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How many people signed up for Obamacare?

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NBC News reports on the number of people who have signed up for Obamacare. It’s even lower than the estimate I reported earlier in the week.

Excerpt:

In a new low point for President Barack Obama and another ding against his signature domestic achievement, only 26,000 Americans signed up for health insurance plans in the month that the federal government’s troubled website has been open for business.

When figures from state-run exchanges are included, more than 106,000 Americans selected plans during the Affordable Care Act’s first month of open enrollment. Still, that number, combined with the administration’s repeated warnings of low early-enrollment figures, won’t mute the mounting political outcryfrom both sides of the aisle over the rocky rollout.

[…]Even the administration’s Democratic allies have begun to exhibit signs of nervousness.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Red State Democrat who’s up for re-election in Louisiana next fall, has proposed a patch to Obamacare that would allow consumers to keep insurance plans threatened by cancellation. The tweak would, in essence, force Obama to make good on his once-stated promise that individuals who like their health care plan could keep it.

The bill, passage of which would represent an embarrassment for Obama, has even won over some administration allies, including California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.  And former President Bill Clinton, whom Obama once dubbed his “explainer in chief,” didn’t help the White House on Tuesday when he endorsed a similar fix.

[…]Throughout it all, Obama’s approval ratings have plummeted to new lows, suffering from successive crises involving a Republican-led government shutdown and near-default on the national debt, and then the struggles of Healthcare.gov.

Breitbart News has more on the revolt of the Democrats who are up for election in 2014.

Excerpt:

On CNN’s The Lead, host Jake Tapper said that Democrats had refused to come on the program to discuss the abysmal Obamacare enrollment numbers released on Wednesday afternoon.

Dana Bash reported, “Republicans are tripping over themselves to come out and talk.” She continued, “we’re not hearing from Democrats so far, the sounds of silence, tells you everything you need to know.”

Tapper confirmed that Democrats were suddenly silent: “To be completely honest, we had difficult time booking Democrats to come on after those numbers were released, to have them come on and talk about fixing the problem.”

And moderate leftists Kirsten Powers and David Frum are furious that that their health care plans have been canceled, and even more furious at the White House spin on the millions of Americans who are losing their health care.

Excerpt:

On Tuesday, two prominent media personalities who support President Barack Obama’s overhaul of America’s health care system took to the airwaves to vent about their insurance plans which have been cancelled as a direct result of the Affordable Care Act.

In an appearance on Special Report on Tuesday, Fox News Channel contributor and Daily Beast editorial writer Kirsten Powers lashed out at the White House – and, by extension, her Democratic cohorts – for implying that her consumer choices were poorly informed and insufficiently focused on the collective good.

“My blood pressure goes up every time they say that they’re protecting us from substandard health insurance plans,” Powers told Bret Baier. “There is nothing to support what they’re saying.”

“I have talked to about how I’m losing my health insurance,” she continued. “If I want to keep the same health insurance, it’s going to cost twice as much. There’s nothing substandard about my plan.”

“All of the things they say that are not in my plan are in my plan,” Powers lamented. “All of the things they have listed — there’s no explanation for doubling my premiums other than the fact that it’s subsidizing other people. They need to be honest about that.”

Powers, a committed Democrat, once supported the aims of the ACA, if not every mean designed to achieve a noble end. Today, it would seem, she is wavering on the virtue of that end as well.

Powers is in good company. On CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday, former Daily Beast columnist David Frum hijacked a conversation about President Bill Clinton’s shocking admonition of President Barack Obama to discuss his own cancelled health plan.

“I’m pulling rank,” Frum informed his fellow panel guests, “because I’m one of those who has had his plan canceled.”

“I still have, but will not very much longer have, a plan in the District of Columbia, covered my wife and my children, which is canceled,” he reported. “I can buy on the exchange a plan that will cost $200 a month more and have a higher deductible. I can’t get back my old plan unless, as Ron [Brownstein] says, the administration drops the element of the law that requires the coverage of everybody.”

“That’s why my coverage went up is because every insurer must now cover everybody,” Frum continued. “I think President Clinton should have the honesty to defend that.”

It’s all falling apart, but will it be in time? I have friends who are in the individual market who are losing their health care and being offered plans with higher deductibles AND higher co-payments,  that cost far more than what they had. We really need to see a push to repeal this monstrosity now before more people have to suffer from it.

