the total number of appeals filed had declined by 10 percent since 1997. Since 2006 they have declined another 18 percent. The Administrative Office ranks the twelve circuits using various caseload benchmarks: 2013 is the 17th straight year that the office has ranked the D.C. Circuit last on both appeals being filed and appeals being terminated. There simply is no need for more judges on the D.C. Circuit when those there now do not have enough to do — unless, of course, the aim is to have a bench more sympathetic to rule by presidential diktat, which may be precisely why Senator Reid wants to go nuclear.

The 'Sesame Street' Presidency

'We Tried Our Best' and 'I'm Sorry' Aren't Quick Fixes for Every Problem

 

By Ken Wheaton

Imagine you've tuned in to one of those classic "Sesame Street" episodes. Not one of those YouTube videos in which they spoof such child-friendly material as "Homeland" and "Breaking Bad," but one in which the younger monsters have been disturbed by something intense. So one of the human adults, Gordon perhaps, arrives at the scene to explain things in very simple language -- as one would to children who might have a hard time grasping complex, abstract concepts.

Now, imagine that after Gordon finishes explaining that sometimes bad things happen to good people, Abby and Zoe, after looking at each other for a moment, turned to Gordon and said, "Are you kidding me with this bullshit?"

This is, in essence, what's happened with the Obama administration's laughable attempts to explain away the many problems it's experienced with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. It's crisis communications via "Sesame Street."

That's not to say that Obama himself is a "Sesame Street" president. While there is something childish in his hopeful overtures to Iran, it's hard to conceive of Grover ordering drone strikes on Oscar the Grouch or Big Bird tapping Cookie Monster's phone.

But I do get the distinct impression, based on his communication strategy, that he thinks he's presiding over a country full of "Sesame Street" characters. And he's Gordon. He shows up, says, "Let me be clear," then walks off the stage -- the show's over before anyone starts asking really pesky questions.

So when Healthcare.gov imploded and the commotion didn't die down after a few days, Obama showed up in the Rose Garden to tell us that bad things sometimes happen and that he was just as mad as the rest of us. Actually, he was even madder than the rest of us. "Nobody is madder than me about the fact that the website isn't working as well as it should," he said. Then he promised to fix it with something called a "tech surge." So don't worry your silly little heads, kids, go off now and tickle Elmo or something, Luis is on the job.

But here's Obama's problem -- aside from the fact that the "adult" in this situation seemingly learned about these problems at the same time we did. Suddenly, Americans were no longer Elmo and Grover. They weren't even Oscar the Grouch. They'd jumped to "The Muppet Show" and gone all Waldorf and Statler on Obama.

Which might explain why there was something almost petulant about follow-up communications. Listen, Obama seemed to be saying, we tried our best. Isn't that good enough for you? No? Well, then we're sorry. Now, are you happy? No? And then they rolled out The Count to further explain the massive successes of the plan, but poor guy couldn't seem to count past 100. 

Just words

 A "Sesame Street" communications strategy can only go so far. It only works when you're preaching to the converted or when you're dealing with something so big as to be almost insurmountable, like peace in the Middle East. Too much sugar-coating and hand-holding might sound like outright lying.

And when you're dealing with a billion-dollar segment of the economy that touches on a tangible, everyday product, one that literally is life and death for some people, "We're trying our best" are just words. People want practical, actual solutions. They want basic competence. And failing all of that, they want someone to pay.

Or, put another way, we are little monsters -- just not the cute, furry ones from "Sesame Street." Sometimes, we want blood. Why? Because had any of us screwed up a project of this scope at our jobs, we'd be just another one of those unemployment figures by the end of the day.

What would an anti-"Sesame Street" communications approach look like? For starters, it could quit acting like a spoiled child caught in the act when it's, well, caught in the act. And it could quit speaking down to Americans like they're gullible 6-year-olds (even if, when it comes to politics, we are just like gullible 6-year-olds).

Perhaps it could embrace a tactic from Obama the Campaign -- instead of Obama the Presidency: throwing people under the bus, quickly and mercilessly. That might mean firing a whole host of friends who were awarded contracts to build Healthcare.gov. And even that inner circle of people tasked with building a reality-deflecting force field around the president (this model's even better than his predecessor's!) And, last but not least, Kathleen Sebelius. She is undoubtedly a nice person who means well. But the buck has to stop somewhere. And it's likely a lot more dignified than trotting her out on "The Daily Show" and letting her squirm while reality trumps talking points.

