It’s Wednesday, November 28th, 2012….and we apologize for our failure to launch a Tuesday edition.  We underwent treatment for kidney stones Monday afternoon, and frankly, the procedure left us a bit tired; so that evening we opted for bed rather than blogging.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, the WSJ details the harsh realities of….

Hope and Exchange

The feds blame the states for refusing to become ObamaCare subsidiaries.

ObamaCare is due to land in a mere 10 months—about 300 days—and the Administration is not even close to ready, so naturally the political and media classes are attacking the Governors and state legislators who decline to help out. Mostly Republicans, they’re facing a torrent of abuse in Washington and pressure from health lobbies at home.

But the real story is that Democrats are reaping the GOP buy-in they earned. Liberals wanted government to re-engineer the entire health-care system and rammed the Affordable Care Act through on a party-line vote, not stopping to wonder whether it would work. Now that implementation is proving to be harder than advertised, they’re blaming the states for not making their jobs easier.

The current rumpus is over ObamaCare’s “exchanges,” the bureaucracies that will regulate the design and sale of insurance and where 30 million people (and likely far more) will sign up for subsidized coverage. States were supposed to tell the Health and Human Services Department if they were going to set up and run an exchange by October, but HHS delayed the deadline to November, and then again at the 11th hour to December.

Sixteen states have already said they won’t participate. Another 11 are undecided, while only 17 have committed to doing the work on their own. Six have opted for a “hybrid” federal-state model. That means HHS will probably be responsible for fallback federal exchanges in full or in part in as many as 25 or 30 states. The opposition isn’t so much political as practical. Or rather, the vast logistical and technical undertaking to build an exchange helps explain why so many Governors resisted ObamaCare in the first place.

States have regulated the small business and individual insurance markets for decades (some well, others less so). Now they’re supposed to toss everything out for a complex Washington rewrite, which is still being rewritten. The exchanges will also help enforce the individual mandate and premium increases. They’ll also have to spend a ton of money. Ohio estimates it will cost $63 million to set up an exchange and $43 million to run annually, based on a KPMG study.

Most spending will go to information technology, in an era when many states still run Medicaid using paper forms and pneumatic tubes. These systems are supposed to allow consumers to review health plans online (or in person and by mail and fax), pick one and then ping HHS and the Internal Revenue Service to determine who is eligible for what subsidies. Private businesses spend years developing and refining such consumer software. States need to fund call centers to field queries and even hire “navigators” to actively encourage people to enroll.

The main problem is that states are being conscripted as federal contractors. HHS has declined to reveal basic operational details except to make clear that state-based exchanges won’t really be run by the states. “No matter which option is chosen,” as Scott Walker put it, “Wisconsin taxpayers will not have meaningful control over the health-care policies and services sold to Wisconsin residents.”

So if things don’t work voters will blame the Governors for decisions made in Washington. And when it turns out that ObamaCare’s costs are underestimated and its benefits exaggerated, they’ll have enabled an entitlement that many of their constituents oppose. The wonder is that any GOP leaders—ahem, Chris Christie and Rick Scott—are still playing Hamlet.

Partly that may be due to the insurance and provider lobbies, especially the hospitals. They’re furious that states might spoil the deals they cut with the White House and frantic for new revenue, which will only flow with the subsidies. (Note that health industry stocks rallied on President Obama’s re-election.) They’re also generally more powerful at the local level and favor state-run exchanges as easier to manipulate. But Governors who give in are setting themselves up as political fall guys, just as the insurers will be when premiums inevitably spike.

We suggested at first that states could try to spin straw into gold, ignore HHS and try to adopt a marginally less destructive approach. One state that tried is Utah, which built an impartial insurance clearinghouse in 2009 based on “defined contribution, consumer choice, and free markets,” as Governor Gary Herbert put it in a November letter to HHS. Now he’s asking Washington to accept “Utah’s version of a health insurance exchange,” even though it clearly does not comply with Affordable Care Act provisions. HHS claims it is trying to be flexible, so this will be a useful test.

But the main reason HHS and ObamaCare partisans are trashing the state hold-outs is that the federal government isn’t any better equipped to make the plan a success. HHS’s reputation as one of the most dysfunctional agencies is notorious. To take one example, an ObamaCare-mandated update to a major computer network called the System for Electronic Rate and Form Filing, which governs insurance approvals, has been delayed by months.

HHS’s bandwidth is likely to be fried and its personnel overloaded by the workload of 25 exchanges or even 16. And the effort will be complicated by the serious legal questions and eventual lawsuits about the statutory authority of a federal exchange to dispense subsidies at all.

The Affordable Care Act barely passed and then barely survived Supreme Court review and the 2012 election. Now the entitlement is hurtling toward a truth-in-advertising moment and liberals are terrified that it won’t produce the results they promised. That was always likely given the central planning architecture of ObamaCare, but now the likes of Mr. Walker are declining to do their work for them and depriving them of scapegoats.

