Tag: posts

Belgian lawmakers are
considering a bill that, if made law, would allow children under 18
to end their own lives.

According to
kirotv the bill, which has popular support, would require the
parents of the child who wants to end their life to consent and for
an expert to deem the child capable of understanding their decision
before being helped to die.

The Washington Post explains some of the arguments put
forward by advocates of the bill and the current status of adult
euthanasia in Belgium:

Advocates argue that euthanasia for children, with the consent
of their parents, is necessary to give families an option in a
desperately painful situation. But opponents have questioned
whether children can reasonably decide to end their own lives.

Belgium is already a euthanasia pioneer; it legalized the
practice for adults in 2002. In the last decade, the number of
reported cases per year has risen from 235 deaths in 2003 to 1,432
in 2012, the last year for which statistics are available. Doctors
typically give patients a powerful sedative before injecting
another drug to stop their heart.

Carine Boucher of the European Center for Bio-ethics, believes
that children lack the maturity to request euthanasia.

From
UPI:

Two thirds of Belgians reportedly favor the euthanasia
expansion. Euthanasia deaths in Belgium rose to 1,432 in 2012
compared to 235 in 2003.

But critics think the proposal goes too far.

“The child does not have the maturity to get married or to buy
alcohol or to buy cigarettes if he is 14. Now we are saying that
because he is suffering, he might have the possibility to ask for
euthanasia,” said Carine Boucher of the European Center for
Bio-ethics in Brussels. “Who will give the suggestion to the child
that one of the solutions is euthanasia? A child doesn’t know what
euthanasia is. A child doesn’t know what death is.”

The Post’s reporting on the proposed bill comes after a

transsexual was helped to die in Belgium last month after
failed sex-change operations.

Children are a difficult subject for libertarians, who put a lot
of value in an individual’s ability to know what is best for them
and in their ability to make choices about what to do with their
body. In many jurisdictions some people under the age of 18 are
deemed mature enough to drive, sign up for organ donation,
join
the military (with
parental consent), and have sex, but are not deemed mature enough
to vote or smoke.

Below is a discussion between Prof. David Friedman and Stefan
Molyneux on libertarian parenting:

So, readers, what
should those under 18 be prohibited from doing, and how should this
be decided? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

• A
  gunman opened fire at Los Angeles International Airport.
  Information is still sketchy in the media, but reports say a TSA
  agent was killed. The gunman has been reported both in custody and
  dead and several others were injured.
• A federal appeals court has struck down the mandate that health
  insurance provided by employers must cover
  birth control.
• Nasdaq is having more
  tech problems, which shut down trading today.
• A U.S. drone strike in Pakistan has
  killed a Taliban leader, which may well sabotage peace efforts
  between Pakistan and the terrorist group.
• More
  part-time college professors are joining unions, which will
  help inflate that education bubble quite nicely.
• 
  Turn your clocks back an hour on Sunday because the government
  told you to.

Get Reason.com and Reason 24/7
content widgets for your
websites.

Follow us on Facebook
and Twitter,
and don’t forget to sign
up for Reason’s daily updates for more
content.

You can’t keep your insurance if you like it
under Obamacare, because you’re too ignorant to understand what’s
good for you. Or at least that’s the argument we’ve been hearing
from a lot of folks on the left — an argument that pivots from
“common good” to soft authoritarianism. President Barack Obama is
all in, as well, claiming that he was merely guilty of forcing
Americans to pick a “Ferrari” health care plan over a “Ford” one.
But as David Harsanyi observes, is it really “picking” if you’re
forced?

View this article.

You can’t keep your insurance if you like it
under Obamacare, because you’re too ignorant to understand what’s
good for you. Or at least that’s the argument we’ve been hearing
from a lot of folks on the left — an argument that pivots from
“common good” to soft authoritarianism. President Barack Obama is
all in, as well, claiming that he was merely guilty of forcing
Americans to pick a “Ferrari” health care plan over a “Ford” one.
But as David Harsanyi observes, is it really “picking” if you’re
forced?

View this article.

Police in Salem, MA—or as it’s often referred to, Witch City,
USA—have charged a psychic studio with unlawfully providing curse
removal services. Fatima’s psychic studio, which
has been offering a Romani form of fortune-telling to tourists for
two decades, was caught violating a
city ordinance which states that psychics may only forecast the
future and read the past. Warding off evil spirits and protecting
patrons from bad auras is strictly forbidden.

