Posted on 02/03/2014 11:32:13 AM PST by Starman417
A supernova is the end outcome not for all stars, but stars of sufficient mass, thought to be between 8 and 15 solar masses. The process is described this way:
•Gradually heavier elements build up at the center, and it becomes layered like an onion, with elements becoming lighter towards the outside of the star. • Once the star's core surpasses a certain mass (the Chandrasekhar limit), the star begins to implode (for this reason, these supernovas are also known as core-collapse supernovas). • The core heats up and becomes denser. • Eventually the implosion bounces back off the core, expelling the stellar material into space
This is the supernova, and the result is the formation of a neutron star.
When stars beyond 20-30 solar masses go supernova, the result is the formation of a black hole.
Supernovae are spectacular phenomena. This is not the fate of Obamacare.
When stars of less than 8 solar masses run out of fuel the star expands into a red giant and then finally cools into a white dwarf. This is the fate of our sun.
This is also how Obamacare will die.
Megan McArdle describes the stages of Obamacare demise:
· 2014: Small-business policy cancellations. This year, the small-business market is going to get hit with the policy cancellations that roiled the individual market last year. Some firms will get better deals, but others will find that their coverage is being canceled in favor of more expensive policies that don’t cover as many of the doctors or procedures that they want. This is going to be a rolling problem throughout the year.· Summer 2014: Insurers get a sizable chunk of money from the government to cover any excess losses. When the costs are published, this is going to be wildly unpopular: The administration has spent three years saying that Obamacare was the antidote to abuses by Big, Bad Insurance Companies, and suddenly it’s a mechanism to funnel taxpayer money to them?
· Fall 2014: New premiums are announced.
· 2014 and onward: Medicare reimbursement cuts eat into hospital margins, triggering a lot of lobbying and sad ads about how Beloved Local Hospital may have to close.
· Spring 2015: The Internal Revenue Service starts collecting individual mandate penalties: 1 percent of income in the first year. That’s going to be a nasty shock to folks who thought the penalty was just $95. I, like many other analysts, expect the administration to announce a temporary delay sometime after April 1, 2014.
· Spring 2015: The IRS demands that people whose income was higher than they projected pay back their excess subsidies. This could be thousands of dollars.
· Spring 2015: Cuts to Medicare Advantage, which the administration punted on in 2013, are scheduled to go into effect. This will reduce benefits currently enjoyed by millions of seniors, which is why they didn’t let them go into effect this year.
· Fall 2015: This is when expert Bob Laszewski says insurers will begin exiting the market if the exchange policies aren’t profitable.
· Fall 2017: Companies and unions start learning whether their plans will get hit by the “Cadillac tax,” a stiff excise tax on expensive policies that will hit plans with generous benefits or an older and sicker employee base. Expect a lot of companies and unions to radically decrease benefits and increase cost-sharing as a result.
· January 2018: The temporary risk-adjustment plans, which the administration is relying on to keep insurers in the marketplaces even if their customer pool is older and sicker than projected, run out. Now if insurers take losses, they just lose the money.
· Fall 2018: Buyers find out that subsidy growth is capped for next year’s premiums; instead of simply being pegged to the price of the second-cheapest silver plan, whatever that cost is, their growth is fixed. This will show up in higher premiums for families -- and, potentially, in an adverse-selection death spiral.
The public will indeed balk when Obama and democrats inform them that the horrible no good greedy insurers have to be reimbursed for their losses through the "risk corridors." And wait until they see the bill:
If Congress had tried to pass a law simply transferring $1 trillion to insurance companies over the next decade, there would have been energetic resistance to its doing so. The Affordable Care Act amounts to the same transfer, even as it places insurers in the enviable position of having a federal law in place that gives Americans a choice between buying their products and being fined by the federal government.
Barack Obama wrote a check that comes straight out of the taxpayer wallet:
Especially troubling is the “risk corridor” provision of the law, under which taxpayers are on the hook for covering large portions of the losses that insurers incur on the Obamacare exchanges. If an insurer pays out claims that exceed 108 percent of its premium collections, taxpayers would cover about 75 percent of its losses.
Obamacare's life hinges on these risk corridors:
It is important to understand how crucial the prospect of a taxpayer bailout of insurers is to the future of Obamacare. Insurers facing the prospect of participating in the exchanges in 2015 without the backstop of a taxpayer bailout would be forced either to price their products properly (and therefore likely well above their 2014 premiums) or withdraw from the exchanges altogether. Either way, the law will become even less attractive to middle-income and moderate-wage households who get little or nothing in subsidies. Insisting on budget neutrality or repealing these provisions would, like the elimination of the individual mandate, not only make good political sense but also help to speed the unwinding of Obamacare, which is essential to the ultimate repeal of the law and its replacement with a real reform of American health care.For that very reason, the insurers and the Democrats are certain to mightily resist a repeal of the bailout provisions. But the more intense their resistance, the more it will reinforce the case against the law. A program that cannot survive without a massive taxpayer bailout of private insurers is not a program that is working. It is a program that is failing, and needs to be replaced.
democrat members of Congress have admitted that Obamacare is not getting the enrollment numbers and types it needs to be sustainable. The risk corridor provisions conveniently expire in 2016 coincidentally with the end of the Obama regime.
