Tidbits Quotations
To Accompany the November 14, 2013 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2013/tidbits11413.htm  
Bob Jensen at Trinity University




My Free Speech Political Quotations and Commentaries Directory and Log ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Political/PoliticalQuotationsCommentaries.htm

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.
George S. Patton

The one I feel for is his wife," Matthews cut in.
Chris Matthews on MSCNB's Hardball (with respect to Chris Christie's Obesity)
Time Magazine's November 18. 2013 cover claims Christie is the "Elephant in the Room."
Think of how the liberal press would explode if Time Magazine  ran a cover story depicting President Obama as the "Donkey With Big Ears"

Benefits of Welfare ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRRwZDSmTVI&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DwRRwZDSmTVI&app=desktop
The Governor of Vermont claims that it's a problem, especially in Vermont, that people get a better deal on Welfare than they get from working.


On Piers Morgan Live Tuesday, guest Bill Maher openly admitted Obama “lied” about Americans keeping their insurance plans, but insisted that he had to because of unified Republican opposition—and the increasingly “stupider” American public
http://www.truthrevolt.org//news/bill-maher-obama-had-lie-stupider-americans
Does this mean lying is a remedy for stupidity?
Actually, throughout history lying by a political candidate is rationalized if leads to one side's political goals? On occasion political leaders do believe or are led to believe their own lies which makes the lies less less onerous than intentional lying. A more common form of "lying" is to tell the truth without filling in some crucial assumptions. For example, President Obama claims that he told the truth about individuals keeping their former health insurance plans. What he left out was the part about the parts of the law that made many individual plans illegal because they did not cover such things as maternity and mental health. He knew that many plans would be revoked but failed to mention this in his promotional speeches before the law was passed.

Another example of huge lies were those expounded by FDR, before Lend-Lease became official in 1941, about the USA's neutrality in the earliest days of WW II. In the eyes of President Roosevelt a majority of Americans were just too stupid to realize the global threat of the Third Reich.

The problem with lying to stupid people is that they don't always remain stupid over time to believe it when a liar later on is telling the truth or lying. They just don't believe most anything coming out of the mouth of a liar. Then again many people believe what they want to believe and deny what they want to deny.


President Obama won the 2013 debt ceiling game of "Chicken." What kind of game is that? When I grew up the game of "Chicken" was when two teenage-driven cars approached each other at 100 mph to see which one, the Chicken, veered off first.
Bob Jensen

Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in the 2012 elections 65,909,451 Obama to 60,932,176 Romney votes.
Among the 48 million people of food stamps, how many voted for Mitt Romney?
The GOP will never win without gaining half the food stamp votes.
Here Are The States With The Most To Lose From Republican Food Stamp Cuts ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/here-are-the-states-with-the-most-to-lose-from-republican-food-stamp-cuts-2013-9
It would do wonders for farmers if we gave food stamps to the 99%. The GOP would do better with that platform.

U.S. National Debt Clock (now $17+ trillion booked debt) ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Also see http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/


From 24/7 Wall Street on November 4, 2013

The American middle class is shrinking
According to a report released earlier this year, an estimated 51% of the population was in the middle class at the start of the decade, down from 61% forty years earlier. It also appears that even as the economy recovers, jobs are being added for low-wage positions much faster. Despite economic growth in the United States, income inequality appears to be worsening nationwide. The gap between the wealthy and the poor varies across the country. Some areas have much more extreme poverty, extreme wealth or both, and very little in between. As of 2012, Sebastian and Vero Beach, Fla., had the highest level of income inequality in the country.
These are the cities with the widest gap between the rich and poor.

http://247wallst.com/special-report/2013/11/04/cities-with-the-widest-gap-between-the-rich-and-poor/?utm_source=247WallStDailyNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=NOV042013A&utm_campaign=DailyNewsletter 

Jensen Comment

Note that except for the cited cities near the wealthy NYC metropolis, most of the high inequality cities cited in the study are in the south where poverty is generally more extreme for a number of reasons, not the least of which illegal immigration that tends to make low income jobs highly competitive and holds back wages. I lived in Texas 24 years and learned very well that there much of the estimated $2 trillion underground economy in the south --- and underground economy that tends to distort poverty statistics because the underground economy data are not collected by census takers ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm
But the underground economy for the most part does little more than put food on the table and a leaky roof over poor families. It does not relieve their poverty unless they are highly successful bank robbers and drug dealers.

Problems of job exportation for lower wages combined with robotics replacements of low-skilled jobs is creating high unemployment among low-skilled workers, especially those workers of color who tend to congregate in the more depressed areas of the country, especially in the south and in some of the major cities like Chicago and Detroit.

The middle class is shrinking because a small proportion is rising to the top (e.g., those with high skills in entrepreneurship and technology) and a large proportion is falling closer to the poverty line. Our knee jerk reaction is that people of color are slipping, but in many instances they were already below the poverty line.

The middle class that's falling at a greater rate includes many of our elderly citizens of all races, creeds, and colors who lost their somewhat attractive jobs since the 2007 recession and can only find minimum-wage jobs at best in this recession.

The elderly are also seeing their meager savings disappear because the Fed's zero-interest rate policy destroyed savings interest incomes that used to prevent much of this drain on their savings balances. Many cannot retire and continue to work years and years after they turn 65 years of age. This takes jobs away from younger people who now live on the edge of poverty.


"Who Really Employs Minimum-Wage Workers? Don't be fooled by organized labor's talking points. Small businesses do the hiring," by Michael Saltsman, The Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304655104579163880944640994?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

. . .

Roughly half the minimum-wage workforce is employed at businesses with fewer than 100 employees, and 40% are at very small businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

The results are similar even if you follow the left's cue and broaden the analysis from minimum wage employees earning $7.25 an hour to "low-wage" employees earning $10 an hour or less: 46% still work for businesses with 100 or fewer employees.

Continued in article


"Racism is alive and well in the U.S. and Elsewhere: The Color of One’s Skin is all too often used as the Measure of One’s Buying Capacity," by Steven Mintz, Ethics Sage, October 25, 2013 ---
http://www.ethicssage.com/2013/10/racism-is-alive-and-well-in-the-us-and-elsewhere.html


"The 33 Whitest Jobs In America," by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, November 6, 2013 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/the-workforce-is-even-more-divided-by-race-than-you-think/281175/

Academe does not appear in the 90%+ white chart. Perhaps this is because academic disciplines vary so much in terms of having minority professors --- especially in disciplines (like mathematics and accounting) having increasing proportions of Asian Americans but not African Americans and Latinos. Also academe is confounded by having "minorities" who are still on Green Cards and are otherwise non-native Americans. Although the proportion of white professors of accounting is declining due mostly to a growing number of Asian accounting professors, the proportion African American and Latino accounting professors is miserably low. The KPMG Foundation for decades has taken on a serious funding initiative to increase the number of African Americans in accountancy doctoral programs. But the number of graduates is still a drop in the proverbial bucket.

"Whatever Happened to All Those Plans to Hire More Minority Professors?" by Ben Gose, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 2008
 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i05/05b00101.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

CPA firms increased their hiring of minorities to over 30% at the entry level, but the retention level drops back down to the neighborhood of 20% ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2012/Jun/20114925.htm
Reasons for lower retention rates include failure of new hires to pass the CPA Examination after being hired. Another perhaps more important reason is the traditionally high turnover of more recent employees in the larger CPA firms where most of those employees move into higher paying jobs (often with clients) or move out of the labor force to become full-time parents. Top minority employees of CPA firms are especially likely to receive attractive job offers from clients.

Law schools have been especially aggressive in recruiting top African American and Latino students.
This competition especially hurts when recruiting minority students for masters programs in accountancy (most CPA Examination candidates now graduate from such masters programs). One reason for law school minority recruitment success is that students can major in virtually any discipline in college and later be admitted to law school if they have the required LSAT scores. Most masters of accounting programs require what is tantamount to an undergraduate accounting major. This greatly reduces the number of minorities eligible to take the CPA Examination. However, students can still be business accountants without having passed the CPA examination. It's much harder, however, to get entry-level experience without first working for either a CPA firm or the IRS.

Occupations with tough licensing examinations tend to have lower lower percentages of blacks and Latinos.

More than half of the black and Latino students who take the state teacher licensing exam in Massachusetts fail, at rates that are high enough that many minority college students are starting to avoid teacher training programs, The Boston Globe reported. The failure rates are 54 percent (black), 52 percent (Latino) and 23 percent (white).
Inside Higher Ed, August 20, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/20/qt

Certification Examinations
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#CertificationExams

Bob Jensen's threads on careers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers


Gender Pay Gap
From 24/7 Wall Street newsletter on November 6, 2013

  • The gender wage gap has narrowed over the years. In 1979, women made an estimated 62% of what men earned. In 2012, the wage of a full-time female employee was roughly 81% of her male counterpart. While that is good news, in the past 10 years, the gap has remained more or less unchanged. The size of the remaining pay inequality depends a great deal on the job. In many of the largest occupations in the country, women earn close to what men do on a weekly basis. In others, however, the disparity remains closer to the 1979 levels. For example, the typical female insurance agent brought in just 62.5% of her male counterpart in 2012. These are the jobs with the widest pay gaps between men and women.

    Jensen Comment
    I don't want to get into hot-button reasons for the gender gap in pay other than to note that there's considerable evidence in some fields that the higher pay for men is sometimes due to the male willingness to work longer hours and/or endure more years of frequent overnight travel for days on end. Female doctors are more likely to apply for emergency room duty purportedly when there are eight-hour shifts as opposed to having to endure long days plus many nights and weekends of on-call duty endured by non-emergency room physicians. For example, private-practice physicians cannot always control what time of day their patients have babies or heart attacks or post-surgery complications.
     


    Why states like Illinois and California cannot tax their way out of unimaginable debt.
    Why states' business taxes on big companies are often a myth.
     

