Obamacare's chickens have come home to roost!

David Dayen should have entitled this The Planned Failure of Obamacare Is Now Upon Us. 

The Health Insurance Cost Crisis Is Now Upon Us 

... We should be clear that this premium apocalypse is a function of returning Obamacare subsidies to where they were in the original version of the law. That was poorly designed to target the middle class with bearing the bloat in the health care system, and no work was done on basic health plans or other public options at the state level. (A federal public option was stripped from the legislation by the threat of that exemplary moderate, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, to withhold his support unless it was dropped.) Now, Democrats are effectively warning that a return to their original vision of Obamacare spells doom. (And what we’re really talking about is how much the government should send to private insurance companies, a horribly inefficient way of ensuring health for American citizens.) ... The ACA was seen as a “starter home” that could be built on, and Democrats built on it. It’s Republican neglect that is taking the wrecking ball to it, with all the political fallout on their backs. ...

Yes, Obamacare was the enemy of the middle class, making it "bear the bloat". Communists have always hated the middle class because the middle class stands in the way of the revolution. Obamacare was designed this way on purpose, by Democrats and Obama who were the communists we always said they were. Senator Max Baucus rightly called it what it was, income redistribution.

Premiums have steadily risen along with deductibles, to the point that everyone pays their premium, then pays out of pocket, no one ever reaches their deductible, and the plan never pays anything. Most people never reap any benefit under Obamacare. Now premiums will explode without the subsidies, making dropping it more attractive than ever.

And No, Republicans had no duty to "build" on Obamacare. It was rammed down their throats in the first place. No Republicans ever voted for this goddamn commie boondoggle. 

The best thing which could happen right now is for the millions imprisoned in this system to opt out of it and let Obamacare implode. That would force the Congress back into the corner it was in in 2009.

Not one more penny should be spent to prop up this system which benefits only the insurance companies. Can you say Luigi Mangione?

Obamacare should be repealed, and nothing done to replace it. It would be painful, but it is the only way.

In the aftermath, someone will start to sell real insurance again out of the ashes, and the current greedy bastards of the insurance industry will scramble to follow them as they lose business and market share. That, the capitalist option, is the only public option which makes any sense, but currently that is against the law.

Just repeal it. 

 

 

 

Because the BBB is a GOP Christmas tree of policy-change goodies masquerading as a reconciliation bill

This was taken down pretty early this morning by the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics. I guess the bosses come in a little later than the help. 

This is arguably one of the best discussions of what is really going on that you will find. 

 

The Parliamentarian Comes for the Beautiful Bill

David Dayen, American Prospect

 

A couple dozen provisions have been removed. No ruling yet on the biggest one, which could mean $3.7 trillion in fake ‘savings.’

The estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s tax provisions reflect a cost of $441 billion over ten years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation’s estimate over the weekend. How, you might ask, could the Finance Committee have extended all the Trump tax cuts, expanded some of them, added a bunch of other new tax cuts, made some temporary business tax cuts permanent, and still only cost $441 billion? The trims to clean-energy tax credits and other rollbacks, you would presume, weren’t SO costly that they would nearly wipe out all of the costs!

 

The answer, friends, is a big gimmick known as the current policy baseline. Senate Republicans are claiming that, because the Trump tax cuts are in place now, as current policy, it costs $0 to extend them. An analogy would be if Congress passed a bill to institute Medicare for All for one day, at the cost of $4 to $8 billion, depending on your estimate, and then the next day they passed a bill extending M4A permanently, which would cost … nothing. The same Republicans who would scream bloody murder at that dastardly maneuver are the ones now employing this absurd maneuver.

 

The reality is that the Trump tax cuts, under a current law baseline that compares the policy to the change to current law, really cost $3.76 trillion over ten years. If you add that to the $441 billion estimate, you have a tax section that costs over $4.2 trillion. This is $400 billion higher than the House version that the Freedom Caucus already found intolerable, and that some self-styled Republican budget hawks in the Senate are grumbling about. ...

In most cases, the parliamentarian looks at whether provisions have a purely budgetary purpose, rather than policy dressed up as a budget item. (This is known as the Byrd Rule, after the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd; the process by which the parties debate the provisions and by which a ruling is made is known as the “Byrd bath.”) ...

For context, the House version costs $3.3 trillion over a decade, according to the latest estimates. We’re verging on $4 trillion for the Senate bill—unless the Republicans’ wish to have the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts entered as zero passes muster with the parliamentarian. ...           

Update Wed Jun 25:

Real Clear Politics put this back up in the rotation this morning, lol. 

News flash: He doesn't mean abortion and never mentions it, almost as if killing 1 million unborn every year since the 1970s wasn't the prolegomenon to the violence now everywhere around us

A System That Allows Children to Be Killed

 

David Dayen, American Prospect :

 

We accept the death of children because we accept a politics that enables it.

 

David Dayen thinks Tim Geithner's disobedience of Obama's orders fed the anger at government Trump parlayed into the presidency

Of course, this begs the question whether Obama knew what he was doing, or even wanted to know.

Here in The New Republic:

Every action fit Geithner’s worldview: The financial system must be stabilized at all costs, as the only way to heal the economy so real people benefit. “We do not need to imagine that he was in the pocket of any one bank,” Adam Tooze wrote in the new book Crashed. “It was his commitment to the system that dictated that Citigroup should not be broken up.” ...

Today, some may welcome the internal dissension in the Trump administration. But Geithner’s actions to protect banks from the president he served, and the anger it bred at a “rigged” system, diminished the public’s faith in government intervention and helped install Trump in the White House.

The Tobin Q ratios for Germany and America tell us Elizabeth Warren and David Dayen are wrong

Louis Woodhill, here:

Put simply, a Tobin Q ratio higher than 100% means that a company is creating economic value, and a Tobin Q below 100% means that a company is destroying value.  The most fundamental social responsibility of a company is to add value to the capital it employs, so the most fundamental job responsibility of a corporate CEO is to keep the Tobin Q ratio of the company he or she leads above 100%. 

Writing for The New Republic, progressive David Dayen argues:

“There’s proven evidence that this model of corporate governance [Warren's] can work. “Co- determination,” the term for worker representation on corporate boards, has created a form of capitalism in Germany where workers are far more equitably compensated and decisions are made with an eye toward long-term goals.”

The problem with this argument is that Piketty’s data shows that, since 1995, America’s Tobin Q ratio has averaged more than 100%, while Germany’s Tobin Q ratio has averaged about 55%.  In other words, America’s evil, rapacious corporations are creating economic value, while Germany’s enlightened companies are doing the equivalent of burning 45% of the euros entrusted to them.

Trump support mirrored by the growth of the 1099 worker as corporate greed turns the Buchanan Brigades into Trump's FU Army

From David Dayen in The New Republic here:

But The New York Times’s Neil Irwin might have found an answer [to the anger out there] last week, when he pointed to eye-opening new research from Princeton’s Alan Krueger and Harvard’s Lawrence Katz on Americans in alternative work arrangements, which they defined as “temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers.” This cohort of the workforce grew from 10.1 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent at the end of 2015, representing an increase of 9.4 million workers. That’s all of the growth in the labor market over the past decade. ...  “Angry” voters may simply be angry workers tossed into the Darwinian world of the modern economy, operating without any fallback support from their employers or their government. This was bound to find its way into our politics, but though solutions for these workers exist, nobody is talking about them.

At 8.2 million after 32 contests, the popular vote for Trump alone with 16 states yet to vote is set to surpass 12 million.