Patterico's Pontifications

7/25/2014

Quick Links I Have Meant to Blog

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:33 am



Which means some of them are a day or two old. Mom’s in town, so that takes precedence.

ONE.

Ezra Klein assures you that Halbig is not going to destroy ObamaCare:

The Halbig case could destroy Obamacare. But it won’t. The Supreme Court simply isn’t going to rip insurance from tens of millions of people in order to teach Congress a lesson about grammar.

. . . .

For Halbig to unwind Obamacare the Supreme Court would ultimately have to rule in the plaintiff’s favor. And they’re not going to do that. By the time SCOTUS even could rule on Halbig the law will have been in place for years. The Court simply isn’t going to rip insurance from tens of millions of people due to an uncharitable interpretation of congressional grammar.

He doesn’t predict anything; rather, he Voxsplains how the future will inevitably turn out. It’s typical Klein: snotty, super-confident, and probably wrong. As I have said, I think Justice Roberts and four other Justices will uphold the Halbig decision. I disagreed with Roberts’s initial ObamaCare decision, because I thought the penalty was a penalty — but I think his opinion was principled. Y’all are free to disagree. We’ll see in, what? Two years or so?

TWO.

Jamelle Bouie at Slate assures you that, even if subsidies are not available under federally established exchanges, Republicans will pay the price:

Of course, what is bad could become catastrophic if the unlikely happens and conservatives prevail at the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court. There have been tweaks and changes, but in the nearly eight decades we’ve had a welfare state, middle-class Americans have never lost an entitlement. And indeed, our largest and most popular programs—Social Security and Medicare—are nearly untouchable. Even anti-entitlement crusaders like Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan have been forced to pose as protectors when appealing to the public.

Simply put, a Republican Party that demolishes Obamacare isn’t one that regains a governing majority—it’s one that throws the health care system into chaos and destroys itself as a viable national party.

“Middle-class Americans have never lost an entitlement.” True enough. It’s about damned time they did.

THREE.

Perry says illegal aliens have committed a $#!&-ton of crime in Texas:

Sean, there have been over the course of the last five years, since the fall of ’08, over 203,000 individuals who have come into Texas illegally who have been booked into our county jails. Those individuals have accounted for over 3,000 homicides and over 8,000 sexual assaults. We can’t afford to wait for Washington to secure this border. We’ve had enough.

Appalling, if true. But is it true? I’m not sure. According to the stats I see here, that’s almost half the murders that have occurred in Texas over the last five years. I count 6223 murders from 2008-2012 (which appears to be the most recent year for which statistics are available) and 38,185 rapes in that same time period. Perry has illegals committing half the murders and about 1/5 of the rapes.

I’m slightly skeptical that illegal aliens are responsible for that high a percentage of the murders. But it may be closer to that percentage than I think — and any number is a problem we shouldn’t have to deal with.

FOUR.

ObamaCare is open to fraud:

An undercover operation found that the majority of fake Obamacare applications submitted were approved by the health law’s enrollment system.

Fake applicants were able to get subsidized insurance coverage in 11 of 18 attempts, according to a report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. The agency conducted the sting operation to test the strength of the Affordable Care Act’s eligibility-verification system.

Shocking that an entitlement might be rife with fraud, isn’t it?

34 Responses to “Quick Links I Have Meant to Blog”

  1. The unearthing of the video by Jonathan Gruber explaining that “State Exchanges mean State, not federal is going to blow up the “typo” argument and Roberts will make that clear. His comment about Congress and the voters suggests that he was saying the Court should not protect Congress from its own ineptitude.

    Here’s what Gruber says.

    What’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges.

    It could not be more clear.

    Mike K (b5c01a)

  2. “…a Republican party that demolishes Obamacare…”. So they will blame Republicans for a law they wrote that not a single Republican voted for? Of course they will and the MSM will be their lapdogs to assign blame. They wrote the law with the intent to force compliance and it blew up in their faces.

    Mike M (a7a4f2)

  3. Simply put, a Republican Party that demolishes Obamacare isn’t one that regains a governing majority—it’s one that throws the health care system into chaos and destroys itself as a viable national party.

    1) It would be judges doing this. Why does he want to further politicize the judiciary?

    2) The health care system was thrown into chaos BY Obamacare, and the Democrats have harmed themselves by it, but (probably) not been destroyed. There is still time, though.

    3) The GOP probably realizes that you cannot just repeal Obamacare and have the chaos dissipate. The status quo ante has been smashed and a bit of that smashing was needed. Their job will be to restructure a free-market medical insurance system that works, undoes the statist controls, and does not burden a few with the costs of needed reform. Solving some of the remaining problems (e.g. need for a national market, tort reform, employee policy portability) ought to be included.

    4) If the Republicans can bring health care out of the ashes of Obamacare, they will complete the destruction of the Democrats as a viable national party.