    From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on November 11, 2013

    Washington state closes in on Boeing deal
    The Washington state legislature completed passage of key elements of an incentive package aimed at guaranteeing that Boeing will locate manufacturing work for its 777X jetliner in Puget Sound,
    the WSJ reports. The roughly $8.7 billion package of extended tax breaks, education and workforce support and permit streamlining was passed less than a week after Democratic Governor Jay Inslee called for a special legislative session to swiftly approve the package. The incentives, along with a pending contract for Boeing’s largest union, are seen as crucial to Washington state’s beubg selected for the work.

    Jensen Comment
    Somehow Washington State is one of the seven states with no state income taxes. How a Blue State manages this is a mystery to me.

    From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on November 11, 2013

    Office Depot faces taxing decision on new headquarters
    A political stalemate could persuade Office Depot to move more than 2,000 jobs out of Illinois as lawmakers grouse about the growing number of companies seeking special tax treatment, the WSJ reports. The company wants to decide soon where to place its headquarters, after closing its $1.2 billion acquisition of OfficeMax last week. The choices: Naperville, Ill., where more than 2,000 people work for what was OfficeMax, or Office Depot’s home of Boca Raton, Fla., which houses more than 1,700 employees. To stay in Illinois, the new company is seeking relief from the state’s taxes, which are among the highest in the country. But a bill offering the office-supply chain $53 million in tax credits over 15 years failed to make it to a full Senate vote during a session that ended last week, and lawmakers aren’t likely to reconvene until next month at the earliest.

    Jensen Comment
    Illinois already gives enormous tax relief to big companies like Caterpillar and Sears to keep them from moving headquarter to another state. Who does that leave to pay for fraudulent Illinois state pensions and half the people who are fraudulently on Illinois Medicaid rolls --- fraudsters who are not really qualified for Medicaid?


    11 Hilariously Wrong Predictions About The Internet ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/11-hilariously-wrong-internet-predictions-2013-11?op=1

    Jensen Comment
    About the only thing hilarious is when they were clearly wrong. The jury may be still out on some of them. Others like "The Atlantic will surpass Huffington Post" and that "Hulu will surpass YouTube" once again demonstrates how easy it is to monumentally overestimate the intelligence of the public.


    Court blocks & boots judge on NYPD stop-frisk ---
    http://nypost.com/2013/10/31/court-blocks-judges-ruling-on-stop-and-frisk/

    She’s out! A federal appeals court on Thursday blocked Manhattan federal Judge Shira Scheindlin’s controversial ruling requiring restrictions on the use of stop-and-frisk by cops but didn’t stop there — the three-judge panel also took the extraordinary step of booting her from the case altogether. In a scathing rebuke, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that Scheindlin exhibited bias in the case that ran “afoul” of the code of conduct for US judges.


    "Hooray for Taxes," by Richard RJ Eskow, Huffington Post, November 3, 2013 ---
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/hooray-for-taxes_b_4210496.html

    Joshua Holland of BillMoyers.com  offers an important counterpoint to today's slanted political dialogue with his new essay on "the high cost of low taxes." This hidden cost needs to become the center of our public debate. Washington's obsession with tax cuts and deficit reduction is distracting the American people from the slow dismantling of the social contract, and its devastating impact -- financial and otherwise -- on all but the wealthiest among us.

    Our political discourse focuses far too much on the cost of taxation, while all but ignoring its benefits. Journalists and politicians rarely discuss the direct or indirect costs Americans often encounter when forced to rely on the private sector for services which might be more efficiently provided through government.

    The Low-Tax Scam

    Any politician who promises to save every household $1,000 in taxes might be guaranteed an electoral victory. But if Americans then learned that nobody was patrolling their streets, checking the safety of their buildings or water, operating their buses, teaching their children, or collecting their garbage, that politician's popularity would be sure to fall.

    And if they then discovered that it would cost them, say, $10,000 to buy those services on the private market? That politician would be best advised to get into another line of work.

    That, at least in my mind, is "the high cost of low taxes." Conservatives like to complain about politicians who promise too much. But when politicians claim that Americans can pay less in taxes, spend less on government, and sacrifice nothing in the way of services, that may be the biggest scam of all. To American clichés come to mind: The first is, there ain't no free lunch. The second is, pay now or pay later.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    The author makes no attempt to explain why his hero high tax nations lowered their marginal tax rates, nations high in public services like Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, etc. Are there questions he's afraid to ask like why higher taxes were drawing down their economies or why half the people in the USA pay no taxes or collect refunds in excess of what they pay into the income tax system?

    Marginal Tax Rate Declines in the Rest of the World ---
    http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/MarginalTaxRates.html

     


    Table 1 Maximum Marginal Tax Rates on Individual Income

      1979 1990 2002
    Australia 62 48 47
    Austria 62 50 50
    Belgium 76 55 52
    Canada (Ontario) 58 47 46
    Finland 71 43 37
    Germany 56 53 49
    Hungary 60 50 40
    India 60 50 30
    Iran 90 75 35
    Ireland 65 56 42
    Israel 66 48 50
    Italy 72 50 52
    Japan 75 50 50
    South Korea 89 50 36
    Sweden 87 65 56
    United Kingdom 83 40 40
    United States 70 33 39

    Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers; International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation.

    I would like to see the author explain why these and virtually all other nations lowered their upper income tax rates ---
    http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/MarginalTaxRates.html

    Also the lagged impact of the Reagan tax cuts enabled President Clinton the balance the budget. Instead of paying for those tax cuts we've been benefiting for over 30 years by allowing half of the USA taxpayers to not pay any income taxes.

    The author is an egalitarian dreamer but not a very good tax economist.
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm

    I do agree, however, that the USA needs a national health plan something like the plan in Canada. But I don't think the author understands why so many high welfare nations have lowered taxes. France is now experimenting with higher taxes and the result is devastating to the economy.

    If socialism is so much better why have virtually all socialism experiments failed? Even hard core socialist nations like Cuba and Viet Nam are reverting to capitalism. What's so wrong with socialism? Even Castro complained that Cubans on generous food rations were less motivated to work. So he at long last lowered their rations.

     


    "All Around The World, Labor Is Losing Out To Capital," The Economist, November 3, 2013 ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/all-around-the-world-labor-is-losing-out-to-capital-2013-11

    . . .

    Cheaper and more powerful equipment, in robotics and computing, has allowed firms to automate an ever larger array of tasks. New research by Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago illustrates the point. They reckon that the cost of investment goods, relative to consumption goods, has dropped 25% over the past 35 years. That made it attractive for firms to swap labour for software whenever possible, which has contributed to a decline in the labour share of five percentage points. In places and industries where the cost of investment goods fell by more, the drop in the labour share was correspondingly larger.

    Other work reinforces their conclusion. Despite their emphasis on trade, Messrs Elsby and Hobijn and Ms Sahin note that American labour productivity grew faster than worker compensation in the 1980s and 1990s, before the period of the most rapid growth in imports. Studies looking at the increasing inequality among workers tell a similar story. In recent decades jobs requiring middling skills have declined sharply as a share of total employment, while employment in high- and low-skill occupations has increased. Work by David Autor of MIT, David Dorn of the Centre for Monetary and Financial Studies and Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego, shows that computerisation and automation laid waste mid-level jobs in the 1990s. Trade, by contrast, only became an important cause of the growing disparity in wages in the 2000s.

    Trade and technology’s toll on wages has in some cases been abetted by changes in employment laws. In the late 1970s European workers enjoyed high labour shares thanks to stiff labour-market regulation. The labour share topped 75% in Spain and 80% in France. When labour- and product-market liberalisation swept Europe in the early 1980s—motivated in part by stubbornly high unemployment—labour shares tumbled. Privatisation has further weakened labour’s hold.

    Such trends may tempt governments to adopt new protections for workers as a means to support the labour share. Yet regulation might instead lead to more unemployment, or to an even faster shift to automation. Trade’s impact could become more benign in future as emerging-market wages rise, but that too could simply hasten automation, as at Foxconn.

    Accelerating technological change and rising productivity create the potential for rapid improvements in living standards. Yet if the resulting income gains prove elusive to wage and salary workers, that promise may not be realised.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    The word sabot is a French word for a wooden shoe (not necessarily a shoe for a human foot).
    Sabotage --- http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sabotage

    Deliberate destruction of property or slowing down of work with the intention of damaging a business or economic system or weakening a government or nation in a time of national emergency. The word is said to date from a French railway strike of 1910 when workers destroyed the wooden shoes (sabots) that held the rails in place.

    I wonder when sabotage of robotics displacing labor might become commonplace in some nations.


    "Are Americans' Fears of Immigration Overstated?" by Neil Malhotra, Stanford University, September 30, 2013 ---
    http://csi.gsb.stanford.edu/are-americans-fears-immigration-overstated

    . . .

    For Silicon Valley, the study has clear implications: Boosting the number of H-1B visas granted has been a high priority in the region. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other entrepreneurs have been funding a lobbying effort to expand the number of such visas granted to computer engineers from abroad amid a shortage of qualified applicants at home. Research such as Malhotra’s could make Washington less skittish about awarding more visas given the narrow group of workers opposed to them.

    The study’s implications for the broader question of amnesty for millions of undocumented workers is not yet clear. Malhotra said more research needs to be done to determine the true reasons behind opposition to amnesty. Margalit, Malhotra’s co-researcher, is currently conducting a similar targeted study of 12 fields that employ a large number of foreigners — including construction and nursing — to see if there is a similar impact beyond the high-tech sector. But Malhotra said no study to date has done a good job really getting at the heart of why people feel the way they do.

    “You can’t do these broad omnibus studies,’’ Malhotra said in an interview. “You have to do targeted research.’’ Understanding why Americans feel the way they do about immigration is important for smart policymaking. “The question is: What is actually driving people in their hearts?’’

    If American views on immigration are primarily tied to economic issues, Malhotra said, “there are policy interventions you can have.’’ If opposition is rooted in cultural biases or racism, that may be harder to address, he added.

