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The New York Times: Has Obamacare Enrollment Stalled?
- admin
- March 25, 2015
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Readers of this blog know that I have made a number of points about Obamacare in recent months: The number of people signing up for Obamacare is well below the level necessary to make the rates stable over the long-term––the longstanding insurance industry standard calls for getting 75{c754d8f4a6af077a182a96e5a5e47e38ce50ff83c235579d09299c097124e52d} of an eligible group in order to have enough healthy people in the pool to pay the costs of the sick people. I
Single-Payer Extremists: Obamacare Has Increased Health System Overhead
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- May 28, 2015
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Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhander are the Bernie Sanders of health policy. For decades, they have advocated that the U.S. adopt a government monopoly, single payer, health system. They write economically illiterate articles asserting that Medicare is great because it has low administrative costs. Nevertheless, a stopped clock is right twice a day, and the good doctors’ latest article nails Obamacare for increasing the overhead of U.S. health insurance. Who would have even thought that was possible? The roughly $6 billion in exchange start-up costs pale in comparison to the ongoing insurance overhead that the ACA has added to our health care system — more than a quarter of a trillion dollars through 2022.
Health Spending Unscathed In Shrinking Economy
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- May 11, 2015
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This morning’s terrible revision to first quarter GDP – from an initial estimate of 0.2 percent real growth to a real loss of 0.7 percent – confirms that health spending stands over our weak economy like a colossus. In the initial estimate, personal consumption spending on health services increased by $23 billion (chained 2009 dollars). Today’s second estimate reports $24.2 billion (Table 3, line 17). So, we can be pretty confident that the folks at the Bureau of Economic Analysis who do this good work have mastered how to measure spending on health services. This emphasizes how much of our prosperity is being devoured by a health system that is still driving everyone crazy, post-Obamacare. The real drop in GDP was a loss of $30.6 billion. Quarter over quarter figures