Oregon Turns Racist and Other Obamacare Stories

Oregon is dropping their state-run Obamacare because apparently over the course of the last few months, everybody in Oregon has inexplicably become racist. There is hope because they are moving over to the federal system so perhaps they are actually just slightly bigoted.

Cover Oregon still isn’t online six months after its troubled launch, and now it looks like it never will be. Portland’s KATU reports that Oregon officials will recommend dumping its “beleaguered” state-run exchange, which was only able to accept paper-only applications because of its nonfunctional website, and will switch over to the federal program.

More and more of us will stop being racists as our plans get cancelled and we'll be forced onto the federal exchanges:

The Obama administration is quietly trying to stamp out some of the skimpiest health plans, a decision that industry officials say could trigger yet another wave of cancellation notices. 

The administration is targeting a type of coverage called fixed benefit or indemnity insurance, which give patients a fixed sum of money whenever they visit the doctor or land in a hospital.

With this kind of success, it's no wonder Senators are starting to defend and run on Obamacare. Kind of. 

It’s an exceptionally well-crafted ad, and I imagine it will help raise Senator Begich’s favorable image. Not surprisingly, it focuses on what is consistently the most popular aspect of Obamacare, a ban on pre-existing conditions used to block insurance. This is one aspect of Obamacare that both Republicans and Democrats support in overwhelming numbers and some variation is included in almost all Republican health care alternatives. No one is for pre-existing conditions. 

But as far as the ad being a defense of Obamacare, if you’re reluctant to name what you are “unabashedly” defending, it’s hard to see how this bodes well for the fight. It’s like showing up at the game with a bag over your head to cheer for your team.

Well they "kind of" defend it because Obamacare only "kind of" works:

The administration has failed to meet 44 statutory deadlines required under Obamacare, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS). 

The report, released on Monday, documents every provision with a specific deadline within the health care law and the administration’s actions taken as of April 15, 2014. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has missed more than half of the 83 deadlines mandated since March 2011.

So the thing Democrats do best, which is force other people to do things they don't want to do, is also something they fail at executing.

The Federalist cuts through the bullshit to show how racist they really are, by questioning whether or not the people are actually getting quality care.

In the torrent of information which deluges the public, the problem of price controls is scarcely mentioned because most writers in the medical policy community belong to a small group of academics, social scientists, economists and members of think tanks whose interests and expertise are in the financial rather than the medical aspects of healthcare.  They  lack the real life experience to appreciate the effects of their recommendations on practicing physicians and their patients. Doctors who know the problems are too busy coping with them to write about them.

This is a long one but in essence Obamacare is destroying the fundamental economics behind health care. If you do this to the housing market, peoples homes are underwater and it's a real pain. But point Phillips Gausewitz makes is that doing this to the medical market will cause more medical problems as Canada and other countries are experiencing due to delays in care:

This situation and the loss of the many intangible rewards of practice: gratifying patient relations, respect, time and funds for continuing education; have made the practice of medicine a much less attractive profession. Physicians who are financially able retire sooner than they would have previously, and the best qualified potential replacements often choose less frustrating careers. 

The result is the growing shortage which, unless corrected, will result in conditions here like those in Great Britain, Japan and Canada where patients are dying and cancers becoming untreatable while they are on waiting lists for care.

Price controls was tried during Nixon and we saw how well that turned out. Let it burn? It's burning. The question is how much damage will it cause.