    The study, presented at a conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, is due to be published in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

    Jensen Comment
    Those who vigorously oppose immigration (sometimes labor unions protecting labor more than businesses seeking labor) often forget that the USA rose to economic dominance of the world on the backs of immigrant laborers and their families. My Jensen grandparents immigrated from Norway and struggled 24/7 on a 160-acre Iowa farm. They eventually died relatively poor in a drafty house without a furnace or plumbing. My grandfather died shortly after my dad was born, but my grandmother and her five sons carried on with the farm in that drafty house with no furnace or plumbing. I remember the outhouse and doing farm chores as a small boy on this farm ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/max01.htm 

    Cities like New York and Boston and Los Angeles are urban melting pots of immigrants, many of whom achieved great success and watched their families prosper.

    At the same time, there's growing fear of getting too much of a good thing.
    I don't think opposition to immigration is so much about losing jobs except in certain industries such as construction currently suffering from unemployment. In my opinion, the main fear of immigration is the fear of being overrun by too much of a good thing. If the USA adopted an open border policy the nation would be overrun by the tired, the sick, and the poor among the approximately one billion people of the world who are desperate. The USA would be destroyed by a sudden influx of hundreds of millions of the poorest people of the world.

    Thus immigration limits must be set to avoid being overrun. But immigration should be encouraged to the extent that life is better in the USA because a controlled number of immigrants make a net contribution to the economic and social good life. We cannot realistically offer a better life to hundreds of millions of poor people if being overrun destroys the opportunities for immigrants themselves as well as those that already live in the USA.

    Immigration authorities in the USA try as best they can to achieve racial and ethic fairness in spreading legal immigration among all nations of the world. Illegal immigration is quite another matter, and the problems here boggle my mind. I don't have any quick answers other than to note that illegal immigration is not just a Hispanic phenomenon. People of many racial and ethnic backgrounds are sneaking into the USA daily, especially from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa as well as from South of the Rio Grande. But it is nowhere near tens or hundreds of millions of people.

    One of our sons works for the hospital in Lewiston, Maine. Lewiston is an old lumber, textile, and paper mill town that fell on hard times when the mills closed ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewiston,_Maine

    At the urging of the United Nations in 1999, the USA opened its gates to 12,000 Somali and Bantu immigrants. Lewiston had many abandoned houses and seemed like a good place to settle the poorest of these new citizens along with Clarkson, Georgia. However, there's a world of difference between Lewiston and Clarkson. Clarkson is a suburb of Atlanta where jobs abound (relatively). Lewiston is surrounded with timberland on economic decline.  The Somali and Bantu new arrivals did get government funding for new shops in decaying downtown Lewiston. But life is still tough, and Lewiston is not a destination of most tourists entering Maine in the summer. Life is very hard for Lewiston's new immigrants, but the town may be better off because of the new small businesses struggling to make it. Government loans to this area would be a whole lot less without these new entrepreneurs who have been given a chance to make a new life. But if 20 million of the poorest Somali and Bantu people received the same open gate to the USA I don't see how they all could have a chance for a better life.

    What I do know is that today it would take a multimillionaire to buy the farm land and the machinery it takes to own and operate the dirt cheap farm in Iowa that my grandparents purchased on credit with no money and farmed with horses in the 1800s.  Opportunities were much better in the USA for poor immigrants in the 1800s. No poor immigrant in the 21st Century could afford what was once our home farm. Opportunities for the good life are much more limited for immigrants in this age unless they are rich in money or rich in specialty skills such as skills needed to become multimillionaires in the Silicon Valley.

    And any family that tries to make it on a mere 160 acres in Iowa in the 21st Century qualifies for food stamps. Farm machinery is just too expensive for a 160-acre farming operation in Iowa. In the 1800s the family and their horses/mules could live off the land if necessary. In the 21st Century the family could not pay the taxes if they tried to farm with horses or mules. The Amish make it with more land and communal sharing and jobs in town.

     


    "J.P. Morgan's Mortgage Troubles Ran Deep:  Deals With Subprime Lenders at Heart of $5.1 Billion Settlement," by Al Yoon, The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2013 ---
    http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304470504579161532779973534?mod=djemCFO_h

    A 1,625-square-foot bungalow at 51 Perthshire Lane in Palm Coast, Fla., is among the thousands of homes at the heart of J.P. Morgan Chase JPM +0.55% & Co.'s $5.1 billion settlement with a federal housing regulator on Friday.

    In 2006, J.P. Morgan bought one of two mortgage loans on the home made by subprime lender New Century Financial Corp. J.P. Morgan then bundled the loan with 4,208 others from New Century into a mortgage-backed security it sold to investors including housing-finance giant Freddie Mac. FMCC +11.89%

    By the end of 2007, the borrower had stopped paying back the loan, setting off yearslong delinquency and foreclosure proceedings that halted income to the investors, according to BlackBox Logic LLC, a mortgage-data company. Current Account

    Settlement Puts U.S. in Tight Spot

    The Palm Coast loan wasn't the only troubled one in the New Century deal: Within a year, 15% of the borrowers were delinquent—more than 60 days late on a payment, in some stage of foreclosure or in bankruptcy—according to BlackBox. By 2010, that number exceeded 50%.

    "That's much worse than anyone's expectations when the deal was put together," said Cory Lambert, an analyst at BlackBox and former mortgage-bond trader. "It's all pretty bad."

    J.P. Morgan sidestepped many of the subprime-mortgage problems that bedeviled rivals during the financial crisis, and avoided much of the postcrisis scrutiny that dragged down others on Wall Street. But now its own behavior during the housing boom is coming under close examination as investigators work through a backlog of cases.

    The bank dealt with some of the biggest subprime lenders of the time, including Countrywide Financial Corp., Fremont Investment & Loan and WMC Mortgage Corp., a former unit of General Electric, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency complaint.

    J.P. Morgan's relationship with New Century, a subprime lender that went bankrupt in 2007 and later faced a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation and shareholder suits, shows that the New York bank was part of the frenzied push to package mortgages for investors at the end of the housing boom.

    The New Century deal, J.P. Morgan Mortgage Acquisition Trust 2006-NC1, was one of 103 cited in the lawsuit against J.P. Morgan brought by the FHFA, which oversees Freddie Mac and home-loan giant Fannie Mae. FNMA +13.40%

    The $5.1 billion settlement is part of a larger tentative deal with the Justice Department and other agencies that would have J.P. Morgan pay a total of $13 billion. That deal is expected to be completed this week.

    "While these settlements seem huge, given the nature of the offenses, they are trivially small," said William Frey, chief executive of Greenwich Financial Services LLC, a broker-dealer that has participated in investor lawsuits against banks that packaged mortgages. J.P. Morgan declined to comment on the settlement or any loans in the bonds it bought.

    The FHFA has gotten aggressive in recouping losses from mortgages and securities sold to Fannie and Freddie. In 2011 it sued 18 lenders, and J.P. Morgan was only the fourth to settle.

    To be sure, the New Century deal was among J.P. Morgan's worst performers, and other mortgage-backed securities it issued at the time have held up better. An improving economy and housing market have lifted many mortgage bonds sold in 2006 and 2007.

    But that is of little consolation to Freddie Mac, which bought more than a third of the $910 million New Century bond deal in 2006 and still is sitting on losses.

    The group of loans backing Freddie's chunk of the deal had more high-risk loans than the rest of the pool. Nearly 44% of Freddie's piece had loan-to-value ratios between 80% and 100%, compared with 31% for the rest, according to the deal prospectus.

    What's more, nearly half the loans backing the New Century deal were from California and Florida, two states hit hard by the housing bust. Of the 4,209 loans in the bond, more than half have some experienced distress, according to BlackBox data.

    Three debt-rating firms gave the top slice of the deal AAA ratings. But as the housing market soured, a series of downgrades starting in 2007 took them all into "junk" territory by July 2011. As of last month, nearly a quarter of the principal of the underlying loans in the deal had been wiped out, with a third of the remaining balance delinquent or in some stage of foreclosure, according to BlackBox.

    Continued in article

    From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on October 28, 2013

    J.P. Morgan settlement puts government in tight spot
    Will the U.S. government have to refund J.P. Morgan part of the bank’s expected $13 billion payment over soured mortgage securities? The question is the biggest stumbling block to completing the record settlement between the bank and the Justice Department
    , writes the WSJ’s Francesco Guerrera. The crux of the issue is whether the government can go after J.P. Morgan for (alleged) sins committed by others. And investors, bankers and lawyers are watching the process closely, worried that it could set a bad precedent for the relationship between buyers, regulators and creditors in future deals for troubled banks.

    "JPMorgan's $13 Billion Settlement: Jamie Dimon Is a Colossus No More," by Nick Summers, Bloomberg Businessweek, October 24, 2013 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-24/jpmorgans-13-billion-settlement-jamie-dimon-is-a-colossus-no-more

    Thirteen billion dollars requires some perspective. The record amount that JPMorgan Chase (JPM) has tentatively agreed to pay the U.S. Department of Justice, to settle civil investigations into mortgage-backed securities it sold in the runup to the 2008 financial crisis, is equal to the gross domestic product of Namibia. It’s more than the combined salaries of every athlete in every major U.S. professional sport, with enough left over to buy every American a stadium hotdog. More significantly to JPMorgan’s executives and shareholders, $13 billion is equivalent to 61 percent of the bank’s profits in all of 2012. Anticipating the settlement in early October, the bank recorded its first quarterly loss under the leadership of Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon.

    That makes it real money, even for the country’s biggest bank by assets. Despite this walloping, there’s reason for the company to exhale. The most valuable thing Dimon, 57, gets out of the deal with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is clarity. The discussed agreement folds in settlements with a variety of federal and state regulators, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the attorneys general of California and New York. JPMorgan negotiated a similar tack in September, trading the gut punch of a huge headline number—nearly $1 billion in penalties related to the 2012 London Whale trading fiasco—for the chance to resolve four investigations in two countries in one stroke. In both cases, the bank’s stock barely budged; its shares have returned 25 percent this year, exactly in line with the performance of Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.