So when a New York resident issued a formal complaint against
Fatima’s, alleging that he paid a psychic $16,800 over several
weeks for placing a curse shield on him, police closed in. In an
investigation led by Detective Sergeant James A. Page, police
learned that the studio’s fortune-teller license was long expired.
They forced the studio to shut its doors and make a court
appearance.

The Boston Globe
reports:

But on Monday night, when Fatima’s owner Harry Mitchell went
before the city’s licensing board to ask for reinstatement, the
lapse worked in Fatima’s favor. Page…said that without a valid
license, the shop was not technically operating under the
fortuneteller’s ordinance at the time of the cash-for-curse
incidents and therefore could not be charged with violating it.

Instead, he issued two $100 fines for operating without a
license. The board granted a probationary license for Fatima’s to
resume operation until the end of the year, provided they promise
not to meddle in curses again and work with the New York man to
come up with some kind of reimbursement.

Mitchell had
explained to the Salem Licensing Board earlier this week that
he had already settled the dispute with the customer and that he
would return the money.

Detective Page told the Boston Globe that while he
thought Fatima’s was making money off deception and fraudulence, it
would be difficult for police to pursue criminal charges since
“people are embarrassed and they’re not going to come forward.”

In response to the allegations, Christian Day, a local warlock
who owns two fortune-telling shops and has appeared on Penn
& Teller’s Bullshit, said:

If they’re a fraud, then we’re all frauds, and all religion is a
fraud. They’re not regulating the priest who absolves you of your
sins and tells you to put some money in the collection basket, or
the old lady who sends all her money to Pat Robertson.

If customers are looking for a reputable place to get their
palms read, they might just want to avoid Fatima’s completely: the
business has received a 1.5 star rating on both Tripadvisor
and Yelp
with reviews such as, “I had a palm reading and she didn’t even
look at my palm,” “Fraudulent Gypsies!!!,” “She told me I was
having a baby!!!! I had a hysterectamy 12 years ago!!!!!,” and
perhaps most tellingly, “Don’t waste your money. Do some
research.”

Almost nothing about Obamacare’s
federal exchange system is working. It’s almost impressive how
comprehensive the federal system’s technical failures are. Just
about every part of the system that has been reported on seems to
have problems, many of which are quite serious.

• The account creation system necessary to even start the process
  of using the exchanges basically didn’t work at all when the site
  launched. Administrators appear to have improved this functionality
  since launch, but Jeff Zients, who is overseeing the
  troubleshooting project,
  says it’s still not working for about 10 percent of users.
• The vast majority of people who can create accounts still can’t
  complete the enrollment process. According to Zients, only about 30
  percent of users are able to get through the system.
• Anyone who successfully logs in gets to the point of shopping
  for specific plans on the exchanges may see prices displayed
  incorrectly, as the system has
  had problems
  calculating eligibility for public subsidies for
  insurance.(Subsidy calculation has also
  proven
  difficult for
  several state-run exchanges.) 
• Anyone who decides to browse for plans without logging in first
  is also
  liable to see incorrect prices. The “shop and browse” feature
  installed to mitigate problems caused by the broken account system
  often displays the wrong prices, because it lumps together premiums
  for anyone who is 49 and under, and anyone who is 50 or older.
  Everyone under 50 is provided prices for a 27-year-old, even though
  prices for people in their 40s might be quite a bit higher.
• Several exchanges are having
  trouble accurately
  displaying provider and network information for the plans on
  offer. This is not a big problem for the federal exchanges yet
  because they are still so dysfunctional, but if the state-run
  exchanges are any indication, it could eventually create headaches
  for people who want to know which doctors and hospitals are
  attached to which plans. 
• Even with just a trickle of individuals making it all the way
  through the process, insurers are
  not getting correct enrollment information from the exchanges.
  As a result, many are reviewing applications manually. If larger
  numbers of applications ever make it through the system, that won’t
  be sustainable. And there may be longer term problems as well: If
  enrollment data is transmitted incorrectly, people could eventually
  find out they didn’t enroll in the plan they selected, or didn’t
  actually enroll at all.
• The small business exchanges aren’t fully up and running
  either. Enrollment in those exchanges, already delayed once, was
  delayed again, the administration
  announced this week.
• The federal exchanges were supposed to seamlessly interface
  with multiple state Medicaid programs, but that functionality,
  originally delayed until November 1, was
  also further delayed last week. And at this point, federal
  officials won’t say when they expect that functionality will be
  complete.
• Security testing for the federal exchange system was never
  completed. An
  internal memo warned that too little testing “exposed a level
  of uncertainty that can be deemed as a high risk.” (The temporary
  security authorization under which the site is operating also
  
  appears to violate the administration’s own web security
  guidelines.)
• The Spanish language version of the website has been
  delayed indefinitely.
• The “data hub” that routes information between multiple
  databases has gone
  down on
  multiple occasions due to hosting facility outages.