That's not where the bad news ends. Obamacare doesn't fix what's wrong. Period.
The real problem with health care wasn't private health care. That was all paid for. The problem with health care costs is the cost of entitlements.
Peter Orszag, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, identified the main driver of increased spending in Medicare as soaring costs in the health care system at large.
Obamacare does not fix it:
Health care entitlement spending is bypassing all other spending. Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program will be greater than all other spending—including Social Security and defense spending: “Spending for major health care programs will be nearly 5 percent of GDP [gross domestic product] in 2013, and such spending is projected to grow rapidly when provisions of [Obamacare] are fully implemented by middecade, reaching 6.2 percent of GDP in 2023.”
Obamcare makes many unrealistic expectations:
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
Why?
Why the why?
(bookmark actually but more fun to do it this way)
I don’t see it taking til 2017 at the rate things are disintegrating in 6-12 mos the pitchforks are going to be coming out.
Pffft. Americans are frogs in a pot. As long as the heat isn’t turned up sharply, Americans will sit and cook.
Refer back to the video of the people at a auto repair facility getting their heath insurance increases. Sure, they were upset, but not angry, more resigned, dis spirited.
The American public deserves less credit than I’ve given them lately, (which is to say, none).
No government program assuring as much ready and uncontrolled opportunity for the unscrupulous to abuse authority and steal from the system will EVER go away!!
NEVER
This should collapse well before the authors’ timeline. Much of the hidden agendas buried in this horror story are coming out much faster than the perps thought it would.
Conservatives/GOP have an excellent opportunity to paint the picture and use it in both 2014 and 2016. Pray for rain.
DITTO!
I remember reading on the Web in 1945, maybe even by the same author, maybe also excerpted, an article titled “How Social Security Will Die”. I’m waiting.
The author is an optimist. Obama will keep making changes and evolving Obamacare into government health care. It may not take a dramatic collapse to set the stage for full government care, but only a passive populace and Congress who will allow Obama to keep changing the plan as he sees fit. Obamacare will absorb providers and provider facilities through control of rates, standards and authorized practices. There will be more subsidies, delays and the cost will always be hidden. There will probably be a fringe private practice totally operating on a cash basis, but it will just be a small percentage of coverage and serve as a safety valve to populist pressure.
The Rats are running from Obama and Obamacare already. As more and more horror stories hit the news Obamacare and anyone who supported it will be radioactive.
The Lamestream Press will not be able to suppress it anymore.
Huh? Wha?
Bingo. Or to borrow from the analogy of another FReeper here, they put the frog in the pot, but then their hand slipped on the dial and they immediately cranked the burner up to 11.
Huh? Wha?
Damned time travelers. I knew they were spying on us. Once in a while, one gives himself away. :)
Got some bad news from the astronomy front on this analogy.
Wikipedia (yes, I know the warnings) article on white dwarfs
A white dwarf is stable once formed and will continue to cool almost indefinitely; eventually, it will become a black white dwarf, also called a black dwarf. Assuming that the Universe continues to expand, it is thought that in 1019 to 1020 years, the galaxies will evaporate as their stars escape into intergalactic space. White dwarfs should generally survive this, although an occasional collision between white dwarfs may produce a new fusing star or a super-Chandrasekhar mass white dwarf which will explode in a Type Ia supernova. The subsequent lifetime of white dwarfs is thought to be on the order of the lifetime of the proton, known to be at least 1032 years. Some simple grand unified theories predict a proton lifetime of no more than 1049 years.
So, Obamacare will never die.
I just can NOT understand why people think Obamacare will die.
It has the full power of the US Government, its treasury, and the printing presses of the Federal Reserve behind it and every other progressive nanny-state scheme.
It doesn’t matter how bad or expensive Obamacare becomes. It will not die - it must be killed - and I see no spine or political will in DC to do that.
Agree; there is a lot of wishful thinking that it will collapse on its own and the politicians won't have to do anything that might be personally painful. Unless it is specifically killed and a wooden stake put through its heart, it will just keep staggering on with more and more money being sucked in that will create more and more constituencies that are dependent on it for treatment or income and will rally to defend it - just like the disaster British Health Care system.
LOLOL Thanks for that.
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