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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (749633)	10/26/2013 12:39:39 PM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1574004

Why Is Obamacare Complicated? October 26, 2013, 9:58 am Krugman Mike Konczal says most of what needs to be said about the underlying sources of Obamacare’s complexity, which in turn set the stage for the current tech problems. Basically, Obamacare isn’t complicated because government social insurance programs have to be complicated: neither Social Security nor Medicare are complex in structure. It’s complicated because political constraints made a straightforward single-payer system unachievable. It’s been clear all along that the Affordable Care Act sets up a sort of Rube Goldberg device, a complicated system that in the end is supposed to more or less simulate the results of single-payer, but keeping private insurance companies in the mix and holding down the headline amount of government outlays through means-testing. This doesn’t make it unworkable: state exchanges are working, and healthcare.gov will probably get fixed before the whole thing kicks in. But it did make a botched rollout much more likely. So Konczal is right to say that the implementation problems aren’t revealing problems with the idea of social insurance; they’re revealing the price we pay for insisting on keeping insurance companies in the mix, when they serve little useful purpose. So does this mean that liberals should have insisted on single-payer or nothing? No. Single-payer wasn’t going to happen — partly because of the insurance lobby’s power, partly because voters wouldn’t have gone for a system that took away their existing coverage and replaced it with the unknown. Yes, Obamacare is a somewhat awkward kludge, but if that’s what it took to cover the uninsured, so be it. And although the botched rollout is infuriating — count me among those who believe that liberals best serve their own cause by admitting that, not trying to cover for the botch — the odds remain high that this will work, and make America a much better place.

To: i-node who wrote (749633)	10/26/2013 12:42:03 PM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1574004

Obamacare and part-time jobs: The myth exploded (again) By Michael HiltzikOctober 22, 2013, 7:55 a.m. Tuesday's tepid brew of jobs data, delayed more than two weeks by the government shutdown, wasn't worth waiting for. It shows an increase in total nonfarm employment by 148,000 in September over August, which is consistent with economic growth crawling along in second gear. The report's most notable nugget is the change in part-time work. Over the last month the number of workers in part-time jobs for economic reasons--slack demand, cutbacks in hours--has remained stable. Over the last year, however, it has fallen by 681,000. Those part-timers also constitute a smaller share of all workers--5.5% in September compared to 6% a year earlier. That puts the lie to the popular conservative meme that Obamacare has transformed America's workforce into part-timers. The idea is that employers wishing to evade the law's requirement that they offer health insurance to employees working more than 30 hours a week will cut their hours to 29 or less. The shorthand about this provided by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), that one-stop shop for Obamacare disinformation, was "single parents who have been forced into part-time work." Previous employment reports have shown no evidence for that, and the new report undermines the myth further. Moreover, the monthly report defines "part-time" more loosely than the Affordable Care Act -- 35 hours a week or less, compared to the ACA's 30 hours--which means there's even less evidence for the Obamacare/part-time meme. The jobs data were collected before the shutdown, so that Republican wound to the economy won't show up until the next jobs report a month from now. But this report does sharpen the picture of the effect of another continuing fiscal blunder by Washington--the sequester. Job growth has hovered around 150,000 per month since March, when the sequester's broad-based government spending cuts went into effect. That's dismal compared to the robust growth that should be visible at this stage of an economic recovery, and underscores how Congress has taken its eyes off the jobs ball. It's also a reminder that programs to help Americans cope with an arid employment landscape are still important. Those include food stamp benefits, which, as we reported Monday, are about to be cut. Your Congress, masters of bad timing. latimes.com