And all the little monsters can sing "The Wheels on the Bus" while we wait.

Obama's Slow Learning Curve

By Peter Berkowitz

Controversy continues to rage about President Obama's announcement at a Nov. 14 press conference that his administration would not compel insurance companies to cancel policies they had changed since passage of the Affordable Care Act and which did not conform to its numerous, costly, and multi-layered requirements.

Much of the controversy concerns the propriety of the president’s declining to enforce a duly enacted law (bearing his signature) whose constitutionality he does not doubt, and whether insurance companies will be able to abruptly change course after three years of preparing to comply with their elaborate and interwoven legal obligations under Obamacare.

But perhaps the president’s most astonishing statement involved an insouciant confession of ignorance. Returning to a common but under-appreciated motif of his presidency, Obama remarked: “What we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.”

What deficiency of Obama’s education and of the education of those who surround him accounts for administration officials not knowing what is perfectly well-known to most ordinary Americans?

This discovery that purchasing health insurance is complex is just the most recent of the rather stunning lessons that Obama professes to have learned on the job about how the world really works.

In January 2010, in a Time magazine interview in which he was asked about the setbacks to his ambitious attempt to reach a final peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, he remarked, “I think that we overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their politics ran contrary to that.”

The problem, the president acknowledged, was that he and his team had failed to understand the domestic challenges faced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: “I think it is absolutely true that what we did this year didn't produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted, and if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high.”

In June 2011, Obama again acknowledged that he had based a defining policy -- the $830 billion stimulus package that he sold to the nation in the first month of his presidency as designed to take advantage of “shovel-ready” jobs -- on false expectations. With unemployment at 9.1 percent and in the 27th consecutive month in which it had not fallen below 8.9 percent, he told his Jobs and Competitiveness Council meeting in Durham, N.C., that “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.”

On Nov. 4 of this year -- five weeks after the calamitous online launch of the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplaces, almost five years into his presidency and less than two weeks before he would reveal that the loss of insurance coverage by millions of Americans taught him that buying coverage was complicated -- Obama said to the Affordable Care Act Coalition Partners and Supporters in Washington, D.C., “Now, let's face it, a lot of us didn't realize that passing the law was the easy part.”

Contrary to the president’s breezy attitude suggesting that these drastic miscalculations were not knowable in advance, we know that all were foreseeable because all were perspicaciously foreseen by critics from the beginning. (The only possible exception is the staggeringly inept rollout of the HealthCare.gov website, the magnitude of which caught even the president’s toughest critics off guard.)

It’s a cliché that democracy is messy and difficult; it’s a truism that politics demands the cutting of deals and the hammering out of trade-offs; it’s common knowledge that implementing public policy and conducting diplomacy involve unforeseen obstacles and intricate maneuvering that are hard to grasp from the outside.

Yet all this keeps catching Obama and his aides by surprise. Team Obama’s surprise, however, is really not all that surprising.

The president and the officials around him are the product of the same progressive version of higher education that simultaneously excises politics from the study of government and public policy while politicizing education. This higher education denigrates experience; exalts rational administration; reveres abstract moral reasoning; confidently counts on the mainstream press to play for the progressive political team; accords to words fabulous abilities to remake reality; and believes itself to speak for the people while haughtily despising their way of life.

The education President Obama received at Columbia University and Harvard Law School -- and delivered to others as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School -- encourages the fantasy of a political world subject to almost limitless manipulation by clever and well-orchestrated images. This explains why the harsh exigencies and intractable forces of politics keep stunning the president, each new time as if it were the very first.

How might higher education be reformed to produce political leaders more familiar with how the world really works, more alive to the realities of social and political life and better able to discuss them honestly with the American people?

Our colleges and universities should offer, and requires students to take, more courses in political, diplomatic, and military history. They should shift the emphasis in moral education from abstract reasoning and arcane hypothetical dilemmas to the study of the virtues necessary to exercise rights and fulfill responsibilities. They should cease to teach that left-liberalism is the only political orientation a decent person could embrace. And they should give pride of place in the curriculum to study of the American constitutional tradition, which teaches, among other things, that government’s competence and purview are limited and that nothing in politics can succeed without adjustment, balancing, and calibration.

Old-fashioned liberal education cannot prevent the forming of delusions about a world beyond politics. But it is vastly to be preferred to the new-fangled version that encourages those delusions.

'Toons of the Day: Underwater

http://tinyurl.com/l9e8syj

CBS Poll: 84% of DEMOCRATS Say Obamacare Should Be Changed Or Repealed…

From the new CBS poll.