Polemics

William Lane Craig on the unexpected applicability of mathematics to nature

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You might remember that Dr. Craig used a new argument in his debate with Lawrence Krauss in Melbourne, Australia.

My notes on the debate record it thus:

The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics:

  • The underlying structure of nature is mathematical – mathematics is applicable to nature
  • Mathematical objects can either be abstract objects or useful fiction
  • Either way, there is no reason to expect that nature should be linked to abstract objects or fictions
  • But a divine mind that wants humans to understand nature is a better explanation for what we see

And now Dr. Craig has expanded on it in the Q&A section of his Reasonable Faith web site.

The question:

Dear Dr Craig

Firstly can I thank you for all your work. My faith in Christ has been enormously strengthened through studying your work in apologetics in particular and I have grown in confidence in my Christian witness.

My question relates to numbers and mathematics as a whole. On the Defenders podcast you state that as God is the only self-existent, necessary being, numbers and mathematical objects, whilst being useful, don’t actually exist as these too would exist necessarily and independently of God. If this is the case, how can it be that mathematics is so easily applied to the natural world? Surely if mathematics only existed in our minds, we would expect to see no correlation between it and how the physical world actually is?

Michael

United Kingdom

Excerpt from the answer:

As philosopher of mathematics Mary Leng points out, for the non-theistic realist, the fact that physical reality behaves in line with the dictates of acausal mathematical entities existing beyond space and time is “a happy coincidence” (Mathematics and Reality [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], p. 239). Think about it: If, per impossibile, all the abstract objects in the mathematical realm were to disappear overnight, there would be no effect on the physical world. This is simply to reiterate that abstract objects are causally inert. The idea that realism somehow accounts for the applicability of mathematics “is actually very counterintuitive,” muses Mark Balaguer, a philosopher of mathematics. “The idea here is that in order to believe that the physical world has the nature that empirical science assigns to it, I have to believe that there are causally inert mathematical objects, existing outside of spacetime,” an idea which is inherently implausible (Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], p. 136).

By contrast, the theistic realist can argue that God has fashioned the world on the structure of the mathematical objects. This is essentially what Plato believed. The world has mathematical structure as a result.

This argument was also made by mechanical engineering professor Walter Bradley in a lecture he gave on scientific evidence for an intelligent designer. You can read an essay that covers some of the material in that lecture at Leadership University.

Excerpt:

The physical universe is surprising in the simple mathematical form it assumes. All the basic laws of physics and fundamental relationships can be described on one side of one sheet of paper because they are so few in number and so simple in form (see table 1.1).

[…]It has been widely recognized for some time that nature assumes a form that is elegantly described by a relatively small number of simple, mathematical relationships, as previously noted in table 1.1. None of the various proposals presented later in this chapter to explain the complexity of the universe address this issue. Albert Einstein in a letter to a friend expressed his amazement that the universe takes such a form (Einstein 1956), saying:

You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world to the degree that we may speak of such comprehensibility as a miracle or an eternal mystery. Well, a priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be in any way grasped through thought. . . . The kind of order created, for example, by Newton’s theory of gravity is of quite a different kind. Even if the axioms of the theory are posited by a human being, the success of such an enterprise presupposes an order in the objective world of a high degree which one has no a priori right to expect. That is the “miracle” which grows increasingly persuasive with the increasing development of knowledge.

Alexander Polykov (1986), one of the top physicists in Russia, commenting on the mathematical character of the universe, said: “We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it.” Paul Davies, an astrophysicist from England, says, “The equations of physics have in them incredible simplicity, elegance and beauty. That in itself is sufficient to prove to me that there must be a God who is responsible for these laws and responsible for the universe” (Davies 1984). Successful development of a unified field theory in the future would only add to this remarkable situation, further reducing the number of equations required to describe nature, indicating even further unity and integration in the natural phenomena than have been observed to date.

The whole paper that started this off is called “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”, and it is a must read for advanced Christian apologists. You can read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Mysterious Tom posted this quote from David Berlinski on Facebook:

Why should a limited and finite organ such as the human brain have the power to see into the heart of matter and mathematics? These are subjects that have nothing to do with the Darwinian business of scrabbling up the greasy pole of life. It is as if the liver, in addition to producing bile, were to demonstrate an unexpected ability to play the violin.