    That JPMorgan is able to withstand penalties and regulatory pressure that would cripple many of its competitors attests both to the bank’s vast resources and the influence of the man who leads it. The sight of Dimon arriving at the Justice Department on Sept. 26 for a meeting with the attorney general underscored Dimon’s extraordinary access to Washington decision-makers—although the Wall Street chieftain did have to humble himself by presenting his New York State driver license to a guard on the street. As news of the settlement with Justice trickled out, the admirers on Dimon’s gilded list rushed to his defense, arguing that he struck the best deal he could. “If you’re a financial institution and you’re threatened with criminal prosecution, you have no ability to negotiate,” Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/A) Chairman Warren Buffett told Bloomberg TV. “Basically, you’ve got to be like a wolf that bares its throat, you know, when it gets to the end. You cannot win.”

    The challenges facing Dimon and his company are far from over. With the $13 billion payout, JPMorgan is still the subject of a criminal probe into its mortgage-bond sales, which could end in charges against the bank or its executives. And other federal investigations—into suspected bribery in China, the bank’s role in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, and more—are ongoing.

    The ceaseless scrutiny has tarnished Dimon’s public image, perhaps irreparably. Once seen as the white knight of the financial crisis, he’s now the executive stuck paying the bill for Wall Street’s misdeeds. And as the bank’s legal fights drag on, it’s worth asking just how many more blows the famously pugnacious Dimon can take.

    Although the $13 billion settlement would amount to the largest of its kind in the history of regulated capitalism, it looks quite different broken into its component pieces. While the relative amounts could shift, JPMorgan is expected to pay fines of only $2 billion to $3 billion for misrepresenting the quality of mortgage securities it sold during the subprime housing boom. Overburdened homeowners would get $4 billion; another $4 billion would go to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates Freddie Mac (FMCC) and Fannie Mae (FNMA); and about $3 billion would go to investors who lost money on the securities, Bloomberg News reported.

    JPMorgan will only pay fines (as distinct from compensation to investors or homeowner relief) related to its own actions—and not those of Bear Stearns or Washington Mutual, the two troubled institutions the bank bought at discount-rack prices during the crisis. Aside from shaving some unknown amount off the final settlement, this proviso enhances Dimon’s reputation as the shrewdest banker of that era. In 2008, with the backing of the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, who saw JPMorgan as a port in a storm, Dimon got the two properties for just $3.4 billion. Extending JPMorgan’s retail reach overnight into Florida and California, Bear and WaMu helped the bank become the largest in the U.S. by 2011. The portions of the settlement attributable to their liabilities are almost certainly outweighed by the profits they’ve brought and will continue to bring.

    Bob Jensen's threads on the subprime mortgage scandals ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm


    Video:  Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama on QE, Tapering, and Volatility
    http://video.cnbc.cohttp://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000211021 m/gallery/?video=3000211021


    The IRS Scandal: Evidence Proves the FEC and IRS violated the Law ---
    http://www.kabc.com/common/page.php?pt=The+IRS+Scandal%3A+Evidence+Proves+the+FEC+and+IRS+violated+the+Law&id=19663&is_corp=0

    The Internal Revenue Service was in clear violation of the law when Lois Learner turned over documents to the federal election commission.

    "She may have been even turning over donor information," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

    The public watchdog group Judicial Watch told Secrets Thursday that it was former boss Lois Lerner who shared the information on groups including the American Future Fund and the American Issues Project.

    The emails obtained by Judicial Watch show that the IRS, which was considering the tax status of the groups, gave the FEC the tax returns of the groups, including income, expenditures and staff pay. Fitton tells McIntyre in the Morning on KABC, the emails also revealed the exact working of the prying political questions the IRS wanted the groups to reveal, such as their goals and the requests for brochures and ads.

    "There was a group of organizations that were involved in C-4 activities which is essentially campaign and public policy that liberals don't like to engage in with well funded conservatives so they use the powers of government to oppress them'" said Fitton. Lois Lerner perfected that over that at the FEC when she when she was a long term investigator council there."

    Lerner then made her way to the exemplary organizational branch of the IRS which is the branch that runs and allows grants exemptions for tax status to the tea party groups. Which were not granted to the tea party.

    According to Fitton the FEC started calling Lerner in 2008 and in 2009 she allegedly sent over a batch of documents to the FEC, which they claim has been made public, however Fitton disputes that. In 2010 emails to the FEC came in response to the organization’s questions about whether the IRS had granted tax-exempt status to the Tea Party groups. It is unclear how the information the IRS sent was going to help the FEC, since the IRS hadn’t determined the tax status of the groups yet.

    "It looks to me one of the reasons they were asking is because attached with the email was an article listing the groups involvement in the campaign fight that Harry Reid was in," said Fitton.

    Under Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, it is a felony for an IRS official to disclose either ‘return information or ‘taxpayer return information,’ even to another government agency."

    "The FBI supposedly is investigating the IRS scandal no one is aware of any investigation of note despite the noise that they are investigating," said Fitton. " Unless there is significant leadership out of Washington that they are concerned about the abuse of the IRS nothing is going to get done, the FBI can investigate something forever, forever and get no consequence or no justice."

    Lerner, who was head of the unit deciding tax exempt status, quit in the scandal.

    "Gay Harvard Grad Matthew Meisel Implicated in Illegal IRS Leak," by Robert Stacy McCain, American Spectator, October 31, 2013 ---
    http://spectator.org/blog/2013/10/31/gay-harvard-grad-matthew-meise

    . . .

    Johnson’s National Review report cites investigators with the House Ways and Means Committee for how the information about donors to NOM (which opposes the legalization of same-sex marriage) was leaked from the IRS, revealing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s private contributions to the organization:

    [A]n IRS agent working in the Exempt Organizations Division — the same division that, until May, was under the direction of Lois Lerner, who retired under duress last month — leaked NOM’s Schedule B to Matthew Meisel, a former employee of Bain & Company… . After he obtained NOM’s donor list from the IRS employee, the committee says, Meisel then turned it over to the Human Rights Campaign. Neither Meisel nor the Human Rights Campaign returned calls seeking comment.

    Continued in article




    Three very smart coders who say the HealthCare.gov site was designed wrong from get go.
    What users first want is a listing of exchange alternatives before feeding in any personal data.
     

    "S.F. programmers build alternative to HealthCare.gov," CBS News, November 8, 2013 ---
    http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57611592/s.f-programmers-build-alternative-to-healthcare.gov/

    (CBS News) On Friday, President Obama had this to say about problems with the Obamcare website during a speech in New Orleans: "I promise you, nobody's been more frustrated. I wanted to go in and fix it myself, but I don't write code."

     But plenty of programmers do write code. And three of them have created their own website that addresses some of the most annoying problems with HealthCare.gov.

     In a San Francisco office shared with other tech start-ups, three 20-year-olds saw HealthCare.gov as a challenge.

    With a few late nights, Ning Liang, George Kalogeropoulos and Michael Wasser built "thehealthsherpa.com," a two-week-old website that solves one of the biggest problems with the government's site.

    They got it completely backwards in terms of what people want up front," said Liang. He added: "They want prices and benefits, so that they could make the decision."

    Liang showed CBS News how it worked. "You come to our website and you put in your zip code -- in this case a California zip code. You hit 'find plans,' and you immediately see the exchange plans that are available for that zip code."

    They have plenty of experience working at places like Twitter and Microsoft before setting out to build their own Internet companies. But this project is a public service.

    "There was no thought of, 'How do we make money this time?'" said Wasser. "It was like, 'This is a problem that we know we can solve in a really short period of time. So let's just do it.'"

    Using information buried in the government's own website built by high-priced government contractors, they found a simpler way to present it to users.

    "That's the great thing about having such a small team," said Kalogeropoulos. "You sit around a table and say, 'Okay, how does this work?' There's no coordination meetings, there's no planning sessions. It's like, 'Well, let's read the document and let's implement this.'"

    And the features keep on coming. CBS News looked at the team's website Thursday and pointed out that the tax subsidy wasn't in there, which is supposed to be one of the most complicated parts of the HealthCare.gov site. But as Liang explained: "Yes, we added this last night...the subsidy calculation is fairly complicated, but it wasn't too bad."

    You can't actually enroll on the HealthSherpa site, but they do provide contact information for companies offering the plans. Users who find a plan they like can go directly to the insurance companies without ever using HealthCare.gov.

     Health Sherpa --- http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/
    This site is unbelievably easy. It does discuss subsidy options. But it is not so great regarding discussion of the real sticking point of these plans ---
    the deductibles that will probably be the main reason many individuals will go uninsured --- if they can't afford the deductibles.

    I advise reading the top line to apply for "Updates" via email.

    I also have questions regarding deductibles.

    Plan Type

    Select the metal levels you prefer.

    I cannot find zip codes that offer Platinum or Catastrophic options. Where are these available?
    Or is this merely a defect in the database to date?

    Also it seems that only HMOs are available in most zip codes that I explored.
    This can be a problem for people who want to choose their doctors or even choose getting an MD-certified doctor.

    I am having considerable luck finding Obamacare answers on the Turbo Tax Forum for Obamacare. You should first search the Q&A for your question and answer. If it is not there you can ask a question for free provided you register (no obligation). .
    --- Click Here
    https://ttlc.intuit.com/health-care?cid=ppc_gg_nb_stan_dk_us-_hv-healthcare-Obamacare&srid=sr3_73548907_go&adid=healthcare&skw=how%20to%20apply%20for%20obamacare&kw={searchQuery}&ven=gg&&_sr_adpos=1t1&&_sr_usid=ppc_gg_nb_stan_dk_us-_hv-healthcare-Obamacare
     

    Income is somewhat well defined.
    The Turbo Tax Forum provided the following link ---
    http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/healthcare/MAGI_summary13.pdf 

    Is tax exempt income also exempt in terms of applying for subsidies?
    No it is not exempt  according to a link provided in the Turbo Tax Forum Answer ---
    http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/healthcare/MAGI_summary13.pdf


    How are highly variable capital gains and losses factored into the calculation?
    They must be included in the income calculation, although these can sometimes be timed in or out temporarily (such as wait for next year to sell at a gain and this year at a loss) or use a deferral strategy such as rolling capital gains on a residence put into another (newer to you) residence. Gains on long-term deferrals such as pension plans are exempt.

