View 796 Tuesday, October 29, 2013
“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”
President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009
Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.
Syrian Freedom Fighters
What we have now is all we will ever have.
Conservationist motto
Regarding the source of the news that Kaiser cancelled 160,000 memberships in Northern California, all of those statements including the one in Forbes Magazine come from a single line :
“Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people – about half of its individual business in the state.” http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/October/21/cancellation-notices-health-insurance.aspx
In a publication called Kaiser Health News. It was quoted in an NBC Health News story that ended:
Jay Hancock contributed to this story. Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. http://www.nbcnews.com/health/thousands-get-health-insurance-cancellation-notices-8C11417913
I have been unable to find any story from a northern California source listing anyone who had received this cancellation, nor have I heard from anyone who says his/her membership was cancelled.
I have this:
Kaiser Cancelations
Jerry
The low cost plans are being canceled. One gets a new plan in 2014.
Going to the Kaiser web site and getting quotes for my birthday [1957].
The new plans have new free services, that show up in your monthly bill.
For reference the plan prices:
Prices December 2013
Copay: $602, $555, $490
Deductible plans: $584, $487, $459, $415 HSA Deductible Plans: $448, $390, $318, $336, $258
Prices January 2014
Copay: $782, $727
Deductible plans: $715, $598, $596
HSA Deductible Plans: $571, $480, $446, $439
David LeFevre
But it has no source listed. I would have thought a story of 160,000 cancellations in Northern California would have caused at least news in that area, but I have been unable to find any. Our local Kaiser office was unaware of any of this when I called the PR department, and friends on staff locally have not heard of it. It is not astonishing – the ACA is going to cause restructure of many health plans – but the details are lacking.
One possible speculation is that a number of employers which offered Kaiser as one of the alternatives to the employee health care plan have withdrawn that option recently, but the bare statement that 160,000 memberships were cancelled does not seem to have any other source or support than the Kaiser Health News report that has been repeated by other publications including Forbes and NBC. I would be glad of any other information on this.
Added at 1530:
" Kaiser cancelled the memberships of 160,000 members in California"
Dr. Pournelle,
Don’t know about the numbers, but here is a decent explanation of why insurance would be cancelled:
Kit Case
All of which is true enough, and probably explains the mysterious “Kaiser cancelled 160,000” report. Apparently ACA has so many exceptions to the “you can keep your policy if you like it” section in the bill that it there are more exceptions than guarantees. This is another reason for the sticker shock, and it is still happening. The Republicans offered to let Obama have a year off to fix ACA, but he turned that down in a huff. He may regret doing that.
Obama admin. knew millions could not keep their health insurance – Investigations
From the article:
President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.
John
No one is astonished to learn that many cannot keep their old insurance policies because the policies will be cancelled: after all, the insurance company calculated the premium on the basis of no existing medical conditions – pre-conditions – and now if the policy is continued they must accept those with pre-conditions or acute maladies at the same premium cost as they used to charge for those without pre-conditions. That is a formula for bankruptcy; so the policies must be cancelled, and the coverage offered to the previous holders at the new premium rate which will have to be considerably higher than what they used to charge, or they can’t stay in business. You can’t pay out more than you take in and continue to exist.
![clip_image002[1]](https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/clip_image002126.gif "clip_image002[1]"){kind=small}
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/02/010212075309.htm# implies that Einstein’s Special Theory is falsified. It also invites revival of an ether theory (a medium in which light waves can wave). Michelson, whose experiment was the main impetus for the Special Theory that abolished ether, never accepted the Special Theory, but Relativity both Special and General are accepted by nearly all physicists (if not understood well by very many of them; the math is brutal). Petr Beckmann in Einstein Plus Two (alas, long out of print and never reissued, but popularized by Tom Bethell in Questioning Einstein http://www.amazon.com/Questioning-Einstein-Is-Relativity-Necessary/dp/0971484597) presents an ether theory to wit, that the ether is gravitational fields, which he says is consistent with all the observations including GPS and the clocks east and west phenomenon**, but with much simpler math. That theory would be consistent with these observations as well.
Obviously science fiction writers would be pleased to do away with the Special Theory and its absolute limit to the speed of light, but most, including me, have written around it one way or another.
** Note: On October, 1971, J. C. Hafele of Washington in St. Louis and Richard Keating of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, borrowed two cesium clocks from the Naval Observatory and bought each a first class found trip seat on commercial flights, one headed east, the other west. The clocks were strapped into the seats and never moved again until they returned, nor were they observed in transit. “The experiment may be the cheapest ever conducted” to test relativity, Scientific American explained. When the clocks were returned to Washington, the west bound clock had speeded up by 273 nanoseconds compared to an identical clock that remained at the Observatory, and the east bound clock had lost 59 nanoseconds. The previous position of Einstein was that “Moving clocks run slow”, but there had been no prediction of a time difference depending on the direction of travel. The explanation by the relativity theorists involved a new frame of reference and a long defense as to what that reference frame was needed. Beckmann’s theory predicted the time differences due to the travel of the clocks through Earth’s gravitational field.
