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New study: health insurance premiums will rise 55% to 85% under Obamacare

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From National Underwriter. (H/T Don Surber)

Excerpt:

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) could cut the number of uninsured Ohio residents by 790,000 in 2017, but it also could increase premiums for the 735,000 residents who have individual coverage by more than 55%.

Consultants at Milliman Inc., Seattle, have included those projections in a forecast report prepared for the Ohio Department of Insurance.

The Ohio department commissioned the report to help regulators know what to expect in 2014, when major PPACA provisions are set to kick in, and a few years further along, in 2017.

PPACA opponents are still fighting in the courts and in Congress to block implementation of PPACA.

If the act takes effect as written and works as drafters expect, PPACA is supposed to require major medical insurers to sell policies that meet minimum benefits requirements on a guaranteed issue, mostly community-rated basis starting in 2014. Individuals and employees at small employers are supposed to be able to buy coverage using tax credits through a new system of health insurance exchanges.

Today, about 10 million non-elderly Ohio residents have some kind of government or commercial health coverage or go uninsured. About 15%, or 1.5 million, were uninsured in 2010, and that percentage could drop to 7.1%, or 712,000, in 2017, the Milliman consultants estimate.

The Milliman consultants suggest that the total number of people covered by insured and self-funded group plans could fall to 5.4 million in 2017, from 6.1 million in 2010.

The number with some kind of individual commercial coverage could increase 735,000, from 350,000.

The percentage with some kind of government coverage, or coverage provided by a private insurer but paid for in whole or in part by the government, could increase to 31%, from 20% in 2010.

Although the percentage of residents with coverage could rise by about 7.9%, the price of individual health insurance coverage might rise about 55% to 85%, excluding the impact of medical inflation, the Milliman consultants predict.

How can this be… it’s named the blah-blah-blah… AFFORDABLE CARE ACT. I swear – if that nutcase in the White House passed a bill banning Christianity, he would call it the Christian Freedom of Religion Act.

Repeal and replace Obamacare.

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Greek men deprived of provider role commit suicide in record numbers

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From the Wall Street Journal, a reminder that recessions hit men the hardest. (H/T Tom)

Excerpt:

]Gross domestic product in the second quarter was down more than 7% from a year before, amid government spending cuts and tax increases that, combined, will add up to about 20% of GDP. Unemployment is over 16%. Crime, homelessness, emigration and personal bankruptcies are on the rise.The most dramatic sign of Greece’s pain, however, is a surge in suicides.

Recorded suicides have roughly doubled since before the crisis to about six per 100,000 residents annually, according to the Greek health ministry and a charitable organization called Klimaka.

[…]Suicide has also risen in much of the rest of Europe since the financial crisis began, according to a recent study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, which said Greece is among the hardest hit.Suicide has also risen in much of the rest of Europe since the financial crisis began, according to a recent study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, which said Greece is among the hardest hit.

[…]A suicide help line at Klimaka, the charitable group, used to get four to 10 calls a day, but “now there are days when we have up to 100,” says a psychologist there, Aris Violatzis.

The caller often fits a certain profile: male, age 35 to 60 and financially ruined. “He has also lost his core identity as a husband and provider, and he cannot be a man any more according to our cultural standards,” Mr. Violatzis says.

Heraklion, commercial center of the island of Crete, has had a spate of such deaths.

[…]Victims once were typically adolescent males or old people facing severe illness, and in normal times suicide cases often involve a mixture of factors including mental illness, says local psychiatrist Eva Maria Tsapaki.

But the economic crash has created a “new phenomenon of entrepreneurs with no prior history of mental illness who are found dead every other week,” she says. “It’s very unusual.”

Hans Bader had a recent post about Obama’s stimulus bill that is relevant.

Excerpt: (links removed)

A logical place to have financed road and bridge repairs would have been Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package. But the stimulus package was purged of most investments in roads and bridges, and filled instead with welfare and social spending, out of political correctness, after feminist leaders complained that building and repairing roads and bridges would put unemployed blue-collar men to work, rather than women.

Christina Hoff Sommers points out that “of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men,” because men “predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007.” But when some administration officials floated the concept of “an ambitious . . . stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams” as a way of “reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy,” “Women’s groups were appalled,” asking “Where are the New Jobs for Women?” and denouncing what they called “The Macho Stimulus Plan.”

As Sommers notes, the Obama administration quickly knuckled under to this pressure, replacing its recovery package with an $800 billion stimulus package that instead “skews job creation somewhat towards women” by spending money instead on social services like welfare that are administered mostly by female employees.

As a 2009 Associated Press story reported, “Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over ‘Shovel-ready’ Projects.” A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services.” Or, as another AP report put it, “Stimulus Aid Favors Welfare, Not Work, Programs.”

The stimulus package also repealed welfare reform, as Slate’s Mickey Kaus and the Heritage Foundation have noted. (In 2008, Obama ran campaign ads claiming to support welfare reform, even though he had sought to undermine welfare reform as an Illinois legislator. The stimulus package largely repealed the 1996 welfare-reform law.)

Men: don’t vote for this man in 2012.

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White Horse Inn interviews Michael Shermer on skepticism

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Look at what Reformed Seth sent me in my e-mail on Thursday morning! A podcast!

Here is the description:

On this program, Michael Horton talks with Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine and author of numerous books including, Why People Believe Weird Things, Why Darwin Matters, and most recently The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. The conversation centers on Shermer’s new book, and why he believes his skeptical and agnostic worldview presents a better explanation for the universe than the claims of the Christian faith. Following the interview, Michael Horton talks with Dean L. Overman, author of The Case Against Accident & Self Organization, about the mathematical improbability of life forming by chance.

You can listen on their web page, or grab the MP3 file here.

And here are the questions asked:

  • Tell us about your background, how did you transition to agnosticism?
  • Are you firm in your convictions, or are you open to changing your mind?
  • What is your new book “The Believing Brain” about?
  • Was your skepticism also the result of the subjective, emotional belief-generating process described in the book?
  • How do you explain the mathematical underpinnings of nature?
  • How do you account for the foundational beliefs that make science possible?
  • Are these precursor beliefs for science also the result of the subjective, emotional belief-generating process?
  • How do you explain the fine-tuning of the universe on naturalism?
  • How do you respond to the historical claims of Christianity, like the resurrection of Jesus?
  • Is it accurate to put all religious claims in the same category without evaluating the claims specifically?
  • Why do you think that if there are two large groups that disagree about a claim, that no one is right?
  • Explain why reason itself is not undermined if man is the result of a random process of evolution?

This interview reminded me a lot of the post I wrote analyzing the apostasy of Dan Barker.

I wanted to write an angry refutation of Shermer’s ignorant speculations. But then I found this follow-up program (MP3 here) featuring the magnificent Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason. Greg’s refutation of Shermer is a lot more respectful than what I would say. Maybe it’s better if I wait a bit and then weigh in later in the comments.

You will also benefit enormously from this debate transcript featuring Michael Shermer and Greg Koukl.