    Is income to be estimated income for last year, this year, or next year, or some type of average?
    Unclear, but I think your last filed tax return is the desired choice. Some ethical adjustments are recommended by me such as when you became employed this year it is unethical to claim a future subsidy on a very outdated tax return.

    The High Cost of Dying
    The undisputed most expensive coverage in Medicare is the cost of dying where dependents of a dying parent will keep that parent in intensive care (at $10,000 or more per day) as long as Medicare picks up the full tab. CBS Sixty Minutes even did a module on this "scandal" where hospitals salivate over keeping a Medicare patient in ICU for a very, very long time.

    On November 22, 2009 CBS Sixty Minutes aired a video featuring experts (including physicians) explaining how the single largest drain on the Medicare insurance fund is keeping dying people hopelessly alive who could otherwise be allowed to die quicker and painlessly without artificially prolonging life on ICU machines.
    "The Cost of Dying," CBS Sixty Minutes Video, November 22, 2009 ---
    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/19/60minutes/main5711689.shtml?tag=mncol;lst;1  
    This is one huge cost difference between most national health care plans and the USA plans beginning in 2014. The USA plans will bear the enormous "cost of dying." But this is mitigated for non-Medicare and non-Medicaid insurance coverage if that coverage carries a relatively high deductible. Dependents may let Grandma slip away if her estate must pay $4,000 of the $10,000 per day it takes to keep her on life extending machines. In this respect Obamacare differs from Medicare and Medicaid.

    This is a link forwarded to me from the Turbo Tax Forum ---
    http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/facts/timeline/timeline-text.html

    Regulating Annual Limits on Insurance Coverage. Under the law, insurance companies’ use of annual dollar limits on the amount of insurance coverage a patient may receive will be restricted for new plans in the individual market and all group plans. In 2014, the use of annual dollar limits on essential benefits like hospital stays will be banned for new plans in the individual market and all group plans.

     

    There should be a Website hot button to a Glossary on  Health Sherpa. No such luck! Maybe someday.

    Obamacare Navigators Caught On Tape Encouraging Lying On Applications ---
    http://townhall.com/tipsheet/christinerousselle/2013/30/11/wow-obamacare-navigators-caught-on-tape-encouraging-lying-on-applications-n1744784?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
    Fact check by asking your own questions --- Click Here

    Obamacare database of questions and answers from TurboTax --- Click Here
    https://ttlc.intuit.com/health-care?cid=ppc_gg_nb_stan_dk_us-_hv-healthcare-Obamacare&srid=sr3_73548907_go&adid=healthcare&skw=how%20to%20apply%20for%20obamacare&kw={searchQuery}&ven=gg&&_sr_adpos=1t1&&_sr_usid=ppc_gg_nb_stan_dk_us-_hv-healthcare-Obamacare
    You do not have to be a TurboTax user to use this free site. The answers are from tax experts as well.

    Other Sources

    Facts about Obamacare
     

    Obamacare Application
     

    Obamacare Health Plan
     

    Apply for Obamacare
     

    Obama Health Care Plan
     

    Copy of Health Care Bill
     

    Obama Healthcare Plan
     

    Obamacare Application Form
     

    The Obama Healthcare Plan
     

    Obama Free Health Care Plan
     

    Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
     

    Health Care Reform Act 2010

     

    Bob Jensen's universal health care messaging --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm

     


    A Bait and Switch Question

  • This is a serious question that I hope will not be taken as political.

    Has President Obama just played a bait and switch game on the Obamacare health exchanges?

    The exchanges posted their deals for individuals at their own Websites and various other Websites, including Healhcare.gov. Then belatedly President Obama announced changes to required mental health coverage that could increase the cost of that particular coverage ten fold.
    "Mental Health Coverage Expanded to Most Insurance Plans," by Alex Wayne, Bloomberg Businessweek, November 8, 2013 ---
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-08/u-s-said-to-announce-new-rule-for-mental-health-coverage.html

    Will the exchanges be required to honor their original deals or will they be allowed in retrospect to increase the premiums for the mental health component in those deals now being signed by individuals?

    A second question concerns the years it will take to generate enough psychiatrists to meet the spike in demand ignited by this executive order, but that's another matter entirely.

    I'm not arguing against having this extended coverage. Personally a young member of my family will benefit enormously the rest of her life from this executive order for extended coverage. Her daily medications cost a fortune.

    Another question concerns the extent to which executive orders can be expanded without balance of power. For example, can the President suddenly declare that all colleges and universities receiving Federal assistance be required to provide free tuition, room, and board to all students whose parents earn less than $50,000 per year?

    Because his mental healthcare executive order will create enormous shortages of psychiatrists can the President declare that medical schools will be free to students majoring in psychiatry --- without having to get Congressional approval of added funding for this purpose?

    In other words what are the limits to "executive orders" for lame duck presidents?

    It seems to me that we are facing an enormous constitutional question concerning balance of powers.


    "Report: IRS sent out billions of dollars in fraudulent returns," The Hill, November 7, 2013 ---
    http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/domestic-taxes/189621-report-irs-sent-out-billions-of-dollars-in-fraudulent

    The IRS sent billions of dollars' worth of refunds to tax cheats around the globe in 2011, according to a new federal report.

    Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration found that well over 1 million fraudulent tax returns made their way through the IRS’s defenses, costing the Treasury just under $4 billion. That includes more than $1 million sent to far-flung locales like Bulgaria, China, Ireland and Lithuania.

    Still, the inspector general also noted that the IRS had improved its efforts to stop tax cheats who file returns using real Social Security numbers or other tax identification numbers.

    The IRS reduced the amount it lost to identity thieves by around 30 percent in 2011, from more than $5 billion in 2010.

    “Identity theft continues to be a serious problem with devastating consequences for taxpayers and an enormous impact on tax administration,” Russell George, the tax administration inspector general, said in a statement.

    “Undetected tax refund fraud results in significant unintended federal outlays and erodes taxpayer confidence in the federal tax system.”

    The IRS has long acknowledged that identity theft is a big problem, and has made battling it a top priority. Taxpayers who file after an identity thief uses their Social Security number can face significant delays in the processing of their legitimate return.

    For instance, the agency has more than twice as many employees working on identity theft cases now – around 3,000 – than it did in 2011, and has trained roughly 35,000 employees to deal with the issue. The IRS has also put new filters into place to weed out potential fraudulent returns, and beefed up its cooperation with local law enforcement.

    But in a statement, the IRS also acknowledged that it was a challenge to keep up with “constantly evolving tactics used by scammers” while it had fewer resources at its disposal.

    “Given significant budget cuts, the IRS continues to balance and shift our limited resources as our work on identity theft and refund fraud continues to grow, touching nearly every part of the organization to better protect taxpayers and help victims,” the agency said.

    “Over the past two years, we have continued to improve our processes and systems for helping identity theft victims and have considerably decreased the time it takes to resolve these complex cases.”

    Jensen Comment
    To add pain to misery, many of those refunds went to cheats who receive cash income in the underground economy that's not reported to the IRS. Thus the cheats get a good deal both ways due to IRS failures ---
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm
    To add tragedy on top of misery about 68 million of 137 million taxpayers in the USA pay no income tax, 98% of whom have reported earnings less than  $100,000 according to Bloomberg. Sounds like even more of a free ride now the the government will also subsidize medical insurance for these taxpayers who either pay no tax or receive a net refund on their tax returns.

    Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm


    Every Breath You Take
    Here's an anti-Bernanke musical performance by the Dean of Columbia Business School ---
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u2qRXb4xCU
    Ben Bernanke (Chairman of the Federal Reserve and a great friend of big banks) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bernanke
    R. Glenn Hubbard (Dean of the Columbia Business School) ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Hubbard_(economics)

    Quantitative Easing (QE) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing

    "Fed Official Who Helped Orchestrate QE: 'I'm Sorry, America,' QE Really Was A Huge Wall Street Bailout," by Steven Perlberg, Business Insider, November 12, 2013 ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/fed-official-sorry-about-qe-2013-11

    Andrew Huszar, a former Federal Reserve employee who executed QE, has written a Wall Street Journal op-ed apologizing for the "unprecedented shopping spree."

    Huszar worked at the Fed for seven years before leaving for Wall Street. The central bank recruited him back in 2009 to manage "what was at the heart of QE’s bond-buying spree–a wild attempt to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds in 12 months."

    "I can only say: I'm sorry, America," Huszar writes. From the Journal:

    It wasn't long before my old doubts resurfaced. Despite the Fed's rhetoric, my program wasn't helping to make credit any more accessible for the average American. The banks were only issuing fewer and fewer loans. More insidiously, whatever credit they were extending wasn't getting much cheaper. QE may have been driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash.

    From the trenches, several other Fed managers also began voicing the concern that QE wasn't working as planned. Our warnings fell on deaf ears. In the past, Fed leaders—even if they ultimately erred—would have worried obsessively about the costs versus the benefits of any major initiative. Now the only obsession seemed to be with the newest survey of financial-market expectations or the latest in-person feedback from Wall Street's leading bankers and hedge-fund managers. Sorry, U.S. taxpayer.

    Huszar argues that QE, while "dutifully compensating for the rest of Washington's dysfunction," has become Wall Street's new "too big to fail."