    Kevin M (b357ee)

  4. It is kind of interesting that Obama may the one who finally leaves Progressive Socialism on the ash-heap of American history.

    The Man with the Minus Touch.

    Kevin M (b357ee)

  5. “… in the nearly eight decades we’ve had a welfare state, middle-class Americans have never lost an entitlement.”

    Note that this “intellectual” doesn’t even question whether this is a good thing – he just charges ahead as if it’s just “the way things have always been” and it never will, or should, change.

    I thought Conservatives were the ones who wanted to preserve the status quo, that Change! was a good thing.

    Or were the liberals full of used food again?

    alanstorm99 (cb237b)

  6. I’m slightly skeptical that illegal aliens are responsible for that high a percentage of the murders. But it may be closer to that percentage than I think — and any number is a problem we shouldn’t have to deal with.

    Along the same lines, and following up from a previous thread here at Patterico, see this.

    Milhouse (c63fe5)

  7. 1. Currently the applicable part of Obamacare that Halbig covers has only been in effect for 1 year. I’m guessing that wasn’t Voxplained. Can the SCOTUS go ahead and pick the Halbig case up for the next session? If they let it drag out in the Appeals courts for 2 more years, then the impacts will indeed be more severe.

    2. Wishful Liberal thinking. Everything they want is for Republicans to be destroyed…what they fail to realize is that the people that vote Republican will never go away. The Whig party was destroyed and became the Republican party. Their dream of a one-party system…well that just shows their communist tendencies.

    3. That would be a very interesting scenario is Perry’s statistics are correct. Could Texas sue the Feds for not keeping their obligations. I don’t think anything would come from that, but it would keep the pressure on immigration enforcement.

    4. Everyone knew it was fraud ridden when it opened. I’m also willing to bet that the late surge for Obamacare applicants in March were from illegals signing up. (Did they get the Spanish portal up around that time?)

    Dejectedhead (a094a6)

  8. #6 Link doesn’t work Milhouse. (It is just bolded text)

    Dejectedhead (a094a6)

  9. Sorry, trying again.

    I’m slightly skeptical that illegal aliens are responsible for that high a percentage of the murders. But it may be closer to that percentage than I think — and any number is a problem we shouldn’t have to deal with.

    Along the same lines, and following up from a previous thread here at Patterico, see this.

    Milhouse (c63fe5)

  10. Mom is much more important.

    htom (412a17)

  11. Homicide stats…..
    This is like the “half of all marriages end in divorce” stat….it doesn’t tell you when the perp came to the USA, only that he/she was arrested and/or charged with a homicide.
    But, like “broken windows”, if you flaunt the law by walking across the border, what other laws are you prepared to ignore?
    The evidence would seem to indicate quite a few of them.

    Welcome to Bill Clinton’s experience with the Mariel Boatlift.

    askeptic (efcf22)

  12. 1. By the time the Supreme Court decides the Halbig case, the law will already have been changed, or change recognized as nbecessary, because there are problem with the subsidies baked in .

    That’s anyway the outcome Chief justice Rpberts will strive for.

    2. Republicans won’t pay a price, unless they have no fix. A great part of the democratic caucus will not have an incentive to co-operate, because they come from states not affected by the Halbig decision – but then there’s Oregon and Hawaii, and the whole thing has to be re-opened anyway.

    3. In the first place, these statistics should probably not be trusted, since they are coming from the anti-immigration lobby, which lies its head off about everything. “booked into our county jails” doesn’t mean athing, since their status is what might have caused them to be booked

    If there is some truth to it, this, it is probably some very distinct subset – for instance members of Mexican drug gangs who have set up shop in Texas, or it may be people brought over as children who lived in the wrong places and went to the wrong schools, and the only distinction between them and the American born who went to the same schools with them, is that the American born are more likely to be committing crimes. I mean we should be very clear, this is almost certainly mostly people brought in as children, and their criminality is an entirely an American phenomena.. It’s a good argument for keeping the population down in certain school districts.

    I note also Governor Perry speaks about 3,000 homicides and over 8,000 sexual assaults but he desn’t speka about all the homicides and sexual assaults committed by people who are NOT individuals who have come into Texas illegally, nor about the percenetage of individuals “who have come into Texas illegally” who have done such things.

    Governor Rick Perry appearently thinks it s agood idea to go after people because of who they are and not what they do.

    That is now how law enforcement is supposed to be work, but suppposing you wanted to work that way, there is a certain American born ethnic group, who have been here since almost the beginning and almost none of whom arrived after 1860 – those that did are largely not part of this – who have the highest ratio of murderers and rapists of any subset of the American population.

