"The page lacked a cancel button or any way to opt out of Medicaid."

"It was done; she was enrolled, and there was nothing to do but click 'Next' and then to sign out."

This happened in the state of Washington, which supposedly has one of the better health-exchange websites and which for some reason has relabeled its Medicaid with the absurd name Washington Apple Health.

IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said:

Shouldn't that be illegal? How can you sign up for something without agreeing to sign up for it.

I answered her question:

How is it any worse than requiring that you have insurance coverage? Once they've done that and detailed what is required, you're in a mandatory system. The computer is simply telling you what your options are within the system. For this woman, there was only one option. There was no way to back out and say I don't want to do what it's been determined I must do. When she entered the website, she gave up the option of going rogue. The rest was a cranking forward into the machinery.

In 6 weeks, only 40,000 have signed up through Healthcare.gov — if "signing up" means putting a plan in your "shopping cart."

"That amount is a tiny fraction of the total projected enrollment for the 36 states where the federal government is running the online health-care exchange, indicating the slow start to the president’s initiative."

Though the number is inflated with those who haven't actually purchased a plan, it's not not additionally puffed up with those who signed up for Medicaid. That number is said to be 440,000, which means only 8.3% of those who have managed to use the website are actually buying health insurance, and 91.6% have used it to access a welfare program.

A spokesman for the insurance industry’s main trade group said the slow early enrollment does not matter as much as how many sign up by the spring. “That’s what will determine how well these reforms are going to work,” said Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for the group America’s Health Insurance Plans.

The insurance industry has a substantial stake in who enrolls, as well as how many do so. Unless enough young, healthy Americans sign up, the cost of coverage is likely to escalate — in turn, discouraging people from getting or keeping coverage.

So the number — 40,000 — is dismal, but if it turns out these are disproportionally the sort of person who will be using a lot of health care services — and don't you think they are? — that's an even bigger problem.

By the way, what's with "young, healthy"? I understand "healthy," but why "young"? If we're going to use stereotypes and generalizations about the groups of people who are less likely to incur health-care costs, why stop at "young"? Why not say "Unless enough young, healthy, male Americans sign up"?

"Men Should Pay for Maternity Care Because BABIES."

Headline at DoubleX about babies, written in babytalk. Here's the argument:

The long-term prosperity of the U.S. depends on healthy citizens, men supply the sperm, it’s just a genetic lottery that made you a man and not a woman, and think of your mother who had to bear you!

But even if you don’t care at all about the women bearing the children, you should care about live human babies that are going to be born regardless of whether their mothers get adequate prenatal care. And really, really bad things happen to babies whose mothers don’t get adequate prenatal care. 

At the point when you purchase insurance, the individual customer would like only to insure for things that are possible. Everyone at the point of purchase knows whether they are male and thus naturally and absolutely immune to the risk of pregnancy. So why can't they get a price based on what they need to insure? The argument at the link is coherent only if you concede that we are no longer talking about insurance. We're talking about taxation to pay for a welfare benefit. 

If we weren't so deeply embroiled in Obamacare, it might be interesting to talk about whether the government should subsidize all maternity care. To do so would nudge women away from abortion. Perhaps the government could use the opportunity to gather information about the quality of the parenting that is likely to ensue and to take stronger actions to protect the "long-term prosperity of the U.S."

Remember, women's bodies are the portals through which all future generations of humanity must enter the scene. Old-school feminism took umbrage at thinking about women as containers of babies, but today's feminists are more like old-fashioned wives, and the message is: Pay the bills!

"This is not what bankruptcy is about.... What’s next? Are they going to start going after food stamps?"

Argues a lawyer for a woman who filed for bankruptcy with $23,000 in debt, whose landlord — not among the creditors — stepped forward with an offer to buy out her rent-stabilized lease for an amount equal to her debt. It's worth it to the landlord because, under NYC's rent stabilization law she pays only $703 a month for a place that would go for thousands in the current market. She's 79 and has lived there for 50 years.

The legal question, pending before the 2d Circuit Court of Appeals is whether the lease is an asset like a car that can be part of the bankruptcy estate or whether it's like a welfare benefit (which would be exempt).

The widow’s lawyers argue that a rent-stabilized lease is a public assistance benefit, just like Social Security or disability payments, and should be exempt from the bankruptcy estate. Treating it like an asset, the lawyers said in court documents, undermines the intent of rent-stabilization laws in New York designed to protect tenants deemed in need of assistance with housing....