That’s from David Berlinski’s “The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions”, (Basic Books, 2009, p. 16-17). Dr. Berlinksi is not a Christian – he is an agnostic.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

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Big government spending is suffocating the next generation with debt

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Youth unemployment by ethnicity (5/13)
Youth unemployment by ethnicity (5/13)

Libertarian economist Veronique de Rugy writes about it in Reason magazine.

Excerpt:

A word of caution for kids heading off to college this year: Your degree may be worth less and cost more than you think. Your job prospects will likely be grim, whether or not you get that sheepskin. Oh, and you’re on the hook for trillions in federal debt racked up by your parents and grandparents.

Washington has willfully ignored the looming crisis of entitlement spending, knowingly consigning young Americans to a future of crushing debt, persistent underemployment, and burdensome regulation. Politicians on both sides of the aisle share the blame.

This summer, Congress made a big bipartisan show of cutting student loan rates to 3.4 percent from an already artificially low 6.8 percent. But even that seemingly helpful gesture will wind up hurting the Americans it claims to help. Federal student aid, whether in the form of grants or loans, is the main factor behind the runaway cost of higher education. Subsidies raise prices, leading to higher subsidies, which raise prices even more. This higher education bubble, like the housing bubble before it, will eventually pop. Meanwhile, large numbers of students will graduate with more debt than they would have in an unsubsidized market.

And when those new, debt-laden graduates head out into the labor market with their overpriced diplomas, they may not be able to find a job. According to data provided to me by my Mercatus Center colleague, former Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Keith Hall, fewer than half of Americans today between the ages of 18 and 25 are employed. For those in that cohort actively on the job market, the unemployment rate is 16 percent, versus 6 percent for job-seekers aged 25 and above.

These young folks are also more likely to be long-term unemployed: While accounting for just 14 percent of the labor force, they make up 19 percent of the long-term unemployed, defined by the BLS as 27 weeks or longer.

The lucky few young’uns with jobs of some kind also suffer from rampant underemployment. In a recent blog post, Diana Carew of the Progressive Policy Institute wrote: “In July 2013, just 36 percent of Americans age 16-24 not enrolled in school worked full-time, 10 percent less than in July 2007.” In other words, of these 17 million young Americans, 5.6 million were working part-time, 3.2 million were unemployed, and 8.4 million were out of the labor force altogether.

I really recommend you read the rest of the article, especially if you aren’t following what Obama’s policies are doing to our economy. Special attention is given to the effects of Obamacare on job creation.

Just as a community service, I want to post for you young people (and your parents) a list of the majors that lead to higher paying jobs:

Top 10 highest-paid college majors

  1. Petroleum Engineering: $120,000
  2. Pharmacy Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration: $105,000
  3. Mathematics and Computer Science: $98,000
  4. Aerospace Engineering: $87,000
  5. Chemical Engineering: $86,000
  6. Electrical Engineering: $85,000
  7. Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering: $82,000
  8. Mechanical Engineering: $80,000
  9. Metallurgical Engineering: $80,000
  10.  Mining and Mineral Engineering: $80,000

And here are some majors that you should avoid at all costs:

  1. Counseling Psychology: $29,000
  2. Early Childhood Education: $36,000
  3. Theology and Religious Vocations: $38,000
  4. Human Services and Community Organization: $38,000
  5. Social Work: $39,000
  6. Drama and Theater Arts: $40,000
  7. Studio Arts: $40,000
  8. Communication Disorders Sciences and Service: $40,000
  9. Visual and Performing Arts: $40,000
  10. Health and Medical Preparatory Programs: $40,000

So young people need to be careful what they study in order to get a job that will allow them to pay off all the government debts that their teachers were busy running up. Their teachers taught them that government spending was good, but their teachers aren’t going to be paying for the government spending. They are the beneficiaries of the increased government spending. The pupils are the ones who will have to work to pay for the spending on the social programs enjoyed by their teachers.

It’s very important for young Christians to understand that degrees are getting more expensive, and it’s important to choose a field that is going to produce a return on your investment. Not only do STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) degrees get you a job that pays, but it has other benefits. For example STEM degrees grind out every last bit of impracticality and entitlement-feeling out of you – because in a STEM program, no one cares about your “specialness”. You solve problems or you fail the class. It’s not a situation where you can just repeat what the professor says in order to get good grades, as is often (but not always) the case in the humanities.