It’s a near-total failure. All the major segments of the
system—the user end, the insurer end, the data-routing in the
middle, the plan information on display, the connections with
state-run legacy systems—are either problem-plagued or broken
entirely.

Almost nothing about Obamacare’s
federal exchange system is working. It’s almost impressive how
comprehensive the federal system’s technical failures are. Just
about every part of the system that has been reported on seems to
have problems, many of which are quite serious.

• The account creation system necessary to even start the process
  of using the exchanges basically didn’t work at all when the site
  launched. Administrators appear to have improved this functionality
  since launch, but Jeff Zients, who is overseeing the
  troubleshooting project,
  says it’s still not working for about 10 percent of users.
• The vast majority of people who can create accounts still can’t
  complete the enrollment process. According to Zients, only about 30
  percent of users are able to get through the system.
• Anyone who successfully logs in gets to the point of shopping
  for specific plans on the exchanges may see prices displayed
  incorrectly, as the system has
  had problems
  calculating eligibility for public subsidies for
  insurance.(Subsidy calculation has also
  proven
  difficult for
  several state-run exchanges.) 
• Anyone who decides to browse for plans without logging in first
  is also
  liable to see incorrect prices. The “shop and browse” feature
  installed to mitigate problems caused by the broken account system
  often displays the wrong prices, because it lumps together premiums
  for anyone who is 49 and under, and anyone who is 50 or older.
  Everyone under 50 is provided prices for a 27-year-old, even though
  prices for people in their 40s might be quite a bit higher.
• Several exchanges are having
  trouble accurately
  displaying provider and network information for the plans on
  offer. This is not a big problem for the federal exchanges yet
  because they are still so dysfunctional, but if the state-run
  exchanges are any indication, it could eventually create headaches
  for people who want to know which doctors and hospitals are
  attached to which plans. 
• Even with just a trickle of individuals making it all the way
  through the process, insurers are
  not getting correct enrollment information from the exchanges.
  As a result, many are reviewing applications manually. If larger
  numbers of applications ever make it through the system, that won’t
  be sustainable. And there may be longer term problems as well: If
  enrollment data is transmitted incorrectly, people could eventually
  find out they didn’t enroll in the plan they selected, or didn’t
  actually enroll at all.
• The small business exchanges aren’t fully up and running
  either. Enrollment in those exchanges, already delayed once, was
  delayed again, the administration
  announced this week.
• The federal exchanges were supposed to seamlessly interface
  with multiple state Medicaid programs, but that functionality,
  originally delayed until November 1, was
  also further delayed last week. And at this point, federal
  officials won’t say when they expect that functionality will be
  complete.
• Security testing for the federal exchange system was never
  completed. An
  internal memo warned that too little testing “exposed a level
  of uncertainty that can be deemed as a high risk.” (The temporary
  security authorization under which the site is operating also
  
  appears to violate the administration’s own web security
  guidelines.)
• The Spanish language version of the website has been
  delayed indefinitely.
• The “data hub” that routes information between multiple
  databases has gone
  down on
  multiple occasions due to hosting facility outages.

It’s a near-total failure. All the major segments of the
system—the user end, the insurer end, the data-routing in the
middle, the plan information on display, the connections with
state-run legacy systems—are either problem-plagued or broken
entirely.

Because Fed-created money enters the economy at
particular points (through banks and bond dealers), a select few
people get it sooner than the rest of us. Those who are
thus privileged are able to buy at the old, lower prices,
while the rest of us don’t see the money until prices have risen.
Sheldon Richman contends that that places an implicit tax and
transfer on the rest of us when the government pursues a policy of
deliberate inflation.

View this article.

The other day Matt Welch

argued that the insurance cancellations triggered by Obamacare
represent “a gut-check moment for the mostly left-of-center
journalists who have made such a show these past few years of
dropping false equivalence and calling out political bullshit at
the source.” So far The New York Times has risen to
the challenge pretty well. A few days ago, reporters Jonathan
Weisman and Robert Pear matter-of-factly
stated that cancellation letters received by people who buy
their medical coverage on the individual market “directly
contradict Mr. Obama’s oft-repeated reassurances that if people
like the insurance they have, they will be able to keep it.”
Meanwhile, in an article published the same day, Reed
Abelson perceived a
“debate” about “whether President Obama misled Americans when he
said that people who like their health plans may keep them.”
Apparently Abelson no longer considers that proposition
controversial. In today’s paper, he and Katie Thomas
write:

The Affordable Care Act was signed into law by Mr. Obama in
2010. Since then he has assured Americans: “If you like your
insurance plan you will keep it. No one will be able to take that
away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the
future.”