    Video:  Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama on how the Fed's Quantitative Easing Doesn’t do Much ---
    http://pragcap.com/eugene-fama-qe-doesnt-do-much 

    Video:  Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama on QE, Tapering, and Volatility
    http://video.cnbc.cohttp://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000211021 m/gallery/?video=3000211021

    Jensen Comment
    Where QE has been monumentally successful is in compensating the savings of older people. Many could previously retire and have saving supplemented by safe Certificate Deposit interest income. Thanks to QE the CDs and other save savings alternatives pay virtually zero interest such that these old folks must more of their savings capital for living expenses. Thanks Ben. You wiped out the old folks and provide zero incentives for younger folks to save early in the career for compounded interest. Compounded interest? What's that?

    Every Breath You Take
    Here's an anti-Bernanke musical performance by the Dean of Columbia Business School ---
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u2qRXb4xCU
    Ben Bernanke (Chairman of the Federal Reserve and a great friend of big banks) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bernanke
    R. Glenn Hubbard (Dean of the Columbia Business School) ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Hubbard_(economics)

     




    In my opinion what is now called Obamacare is beyond the point of no return until this nation comes to its senses and adopts a National Health Care Plan. Oh Canada!

    Note the Khan Academy module explaining Obamacare ---
    https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/american-civics-subject/american-civics/v/ppaca--or--obamacare

    I'm a big fan of the thousands of learning modules (and now university partnerships) of the astounding Khan Academy ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI 

    The Khan Academy module is non-political and is a pretty good broad summary, especially with respect to penalties (taxes) on individuals who elect not to sign up for medical insurance. These penalties get rather steep beginning in 2016 for working people. This should be carefully explained to students in college, although many of them will be covered on the plans of their parents until they reach 26 years of age.

    The Khan Academy module, however,  does not explain much about the subsidies.

    "Affordable Care Act: 17 Million Can Get Subsidies," by Mary Agnes Carey, WebMD News from Kaiser Health News, November 5, 2013 ---
    http://www.webmd.com/health-insurance/20131105/17-million-people-eligible-for-premium-subsidies-study-finds 

    Jensen Comment
    Fraud is inevitable and cannot be prevented when it comes to giving out subsidies to insured that are not legally entitled to such subsidies. Firstly, there's the $2 trillion underground economy where people are receiving income that even the IRS cannot detect --- those folks who work for unreported cash earnings. We're talking about millions of people who do not report any income to the IRS or greatly under report their incomes ---
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm 

    Secondly, the 17 million reported above does not jive with the estimated 49.5% (of 130 million) of taxpayers who file tax returns but do not pay any income taxes. Some of them have incomes offset by credits such as credits for dependents, but its likely that the nearly all of 50% of taxpayers who pay no income taxes qualify, at least on paper, for subsidies ---
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm 

    Most of those making more than $100,000 pay some income taxes. Bloomberg reports that 98% of those that pay no income taxes have less than $100,000 in earnings.

    A family of four making less than $94,000 qualifies for a health insurance subsidy from the government.
    Hence I think the 17 million estimate is wildly inaccurate unless tens of millions of those eligible for subsidies simply go uninsured because they cannot afford the deductibles even if the premiums with subsidies are affordable.

    One added qualifier is the huge unknown (at least to me) number of Medicaid and Medicare recipients who are scoped out of the Affordable Health Care Act. Those on Medicaid do not pay income taxes. Most of those on Medicare do pay income taxes such that the sources of error in estimating the number of others not on Medicare or Medicaid who will actually claim subsidies under the Affordable Health Care Act is probably impossible to estimate within a 10 million range of error or more.

    The enormous source of error that cannot be eliminated is that $2 trillion underground cash-only economy that takes place under the noses of the IRS enforcers of taxes.

    Fraud in common in both Medicare and Medicaid. It will also be common in the granting of subsidies for health care insurance.

    "Audit reveals half of people enrolled in Illinois Medicaid program not eligible," by Craig Cheatham, KMOV Television, November 4, 2013 ---
    http://www.kmov.com/news/just-posted/Audit-reveals-half-of-people-enrolled-in-IL-Medicaid-program-not-eligible-230586321.html?utm_content=buffer824ba&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

    The early findings of an ongoing review of the Illinois Medicaid program revealed that half the people enrolled weren’t even eligible.

    The state insisted it’s not that bad but Medicaid is on the federal government’s own list of programs at high risk of waste and abuse.

    Now, a review of the Illinois Medicaid program confirms massive waste and fraud.

    A review was ordered more than a year ago-- because of concerns about waste and abuse. So far, the state says reviewers have examined roughly 712-thousand people enrolled in Medicaid, and found that 357-thousand, or about half of them shouldn't have received benefits. After further review, the state decided that the percentage of people who didn't qualify was actually about one out of four.

    "It says that we've had a system that is dysfunctional. Once people got on the rolls, there wasn't the will or the means to get them off,” said Senator Bill Haines of Alton.

    A state spokesman insists that the percentage of unqualified recipients will continue to drop dramatically as the review continues because the beginning of the process focused on the people that were most likely to be unqualified for those benefits. But regardless of how it ends, critics say it's proof that Illinois has done a poor job of protecting tax payers money.

    “Illinois one of the most miss-managed states in country-- lists of reasons-- findings shouldn't surprise anyone,” said Ted Dabrowski.

    Dabrowski, a Vice-President of The Illinois Policy Institute think tank, spoke with News 4 via SKYPE. He said the Medicaid review found two out of three people recipients either got the wrong benefits, or didn't deserve any at all.

    We added so many people to medicaid rolls so quickly, we've lost control of who belongs there,” said Dabrowski.

    Continued in article

    Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm


    Question
    How many insults can you find in This New Yorker Cover for November 1, 2013?
    Why do old folks like me have an edge over young whipper snappers trying to answer this question?---
    http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/11/new-yorker-magazine-cover-obamacare-website-troubles.html

    Hint
    http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/11/01/new-yorker-mag-cover-slams-obama-and-sebelius


    The book in her hand pretty much says it all ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/kathleen-sebelius-websites-for-dummies-obamacare-healthcare-gov-tennessee-brian-kelsey-2013-11


    Saving Our Top Medical Schools
    "Saving Academic Medicine from Obsolescence," by Benjamin P. Sachs, Ralph Maurer, Steven A. Wartman and Marc J. Kahn, Harvard Business Review Blog, November 8, 2013 ---
    http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/saving-academic-medicine-from-obsolescence/

    The United States spent 17.9% of the GDP on healthcare in 2012. Academic medicine, which makes up, approximately, 20% of these costs ($540 billion), is under profound threat. Teaching hospitals and medical schools are faced with declining clinical revenue, dwindling research dollars and increasing tuition costs. To meet these challenges, we believe academic medicine must embrace disruptive innovation in its core missions: educating the next generation of health professionals, offering comprehensive cutting-edge patient care, and leading biomedical and clinical research.  Medical schools and academic health centers will need to significantly adapt in each of these areas in order to ensure the long-term health of the medical profession. The following are a few examples of disruptive innovations Tulane School of Medicine has embraced.         

    Medical information doubles roughly every five years, making it impossible for physicians to stay current. Computing power has also increased to the point that machines like IBM’s Watson, first programed to play chess and Jeopardy, are now used to diagnose and recommend treatment for patients.  Mary Cummings, one of the first women aviators to land a plane on an aircraft carrier, faced a similar situation when she left the navy; a computer was replacing many of the skills she had acquired in order to fly.  Today, as the Director of the Human and Automation Lab at MIT, she poses an important and related question: “Are we in Medicine teaching the next generation of physicians skills or are we teaching them expertise?”  If we are teaching the former, then academic medicine faces obsolescence. However, if we emphasize the latter, our mission is durable. Skills equip people to respond to specific well-understood circumstances; expertise provides the capability to respond to highly complex, dynamic and uncertain environments.

    At Tulane University School of Medicine, we believe that the focus of medical education should be on how we teach; because what we teach will be largely out of date by the time students finish their training. The expertise required for the next generation of physicians is to be lifelong learners, team players, educators and problem solvers. We teach expertise through an “inverted” learning model. Students are expected to have reviewed the subject material before class. During class-time the students work in small groups to solve problems and explain to their colleagues issues they did not understand. Master teachers are still needed to facilitate students’ synthesis of material in a collaborative discussion-oriented environment, but this structure has the advantage of allowing investment in the areas where hands-on teaching adds value while providing cost savings in the areas where it does not. The organization that is likely to play a major role in providing on-line medical education is the Kahn Academy under Dr. Rishi Desai. A newly established three and a half year program for medical students with PhDs in the biomedical sciences leverages these adult learning principles. This program shortens the time to get a degree and so reduces the cost of tuition.

    Business models for patient care, a key source of revenue for medical schools, are also undergoing enormous change. Driven by the need to lower costs, and aided by new technologies, patient care is moving from the hospital to the outpatient setting and ultimately to wherever the patient happens to be located.  For example, when the ACA (Affordable Care Act) is fully implemented in 2014 with a substantial increase in Medicaid recipients, the need for more primary care, as experienced in Massachusetts, will overwhelm the available capacity to provide such care.

    One solution to this problem is moving the majority of primary and secondary healthcare delivery into the community.  After Hurricane Katrina, Tulane partnered with a network of Federally Qualified Health Centers in order to provide services to low and middle-income patients in community-based clinics designated as medical homes. These not only provide less expensive care, but also provide the kind of experiential learning necessary to teach expertise to trainees.  Expansion into telemedicine, which has been shown to reduce the cost of Medicaid in California and has had a dramatic impact in the United Kingdom on patients with diabetes, heart failure, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, will further reduce costs while improving the quality of care.

    Yet another driver of disruption in academic medicine is the changing nature of how research is performed.  It has been estimated that for every research grant dollar received by an academic health center, the institution must spend an additional 25 to 40 cents to support that research.  Given declining clinical revenues and the relative flattening of the NIH budget, the ability to garner research funding is increasingly competitive and difficult to sustain. For most medichttp://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htmal schools, this makes traditional research models inefficient and some institutions that have traditionally been primarily research focused will have to change their emphases.

