Reading between the lines on the individual mandate of ACA

 I wanted highlight something important that is happening with regard to a key tenet of the "Affordable Care Act": the so called "individual mandate".  

To recap, ACA was a joint deal between government and the insurance companies to force people to consume more of their product than people felt they needed to buy.  Not that people are always right about what they do and don't need, but at the end of the day their suffering for having done the wrong thing and their being rewarded for having done the right thing is the feedback mechanism that keeps the herd moving forward in the right direction.  Government needed to replace normal marketplace feedback with central planning in order to save itself.

When government starts mandating that limited resources be spent in a particular way, it is cronyism pure and simple.  If a person has enough money to pay his rent OR to buy health care insurance for his young family, he is going to pick one or the other.  "Just buy both" is how rich people think; it is often not an option for young people.  And make no mistake, the government needs young people to participate in this ridiculous scam and in massive numbers.  Why??  Because young people will end up paying into the system without receiving benefit due to their youth and strength.  This something for nothing scam will provide more money to offload the federal government from paying up on past healthcare promises to boomers.  Promises for which there is no money to pay.  In other words, ACA is all about covering up the past Ponzi Promises and cronyism of a massively corrupt government.  They don't give two $hits about your health, and neither should they.

Unfortunately for the con men, this plan was rushed into place like the emergency stop gap that it in fact is and now Obama is falling back left and right in retreat.  Each fall back requires him to grant some special dispensation to this group or that, effectively making them above the law by presidential, dictatorial decree.   Equally unfortunately for emperor Obama, his plan is so full of holes that it is requiring him to provide exemptions for exactly those who he needs in the system.

There are two things in this Newsmax article on the subject that I think are worth noting:

1) The opening of the door to a "hardship exemption".  

A strong pillar of liberalism is the pandering to the weak and the infirmed.  It's the mean conservatives who are the hard nosed SOBs that require PayGo, everyone sharing the burden, etc.  Liberals like to declare whole classes of marginally productive people as protected species in order to buy their votes.  Unfortunately for Obama, he has created a nation of weaklings who clamor for government support on every matter.  Everyone will want their hardship exemption just like everyone wants a free Obama phone. 

How will he pick and choose among all the black Friday shoppers that are going to mob him for his special, limited time offer "mandate exemption" deal?  He's either going to have to become a hard nosed SOB about it (and risk the ire of his "someone else owes me a living" followers) or  his little health care Ponzi will collapse under its own corrupt weight.  Per the article"However, the announcement raises fairness questions, as it gives a subset of Americans relief from the requirement to buy insurance. "It is the beginning of the end of the individual mandate," said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina."

2) Fairness is the tip of the iceberg and is the least of the worries. 
 This program is about money and power, not fairness and certainly not about public healthcare.  It never was about anything else than money and power and it never will be about anything else than money and power.  The insurance companies represent the money side of this scam.  And here is what they think about it: "An insurance industry trade group, America's Health Insurance Plans, criticized the change that could divert more consumers away from the new plans offered under Obamacare. "This latest rule change could cause significant instability in the marketplace and lead to further confusion and disruption for consumers," AHIP President and CEO Karen Ignagni said in a statement."  

What the insurance companies are saying is that they are very, very worried that the deal they made with the federal devil is about to burn them.  If you didn't catch that, let me explain.  The ACA puts mandates on the insurance companies as well as on the sheeple.  Those mandates, like forgetting about preexisting conditions, represent massive risk.  In fact, from an actuarial standpoint, they represent real cost.  Insurance companies calculate the average payout that will be needed and amortize it over the participants.  IF they assume that everyone will be forced to do something at the barrel of the IRS gun under force of corrupt, cronyism-stench laws then they can agree to things that they know will cost them a lot of money.  They assume they will make up the losses by including more people in the insured pool and especially more young people who have not historically been big insurance buyers because of their youth and strength.  

But each time Obama makes an exemption from participation, even for one day, that means that the insurance industry assumes a higher level of risk to reward which will absolutely end up in higher costs vs revenue than expected.  What they thought was going to be a rip off of the American people is looking less and less rosy each time Obama opens his executive pie hole and emits another vote-buying backtrack on the Obamacare scam.  The insurance industry is rapidly emerging as the patsy who will bail out the federal government's past and present Ponzi Promises of low cost health care to a rapidly aging boomer herd.
 

Oh, what a tangled web we weave

When first we practise (sic) to deceive!

--Walter Scott: Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field