Month: February 2014

Actuaries from the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimate that about two thirds
of small businesses will see their health insurance premiums rise
under Obamacare.

Via The Wall Street Journal.

The report analyzed employers with 50 or fewer full-time
employees that buy outside insurance policies for workers, a group
it estimated at 17 million people in 2012. It focused on a piece of
the 2010 law that prevents insurance companies from pricing
policies based on customers’ health status.

Before this year, insurance companies could charge higher prices
if an employer had older, sicker workers. Now, under the Affordable
Care Act, insurance companies can’t price on health status and are
limited by the amount they can price by age.

The report concluded that about 65% of small businesses, or
plans covering 11 million people, would see an increase in
insurance premiums under these so-called community-rating
provisions of the health law. About 35% of employers would see a
decrease for plans covering six million people. 

The report looks narrowly at restrictions built into the law
which limit higher premiums for sicker or older workers. It doesn’t
factor small business tax credits or other parts of the law that
might affect premiums into the equation. And it doesn’t indicate
how large the increases or decreases might be. But it does
highlight the way that Obamacare’s rating rules change the cost
calculous for insurers and for employers, and the ripple effects on
coverage and costs that are likely to continue for a while into the
future. 

I’ve
got a piece up at Time.com about the death of Harold Ramis, the
writer-director-actor who played a leading role in many of the
biggest comedy films between the late 1970s and early 1990s.

Here are some snippets:

Ramis was nothing less than one of the subversive auteurs behind
a whole new way of laughing at the world that mixed brains (he was
a National
Merit Scholar after all), cheap gross-out gags
(see Caddyshack’s scene in which a Baby Ruth candy
bar is mistaken for a turd in a swimming pool), and
unapologetically anti-authoritarian antics
(Ghostbusters enjoys a strong reputation as
the most
libertarian movie ever due to its hostile depictions of
regulators as figuratively “dickless”).

From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, he made it seem as
if the Boomers were not simply going to inherit the Earth but
transform it into an edgy paradise that our parents, stuck in a
past where Bob
Hope and Johnny Carson and
other dinosaurs still roamed the world, could never really
grok….

Ramis’s oeuvre flattened out
after Groundhog Day. In the wake of critical and
commercial success, his output became increasingly programmatic and
uninteresting. Rather than taking chances and blow up comic forms,
he directed movies such as Analyze
This and Analyze That, schmaltzy,
safe-as-milk comedies featuring Billy Crystal as the shrink for
Robert DeNiro’s by-the-number mob boss. He appeared in vanilla
roles in forgettable movies such as Baby Boom, a late
’80s fantasy in which Diane Keaton’s businesswoman protagonist not
only turns her back on New York’s demanding capitalist but gets
rich by pushing gourmet baby food.

The raging bulls and easy riders of the boomer generation — who
had turned Hollywood and America on its ear in a sustained blast of
antinomian anger and humor — slowly became as dulled and
self-satisfied as their parents had seemed.

Read the whole thing.

I don’t pretend to fully understand the
medical controversy at the core of the dispute over
Justine Pelletier. It troubles me, though, that the state of
Massachusetts decided to resolve a difference of opinion between
physicians at Tufts Medical Center and Boston Children’s Hospital
by taking a teenage girl away from her parents and
treating their adherence to the Tufts diagnosis as child abuse.
Just as troubling, is that the judge in the case slapped a gag
order on the parents in an effort to prevent them from voicing
their displeasure with official conduct. Once again, American
apparatchiks display their discomfort with public criticism and
debate.

We’ve seen this before with gag orders issued to
recipients of national security letters, forbidding them from
publicly challenging or complaining about government snooping. Even
many judges find those gag orders
constitutionally questionable. They’re convenient, though, for
government officials who like to go about controversial business
with a minimum of muss, fuss, and challenge.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Matt Zimmerman
pointed out with regard to gag orders issued in conjunction
with national security letters, “Any statutory structure that
grants the executive branch such power and couples that power with
the ability to hide its behavior from scrutiny is ripe for
abuse.”

Grabbing children from their parents is a draconian act that is
also “ripe for abuse.” It might be done in a punitive, abusive,
mistaken, or arbitrary fashion. It’s certainly open to question and
criticism when it appears to have been done as a matter of picking
sides in a legitimate difference of opinion between reputable
medical experts.

Why shouldn’t parents be as free to challenge the forcible
removal of a child from their care as a company or individual is to
challenge the siphoning of sensitive information by inquisitive
officials?

Yet the Boston Globe
reported yesterday:

One issue before the judge in today’s hearing was whether Lou
Pelletier should be held in contempt of court for violating a gag
order. The teen’s father has recently given media interviews in
which he expressed frustration with the quality of care his
daughter is getting while in DCF custody, care that he has asserted
has been nearly fatal for her.

Held in contempt for publicizing his fears that the state is
killing his kid? How…inconsiderate of the judge’s feelings.

There may be times when a gag order is appropriate, but
the only one coming to mind right now is an order that would
prevent government officials from telling members of the public to
shut up.

• President Barack Obama has
  reportedly told Afghan President Hamid Karzai that the U.S. is
  planning to pull all
  troops out of the country by the year’s end.
• 
  Debbie Dingell, husband of Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) will
  announce on Friday that she will pursue her husband’s seat in
  office. He is retiring after 58 years.
• Asiana Airlines has been
  fined $500,000 by the feds for failing to assist family members
  of passengers in last year’s crash in San Francisco where three
  died. It’s the first time an airline has been fined for this type
  of violation.
• The United States
  expelled three Venezuelan diplomats in retaliation for the
  Venezuelan government doing the same to the U.S.
• Those close to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer believe she is
  planning to veto the attention-grabbing bill that allows
  business to discriminate against customers on the basis of
  religious beliefs.
• In a
  pair of Supreme Court decisions today, the court ruled that
  police can search homes without warrants if a resident consents,
  even if another resident refuses, and in another case, that the
  courts can freeze a defendant’s assets prior to a court case, even
  if it interferes with the defendant’s ability to hire a lawyer to
  fight the charges.

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