Tag: news

If you want your health care, you can
keep banging away on the federal Obamacare exchange website until
you get routed to taxpayer-funded Medicaid. But you might not get
to keep that Medicaid coverage, because you don’t necessarily
qualify, no matter what the nice, if slightly confused, robots at
Healthcare.gov say. But, at least you’ll have plenty of company.
The vast majority of people getting enrolled in coverage through
the website are being signed up for Medicaid. We just don’t yet
know how many of them will actually get covered by that
coverage.

Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute points out in the New York
Post:

The good news, if you want to call it that, is that roughly 1.6
million Americans have enrolled in ObamaCare so far.

The not-so-good news is that 1.46 million of them actually
signed up for Medicaid. If that trend continues, it could bankrupt
both federal and state governments.

That’s no joke! My own Arizona, which has a comparatively lean
and mean version of Medicaid in the form of the Arizona Health Care
Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), has seen costs rise by 98 percent
from 2004 to 2014 (PDF). In Arizona, AHCCCS is only the second
most expensive budget item, while “For most states,” points out
Tanner, “Medicaid is the single-largest cost of government,
crowding out education, transportation and everything else.”

But hold on there! Many of those people being routed to Medicaid
by Healthcare.gov are arriving in the wrong location. Reports

USA Today:

When consumers applying for insurance put their income
information into subsidy calculators on HealthCare.gov — the
exchange handling insurance sales for 36 states — it tells them how
much financial assistance they qualify for or that they are
eligible for Medicaid. If it’s the latter, consumers aren’t able to
obtain subsidies toward the insurance, although they could buy
full-priced plans.

If the Medicaid determination is wrong, consumers should file an
appeal with the federal marketplace, says Department of Health and
Human Services spokeswoman Joanne Peters, but she says she does not
have an estimate on how long that would take.

Brokers are reporting that some of their clients are in
insurance limbo as they wait for the error to be corrected by HHS
or their states so they can reapply.

Jessica Waltman, top lobbyist for the National Association of
Health Underwriters, says she’s heard a number of reports from
around the country of people making as much as $80,000 a year being
told they qualify for Medicaid on HealthCare.gov.

Yeah… That’s a mistake.

Nobody seems entirely sure how much chaos has been created yet.
Basically, officials don’t yet know what they don’t know. But
there’s plenty of uncertainty to go around for state budget
planners as well as people who just want to buy some health
coverage without a hassle.

In our November Reason magazine
feature,
“How to Break an American City,” we highlighted the
dysfunctional fiscal policies driving municipalities into the
poorhouse. I made note of a specific policy in the city charter for
San Bernardino, California, which was approved to enter bankruptcy
earlier this year.

San Bernardino’s charter requires that the city tie the wages of
its public safety employees to the averages of those paid in nearby
cities with similar population sizes. Unfortunately, San Bernardino
is the poorest of those cities, meaning it is legally bound to pay
its police and firefighters much more than its market can bear. As
a result, even while making its case for bankruptcy months ago, the
City Council voted to increase some police salaries.
They did so again just last week.

Courtesy of CalPensions and Public CEO:

Following the city charter, a reluctant San Bernardino city
council last week approved a police pay raise costing about $1
million, the second $1 million police salary increase since the
city filed for bankruptcy last year.

The four council members who voted for the 3 percent pay hike
all criticized a city charter provision linking San Bernardino to
the average police pay in 10 other cities, most much wealthier with
higher per-capita income.

When a pay hike was approved last March, the city
attorney, James Penman, and a councilman, Robert Jenkins, argued
competitive pay attracts quality officers to combat a high crime
rate. Penman was recalled last month, and Jenkins was not
re-elected.

“I think most residents are puzzled and outraged that we are
compelled during bankruptcy to provide substantial pay increases,”
a newly elected councilman, Jim Mulvihill, said last
week. “Not only that, it’s not any negotiation within
our community.”

Several groups pushed to repeal the charter provision after the
bankruptcy. But the city council chose not to put a repeal measure
on the ballot last month, citing short timelines and ballot costs,
the San Bernardino Sun reported.

Read the whole story
here.

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For one of the few times in its macro economic policy thought
and action, the federal government relies on a subtle analysis of
“things not seen” to defend its apparent $10.5 billion loss on the
General Motors bailout as a success,
via USA Today:

U.S. taxpayers no longer own any of automaker General Motors.
The Treasury sold the last of its remaining 31.1 million GM shares
today.

The taxpayer loss on the GM bailout finishes at $10.5 billion.
The Treasury department said it recovered $39 billion from selling
its GM stock, and had put $49.5 billion of taxpayer money into the
GM bailout….

The administration emphasizes that the loss it took on GM shares
is far less constly than had GM been allowed to fail.

“Inaction could have cost the broader economy more than one
million jobs, billions in lost personal savings, and significantly
reduced economic production,” Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said in
a statement announcing that Treasury had sold all its remaining
shars.

What might have happened to that money, those resources,
those skills, those people, if they had not been diverted by
government action? No one knows, or will ever know, and the
government would prefer you not think about it.

See “Illegal. Illiberal. Ill-Fated,” our
Aug/Sept. 2009 cover story on why Washington shouldn’t have
bailed out the auto industry.

Today the Obama administration hosted the
first-ever White House Conference on Drug Policy Reform. But don’t
be confused: Although “drug policy reform” usually means moving
away from the use of violence to stop people from consuming
arbitrarily proscribed psychoactive substances, that is not what
President Obama has in mind.

