Last Call

Any questions about what Slugline BuzzFeed’s raison d’être is?




Gosh I’m shocked.  No sirens while you’re at it Ben?  Maybe that’s not in the budget.

President Obama’s enemies often accuse him, in the starkest political terms, of crudely acting to shift resources toward his political base: Green energy donors; single women; Latinos; African-Americans.

But the next 12 months are likely to reveal the opposite. Imminent elements of Obama’s grandest policy move, the health care overhaul known as ObamaCare, are calculated to screw his most passionate supporters and to transfer wealth to his worst enemies.

His worst enemies apparently being “BuzzFeed”, judging by the article.

The passionate supporters are the youth, who voted for him by a margin of 60% to 36%, according to exit poll samples of people 29 and under. His enemies are the elderly: Mitt Romney won 56% of the votes from people 65 and over. And while one of ObamaCare’s earliest provisions was a boon to the young, allowing them to stay on their parents’ insurance through the age of 26, what follows may come as an unpleasant surprise to many of the president’s supporters. The provisions required to make any sort of health insurance plan work — not just ObamaCare, but really any plan of its sort — require healthy young people to pay more in health insurance than they consume in services, while the elderly (saved by Sarah “Death Panels” Palin from any serious attempt to ration expensive and often futile end-of-life care) consume far more than they pay in. There is always a push and pull, however, and this year will be spent laying plans to shift the burden further toward the young.

Holy crap, Ben Smith has discovered ACTUARIAL SCIENCE.  Healthy people paying for premiums and not consuming health care pays for sick people who are consuming health care.  ALERT THE INTERNETS.

State and federal officials and the health care industry are currently preparing to implement two specific ObamaCare provisions taking effect on January 1, 2014, acting on this politically perverse principle of shifting resources from your supporters to your opponents. The first is the individual mandate, which aims to force the young, childless, and healthy — “Young Invincibles,” as they are said to think of themselves — to buy heath insurance, even if they think (and even perhaps make a rational, if risky, bet) that they don’t need it.

2010 Teabagger town halls are on the phone, Ben.  They want their crapass argument back.  Seriously man, are you just now figuring out how Obamacare works, bro?  Why the individual mandate was kind of key to the program?  You can’t possibly be this dense.

The second is a lesser-known policy to limit the practices of charging different premiums to different ages, known as age-rating. Many states currently set a limit on this difference, often mandating that an old person shouldn’t pay a premium more than five times a younger person’s, even if she’s expected to use more than five times as much health care. The ObamaCare provision kicking in next January 1 would reduce that ratio to three-to-one, essentially limiting what the elderly pay in part by forcing young people to carry a larger share of the total cost of national health care.

Once again, this BREAKING NEWS MUST CREDIT SLUGLINE BUZZFEED has been common knowledge to any of the policy wonks that have been involved in this discussion, the list of which apparently never included one Ben Smith.  Skip to the end already, son.

So attack Obama on whatever grounds you want, and accuse him if you like of rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies. But that charge, true to some degree of most politicians, may be less true of this one than any other in recent memory. The central question, as Mahar notes, is, “How do we choose between children and their grandparents?” In any normal political calculation, that answer would be clear: You choose the ones who voted for you.

This isn’t even effective firebagging, frankly.  It’s high school newspaper level nonsense.  In all seriousness, this information has been readily available for years now, and the whole point of doing all this is by invoking th mandate, overall health care costs are pushed downwards based on the other provisions in the law that Slugline BuzzFeed Ben conveniently forgets about.  If you’re just now sitting down to the table on ObamaCare, man, all the seats are taken.

Sit your ass down at the kid’s table with the rest of the cat GIF “journalists” and stop talking.