Top Dem Aide: Obama “More Unpopular” Than George W. Bush With Congressional Democrats…

h/t Weasel Zippers



http://tinyurl.com/qbt8ruy

The Obamacare Crisis

 

By Thomas B Edsall

Health care as a necessity comes only after food, shelter and income security. The mismanagement of the website HealthCare.gov and the cancellation of millions of policies pushes an underlying question out into the open: is the federal government capable of managing the provision of a fundamental service through an extraordinarily complex system?

This system requires coordination of over 288 policy options (an average of eight insurers are competing for business in 36 states), each with three or more levels of coverage, while simultaneously calculating beneficiary income, tax credit eligibility, subsidy levels, deductibles, not to mention protecting applicant privacy, insuring web security, and managing a host of other data points.

A malfunction at any one of these junctures could prove fatal.

In enacting the Affordable Care Act, President Obama and his Democratic supporters in Congress took on the task of creating a set of information technologies that has to interconnect with the I.R.S.; the Departments of Labor, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security; the Social Security Administration; state governments; insurers; employers; hospitals; and practitioners in the private sector.

Robert Charette, president of the ITABHI Corporation — a tech firm specializing in risk management — describes the problems:

“HealthCare.gov is a huge system of systems and it’s extremely difficult to manage these things even in the best of times. That’s mostly because you have so many different interfaces with so many different assumptions controlling how the individual systems operate. And they’re rarely built with enough flexibility to be used by lots of other systems. If you take a look at the IRS systems, the Department of Homeland Security systems, or any of the other ones we’re talking about, they were never created to be connected to something like HealthCare.gov.”

The seven million people officials initially estimated would sign up for the Obamacare insurance exchanges this year are putting their well-being and that of their families in the hands of government bureaucracies armed with demonstrably inadequate technological expertise.

The chaos surrounding efforts to activate HealthCare.gov reinforces a key conservative meme: that whatever the test is, government will fail it. Insofar as voters experience their interaction with government as frustrating and unreliable, the brunt of political damage will hit Democrats, both as the party of government and as the party of Obamacare.

Cumulatively, recent developments surrounding the rollout of Obamacare strengthen the most damaging conservative portrayals of liberalism and of big government – that on one hand government is too much a part of our lives, too invasive, too big, too scary, too regulatory, too in your face, and on the other hand it is incompetent, bureaucratic and expropriatory.

In addition, the Affordable Care Act can be construed as a transfer of benefits from Medicare, which serves an overwhelmingly white population of the elderly – 77 percent of recipients are white — to Obamacare, which will serve a population that is 54.7 percent minority.  Over 10 years, the Affordable Care Act cuts $455 billion from the Medicare budget in order to help pay for Obamacare.

Those who think that a critical mass of white voters has moved past its resistance to programs shifting tax dollars and other resources from the middle class to poorer minorities merely need to look at the election of 2010, which demonstrated how readily this resistance can be used politically. The passage of the A.C.A. that year forced such issues to the fore, and Republicans swept the House and state houses across the country. The program’s current difficulties have the clear potential to replay events of 2010 in 2014 and possibly 2016.

The dysfunctional A.C.A. portal is not the only liability for Obamacare. 

In some states, insurance companies operating through new health care state exchanges are excluding key hospitals from coverage. In New Hampshire, for example, as Jonathan Weisman of the Times reported, there is one provider, Anthem Blue Cross, and it has excluded 10 of the state’s 26 hospitals from participation in the company’s coverage.

Responding to an email, Drew Altman, the president and C.E.O. of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, wrote of the A.C.A.:

“I think the bottom line here is that the ‘winners’ greatly outnumber the ‘losers’ in general and in the individual market in Obamacare, but the media and political math is different from the actual math. A significant minority of ‘losers’ or self-perceived losers and a few high profile bad outcomes (possibly NH) are more than enough to cause real political problems.”

According to Robert J. Blendon, a professor at Harvard’s School of Public Health, the New Hampshire type of problem is more endemic:

“This is the next big political story. The president promised people they could keep their doctor and implicitly their hospital. A number of state exchanges are like New Hampshire in that they are offering what are called narrow network plans. Some of these plans exclude coverage at children’s hospitals as well, which means some parents with sick children will have to change their source of care. This too is not what was promised.”

