Pejman Yousefzadeh

Just when you think you have seen it all …

We’ll start by noting yet more evidence that the IRS’s audits of political groups was entirely inequitable in nature:

When the Barack H. Obama Foundation sought tax-exempt status to raise money for good works in Kenya, the Internal Revenue Service provided quick help.

The IRS approved charitable status for the foundation, which was run by President Obama’s brother and named after his father, in about a month’s time. The IRS also agreed to give the group this important financial status retroactively, back to 2009, when it had begun its fundraising.

The 34 days the IRS’s Cincinnati office took to process the foundation’s application stands in contrast to the waits of several months — and sometimes longer than a year — that several conservative groups say they experienced with the same office. Obama has apologized, saying Americans have a right to be angry that the office improperly targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny.

And more:

The Internal Revenue Service scandal involving the apparently unjustified targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups has also hit home with the Hispanic community.

George Rodriguez, former president of the San Antonio Tea Party, said that when the organization applied for non-profit status, leaders were intimidated by IRS workers with excessive paperwork and meddling questions.

“They asked us all sorts of things that were out of the norm,” Rodriguez, now head of the conservative South Texas Alliance, told Fox News Latino. “We knew these questions were not the norm and we had our suspicions about them.”

I am late to this, but this past Friday, we had yet another jobs report. Yet again, we were told by various pundits that we ought to be happy with the details of the report. Yet again, I am forced to join James Pethokoukis in begging to differ:

US job growth in April beat economist expectations as nonfarm payrolls rose 165,000, and the jobless rate fell to a four-year low of 7.5%. But the report contained worrisome signs that President Obama’s health care reform law is hurting full-time, high-wage employment.

While the American economy added 293,000 jobs last month, according to the separate household survey, the number of persons employed part time for economic reasons — “involuntary part-time workers” as the Labor Department calls them – increased by almost as much, by 278,000 to 7.9 million. These folks were working part time because a) their hours had been cut back or b) they were unable to find a full-time job. At the same time, the U-6 unemployment rate — a broader measure of joblessness that includes discouraged workers and part-timers who want a full-time gig – rose from 13.8% to 13.9%.

What’s more, there wasa  0.2 hour decline in the length of the average workweek. This led to 0.4 percentage point drop in the index of average weekly hours, “equaling the largest declines since the recovery began,” notes economist Dean Baker of Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Let’s see, more part timers and fewer hours worked. Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin says what we’re all thinking: “This is not good news as it reflects the reliance on part-time work. … the decline in hours and rise of part-time work is troubling in light of anecdotal reports of the impact of the Affordable Care Act.”

Anecdotal reports like this one from the Los Angeles Times: “Consider the city of Long Beach. It is limiting most of its 1,600 part-time employees to fewer than 27 hours a week, on average. City officials say that without cutting payroll hours, new health benefits would cost up to $2 million more next year, and that extra expense would trigger layoffs and cutbacks in city services.”

Regardless of whether one thinks that Obamacare is weakening the labor market—and there is evidence for that proposition—168,000 jobs created just barely helps keep up with population growth. We really need to be creating 100,000 jobs more per month in order to have any hope of reaching full employment anytime soon. And we just aren’t doing it.

The Affordable Care Act states that employers with fifty or more employees need to provide their employees health care, or pay a penalty.

So now, more employers are shifting full-time employees to part-time so that they don’t have to pay for health care, and can avoid paying any kind of penalty as well.

Now, to be fair, the story does mention that there has been a trend towards part-time work in employment rolls even before health care “reform” came on the scene. But the story also mentions that the Affordable Care Act is definitely a factor in contributing to the shift, and when one reads the story in full, it becomes exceedingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that the shift to part-time work will only accelerate as a consequence of Obamacare. And in an employment market that features an unemployment rate still alarmingly close to 8%, with massive amounts of underemployment to boot, that’s very, very bad news.

Longtime readers of mine know that this is the part of the blog post where I lament that we decided to pass health care reform in order to find out what is in it—instead of, you know, finding out what’s in the bill before passing it. Incidentally, I will bet dollars to doughnuts that Obamaphiles will attack employers for acting in accordance with the perverse incentives contained in Obamacare, while ignoring the fact that the people who drafted and passed the Affordable Care Act, are the ones who should be blamed for bringing about those perverse incentives in the first place.

My, but isn’t this interesting?

Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.

The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said.

A source close to the talks says: “Everyone has to hold hands on this and jump, or nothing is going to get done.”

Yet if Capitol Hill leaders move forward with the plan, they risk being dubbed hypocrites by their political rivals and the American public. By removing themselves from a key Obamacare component, lawmakers and aides would be held to a different standard than the people who put them in office.

Young Ezra Klein tells us that this really isn’t that big a deal; all that he says has happened is that a Republican amendment “has possibly created a problem in which the federal government can’t make its normal contribution to the insurance premiums of congressional staffers.” As a consequence, there is a need for “some method through which the federal government can keep making its current contribution to the health insurance of congressional staffers.” Klein sums up:

This isn’t, in other words, an effort to flee Obamacare. It’s an effort to fix a drafting error that prevents the federal government from paying into insurance exchanges on behalf of congressional staffers who got caught up in a political controversy.