“It’s an unfair money-grab,” said David B. Shaev, the New York state chairman of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys. “To remove this foundation, this safety net, it’s unconscionable.”

You have to read pretty far into the linked NYT article to see that the landlord in this case is not trying to throw the woman out. His offer allows her to stay for the rest of her life. He does, however, want to block her 50-year-old son (who lives with her) from having "succession rights" to the place. Nevertheless, the article ends with a quote from the old woman:

“I’m afraid to find a white paper on my door,” she said with her head down, tearing up as she tugged at the edges of her plastic-covered chair.

Any tears for the young people who are trying to live in NYC, looking for apartments and stuck entering a housing market skewed by the 2.2 million people in rent-stabilized places? No, because Mary Veronica Santiago is a specific person, crying here for you, and you're not supposed to notice that her real concern is for a middle-aged man who'd like to live out his years in one of the cheap apartments that make other apartments so insanely expensive in NYC. And no one cries for the creditors, owed $23,000. They're just credit card companies.

It’s an unfair money-grab... it’s unconscionable....

Why is a benefit that comes at the expense of a private landlord equated with "a public assistance benefit, just like Social Security or disability payments"? I know welfare benefits are paid for out of money that comes, via taxation, from private citizens, but that is pooled money, collected according to whatever tax policies the legislatures have seen fit to adopt. Government may create valuable rights for tenants under rent-stabilization, but the value is extracted from one individual or entity — a particular landlord. Isn't it strange to call the landlord's loss of income a public assistance benefit?

ADDED: Reason's Matt Welch is also talking about this: Like me, he highlights the son's interest. ("That's right — in New York City, you can put your rent-stabilized apartment in your will, and hand it off to the next generation of $703-a-month payers.")

"Youth gang riots in the Swedish capital Stockholm have entered fifth straight night."

"Hundreds of mostly immigrant teenagers tore through the suburbs, smashing windows and burning cars in the country’s worst outbreak of violence in years."

“The problem is not from the Swedish government or from the Swedish people,” [said Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist]. “The last 20 years or so, we have seen so many immigrants coming to Sweden that really don’t like Sweden. They do not want to integrate, they do not want to live in [Swedish] society: Working, paying taxes and so on.”

“The people come here now because they know that Sweden will give them money for nothing. They don’t have to work, they don’t have to pay taxes – they can just stay here and get a lot of money. That is really a problem,” Carlqvist added.

“The police could do so much, [instead] they have told the public that they mean to do as little as possible. But they could go there and use water cannons, they could not let people out onto the streets at night. There are so many things they could do within the law – but they don’t do it,” she said.

The police won't protect the people who work and have their money redistributed to people who don't work and don't even like Sweden. It's the taxpayers who should be protesting, but they're humbly cowering hoping for police protection, and they can't even get that.

"We can’t democratize good food without placing tangible value on the work done in the home."

Says Kristin Wartman (via Instapundit), op-edding in the NYT about how the government ought to give people a financial incentive to cook at home. I haven't read it yet, but I'm going to bet that encouraging the single-earner family is not the idea — even though the loss of the 2-parent-single-earner household is probably a big reason for our reliance on the convenience foods that are making us fat.

Reading now:

In the 1960s and ’70s, when American feminists were fighting to get women out of the house and into the workplace, there was another feminist arguing for something else. Selma James, a labor organizer from Brooklyn, pushed the idea of wages for housework. Ms. James, who worked in a factory as a young woman and later became a housewife and a mother, argued that household work was essential to the American economy and wondered why women weren’t being paid for it. As Ms. James and a colleague wrote in 1972, “Where women are concerned their labor appears to be a personal service outside of capital.”

Oh! Here we go! The government is the new husband. It's the track we've been on all these years and the consummation is nigh.

Since women first began to enter the work force, families have increasingly relied on processed foods and inexpensive restaurant meals....

Women going out to work was the problem. But we can't go back to old-fashioned husband-and-wife division of labor. We must do something new, moving into a closer and closer embrace with the government.

It’s nearly impossible for a single parent or even two parents working full time to cook every meal from scratch, planning it beforehand and cleaning it up afterward. This is why many working parents of means employ housekeepers. But if we put this work on women of lower socioeconomic status (as is almost always the case), what about their children? Who cooks and cleans up for them?

One way for lower income people to have amenities similar to what rich people have is to have one partner stay home. To do this, you need to do the math and keep a budget. Part of the home-based work is economizing. It costs money to go to work, including all the extra spending on convenience foods. But people have forgotten how to run a family as a single economic unit. Both must work — it will be insisted. Both will work, incur excessive expenses because no one is at home, and they will pay these expenses with after-tax earnings.