“Drug policy reform should be rooted in neuroscience, not
political science,” says Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, in the
email message announcing the conference. “It should be a public
health issue, not just a criminal justice issue. That’s what a
21st-century approach to drug policy looks like.”  

In truth, this 21st-century approach to drug policy looks a lot
like the 20th-century approach to drug policy. Kerlikowske, who is
still upset that he does not get credit for ending
the war on drugs when he took office in 2009, thinks
enlightenment in this area means forcing
drug users into “treatment” by threatening them with jail rather
than sending them directly to jail. He needs the heavy hand of the
state not only to impose treatment on recalcitrant drug users but
to imprison people who supply them with the drugs they want. That
is why Kerlikowske says drug policy is “not just a
criminal justice issue”—because he cannot imagine a drug policy
that does not entail locking people in cages for actions that
violate no one’s rights, whether those actions involve using
politically disfavored intoxicants or helping people do so.

Patrick Kennedy, co-founder of the anti-pot group Project SAM, likewise tries to
distract attention from the half a million Americans imprisoned for
drug offenses. “For too long drug policy has been caught in between
the false dichotomy of legalization versus incarceration,” Kennedy
says in a press release about the White House conference, where he
co-chaired a panel. The alternative to legalization is continued
prohibition, which requires incarceration. Prohibitionists like
Kennedy and Kerlikowske should have the courage to defend stripping
people of their liberty for doing nothing more than supplying a
product to eager buyers. Instead they pretend this is not
happening.

As for Kerlikowske’s claim that he seeks to depoliticize drug
policy, that is impossible as long as the government tries to
dictate what people put into their bodies. How can such an endeavor
be anything but political? The Obama administration, for example,
is committed to
defending the position that marijuana, which the Drug
Enforcement Administration’s chief administrative law judge once
called
“the safest therapeutically active substance known to man,” has a
high potential for abuse, lacks medical value, and cannot be used
safely even under a doctor’s supervision. This is Kerlikowske’s
idea of sound science.

Mason Tvert, director of communications at the Marijuana Policy
Project,
argues that Kerlikowske’s avowed respect for neuroscience is
also belied by his continued support for a policy that encourages
people to use a more dangerous intoxicant instead of marijuana.
“Every objective study on marijuana has concluded that it poses far
less harm to the brain than alcohol,” says Tvert, co-author of
Marijuana
Is Safer. “The ONDCP has long championed laws that steer
adults toward using alcohol and away from making the safer choice
to use marijuana. If the drug czar is truly committed to
prioritizing neuroscience over political science, he should support
efforts to make marijuana a legal alternative to alcohol for
adults.”

Today the Obama administration hosted the
first-ever White House Conference on Drug Policy Reform. But don’t
be confused: Although “drug policy reform” usually means moving
away from the use of violence to stop people from consuming
arbitrarily proscribed psychoactive substances, that is not what
President Obama has in mind.

“Drug policy reform should be rooted in neuroscience, not
political science,” says Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, in the
email message announcing the conference. “It should be a public
health issue, not just a criminal justice issue. That’s what a
21st-century approach to drug policy looks like.”  

In truth, this 21st-century approach to drug policy looks a lot
like the 20th-century approach to drug policy. Kerlikowske, who is
still upset that he does not get credit for ending
the war on drugs when he took office in 2009, thinks
enlightenment in this area means forcing
drug users into “treatment” by threatening them with jail rather
than sending them directly to jail. He needs the heavy hand of the
state not only to impose treatment on recalcitrant drug users but
to imprison people who supply them with the drugs they want. That
is why Kerlikowske says drug policy is “not just a
criminal justice issue”—because he cannot imagine a drug policy
that does not entail locking people in cages for actions that
violate no one’s rights, whether those actions involve using
politically disfavored intoxicants or helping people do so.

Patrick Kennedy, co-founder of the anti-pot group Project SAM, likewise tries to
distract attention from the half a million Americans imprisoned for
drug offenses. “For too long drug policy has been caught in between
the false dichotomy of legalization versus incarceration,” Kennedy
says in a press release about the White House conference, where he
co-chaired a panel. The alternative to legalization is continued
prohibition, which requires incarceration. Prohibitionists like
Kennedy and Kerlikowske should have the courage to defend stripping
people of their liberty for doing nothing more than supplying a
product to eager buyers. Instead they pretend this is not
happening.

As for Kerlikowske’s claim that he seeks to depoliticize drug
policy, that is impossible as long as the government tries to
dictate what people put into their bodies. How can such an endeavor
be anything but political? The Obama administration, for example,
is committed to
defending the position that marijuana, which the Drug
Enforcement Administration’s chief administrative law judge once
called
“the safest therapeutically active substance known to man,” has a
high potential for abuse, lacks medical value, and cannot be used
safely even under a doctor’s supervision. This is Kerlikowske’s
idea of sound science.

Mason Tvert, director of communications at the Marijuana Policy
Project,
argues that Kerlikowske’s avowed respect for neuroscience is
also belied by his continued support for a policy that encourages
people to use a more dangerous intoxicant instead of marijuana.
“Every objective study on marijuana has concluded that it poses far
less harm to the brain than alcohol,” says Tvert, co-author of
Marijuana
Is Safer. “The ONDCP has long championed laws that steer
adults toward using alcohol and away from making the safer choice
to use marijuana. If the drug czar is truly committed to
prioritizing neuroscience over political science, he should support
efforts to make marijuana a legal alternative to alcohol for
adults.”