Anyone who believes that this issue can be dismissed and dispensed with because of the “drafting error” excuse ought to read Megan McArdle, who points out that the “drafting error” excuse has been worn out, and that it may now be time to consider the entire health care reform bill “one long drafting error.” Of course, we would have known that earlier if we didn’t take Nancy Pelosi’s advice to pass the bill in order to find out what is in it.

In the meantime, get ready for increases in health insurance premiums. And don’t think for a moment that those increases will be limited to Maryland.

Those are the words now associated with the implementation of Obamacare:

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said Wednesday he fears a “train wreck” as the Obama administration implements its signature healthcare law.

Baucus, the chairman of the chamber’s powerful Finance Committee and a key architect of the healthcare reform law, said he fears people do not understand how the law will work.

“I just see a huge train wreck coming down,” he told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at a Wednesday hearing. “You and I have discussed this many times, and I don’t see any results yet.”

Baucus pressed Sebelius for details about how the Health Department will explain the law and raise awareness of its provisions, which are supposed to take effect in just a matter of months.

“I’m very concerned that not enough is being done so far — very concerned,” Baucus said.

Baucus is a red state Democrat facing a tough re-election, so it’s somewhat unsurprising that he would take the Obama administration to task in advance of his re-election fight. Still, it is notable that he would make the comments he has made. And hey, it’s not as though concerns about the implementation of Obamacare are misplaced.

It won’t.

Usually, at the end of blog posts discussing a nasty Obamacare-related surprise, I put up a certain video featuring Nancy Pelosi telling us that it was preferable to legislate health care reform before actually finding out what that reform entailed. But I see that Megan McArdle made the appropriately acid Pelosi-related observation in the last paragraph of her blog post, so no video this time.

But through his administration’s mismanagement in setting up health insurance exchanges, the president has managed to tick Klein off:

Let me try to understand this: the key incentive for small businesses to support Obamacare was that they would be able to shop for the best deals in health care superstores — called exchanges. The Administration has had three years to set up these exchanges. It has failed to do so.

This is a really bad sign. There will be those who argue that it’s not the Administration’s fault. It’s the fault of the 33 states that have refused to set up their own exchanges. Nonsense. Where was the contingency planning? There certainly are models, after all — the federal government’s own health-benefits plan (FEHBP) operates markets that exist in all 50 states. So does Medicare Advantage. But now, the Obama Administration has announced that it won’t have the exchanges ready in time, that small businesses will be offered one choice for the time being — for a year, at least. No doubt, small-business owners will be skeptical of the Obama Administration’s belief in the efficacy of the market system to produce lower prices through competition. That was supposed to be the point of this plan.

Don’t get me wrong; Klein manages to find some ways to blame Republicans for the problem, but he can’t avoid placing the bulk of the blame on the administration. I’m sure that he tried his best not to, but amazingly enough, journalistic integrity won out.

And just yesterday, Klein was forced to follow up:

Steve Brill, who wrote TIME’s Bitter Pill cover story last month, has a follow-up in his Reuters column about Obamacare’s inability to implement the rules it has set in place against the depredation of so-called “non-profit” hospitals. 

I am really growing concerned about the sloppiness of this Administration. Bill Clinton, by contrast, was a governor. He cared about the “how” of government—how the Arkansas Department of Motor Vehicles dealt with its customers, for example. He brought that concern to Washington and made “reinventing government” a major initiative in his Administration. His reform efforts were hamstrung by the recalcitrance of the public employees unions, but he understood what was at stake: “Our biggest job is to move government from the Industrial Age to the Information Age,” he told me five years before he became President. If government didn’t work well, the public constituency for new and necessary programs like universal health care would evaporate.

Barack Obama is not a “how” President. Oh, he pays lip service to government reform. His people can tell you the number of unnecessary regulations they’ve eliminated. It barely scratches the surface of what needs to be done—there is no creative destruction in government, regulations pile up on top of each other like silt, generation after generation. And while the Democrats are feeling pretty smug these days, given the overwhelming silliness of the Republicans, the President may be paving the way for a conservative revival—if Obamacare turns out to be as nasty a mess as, say, the Veterans Administration.

Again, there is an attempt to take a shot at Republicans, but try as he might, Klein can’t avoid the conclusion that the Obama administration is not up to the job when it comes to implementing Obamacare.

Gosh, if only we were able to take these implementation problems into account before we passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Perhaps we might have been able to take some of it into account if we actually read the bill before passing it.

Instead, of course, we listened to Nancy Pelosi:

I might be open to the belief that Barack Obama’s presidency heralded and heralds “a liberal moment” similar to the “conservative moment” that led to and was reinforced by the presidency of Ronald Reagan. But that doesn’t mean the Obama coalition is not vulnerable and cannot be broken up early in its lifetime. I mean, after all, imagine what might happen to the coalition if Shikha Dalmia turns out to be right:

Not even the most ardent defenders of Obamacare — aka the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — claim anymore that the law will lower health coverage costs for Americans. How, then, will it achieve universal coverage, its central goal?