The day after ObamaCare passed, we invoked the “Pottery Barn” rule that Colin Powell once applied to Iraq: You break it, you own it. Washington is about to break it, and the states are saying they won’t be accomplices.

The Journal certainly called it; but we’ve no doubt whatsoever the MSM will never accurately recall, let alone report, their remarkably prescient prediction.

Meanwhile, we go back to the ranch with two charter members of The Gang That Couldn’t Hit The Broad Side Of A Barn With A Bazooka, and Idiots on Parade, aka “The Ego Has Landed” segment, and these two headlines:

Santorum: Come to Think of It, I Might Run in 2016, Too

Gingrich Not Ruling Out A 2016 Run

They’re “the stuff of dreams” alright….

….Hillary’s dreams; and living proof of Einstein’s definition of insanity.

Which brings us to today’s Money Quote, courtesy of the WSJ and Bruce Bawer’s thoughts on the oxymoron of “higher education”, i.e., “why the American miracle is fading into the mists of history”:

“Some of the parents just don’t realize how much things have changed since they were students. Indeed, some of them are so young that they, too, were students under the current dispensation—and they think this is what humanities education is. And so they instruct their children to avoid the humanities as much as they can and to concentrate on “practical” courses that will lead directly to profitable careers. As a result of which their kids never acquire a real liberal education—and thereby risk the danger of never truly understanding, among other things, what it means to be an American. And with every kid who emerges from college possessing a diploma—and an idea of America derived not from the values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution but from the preaching of identity studies—the American miracle fades a bit more into the mists of history.“

In a related item, here’s the latest installment of our “Those Who Do Not Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It” segment, courtesy of, if you’ll forgive the expression (and even if you won’t!), one truly dumb broad:

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.“

Joy Behar: “He was using drugs, and then he found religion. A lot of times I’ve noticed that people do that. They’re on drugs, and then they give up drugs, they need a new addiction, and the new addiction is religion.“

Atta girl, Joy; you’re right at home….particularly as Lenin also likely coined the phrase “useful idiots”.

And in the Environmental Moment, Rob Green, Executive Director of the National Council of Chain Restaurants tells us the truth behind why Americans are paying more in the check-out at their local grocery store:

A Mandate to Raise Food Prices

The cause of higher grocery bills isn’t the drought. It’s the failed federal ethanol policy.

Americans should understand that this year’s drought—the worst in 50 years—isn’t the primary reason for record-high food prices. The drought made things worse, but the leading driver of long-term increases in food costs is a deeply flawed federal mandate.

In 2005, Congress enacted the Renewable Fuel Standard to mandate the use of corn-based ethanol in gasoline. The cost of food commodities immediately began to rise. As a result, Americans have had to deal with some of the highest food prices on ­record. While the drought will end at some point, the price increases caused by the ethanol mandate will continue unless the government reverses course.

Proponents of ethanol argue that it lowers greenhouse-gas emissions and gas prices, but these findings remain subject to intense debate. The higher food prices all Americans now pay are indisputable.

Under the federal mandate, Americans must use 15 billion gallons of ethanol in gasoline ­annually by 2015. To meet this goal, 5.3 billion bushels of corn per year—equal to more than 40% of the 2011 corn crop—must be processed and burned as ­ethanol, not used for food or livestock feed.

The result: higher prices across the entire food chain, from products directly containing corn to protein raised on corn feed and crops that compete with corn for farmland. That includes the bread on the table, the eggs at breakfast, the chicken or steak at dinner, and almost all dairy products.

Since the enactment of the ethanol mandate in 2005, the use of corn in ethanol has skyrocketed to more than five ­billion bushels per year from 1.3 billion. Corn prices immediately began to rise, too, and in each year since they have exceeded the highest price seen between 1976 and 2006. Price increases also spread to other parts of the agricultural sector, as farmers switched to corn from other crops and livestock.

New research by PricewaterhouseCoopers (on behalf of the National Council of Chain ­Restaurants) finds that by the time the mandate’s 2015 goals are met, it will have caused a 27% increase in corn prices. ­Increased corn prices have ­already led to higher prices for other commodities, such as soybeans (by up to 16%), pork (by up to 15%) and poultry (by up to 8%).

Chain restaurants rely on these products for the food they serve. According to the PwC study, the federal mandate costs the typical chain restaurant up to $18,000 per year, per restaurant location. That is money that could otherwise go to building new restaurants, expanding operations or hiring new workers.

At some point in the future, alternative forms of biofuel might be produced without the distortionary impact on food prices. But such alternative biofuels aren’t yet commercially ­viable. So the elevated corn and other commodity prices caused by the ethanol mandate will continue into the foreseeable future. The increased costs to the food chain will have to be paid as long as the policy remains in place. (And guess who ultimately gets to pay them, both in restaurants and at the grocery store?!?)

