The Big O Loses the Big One

Some people just can't be happy for ObamaCare.

The Supreme Court. On most days, but not today, it is simply the Scaley Five. Today, it shocked the world by upholding ObamaCare's individual mandate. The one that makes you buy medical insurance or the IRS will visit you next next April to extract an ounce or two of the flesh you insist is invincible.

BuyO'Pay, one might call it.

Great? Or more like "okay."

The kludge that is BuyO'Pay eeked [sic] by on the tax angle. The Feds can sic the IRS on you until you scream. And then can't anymore. As in, who needs the rack these days?

Mandate on that for a while!

But the rationale that matters, the one that might allow real healthcare reform some day? That one was flogged silly (emphasis, silly) by an argument so comical that this long snoozing blog awoke like the alarm went off before noon.

The rationale employed Jon-Bob (Chief Justice Roberts if you got here late) for rejecting the use of the Commerce Clause to uphold the individual mandate is completely so next to last century, as one would expect. Perhaps, that was the deal that got his vote to uphold BuyO'Pay on taxing grounds.

Jon-Bob is pretending, essentially, that individuals without insurance are not in interstate commerce in the healthcare market.

If pretending were actual thinking, you'd all be at MIT.

He does use the insurance angle, but health insurance is not really not just insurance. Healthcare and its coverage is best though of as the medical risk allocation and coverage market. The one in which you all trade, almost every day. Today, did you take that aspirin you bought last week? Or use a band aid? Soap and condoms (though both may be more about religion and sex)? It's about health and medical care.

Almost everyone's medical risks in this country is covered one or more risk-spreading schemes. Every single product you touch is covered by product liability insurance, mostly to cover medical risks. By car insurance and workers comp, both with significant medical care coverage. Most of America's adult youth are, however vaguely, in the market for jobs not yet outsourced by Bain. Such jobs almost always come with fringes and workers comp. Those who are not interested in jobs, are likely eligible for Medicaid or living in their parents' attic as insurance riders

Your medical risks are covered, in part, by insurance held by others whenever you drive, shop, go to school or eat a Big Mac and super-sized fries.

You are not all in the national market for medical risk coverage? Please. Try to avoid it.

You are all covered by Social Security disability or Medicaid right now. All you have to do is meet the eligibility standards. You pay for Medicare, which is what, exactly? You are covered by governmental mandates that most ER's can't reject your emergency medical treatment, private insurance or not. If that's not a socially imposed medical risk coverage, what is?

Even just using a sidewalk. What do you keep telling yourself: Step on a crack, send your mother the ER. for free. Well, at least, that's her frakkin' risk, not yours. Unless, of course, you trip and break your own back or something silly.

Admittedly, if the sky falls, that is a medical risk that is not covered. And, thanks in small part to Jon-Bob's rationalizing, that is coming.

A Tea Party Huzzah for Health Insurers

The Heathcaristas in TBO's Socialist administration may be turning cartwheels to the point of dizzying the liberal media.  It doesn't take much to figure their misguided glee.

WellPoint.

No, not Good Point, but there's a beacon of goodness for all adherents of the Tea Party of Wonderland ("TP")

WellPoint is a big health insurance company, with 33 million insureds.  Many had though the name meant something about making people well, but, it turns out, it has everything to do with only intelligently incentivizing women who stay well.

Seems the huge, free-market health insurer borrowed some unemployed computer programer from Lehman's and cooked up an algorithm--computer-speak for a routine that figures certain things out on its own--that plucked out, from WellPoint's millions of paid-up policy holders anybody who no longer did not have breast cancer.  Having done that, algorithm raised a little pink flag next to all those names and went back looking for more.

The next step was left to tireless WellPoint staffers, TP'ers themselves perhaps, who sent pink slip-like notices out to the flagged women, stuck on a pink Post-it on those files and passed along them to magnifying-glass-wielding file-reading specialists.  Those intrepid, if strained-eyed, gallants scrutinize the pink-Post-it'ed policy applications for omissions, errors or downright misspellings to justify the previously sent cancellations.