    An additional disruptive technology in research is using “big data,” large data sets that can be analyzed in distributed and cloud computing environments. In 2011, the 3-dimensional structure of a retrovirus protease was finally determined after eluding scientists for over a decade.  The configuration was not discovered by a computer, by a single scientist or even by a group of scientists working in a laboratory.  Rather, the structure was determined by a group of gamers working in the cloud with a program called Foldit that was developed by computer scientists at the University of Washington in only three weeks. The ability to collaborate without physical interaction using a variety of skill sets challenges the definition and funding models of research (not to mention who gets credit), but has vastly superior economies of scale.

    Continued in article

    Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm


    One of the many real scandals of the Affordable Healthcare Act
    Most Obamacare exchange insurance companies offer inferior policies, many of which come from newly-formed sham insurance companies started up on shoe-string government loans --- companies without any prior experience in the insurance business or any other type of business. Guess who will get stuck with the bills when those poorly capitalized and inexperienced new "insurance" companies declare bankruptcy? This is really a no-brainer question.

    "Top Hospitals Opt Out of Obamacare," USA Today, October 30, 2013 ---
    http://health.usnews.com/health-news/hospital-of-tomorrow/articles/2013/10/30/top-hospitals-opt-out-of-obamacare

    Americans who sign up for insurance on the state exchanges may not have access to the nation's top hospitals, Watchdog.org reports.

    The Obama Administration has been claiming that insurance companies will be competing for your dollars under the Affordable Care Act, but apparently they haven't surveyed the nation's top hospitals.

    Americans who sign up for Obamacare will be getting a big surprise if they expect to access premium health care that may have been previously covered under their personal policies. Most of the top hospitals will accept insurance from just one or two companies operating under Obamacare.

    [CHART: Which Top Hospitals Take Your Insurance Under Obamacare?]

    "This doesn't surprise me," said Gail Wilensky, Medicare advisor for the second Bush Administration and senior fellow for Project HOPE. "There has been an incredible amount of focus on the premium cost and subsidy, and precious little focus on what you get for your money."

    Regulations driven by the Obama White House have indeed made insurance more affordable – if, like Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, you're looking only at price. But responding to Obamacare caps on premiums, many insurers will, in turn, simply offer top-tier doctors and hospitals far less cash for services rendered.

    Watchdog.org looked at the top 18 hospitals nationwide as ranked by U.S. News and World Report for 2013-2014. We contacted each hospital to determine their contracts and talked to several insurance companies, as well.

    The result of our investigation: Many top hospitals are simply opting out of Obamacare.

    Chances are the individual plan you purchased outside Obamacare would allow you to go to these facilities. For example, fourth-ranked Cleveland Clinic accepts dozens of insurance plans if you buy one on your own. But go through Obamacare and you have just one choice: Medical Mutual of Ohio.

    And that's not because their exchanges don't offer options. Both Ohio and California have a dozen insurance companies on their exchanges, yet two of the states' premier hospitals – Cleveland Clinic and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center – have only one company in their respective networks.

    A few, like No. 1-rated Johns Hopkins in Maryland, are mandated under state law to accept all insurance companies. Other than that, the hospital with the largest number of insurance companies is University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland with just four. Fully 11 of the 18 hospitals had just one or two carriers.

    "Many companies have selectively entered the exchanges because they are concerned that (the exchanges) will be dominated by risky, high-using populations who wanted insurance (before Obamacare) and couldn't afford it," said Wilsensky, who is also on the board of directors of UnitedHealth. "They are pressed to narrow their networks to stay within the premiums."

    Consumers, too, will struggle with the new system. Many exchanges don't even list the insurance companies on their web sites. Some that do, like California, don't provide names of doctors or hospitals.

    The price differences among hospitals "can be pretty profound," said Joe Mondy, spokesman for Cigna insurance. "When you are doing a cost comparison with doctors, you should look up the quality of the hospital as well. Hospital 'Y' could be great at pediatrics and not great at surgery."

    Insurers operating in the exchanges are apparently hesitant to talk about the trade-off between price and quality. Two of the nation's largest insurers – Wellpoint and Aetna – refused to respond to a dozen calls and emails placed over the course of a week.

    Wellpoint and Aetna's decision to not educate the public on its choices doesn't sit well with two experts.

    "There is no reason to keep that quiet. It's not going to be a good secret for very long when people want to use the plans," Wilensky said.

    "In many cases, consumers are shopping blind when it comes to what doctors and hospitals are included in their Obamacare exchange plans," said Josh Archambault, senior fellow with the think tank Foundation for Government Accountability. "These patients will be in for a rude awakening once they need care, and get stuck with a big bill for going out-of-network without realizing it."

    All of this represents a larger problem with the Affordable Care Act, said Archambault, who has extensively studied the law.

    "It reflects deeper issues in implementation," he said. "Some hospitals and doctors don't even know if they are in the network."

    Just look at Seattle Children's Hospital, which ranks No. 11 on the U.S. News & World Report best pediatric hospital list. When Obamacare rolled out, the hospital found itself with just two out of seven insurance companies on Washington's exchange. The hospital sued the state's Office of Insurance on Oct. 4 for "failure to ensure adequate network coverage."

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    Of course this is correctable when Congress forces all accredited hospitals to accept insurance receivables from exchange companies that are likely to go bankrupt. Or the Congress can guarantee the payments from these unstable startup companies. But try getting this legislation past the "defeated" Republicans in Congress.

    The only hope for Obamacare is probably in the hands of the American voters who might kill and bury the Republican Party in the 2014 and 2016 elections. Will the nation be better off with a one-party system? Probably so if you talk to most college professors.

     

    "Tax Realities for Self-Employed Who Get Obamacare Subsidies," by Karen E. Klein, Bloomberg Businessweek, October 10, 2013 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/tax-realities-for-self-employed-who-get-obamacare-subsidies 

    "Yes, People Are Losing Their Insurance Under Obamacare." by John Tozzi,  Bloomberg Businessweek, October 29, 2013 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-29/yes-people-are-losing-their-insurance-under-obamacare?campaign_id=DN103013

    . . .

    The Affordable Care Act sets standards that private insurance companies must follow. Health plans must pay for at least 60 percent of their members’ medical costs on average. They also have to provide 10 areas of coverage, called essential health benefits, such as hospitalization, mental health treatment, and maternity care. Plans that don’t meet these standards generally can’t be sold after 2013, unless they’re grandfathered (more on that below). Insurers are ending these plans and pushing people to buy more comprehensive policies, some of which may also have higher premiums. For low- and middle-income people, the law provides subsidies to make health coverage more affordable.

    . . .

    What about “grandfathered” plans?
    Health plans that existed before Obamacare was passed in 2010 could avoid some of the new standards if they didn’t change much else. It’s up to insurers and employers to decide whether they want to keep offering so-called grandfathered plans. But plans that significantly increased what people have to pay or changed the benefits offered in the last three years would lose their grandfathered status, and they have to follow the new rules starting in 2014. The grandfather option also gives some political cover to the White House, because it puts the decision to terminate a plan on insurance companies, not the government.

    Continued in article


    "NBC News: "Obama Administration knew millions could not keep their health insurance," by Bob Beauprez, Townhall, October 30, 2013 ---
    http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/bobbeauprez/2013/10/30/nbc-news-obama-administration-knew-millions-could-not-keep-their-health-insurance-n1733175 

    When Obama repeatedly made the claim – "If you like your health plan; you can keep your health plan" – objective observers knew it wasn't so. This morning, the media is buzzing with evidence that Obama knew it was a lie, but deliberately kept spinning the same phony claim for years.

    The shock in all this is not that Obama was lying; he has a well established record of that. It's that somebody has uncovered the evidence; the smoking gun. The following is the NBC News account of the mess du jour for the White House and ObamaCare.

    Our sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”

    None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration….

    Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

    That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

    Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

    Continued in article


    "Obamacare Leaves Doctors On the Hook for Deadbeats: The Affordable Care Act doles out three months of free health care to individuals who choose to default on their premiums; providers and insurers pick up the tab," by Tori Richards, Reason.com, November 7, 2013 ---
    http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/09/obamacare-leaves-doctors-on-the-hook-for

    Tucked inside nearly 11,000 pages of the Affordable Care Act is a little-known provision that doles out three months of free health care to individuals who choose to default on their premiums.

    People who receive the federal subsidy to be part of Obamacare will be allowed to incur a three-month “grace period” if they can’t pay their premiums and then simply cancel their policies, stiffing the doctors and hospitals.

    Their only repercussion is that they have to wait until the following year’s open enrollment if they want coverage on the exchange.

    “It will help break the system,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, one of a core group of Republicans who oppose Obamacare. “This is a huge piece of evidence to show this can’t work, you will break the system and bankrupt people involved.

    “The hospitals, doctors and insurance companies will be left holding the bag. There will be disagreements over who will pay for what. Lawyers will get involved because we are talking about a lot of money,” he said.

    Under Section 156.270 of the Affordable Care Act, the insured needs to pay a premium for just one month before qualifying for the three-month grace period. The insurance company must pay the claims during the first month of the grace period; during the second and third month doctors and hospitals are left to collect unpaid bills.

    This loophole wasn’t lost on some unnamed individuals who queried the Department of Health and Human Services during an open comment period for the new law in 2011.

    While officials at HHS did not respond to requests for comment on this story, they did offer a glimpse into their thinking in a March 27, 2012, report contained in the Federal Register.

    “HHS will continue to explore options for incentivizing appropriate use of the grace period,” the register said.  “HHS will monitor this issue moving forward and will continue to work on the development of policies to prevent misuse of the grace period.”

    Experts say the federal government has given people the green light to commit fraud.