But it is happening.

Furthermore, Abelson and Thomas say “insurance companies are
canceling millions of individual plans that fail to meet minimum
standards,” up from the “hundreds of thousands” estimated by
Weisman and Pear on Tuesday. In other words, according to the
Times, it is indisputable that Obama broke his
promise and that millions of Americans are bearing the
consequences.

That seems clearly accurate to me, but yesterday Obama
implicitly
argued that it’s not:

If you had one of these substandard plans before the Affordable
Care Act became law and you really liked that plan, you’re able to
keep it. That’s what I said when I was running for office. That was
part of the promise we made. But ever since the law was passed, if
insurers decided to downgrade or cancel these substandard plans,
what we said under the law is you’ve got to replace them with
quality, comprehensive coverage—because that, too, was a central
premise of the Affordable Care Act from the very
beginning. 

Note that “substandard” means “below the standard I have set,”
which is another way of saying that you may like your health plan
but
the president does not. Still, Obama is not claiming that his
personal distaste for your health insurance choices is enough to
void his guarantee. Instead he is retroactively adding a caveat to
his promise: If you like your plan, you can keep your plan—provided
it is exactly the same as the coverage you had before the law took
effect. If any of the terms have changed, all bets are off.

It will be illuminating to see whether the
Times and other news outlets dignify this
Clintonesque evasion by presenting it as a plausible alternative to
the view that Obama has not delivered what he said he would. As
Welch observed, “You can subject the policy and politics of
Obamacare to truth-scans, or you can carry water for the president.
You cannot do both, at least without a laugh track.”

The other day Matt Welch

argued that the insurance cancellations triggered by Obamacare
represent “a gut-check moment for the mostly left-of-center
journalists who have made such a show these past few years of
dropping false equivalence and calling out political bullshit at
the source.” So far The New York Times has risen to
the challenge pretty well. A few days ago, reporters Jonathan
Weisman and Robert Pear matter-of-factly
stated that cancellation letters received by people who buy
their medical coverage on the individual market “directly
contradict Mr. Obama’s oft-repeated reassurances that if people
like the insurance they have, they will be able to keep it.”
Meanwhile, in an article published the same day, Reed
Abelson perceived a
“debate” about “whether President Obama misled Americans when he
said that people who like their health plans may keep them.”
Apparently Abelson no longer considers that proposition
controversial. In today’s paper, he and Katie Thomas
write:

The Affordable Care Act was signed into law by Mr. Obama in
2010. Since then he has assured Americans: “If you like your
insurance plan you will keep it. No one will be able to take that
away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the
future.”

But it is happening.

Furthermore, Abelson and Thomas say “insurance companies are
canceling millions of individual plans that fail to meet minimum
standards,” up from the “hundreds of thousands” estimated by
Weisman and Pear on Tuesday. In other words, according to the
Times, it is indisputable that Obama broke his
promise and that millions of Americans are bearing the
consequences.

That seems clearly accurate to me, but yesterday Obama
implicitly
argued that it’s not:

If you had one of these substandard plans before the Affordable
Care Act became law and you really liked that plan, you’re able to
keep it. That’s what I said when I was running for office. That was
part of the promise we made. But ever since the law was passed, if
insurers decided to downgrade or cancel these substandard plans,
what we said under the law is you’ve got to replace them with
quality, comprehensive coverage—because that, too, was a central
premise of the Affordable Care Act from the very
beginning. 

Note that “substandard” means “below the standard I have set,”
which is another way of saying that you may like your health plan
but
the president does not. Still, Obama is not claiming that his
personal distaste for your health insurance choices is enough to
void his guarantee. Instead he is retroactively adding a caveat to
his promise: If you like your plan, you can keep your plan—provided
it is exactly the same as the coverage you had before the law took
effect. If any of the terms have changed, all bets are off.

It will be illuminating to see whether the
Times and other news outlets dignify this
Clintonesque evasion by presenting it as a plausible alternative to
the view that Obama has not delivered what he said he would. As
Welch observed, “You can subject the policy and politics of
Obamacare to truth-scans, or you can carry water for the president.
You cannot do both, at least without a laugh track.”