WellPoint's CEO, Angela "Pinkie" Braly, surely gets a bonus based on such algorithms.  And she should. Wellpoint's charter does not mention justice, welfare or blessings and the corporation mission should not be diverted by such preamblings.  WellPoint's precept is singular, as is Pinkie's job:  Profit.  Pure and simple.  Women with breast cancer are bad risks for any insurance company.  They will almost certainly cost more than a woman whose worst complaint is a weekend of Viagra.

As you the critics out there, ask yourself this, and think of it as your money at risk:  Would you insure a sick person against getting sick?  They're already sick, for God's sake.  No one can expect you to insure someone who is guaranteed to require a big reserve before she pays her second premium. Taking a risk, you could live with that, but a known sure thing headed the wrong way? That's not insurance, that's a bottom-line uglier than a quart of Pepto.  It's flaming, bonus-blotting red.

So, don't you flinch, Pinkie. In the Tea Party of Wonderland's Kool-Aid pinned eyes, you are a superstar!  You are what TP was invented for.

And, Pinkie?  Don't wear a ribbon when go to get your well-deserved, if ironic, Teabagger of the Quarter Award from Alice Palin.

It's Healthcare Yet Again and It's Huge

I didn't bring it up, The Big O did.  He didn't say anything substantive about it, just that he hasn't given up on those two incompatible bills waiting in Congress for Big Brown to get seated and, then, to stop talking.  TBO and the Congressional bills will force Universal Healthcare Insurance Coverage by 2030 or a year after the melting of the Himalayan Glaciers, whichever is later.

Those bills, I believe, will require that you buy health insurance from Blue Cross or some other insurance company, unless you are a CEO, a union welder or a direct descendant of a Congressman.

The bills don't do any of the things that TBO had promised when he and that other guy really had to make serious promises, but the bills sound like they do.  One great thing, I believe both bills, allow only one precondition--honest, only one--insurance companies can use to bar you from getting that nice $600 a month policy.

One precondition:  Being born with Original Sin.

Sound tough?  Yeah, well, let 'em prove you were...

I'll be damned.  I just read both bills cover-to-cover and it looks like we have to prove we weren't.

So, if Congress' idea of Universal Healthcare won't cut it, what is TBO to do with all us uninsured and now pretty much uninsurable?

As usual, I think I have the answer.  Create a Healthcare Universal Group Endowment, an independent Federal Entity (a word we use when we don't know what something is), like the Post Office, but with no pretense of offering services.  HUGE would then hire all the uninsured to work for it for $100 a month, tax free.  Wait, don't scoff just yet.  Give them Senator-level health care insurance, too.  (Except illegals and their children, who probably make more than $100 dollars a month already.  The children, I mean.  They can still go to any nearby ER.)

One last thing:  You join up with HUGE or you go to jail in Kansas.

What would someone like me do at HUGE?  Wait on the beach by my cell phone in case I get a call ordering me into Public Service.  Whatever that is.  Oh, I forgot, being a Senator is Public Service.  I can do that and without a Blackberry playing K-Street stripper videos during TBO speeches.

I suppose I could negotiate with our local hospital or clinic for better prices for all us HUGE employees.  Or hammer the Medicine Shop up the street down to Walmart drug prices.  I'd do both for $100 nano-bucks (definition coming tomorrow)!

To be completely truthful (this once), I didn't come up with this alone.  A faithful reader of this blog suggested just moving everyone to Massachusetts and use their Commonwealth Operation Massachusetts Merciful Insurance Endowment universal healthcare system.  That is a great idea and COMMIE works great, only Boston is too expensive a place to live already. So I tweaked her modest idea a little into my HUGE concept.

It was pretty tough, actually.  I had to arbitrarily reverse the order of "Healthcare" and "Universal".  And what is an "Endowment"?

Still, HUGE goes COMMIE one better by using Federal Prison as encouragement to participate.  It is surely government at its best.  And, paraphrasing Mrs. TBO, For the first time, I am proud to be a soon-to-be-insured American.