All the while, it isn’t clear what good ethanol use will be doing for the environment. This is especially true if the long-run impact of increased corn production is to convert forests into croplands, substitute normal crop rotation with practices that use more fertilizers, and further tax local water resources. If so, any net reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions can disappear altogether.

In exchange for an alleged benefit that is uncertain at best, the ethanol mandate effectively requires that Americans pay a tax on the food they purchase. However laudable the mandate’s intended goals, its downsides outweigh any possible benefits.

The chain-restaurant industry isn’t anti-ethanol. We simply believe it is time for the ethanol industry to stand on its own, as restaurant owners and operators do every day. Congress and the president should repeal the misguided Renewable Fuel Standard and allow the free market to allocate corn to its most highly valued use—not one ­imposed by a government that forces food to be burned for ­inefficient fuel.

More at the pump, more at the check-out….with nothing to show in the fight against anthropogenic global warming, i.e., Climate Scam; if this doesn’t typify Washington policy making at its best, nothing does!  “Nothing”, in fact, is infinitely preferable!

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this interesting projection forwarded by Rick Saas, Esquire Extraordinaire:

And in News of The Morbidly Obese, we learn….

Sickly, obese Bronx woman dies in Hungary after airlines say she’s too fat to fly

A sickly, obese Bronx woman was left stranded in Hungary then died from kidney failure after airline officials booted her from three New York-bound flights because she was too fat, her husband says. “All we wanted was to come back home to get her treatment,” said a grieving Janos Soltesz, a Staten Island Ferry security guard whose 56-year-old wife, Vilma, died in Hungary nine days after she was kicked off the first of three jets.

Vilma, who weighed about 425 pounds, had only one leg and used a wheelchair. She traveled with her husband of 33 years to Hungary on Delta and KLM airlines on Sept. 17.

….They planned to come home Oct. 15 so Vilma could resume treatment with the doctors she had been seeing for years. But the couple, both natives of Hungary, were told Vilma couldn’t be accommodated by KLM after they boarded the jet home, Janos said. “They tried to fit her into the back of the plane, but they didn’t have an extension to secure her,” Janos, 56, said.

Her illness, a combination of kidney disease and diabetes, caused her to gain water weight, and the airline said it didn’t have a seat-belt extender for her, Janos said. He was also told the seat back couldn’t handle his wife’s weight. “It appeared on the passenger’s return that it was not physically possible for her to board the aircraft, despite every effort made by KLM to this end. A seat or belt extender did not offer a solution, either,” said KLM spokeswoman Ellen van Ginkel.

….Then they were told to drive five hours to Prague for a Delta plane that could accommodate her as a disabled person, said attorney Holly Ostrov Ronai, who is mulling a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the airlines accusing them of violating laws protecting the disabled. “This absolutely contributed to the cause of her death,” Ronai said. “They managed to get her over there and were obligated to get her home.”

In Prague, Delta staff told the couple the airline’s plastic wheelchair couldn’t hold her weight, Janos said. The staff also couldn’t put her on the sky-lift elevator, the airline said. “After the operating carrier in Budapest was physically unable to board Mrs. Soltesz on its flight, and despite a determined good-faith effort by Delta in Prague, we were also physically unable to board her on our aircraft,” said Delta spokesman Russel Cason.

So the couple drove back to their vacation home and called their New York travel agent to make other arrangements. Finally, the agent said they could get on an Oct. 22 Lufthansa flight to New York via Frankfurt, which would be able to accommodate her size. Then trouble struck again. On the plane, the crew, with help from the local fire department, was unable to move her from her wheelchair to the three seats assigned to her.

The captain ordered them off after 30 minutes of no success. “We had 140 passengers on board, and they had connections and needed to travel,” said Lufthansa spokesman Nils Haupt. “The question was never the seat belt. The question was the mobility of the passenger.”

So they again went back to the vacation home to make other arrangements as Vilma became sicker and sicker. Neither trusted the doctors in Hungary, especially because they wouldn’t be familiar with her lengthy medical history, Janos said. “She was very ill and did not trust that the hospitals in former communist Hungary could attend to her needs,” Ronai said.

Janos found Vilma dead two days later and buried her in Hungary. “I’m lonely now. Wherever I am going, I am just going alone. I am missing her a lot,” he said, adding he was grateful to work his ferry job on Thanksgiving to keep his mind off his late wife. “There were only two women in my life — my mother, who I lived with for 23 years, and Vilma, who I lived with for 33 years,” Janos said.

Sounds more like 4-1/2 women….assuming of course Janos’ mother weighed in at under 200 lbs.  No offense to the bereaved, but we’re forced to conclude Vilma’s morbid obesity caused her health problems (including her diabetes and kidney issues) and ultimately, her death; not the airlines inability to provide the lift to counter her significant drag.

And since we’re on the subject of drag, we’ll call it a day with News of the Bizarre, and this….”titillating” item:

Belgian man finds out his wife of 19 years was born a man

Which just goes to prove, the more things change, the more they remain the same: caveat emptor, baby!

Magoo