In the state of Washington, the Seattle Children’s Hospital was initially left off the list of approved care providers by five of the seven insurers operating in Kings County through the state exchange, Healthplanfinder. The hospital was forced to sue state officials in order to gain eligibility.

Obama and his party's elected officials not only have the elections of 2014 and 2016 to worry about, but also the future prospects of the liberal agenda writ large, which had appeared to be slowly gaining momentum before the Obamacare portal snafu.

The degree of political damage inflicted so far is reflected in this RealClearPolitics graph (Figure 1) of voter responses to the question: “If the election for the U.S. House of Representatives were being held today, would you vote for the Republican candidate or for the Democratic candidate in your district?” 

 

The graph shows a collapse in Democratic voting intention. In effect, all the gains Democrats made during the period Republicans shut down the government and demanded an end to Obamacare have been lost since Obamacare was actually launched.

More granular analysis of Democratic losses in recent weeks can be found by comparing two Quinnipiac polls, the first released on Oct. 1, 2013 when Democrats had a nine point, 43-34, advantage on the generic voting question; and the second released on Nov. 13 when the Democratic lead was erased and the parties were tied at 39-39.

The biggest drops were among self-identified independents, who went from slightly favoring Democrats, 32-30, to decisively Republican, 37-26; men, an 11-point shift; voters making less than $50,000, 11 points; and young voters 18-29 who showed the largest shift of all, 24 points. The drop off among lower income and young voters strikes at the heart of the Obama coalition. Voters 65 and over, who had backed Republicans by large margins in 2010, but who favored Democrats 43-37 in the October  poll, were back in the Republican fold, 41-38, by November.

“The redistributive arithmetic of Obamacare’s architecture could never add up,” Steven Hayward, a visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado, wrote in Forbes magazine: “The wonder is that Obama’s political team didn’t see this coming and prepare a pre-emptive strategy for dealing with the inevitable exposure of the duplicity at the heart of Obamacare’s logic.”

David Frum, a right-of-center columnist for the Daily Beast, recently pointed out in an article called “The Obamacare Ripoff,” that Obamacare poses dangers to Democratic support in the middle class.

“The Affordable Care Act was ingeniously designed to deliver benefits to Democratic constituencies and impose costs on Republican ones,” Frum wrote. “The big surprise in the ACA rollout is that this design is going awry. It’s not only plutocrats and one-percenters who will find themselves worse off; not only the comparatively affluent retirees enrolled in Medicare Plus programs.”  These liabilities are becoming apparent in comments from regular voters.

Jennifer Harris, a self-employed lawyer in Fullerton, Calif., was notified that Health Net Inc. has cancelled her $98-a-month policy, and the cheapest plan she can find that meets Obamacare requirements cost $238 a month. In a comment sure to warm the heart of Republican strategists looking for issues to divide the struggling middle class from the poor, Harris told the Los Angeles Times, “It doesn’t seem right to make the middle class pay so much more in order to give health insurance to everybody else.”

In the same L.A. Times story, Deborah Cavallaro, a real estate agent in Westchester, Calif. who faces a 65 percent increase in health coverage costs, said: “All we’ve been hearing the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it.”

“I’m infuriated because I was lied to,” Cavallaro added.

At his press conference on Nov. 14, Obama promised to try to resolve the problems of those facing cancellations, but he indicated that their concerns are not his highest priority:

So we’re going to do everything we can to help the Americans who have received these cancellation notices. But I also want everybody to remember there are still 40 million Americans who don’t have health insurance at all. I’m not going to walk away from 40 million people who have the chance to get health insurance for the first time. And I’m not going to walk away from something that has helped the cost of health care grow at its slowest rate in 50 years.

Obama declared that his goal:

in terms of winning back the confidence of the American people is just to work as hard as I can; identify the problems that we’ve got, make sure that we’re fixing them. Whether it’s a website, whether it is making sure that folks who got these cancellation notices get help, we’re just going to keep on chipping away at this until the job is done.

Obama, and, with him, the Democratic Party, are in a bind, however, because there is no ready solution to the mounting perception of fiasco.

Both legislative and regulatory “fixes” of the cancelled policies problem, which would provide a mechanism for insurance companies to continue existing coverage for a year or more, will have complex and adverse consequences. 

The industry sets rates three months in advance of each year. The rates for 2014 were set last month. If the industry is forced in 2014 to accept smaller profits, or actual losses, because of a government-mandated requirement to continue current policies, it will attempt to make up for lost revenue in 2015 by raising premiums. Providing temporary relief may create an even more severe problem in October 2014 with an election looming.

