
5 States Potentially Headed for Obamacare Disasters - ytNumbers
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/01/19/5-states-potentially-headed-for-obamacare-disaster.aspx
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somebody63246
The pudding here is that young healthy people will be footing the bill for
other demographics. It's great how they tricked people into doing this. They
young and stupid are vulnerable and will always be an easy target to pick on.
Just like the military recruits them for pennies on the dollar, and sends them
out into battle. If anyone should be skeptical of the government, it should be
young people. In reality, the skeptics seem to be the middle age, who have
witnessed over the years how the system works. The dilemma is that the middle
age doesn't have the time to have a big voice, but the younger stupid
demographic has so much free time to spout their non-wisdom to the rest of the
world through the internet like I am doing right now.

~~~
hga
I'm not sure the young are that stupid when it comes to dollars out of their
pocket.

Penalties the IRS can charge for not signing up (to sites many found difficult
or impossible to do so in the first place) are minimal this year, and get
really big in year 3 as I remember. But it remains to be seen that this is
politically feasible, there aren't many people who are closely watching this
never popular in the first place train-wreck who think they'll stand.

ADDED: I guess you're also not familiar with the Jacksonian part of the US
(roughly Greater Appalachia with plenty of the south). We don't volunteer for
the military just because of the compensation, but because its our duty.

A greater point to make is why are the young listening so much less to their
elders? The '60s "don't trust anyone over 30" and all this youth culture
emphasis has had terrible results. Bringing this around to hacker territory,
it was quite sad to watch the microcomputer crowd make so many of the same
mistakes their elders made and learned from, and it's utterly damning that
almost all our software technology is from a base no older than the calendar
'60s.

~~~
somebody63246
Why do the penalties get bigger and bigger and bigger each year? Let me guess.
Perhaps it is to get people to say "its not that bad" at first, so they could
get it passed. What boggles my mind is that people actually promoted the idea
of giving up their freedom to another person. Letting someone else dictate to
them what is going to happen. Especially the youth, who fight their parents
growing up in order to be able to make their own decisions. Then what do they
do? They place a portion of their brain that is responsible for making health
decisions on a silver stamped plate, and hand it away, all the while with a
big happy smile. "Here you go, you can have my freedom, just don't penalize me
for 3 years and i'll put a sticker on my car with your name on it, because I
am now your bitch." I guess the part that pisses me off the most is that they
didn't only put their own ability to make rational decisions on a silver
plate, they put everyone elses on a plate too. They stole that decision from
me. Not a whole lot is going to be different, but its just one more decision
that I want get to make. Slowly over time, they keep handing over my
decisions, until I become an integer instead of a human. Life is about making
decisions and adventure, it isn't supposed to be pre-planned for you to follow
the same path as everyone. You choose your own destiny.

~~~
hga
Well, we don't have a direct democracy (thank goodness; impossible
communications wise for the original 13 states, historically most unwise given
the stark object lesson of Athens, which our Founders were familiar with). So
it's not like they directly voted on this, and remember Pelosei's " _But we
have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it_ ". Which due to
Scott Brown's election overstates the case, there turned out to be plenty of
time to analyze the unfinished Senate bill before it was passed by the House.

The real question is how have the young been convinced to vote for one anti-
freedom side vs. another? After they helped put those politicians in office
it's too late.

Especially when the fears raised about the other side, social issues stuff,
are entirely impractical and improbable, the national level Republicans have
done even less for social conservatives than they've done for gun owners (I
follow the latter very closely) and have no stomach whatsoever for doing
battle there.

Well, as we're noting, perhaps harsh experience will teach them a lesson. They
are slowly losing their enthusiasm for Obama....

You might also look into all the work done on rational ignorance:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance)
And why are they satisfied to get so much of their political information from
comedy shows? And how things have gotten so polarized even admitting to being
in favor of conservative or Republican stuff can have dire real world
consequences; a threshold appears to me to have been passed in the aftermath
of California Proposition 8.

Back to rational ignorance: to take myself as an example, what would it matter
how I politically educated myself if I today lived in California? Even voting
a straight Republican ticket wouldn't accomplish much with how "wet" I gather
the state party has become. Or how I follow politics because my mother does
and taught me that, plus I came of political age in a very consequential time,
not long after Nixon's first term began, and a bit later realized the America
I thought I had grown up in was _gone_ , and researched the what and why. I
don't do it just so I can vote better.

Bottom line, details omitted for this posting: when " _The Gods of the
Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!_ " in due course, and
probably pretty soon, these young will learn their lesson, at least those who
survive...

~~~
somebody63246
It's ironic that we now have more people in poverty, fewer jobs, and gun sales
have increased, meanwhile, those very same things that the democrat party
claims to be trying to reduce, are on the rise. They either have a secret
plan, which is their true motive for decision making, or they lie to
themselves claiming that the plan is pulling people out of poverty, and
claiming that their gun laws are working. I can't figure it out.

~~~
hga
Well, besides the usual hell-holes, only Colorado has really changed their gun
laws for the worst in the last N years.

Compare to the nationwide sweep of shall-issue concealed carry regimes
starting with Florida in 1987 and ending with the court enforced one in
Illinois right now (ironically enough, including Colorado, and they had to
drop the law they proposed to ban them from public college campuses). Only 7-8
states are left out, although they include the large population ones of
California and New York.

At the judicial level, the Supremes finally acknowledged the 2nd ( _Heller_ )
and 14th ( _McDonald_ ) Amendments, and while this has had almost no effects
"on the ground" outside of Illinois, hey, a Federal judge just granted a
preliminary injunction against the Army Corps of Engineers' new total gun ban
on their lands.

At the national level, the "assault weapons" ban sunsetted and shows no sign
of returning, you can now carry concealed in National Park land, put guns in
Amtrack stowed luggage....

The sweep of shall issue regimes has had an effect on gun sales, as many
people take advantage of them. But they don't explain the whole incredible
increase, especially the increase in sales of rifles of military utility;
heck, the last batch of military surplus inexpensive bolt action battle rifles
has been exhausted....

I don't know if they claim their gun laws are "working", outside of the
traditional gun owner's hell-holes; if they are, they're delusional.

As for the rest, well, anyone who can read a chart notices that LBJ's "War on
Poverty" ended the decline in the poverty rate. Jobs, they only emphasize the
number still looking for work, not the ones including the underemployed or
dropped out e.g. due to giving up trying to find a job. And we've noticed a
pretty constant pattern of economic reports being adversely adjusted after
first announced....

------
VLM
If you analyze it thru startup glasses, its interesting to see various
assumptions about what percentage of the target "customers" will sign up.

~~~
hga
I suppose so, but this sort of problem is well understood by the insurance
industry and that's why the "risk corridors" exist. Just a fancy name for a
variation on standard reinsurance, how insurance companies themselves buy
insurance:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinsurance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinsurance)

The government _had_ to do this because no one could predict ahead of time
what pools the insurance companies would end up with in 2014, except I'm sure
the latter weren't as optimistic as the government.