![clip_image002[2]](https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/clip_image002218.gif "clip_image002[2]"){kind=small}
Yesterday’s View had this:
Some numbers to contemplate:
Expenditures in 2011 (Billions of Dollars):
New Homes $337 Billion
Automobiles $328 Billion
Computers $375 Billion
Comply with Tax Code $392 Billion
Which generated this letter
Dr. Pournelle,
[I delete the Patron Subscription renewal notice with thanks]
In a recent post, you included this information:
Expenditures in 2011 (Billions of Dollars):
New Homes $337 Billion
Automobiles $328 Billion
Computers $375 Billion
Comply with Tax Code $392 Billion
Would you mind sharing your source? I would love to share this with some friends, but I hate to quote unsourced numbers.
Thank you,
Beth
The source of that is The Growth Experiment Revisited: Why Lower Simpler Taxes Really Are America’s Best Hope for Recovery, by Lawrence B. Lindsay. http://www.amazon.com/The-Growth-Experiment-Revisited-Americas/dp/0465050700
Lindsay, one time Harvard Professor of Economics, was a close advisor in economics to Ronald Reagan, and later was the principal economic advisor to Bush I, an economic period that produced budget surpluses. His Reagan years were reported in The Growth Experiment; in this new book he reports on what has happened since 1990 when The Growth Experiment was published.
I heartily recommend this book to your attention. It is all essential to understanding a way out of the train wreck we find ourselves in.
![clip_image002[3]](https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/clip_image002320.gif "clip_image002[3]"){kind=small}
I am working on a report on what has happened to science, and how “Science has lost its way” as Michael Hiltzik put it in Sunday’s LA Times. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20131027,0,1228881.column#axzz2j8pM1NRd
Very few science experiments are every confirmed; when they are the error rates in the original reports, though peer reviewed and published in leading journals like Science and Nature, are astoundingly high. It is a matter of very great concern.
And it’s lunch time.
I have a good deal of mail reflecting the following views:
Mass Cancellations Jerry,
More corroboration for the Kaiser Health News story: The Director of "Covered California" (which I gather is the official California state Obamacare implementation organization) says 800,000 to 900,000 Californians overall will lose individual coverage this January 1st due to Obamacare not grandfathering their plans.
Given that Kaiser Permanente has 40% of the overall California health insurance market, 6.6 million customers overall, 1.1 million of these non-group (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/29/business/la-fi-mo-health-insure-market-20130129),
160,000 losing their individual Kaiser coverage at the end of this year seems highly plausible and in rough proportion to the national numbers being reported.
Note also that this implies hundreds of thousand more Californians losing their Kaiser individual coverage at the end of next year, and millions more Californians overall losing their individual coverage then
– see my previous letter.
Kaiser Health News, for what it’s worth, has been one of the more reliable and factual Obamacare news sources I’ve found during the last couple years I’ve been following this. They are in fact associated with the Kaiser Foundation; they’re not some fly-by-night outfit.
And 900,000 Californians losing coverage this year makes the 2 million nationwide estimate I quoted earlier look distinctly conservative.
I’m not surprised that you had a hard time finding others reporting this story a day ago, by the way. This story is just in the last 24 hours hitting mainstream media consciousness, after being ignored for years.
I suspect we’ll see a lot more data emerge in coming days.
Porkypine
I have never doubted that a very large number of healthcare insurance policies would be cancelled as a result of the Affordable Care Act, nor have I any doubt that some of them will be at Kaiser; thus when I heard the 160,000 at Kaiser story I was merely looking for some details. The surprise came when I did not find them, nor have I yet a week later., I found a number of citations of NBC news and Forbes but they all traced back to a single sentence in the Kaiser Health News issue – a simple assertion without details or cause. And I do note that Kaiser Health News although founded at the same time as Kaiser Permanente is not the same group and does not have so far as I can see any sharing of Directors or staff. I don’t actually question that 160,000 memberships have been cancelled – but I have yet to find any details, or hear from anyone it happened to. This seems very odd to me, because Kaiser Health News is not a source of news about Kaiser policy: it reports but it does not make or govern or debate Kaiser policy. If it is reporting inside knowledge it certainly doesn’t have much detail to report. That seems odd.
Normally when 160,000 people lose their health insurance there will be a flood of local stories featuring people who have just lost their insurance, with much weeping and sorrow. I haven’t found those. Perhaps the news media have a reason for neglecting the stories: indeed my suspicion was that this was a direct result of ACA and reporting the details would have been seen as harmful to Mr. Obama and ACA.
And I first saw it about a week ago, and thought that by now it would have sunk in. Perhaps it has.
We have not seen the last of the consequences of ACA. I am still concerned how it will affect me: although I paid my Kaiser membership fees or premiums for years, when I reached 65 I was told that I could either allow Medicare to pay them for me, or I could pay about 4 times as much as I had been paying the day I turned 65. On reflection I decided to allow you to pay it for me, since clearly the 4 times as much was not insurance premium cost: I wasn’t any more likely to be critically ill at the end of my birthday month as I was when it began. My payments increased because the law said they would, and for no other reason.
I will be interested in how this all turns out. I am one of those who is pleased with the health care plan I had before the Affordable Care Act, but then I was happy enough with what I had been paying before I turned 65. I wasn’t given any choice in that matter; I do not know what choices I will have this time. Everyone I talk to at Kaiser says I should not worry about it. We’ll see. I am of an age to frighten MBA administrators of health care plans…
And this from the Washington Post
![clip_image003[1]](https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/clip_image00316.gif "clip_image003[1]"){kind=small}