    “In a sense, it legalizes fraud,” said Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute of Human Exceptionalism and a frequent critic of the Affordable Care Act. “It legalizes putting your burdens on the insurance companies’ shoulders and never paying your premiums. The government wants people to be irresponsible and apparently they want the whole system to descend into chaos.”

    In Massachusetts, where a variation of Obamacare already exists, the problem already has emerged, said Devon Herrick, senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis.

    “People are signing up and getting care and bailing out,” Herrick said. “I was talking to an insurance agent a few years ago (in Massachusetts). She said once a week she would get a call from a college girl who discovers she’s pregnant and wants health insurance. That’s an example of a condition that you can schedule.”

    Some medical professionals are bracing themselves for the worst.

    The Texas Medical Association is educating its members about the loophole and receiving feedback from worried doctors. Many in that state operate on a shoestring budget, sometimes taking out loans to stay in business.

    November 10, 2013 reply from Bob Jensen

    Hi Bob
    Who picks it up now?
    Elliot

    November 10, 2013 reply from Bob Jensen

    I think that the patient eventually loses coverage for non-payment these days. If people, before Obamacare, could keep their coverage while not paying premiums what's the incentive to pay premiums?
     
    One time my wife fell out of a tree in San Antonio. The silly thing decided to cut a limb that she knew I had arranged for a tree service to remove the next day. She got impatient --- grrrr!  The North East Baptist Hospital (where she worked as an OR nurse before her back surgeries took command of her life)  was less than a block down the street. When I got home I took her to the ER down the street because I thought she needed X-rays. 
     
    To make a long story shorter, while we both were in the waiting room of the NE Baptist  Hospital ER an ambulance wheeled in patient on a stretcher who supposedly had a heart attack. The first thing the ER checked on was if he had insurance. He did not have insurance. Next a physician checked his vital readings. It was decided that he was stable enough to be put back in the ambulance with orders to take him to the huge downtown Bexar County Hospital  that had a contract with Bexar County to treat uninsured patients --- including many, many pregnant women who crossed the Rio Grande shortly before giving birth in the Bexar County Hospital.
     
    In another instance I know a neighbor woman who overdosed on pills and parked her car in the parking lot outside the NE Baptist Emergency Room. When she was discovered unconscious and needing her stomach pumped she was rushed by ambulance downtown to the Bexar County Hospital that saved her life and stole her purse --- a Bexar County Hospital ER nurse was caught later using this woman's  credit cards.
     
    That Elliot is what happens in a city if the patient has no medical insurance. Bob Jensen's Bexar County Property taxes included over a thousand dollars a year paid for uninsured to be treated in the Bexar County Hospital.

    The physicians and hospitals often do not treat uninsured patients through normal channels. They ship them off to "approved" hospitals that have tax-supported emergency rooms. The emergency rooms treat the patients who often endure the long waits of maybe a day in the waiting rooms unless there is a life-threatening emergency. The ER can eventually admit the patient to the hospital, and the hospital can take legal action to get what it can out of the uninsured patients.
     
    I don't know how this system will change for the uninsured under Obamacare.
    My guess is that the Bexar County Hospital will need more money to treat uninsured patients even though the insurance companies may have a somewhat harder time dumping customers who default on their premiums. An increasing number of babies born at the Bexar County Hospital will return south of the Rio Grande as USA Citizens thanks to the 14th  Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the taxpayers of Bexar County.
     
    I'm not exaggerating when I say that a lot of people, including professors, who work in Bexar County reside outside the county just to save on property taxes. I don't mean to sound like a redneck, but that is the way it works. Many of us also lived in Bexar County and paid higher taxes thinking that this was a fair thing to do.
     
    PS
     
    In Boston hospitals like the New England Baptist hospital where Erika had many of her spine surgeries dropped its ER service entirely so it was no use for ambulances to bring in emergency patients. It would be too costly to treat dire emergencies pro bono without a contract with the City of Boston to pay for uninsured patients. I think most of Boston's ER patients are shipped to Mass. General Hospital supported by Boston's property owners.
     
    Respectfully,
     
    Bob Jensen

     

    November 10, 2013 reply from Elliot Kamlet

    OK.  So as we all know,  someone always pays. It seems like arguments can be made for different constituencies picking up the tab.   Frankly I don't know the most "fair" approach but is the new reality of who pays worse than what you just described we have now?

    November 11, 2013 reply from Bob Jensen

    The myth is that insurance companies pay for bad debt customers in the long run. As with all costs in the long run they are passed on to customers or taxpayers if the companies do not go bankrupt.
     
    I don't think Obamacare envisions letting its exchanges, most of whom are financed with new low-interest government loans, go bankrupt. So bad debts will be passed on somewhat with increased premiums to customers. However, the lion's share will eventually be charged to income taxpayers --- the 50% of taxpayers who actually pay some income taxes.
     
    Alternatively, the government will bypass taxpayers with more Treasury bond borrowing or simply print money through a complicated process we know as Quantitative Easing.
     
    Who pays in the long run with more government borrowing and printing of money to pay its bills? That's a no brainer.
     
    The difference between Obamacare and national health Insurance is that even the poor and the middle class are sharing in some of taxes collected to pay for their national health insurance. In the USA the 50% paying no income taxes are paying for the premium costs net of premium subsidies.

    However, where non-Medicaid patients are getting hit hardest is in those deductibles that may ruin Obamacare unless taxpayers shovel in more to reduce those deductibles.
     

    Plan Type

    Select the metal levels you prefer.

    Bad debt expenses, premiums, premium subsidies, and deductible expenses are four things.

    The biggest "thing" will be the millions that remain uninsured who turn up at hospital ERs with no insurance after Obamacare is in full force. My understanding is that local property taxpayers will still pay the lion's share of those ER services, although some of the non-reimbursed expenses will be passed on to paying patients just like they are today. This a major reason why hospital rooms costing less than $50 per day when I was a kid are now well over $1,000 per day and going up and up and up.

    Respectfully,
    Bob Jensen

    Bob Jensen's universal health care messaging --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm


    Jensen Question
    Will the Affordable Health Care Act taxpayer subsidies also help with the deductibles?

    On television the other night a woman who succeeded in signing up for Obamacare said the only plan she could afford cost her $140 per month with a $13,500 deductible.

    I don't know if this is better or worse than she can get on the market these days, but this does not seem especially affordable to me unless she has substantial savings and very low probability of filing large claims.  I think the subsidy only helps with the $140 monthly payments and not the deductibles. I could be wrong about this. The bottom line is that the people who can least afford the premiums are even less able to afford the higher deductibles.

    Will the subsidies also help with the deductibles or do they only help her with her $140 monthly payments if she qualifies for a subsidy?

    Subsidies are available to an insured person or family making 0% to 400% of the government-defined poverty threshold of declared (not including underground) revenue. But people on Medicaid are not required to buy added medical insurance and are covered free of charge jointly by the federal and state governments.

    One of the purposes of the Affordable Health Care Act is to sign up people with mental illnesses and other chronic conditions or pre-conditions that are not presently covered for them in currently available medical insurance plans. It does not seem to me that plans with $13,500 deductible gives them much improvement unless they have access to income or savings to cover such huge deductibles. The Affordable Health Care medical insurance plan should have been a national health care plan from the start. Oh Canada!

    It's very hard to provide help with deductibles since those that choose higher deductibles so they can have lower premiums might unfairly be getting government help relative to those that pay higher monthly premiums to get lower deductibles.

    It's a bit analogous to a fast food restaurant that allows refills on small cups of soda. Why would any body who eats inside the restaurant pay more for a large cup of soda?

    On Piers Morgan Live Tuesday, guest Bill Maher openly admitted Obama “lied” about Americans keeping their insurance plans, but insisted that he had to because of unified Republican opposition—and the increasingly “stupider” American public
    http://www.truthrevolt.org//news/bill-maher-obama-had-lie-stupider-americans
    Does this mean lying is a remedy for stupidity?
    Actually, throughout history lying by a political candidate is rationalized if leads to one side's political goals? On occasion political leaders do believe or are led to believe their own lies which makes the lies less less onerous than intentional lying. A more common form of "lying" is to tell the truth without filling in some crucial assumptions. For example, President Obama claims that he told the truth about individuals keeping their former health insurance plans. What he left out was the part about the parts of the law that made many individual plans illegal because they did not cover such things as maternity and mental health. He knew that many plans would be revoked but failed to mention this in his promotional speeches before the law was passed.

    Another example of huge lies were those expounded by FDR, before Lend-Lease became official in 1941, about the USA's neutrality in the earliest days of WW II. In the eyes of President Roosevelt a majority of Americans were just too stupid to realize the global threat of the Third Reich.

    The problem with lying to stupid people is that they don't always remain stupid enough over time to believe it when a liar later on when he or she is telling the truth or lying. They just don't believe most anything coming out of the mouth of a liar. Then again many people believe what they want to believe and deny what they want to deny. We no longer value truth and integrity in our political leaders. We only cheer when the other guy's oxen get gored to put meat on our table

    Bob Jensen's universal health care messaging --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm




    Bob Jensen's universal health care messaging --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm

    Bob Jensen's Tidbits Archives ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbitsdirectory.htm 

    Bob Jensen's Pictures and Stories
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm

    Summary of Major Accounting Scandals --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_scandals

    Bob Jensen's threads on such scandals:

    Bob Jensen's threads on audit firm litigation and negligence ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm

    Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

    Enron --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm

    Rotten to the Core --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

    American History of Fraud --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudAmericanHistory.htm

    Bob Jensen's fraud conclusions ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on auditor professionalism and independence are at
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001c.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on corporate governance are at
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Governance 

     

    Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm

    ·     With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review (TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier

    ·     With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams

    ·     With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of Accountancy Ignores TAR

    ·     With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research into Undergraduate Accounting Courses

    Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave  --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
    By Bob Jensen

    What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?  ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong

    The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

    AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1

    Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm

    Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and Statistics ---
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So

    Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews

    Bob Jensen's economic crisis messaging http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

    Bob Jensen's Home Page --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/