As Alex MacGillis of the New Republic points out, the fixes:

“raise the likelihood that insurers would be raising rates on the exchange — which came in at relatively competitive levels for 2014, all in all — to much higher levels for 2015. And again, those rates would be announced in October 2014, just before the midterms.” 

Top industry officials have confirmed this point, noting that allowing a generally younger and healthier population to keep its current policies will inevitably result in a sicker and older population signing up for coverage via Obamacare exchanges, which will drive up the costs of providing health care to exchange participants.

Karen Ignagni, the president and C.E.O. of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the trade association for the health insurance industry, issued a statement declaring, “If now fewer younger and healthier people choose to purchase coverage in the exchange, premiums will increase and there will be fewer choices for consumers.”

Jim Donelon, the president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, also released a statement noting that his association “has been clear from the beginning that allowing insurers to have different rules for different policies would be detrimental to the overall market and result in higher premiums.”

Obama has placed himself and his party in what now looks like a zero-sum bind, forcing a choice between inflicting the painful consequences of Obamacare on the electorate now or 11 months from now.

Politicians invariably choose to put off problems when they can. That means most of next year will be taken up by the administration’s struggle to protect the crown jewel of the president’s tenure without letting the roof collapse on his party.

The increasingly complex and technical character of the health care system – complexity which voters recognize, and about which they make implicit and  explicit inferences – is what has turned the disastrous rollout of the HealthCare.gov portal into a ever escalating political crisis. This crisis has in turn generated a pervasive fear that the services provided under the Affordable Care Act, once they are finally in place, will themselves be subject to fatal technical glitches.

An effective health care delivery system that employs an open exchange among 50 states is likely to take years if not decades to complete. It will require that personal and confidential information not be compromised. A nationwide plan that works in the open market will require a vast hardware infrastructure, enough to consist of whole city blocks. Google and Amazon have taken over a decade to successfully deploy such hardware.  And it was Obama himself who promised, in a speech on Sept. 26,  service at an Amazon level:

“Starting on Tuesday, every American can visit HealthCare.gov to find out what’s called the insurance marketplace for your state.  Here in Maryland, I actually think it’s called MarylandHealthConnection.gov. MarylandHealthConnection.gov.  But if you go to HealthCare.gov, you can look and they’ll tell you where to go.  They’ll link to your state.

Now, this is real simple.  It’s a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health insurance plans, side-by-side, the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak —  same way you shop for a TV on Amazon.  You just go on and you start looking, and here are all the options.”

Calming the anxieties raised by events so far will be an exceptionally difficult task.

There is obvious irony in the possibility that technology could bring down the most high-tech president in American history. Is the federal government equipped to take responsibility for a venture of such magnitude and importance?

Technology aside, the stakes could not be higher for the Democratic Party.

The Affordable Care Act “is often compared to Social Security and Medicare but these comparisons are imprecise and misleading,” as Edward Carmines, a political scientist at Indiana University, put it in an email: “The distinctive feature of the new health care law is its redistributive nature, which is mostly absent from Social Security and Medicare.”

Carmines went on, succinctly analyzing the political problem lying at the heart of Obamacare:

“Most of the benefits of the new program will go to the poor and less-well-off and most of the costs will be born by the well off. Neither is true of Medicare or Social Security. When the new law was passed it was hailed by the New York Times as the most redistributive policy in a generation, and they were right. It was not sold as being markedly redistributive, of course, but that is how it was designed and will operate. This does not mean it is a bad policy or doomed to fail. But it does mean that it was bound to be caught up in controversy and heated debate.”

Sorry, Dems, Republicans Haven't Scared Young Invincibles From Enrolling In Obamacare. They Are Acting In Their Own Self Interests.

New on the Obamacare Truther agenda: Republicans are responsible for young voters not signing up in droves for Obamacare because they have skeered them or something.  From Dana Milibank: 

The Republicans’ scary-movie strategy has some logic to it: If they can frighten young and healthy people from joining the health-care exchanges, the exchanges will become expensive and unmanageable. This is sabotage, plain and simple — much like the refusal by red-state governors to participate in setting up the exchanges in the first place. But those sabotaging the new law should be careful what they wish for: Instead of killing the law, they are likely to make it more expensive to taxpayers. Their efforts could have the effect of turning Obamacare, which relies on private insurance and the free market, into just the sort of big-government entitlement Republicans were worried about in the first place.