    Sammy Finkelman (51afd4)

  13. 9- Reason advocates for open-borders, so I would expect them to put the best possible face on this situation. I doubt if they’ll be posting anything by the “Pat Buchanan’s” or “Michelle Malkin’s” of the commentariate.

    askeptic (efcf22)

  14. It is convenient to have an inside source into Robert’s brain.

    askeptic (efcf22)

  15. Kevin M (b357ee) — 7/25/2014 @ 8:01 am

    The GOP probably realizes that you cannot just repeal Obamacare and have the chaos dissipate. The status quo ante has been smashed and a bit of that smashing was needed.

    I don’t think there are too many people in the Republican Party who are prepared to tackle this issue. It’s easier just to vote to repeal.

    Their job will be to restructure a free-market medical insurance system that works, undoes the statist controls, and does not burden a few with the costs of needed reform. Solving some of the remaining problems (e.g. need for a national market, tort reform, employee policy portability) ought to be included.

    Absolutely. And get rid of means testing too.

    There are some other problems, too. The new drug development system is broken. New doctirs are often saddled with high studnet loans, which prevents them from becoming general practioners..

    Sammy Finkelman (51afd4)

  16. Sammy, do you actually know a Republican?

    askeptic (efcf22)

  17. Those individuals have accounted for over 3,000 homicides and over 8,000 sexual assaults.

    Since 1968? Gov Perry doesn’t say all these murders and rapes were committed after 2008, or taht they are identical with the 203,000 people booked into Texas jails. And is this including some estimate for unsolved crimes?

    Sammy Finkelman (51afd4)

  18. I even know somebody who said he was re-registering as a Republican. I know a few people.

    Sammy Finkelman (51afd4)

  19. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

    JD (dd5bcb)

  20. askeptic (efcf22) — 7/25/2014 @ 12:44 pm

    But, like “broken windows”, if you flaunt the law by walking across the border, what other laws are you prepared to ignore?

    Bankruptcy laws, campaign finance laws. Anything that depends on filing proper forms.

    Mostly “malum prohibitums” not “malum in ses.”

    Sammy Finkelman (51afd4)

  21. 4. What I wondering is, could someone see a doctor with that?

    I can see a posisbility for mixing up medical records. Till now, that was mostly peopl using other people’s Medicaid cards (stopped mostly by pictures and by the fact that usually the person being impersonated has and needs their own doctors) or getting prescriptions for somebody else (somewhat common, especially with things like antibiotics.

    Sammy Finkelman (51afd4)

  22. Years ago, the borders north and south, should have had the national guard protecting them.
    Finally Perry stepped up. It has to be less expensive to keep these illegals out, than to have them come here, work, commit heinous acts of crime, and send money home.

    mg (31009b)

  23. And the beauty of it, and what the Left is caterwauling about,
    is that since they are agents of the Governor, they can be deputized to enforce TX law, with full arrest powers.
    Do we still have ‘rag-pickers’ because they would have a great harvest of rended garments along the Acela Corridor.

    askeptic (efcf22)

  24. mg (31009b) — 7/25/2014 @ 1:16 pm

    It has to be less expensive to keep these illegals out, than to have them come here, work, commit heinous acts of crime, and send money home. </I.

    Which is the problem – working or committing crimes? Sending money abroad. What is this the second coming of mercantislism.

    I think one of the biggest fallacies here is the equating of newly arrived people with criminals, since all those people Gov Perry talked about weer probably here for a long, long time.

    In New York City, immigration and immigrants are associated with a reduction in crime.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03wwln_idealab.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

    Ramiro Martinez Jr., a professor of criminal justice at Florida International University, has sifted through homicide records in border cities like San Diego and El Paso, both heavily populated by Mexican immigrants, both places where violent crime has fallen significantly in recent years. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “I’ve discovered that the homicide rate for Hispanics was lower than for other groups, even though their poverty rate was very high, if not the highest, in these metropolitan areas.” He found the same thing in the Haitian neighborhoods of Miami. In his book “New York Murder Mystery,” the criminologist Andrew Karmen examined the trend in New York City and likewise found that the “disproportionately youthful, male and poor immigrants” who arrived during the 1980s and 1990s “were surprisingly law-abiding” and that their settlement into once-decaying neighborhoods helped “put a brake on spiraling crime rates.”

    … Sampson’s theory may be the most provocative yet. Could America’s cities be safer today not because fewer unwanted children live in them but because a lot more immigrants do? Could illegal immigration be making the nation a more law-abiding place?

    Everybody who has experienced this knows that this is true.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  25. What’s more, immigrants, particularly illegal immigrants, become substitute crime victims, if you want to get cold-blooded about it.

    Without legal and illegal immigrants, the criminals not in jail would rob and rape and kill American citizens. This way they are more likely to commit crimes against others before getting locked up.

    Here, now I’ve given you a cynical evil self-interested motive for supporting freer immigration, even more evil than cheap labor. Use it.