The short answer is, it won’t.

Last week, major insurers warned of double-digit premium hikes for small businesses and individuals when Obamacare goes into effect next year. Likewise, the nonpartisan Society of Actuaries this week estimated that costs to insurers that provide coverage to individuals will rise 32 percent on average within the first three years of the law, with premium increases sure to follow.

Similar analyses last year had already forced MIT’s Jonathan Gruber to admit that his projections that the law would lower premiums for young and old alike were wrong — even though his projections were instrumental in securing Obamacare’s passage. Gruber’s revised estimates now show that even the least affected states, such as Colorado, will experience premium hikes of nearly 20 percent by 2016.

Clearly, the word “affordable” should be scratched from the law for the sake of truth in advertising. But what about the “protection” part — namely, universal coverage?

That too is a lie.

Read the whole thing. I am, of course, rooting for Shikha Dalmia to be wrong; if she is right, the lives and health care of millions of Americans could and will be compromised. But we cannot afford to ignore the significant structural flaws inherent in Obamacare, or the massively deleterious consequences of implementing those flaws.

And as I never tire of stating/asking, wouldn’t it have been nice if we learned about those flaws by finding out about the contents of the Patient Protection (Ha!) and Affordable (Ha!) Care (Ha!) Act? You know, like we do with other pieces of legislation?

Alas, as we all too easily recall, some people had other ideas about how best to master the substance of the bill:

Alternatie title: “Yes Virginia, Costs Will Be Passed Down to the Consumer”:

The fight over Obamacare, so far held at the 30,000-foot level, is about to hit home. The latest impact hot off the grill: prices of burgers and hot dogs at Five Guys, the national chain that started in Washington, are going to rise to cover the president’s mandated insurance coverage.

“Any added costs are going to have to be passed on,” said Mike Ruffer, a Five Guys franchise holder with eight of the popular restaurants in the Raleigh-Durham, N.C. area. He will need all the profits from at least one of his eight outlets just to cover his estimated added $60,000-a year in new Obamacare costs.

What’s more, he’s iced plans to build another three restaurants until after the administration explains the exact rules and penalties employers will face. The law’s plan to have those available March 1 has been pushed back to October.

Look for the same sort of thing to happen to other businesses. And look as well for Obamaphiles to attack those businesses for doing precisely what the laws of economics predict that they will do.

Link:

Companies have a new solution to rising health-insurance costs: Break up their employees’ marriages.

By denying coverage to spouses, employers not only save the annual premiums, but also the new fees that went into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act. This year, companies have to pay $1 or $2 “per life” covered on their plans, a sum that jumps to $65 in 2014. And health law guidelines proposed recently mandate coverage of employees’ dependent children (up to age 26), but husbands and wives are optional. “The question about whether it’s obligatory to cover the family of the employee is being thought through more than ever before,” says Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health. See: When your boss doesn’t trust your doctor

While surcharges for spousal coverage are more common, last year, 6% of large employers excluded spouses, up from 5% in 2010, as did 4% of huge companies with at least 20,000 employees, twice as many as in 2010, according to human resources firm Mercer. These “spousal carve-outs,” or “working spouse provisions,” generally prohibit only people who could get coverage through their own job from enrolling in their spouse’s plan.

Such exclusions barely existed three years ago, but experts expect an increasing number of employers to adopt them: “That’s the next step,” Darling says. HMS, a company that audits plans for employers, estimates that nearly a third of companies might have such policies now. Holdouts say they feel under pressure to follow suit. “We’re the last domino,” says Duke Bennett, mayor of Terre Haute, Ind., which is instituting a spousal carve-out for the city’s health plan, effective July 2013, after nearly all major employers in the area dropped spouses.

And who needs to keep insuring the actual pesky employees?

But when employers drop spouses, they often lose more than just the one individual, when couples choose instead to seek coverage together under the other partner’s employer. Terre Haute, which pays $6 million annually to insure nearly 1,200 people including employees and their family members, received more than 20 new plan members when a local university, bank and county government stopped insuring spouses, according to Bennett. “We have a great plan, so they want to be on ours. All we’re trying to do is level the playing field here,” he says.

Of course, the inability to keep one’s health care plan may well interfere with the ability to see the doctor one prefers to see.

I think that it would have been nice to have anticipated and discussed these consequences before health care “reform” was passed. Alas, a certain person who was—and still is—far more powerful than me thought differently:

Via the Transom, more information about the effects of health care “reform”:

The Congressional Budget Office says the year-end fiscal cliff deal that preserved lower tax rates for most households produced a little-noticed side-effect: Fewer people will get health insurance from their employer over the next decade.

That nugget of economic thinking pops up in the nonpartisan office’s annual update of its budget and economic forecast.

The CBO has long said it expects the new federal health law will prompt some companies to drop millions of employees from health plans because workers have new options to buy insurance on their own. In August, CBO put the number at four million over 10 years. Now it’s seven million.

Recall that Barack Obama and his allies promised us that if we liked our health care plans, we could keep them. Apparently not.

Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if someone asked Nancy Pelosi about this?