If they succeed in scaring people away, the ones who join exchanges are likely to be older and sicker, making the insurance pool costlier to insurers. As Larry Levitt, a senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, explained to me, if costs are more than 3 percent higher than anticipated in the first few years of Obamacare, the federal government will have to pick up at least half of the additional expense.

If the health-care exchanges continued to attract only the elderly and the sick in future years, premiums would rise and the only people likely to remain in the program will be those who qualify for the federal subsidies, which would increase sharply because individual contributions are limited to a percentage of the recipient’s income.

“The more successful opponents are at discouraging young and healthy people from enrolling, the bigger share of the cost the federal government will end up covering,” Levitt said. “The implication of encouraging young and healthy people to sit on the sidelines is that costs are shifted to the federal government.”

No, young consumers have not been frightened of Obamacare.  They are correctly frightened by what Obamacare will do to their wallets, especially in Obama's economy.

Obamacare is based on a completely counterintuitive premise:  Young adults will want to purchase more insurance than they need and pay much more than they did under the old system for healthcare they will not use in order to keep the premiums for older people and those with preexisting conditions.

This was never going to happen.

As I have explained to many a Prog, the community rating requirement in Obamacare prohibits insurance companies from charging older and sicker people more than 3 times what they bill their healthy customers.  Keep in mind that the Young Invincibles consume $1 in healthcare whilst people in their 60s, for example, consume $6.  Thus, under Obamacare, those that consume $6 in healthcare can be charged no more than three times that those that consume only $1.  Since insurance companies would quickly go out of business if they continued to charge the Young Invincibles $1 and cut those who consume $6 in healthcare per year only $3.

Everyone with any sense understood this.  They also realised what the result would be.  Of course the Young Invincibles were going to have to pay more so that the older and sicker, including those with preexisting conditions, could pay less. 

The problem with this scheme, however, is that is disregards human behaviour.  It may work in theory, but it doesn't work in practise.  Young people are not going to rush out to spend their few dollars to subsidise people, who are generally better off than they are.  Obamacare was ALWAYS going to increase premiums for a large swath of the American population, including those that work at small businesses, who aren't even subject to the employer mandate.

This is especially true considering the fact that Obamacare doesn't actually attack the main problem with healthcare: the cost...well, outside of Medicare/Medicaid and the IAPB anyway.  Competition would reduce costs, but Obamacare doesn't do that, especially in less populated areas where 'choice and competition' means, as an East German apparatchik might have said, 'you can have the black Trabant or the black Trabant.' In many areas, there is only one carrier.  Even when there are more than one carrier, there is no real competition.

Finally, if I understand the issue correctly, the Obamacare 'subsidies' are actually tax credits, which means that someone entitled to government assistance doesn't receive it until she files her tax return.  This would require the 'subsidised' person to still come up with the full premium - out-of-pocket - before she sees a dime.  If a person couldn't afford for a 'substandard' policy before Obamacare, how will she be able to pay the premiums on an Obamacare-compliant policy?  In other words, if she couldn't make a $150 payment per month, how will she be able to pay a $300 premium even if she gets tax credits?  Obamacare still requires her to come up with $1,800 more per year when she couldn't afford the $1,800 for the pre-Obamacare policy.

How many people, who actually understand all of this, are going to be flocking to purchase health insurance?  Probably a lot less than will be needed for Obamacare to succeed.  Sure, many Americans will purchase health insurance and comply with the mandate, but what else are they supposed to do?  Go without health insurance?  Pay 1% (then 2%, then...) of their income in penalties and roll the bones that they don't get sick?  Even if they do purchase Obamacare insurance policies that doesn't mean that they will come to 'love' Obamacare...no more than people, who are forced to use elevators, come to love elevator music.  They are a captive audience.  Yet, this 'captive audience' will still lack those that cannot afford health insurance.

How does the Obama administration feel about those being priced out of the market?  Just look at what Jay Carney said about the single mom, who Obama cited as an Obamacare 'success' story in his remarks in the Rose Garden a few weeks ago.  She was so excited about getting health insurance...until she found out that she didn't qualify for subsidies.  Now, as before, she cannot afford health insurance and the administration's response is: 'The White House is certainly as sorry as we can be that Jessica can’t afford it, but that the law is still doing plenty of good.'  That isn't exactly a 'success' story and shows the callousness of Obamacare.

Obamacare is predicated on people acting against their own self interests, which is always a disastrous bet to make.  To believe that people will act against their own self interests requires unicorn thinking.