    Nobody actually thinks this way, of course. And actaully people shouldn’t be sent into bad places.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime

    The Handbook of Crime Correlates states that unlike studies outside the US, a majority of studies in the US have found lower crime rates among immigrants than among non-immigrants. Again, the country of origin may be more important than immigrant status itself.[1]

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  27. There’s a combination of factors w.r.t immigration. It probably isn’t the case that if you’re willing to get to the country illegally you’re necessarily more likely to be a criminal in a generalized way.

    I know some Asians, and I feel pretty confident that if they couldn’t get the right paperwork they might just work under the table and dodge immigration stuff until they could get things squared away; they certainly wouldn’t just immediately pack up and leave because they’re now technically an illegal. I’m not sure how many of them would consider coming to the country illegally; I’m sure some would. They’re very unlikely to commit any meaningful crimes, though. Asians in general don’t care much about paperwork, outside of making it as likely as possible that everything will be in good order for themselves and their families.

    I’m not sure that the studies about immigrant areas having lower crime rates mean anything, other than that certain types of people have certain crime rates. If you’re saying that areas with lots of Asian immigrants have low crime rates, then yes, I’m sure that’s true. The reason people go in for the broken windows approach to immigration is that when you have illegal immigration you don’t know who you’re getting. That’s the whole point. People who weren’t violent before are unlikely to start on the near side of the border, but then when they come illegally we don’t know if they were violent before or not.

    I’m very open to arguments about how our legal immigration system sucks. It makes me angry that our government makes it hard for useful, productive Asians (for example) to get through the system, and that it’s very inconsistent, takes a long time, and costs a lot of money for no particular reason. But most people who are “pro-immigration” are really just against our country having any say at all in who comes here and is allowed to stay, and that’s a ridiculous position to take. A lot of innocent people are suffering and dying right now because of the foolishness of this open-borders stuff. It would only get worse if we embraced it officially; see also Australia, Gillard vs. Abbott.

    Eidolon (1858aa)

  28. Eidolon (1858aa) — 7/25/2014 @ 3:04 pm

    It makes me angry that our government makes it hard for useful, productive Asians (for example) to get through the system, and that it’s very inconsistent, takes a long time, and costs a lot of money for no particular reason.

    The only thing that will ever get the system to change is more illegal immigration. That’s a fact.

    And the numbers are far too low anyway. I don’t know how the statistics break down by country.

    People who come here after the age 18 or so are very rarely criminals. (with a few exceptions maybe) It’s people who are brought up here who become criminals.

    If you don’t want broken windows don’t create a situation where a lot of people have no reasonable alternative in their lives except to evade the law. There must be amnesty, over and over again. the slate needs to be continuously wiped clean.

    Sammy Finkelman (51afd4)

  29. Your assumption seems to be that there’s no way for people not to come to the US. That’s absurd. Nobody has to come here.

    You’re basically saying that if somebody has a bountiful garden with a barbed wire fence around it then it’s his fault if people get hurt trying to eat his vegetables, and he has no right to try to defend his property in any way. You’re saying we have no right to decide who gets to come into our country and who gets to stay. (I love how Mexico’s stringent immigration rules never bother the people who complain endlessly about the US’s much laxer ones.)

    At that point it’s advantageous not to be a citizen because then you don’t have to pay taxes, and you can just take advantage of poorly/deliberately designed programs like Obamacare which don’t properly check citizenship status. You can sponge money off of the citizens, thus encouraging more illegal immigration until the whole society collapses under a mountain of debt and criminality. Do liberals ever think any of these things through?

    Eidolon (1858aa)

  30. Since they’re trying to destroy all that is positive about the USA, what’s to think about?

    askeptic (efcf22)

  31. Obamacare open to fraud: A statistic I would like to see: what proportion of subsidized policies are “Silver 94” plans that have near zero co-pays and no deductible? As I hear it, all you have to do is claim an income just above the Medicaid cut-off and you get nearly free medical care for a year. Want to see a specialist: $5. Need a brand-name prescription? $3. Need an MRI? $5. Etc.

    Here’s the cheery part: even if you lie and really make $200K in 2014, they will not ask for you to make up the normal copays (or deductibles) which are MUCH higher (you will have to pay back the premium subsidy).

    Bet you there are a surprising number of folks in the narrow bracket just above Medicaid, almost all of whom are lying.

    Kevin M (b357ee)

  32. sammy- take another hit of that orange sunshine and flip the grateful dead album.
    Illegals do not make crime go away. every time one of them steps across the border its a felony.

    mg (31009b)

  33. I wonder, does anyone have the numbers for how many drunk driving deaths illegal immigrants are responsible for? I seem to recall seeing somewhere the proportion was pretty high.

    Brad (00d86c)

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    Buster (36f123)


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