Stay-at-home parents should qualify for a new government program while they are raising young children — one that provides money for good food, as well as education on cooking, meal planning and shopping — so that one parent in a two-parent household, or a single parent, can afford to be home with the children and provide wholesome, healthy meals.

These payments could be financed by taxing harmful foods, like sugary beverages, highly caloric, processed snack foods and nutritionally poor options at fast food and other restaurants. 

See? The money for all of this will be created by targeting those who pick the wrong option. By the way, how do you make sure the stay-at-home parent actually does cook and does produce "wholesome, healthy meals"? And isn't this the return of the welfare mother?

Now, I think at some point we will have a problem with women not producing enough offspring to maintain the population, and we might need to provide full support for the women who want this form of work. But who should "qualify for a new government program"? When/if that happens, I predict the people will want the participants in the program to be held to high standards and subjected to surveillance to insure that the rules are followed.

Wartman imagines a program that will be supported by the taxpayers because the money comes only from "a tax on harmful food products." She likes the symmetry of the positive and the negative reinforcement. She inhabits a policy wonk dream world that has so little to do with the ways of the human being that I'd like to think she's doing one of those "Modest Proposal" satires. But she's not. She's one of these people who are infatuated with government and have no realistic idea of what an awful husband the government really is.

***

This is one of those posts where I wrote one more sentence. Then I contemplated my writing, decided restraint was appropriate, and deleted it. I leave it to you to write a kicker sentence containing the word "fuck."

"An odd coalition of advocates for the needy, local retailers and big corporations..."

"... is opposing a fast-moving bill limiting junk food for food stamp recipients."

The proposal's lead sponsor, former potato chip salesman and state Rep. Dean Kaufert (R-Neenah), wants to require [Wisconsin] FoodShare recipients to use their taxpayer-funded benefits to buy more nutritious food. Kaufert said his bill makes sense as a response to the stories he hears from retail clerks and others about FoodShare benefits being used for large junk food purchases.

Stories he hears...

"It's wildly popular," Kaufert said of the bill. "It's one of those street or sidewalk issues where everyone has a story (about FoodShare problems)."

How about if we make all laws through this street-and-sidewalk approach? Junk food. Junk law. Junk everything!

Gov. Patrick's administration won't release details about Tamerlan Tsarnaev's welfare benefits.

Reason given: privacy.

Rush Limbaugh, yesterday:

Tamerlan and his bride and their three-year-old daughter all have been on welfare as recently as last year.  Isn't that wonderful?  I was wondering where they got the money to buy all this stuff.  The whole family's on welfare.  So we have another great example of your tax dollars at work. Your tax dollars helped to pay for the explosives, as well as Tamerlan's at least two trips back to Dagestan, his late-model Mercedes, his $900 shoes... How could welfare pay that much money?  How can welfare pay for all this?  Okay, let's say welfare didn't pay for all of it.  If they're able to get this other stuff, what are they doing on welfare in the first place, is the question?

"In the past, people never asked for help unless they needed it."

"My grandmother was offered a pension and she was offended. She did not need it. But now people do not have that mentality. They think of these benefits as their rights. The rights have just expanded and expanded. And it has brought us a good quality of life. But now we need to go back to the rights and the duties. We all have to contribute."

Denmark reconsiders the welfare state. 

"I don’t endorse the argument of the philosopher John Rawls that no one is entitled to a high income because..."

"... even characteristics that we think internal rather than external to a person, like IQ and leadership skills and athletic skills and energy and good health, are ultimately the product of luck. Therefore, Rawls argued, no one should be allowed to keep more of his earnings than necessary to 'incentivize' him to exert himself in a way that will maximize the social product."

So says Richard Posner. His objection is:

That treats people like the cells of an animal’s body, or the ants in an ant heap. Rather my point is that, to the extent reducing income inequality increases overall social welfare, there is a case for programs, financed by the well to do, that increase overall welfare by more than the cost of the programs. There is no reason to think that the cost would impose a crushing burden on the well to do, a result that would be objectionable quite apart from the costs in diminished incentives, and related costs such as tax avoidance and emigration.

Chew on that. I was distracted by "ant heap." Who says "ant heap" rather than "ant hill"?  I'm more the literary type than the economic. But speaking of departmentalization of each of us having our various skills and predilections, whether inborn or cultivated, my searching for the answer to my heap/hill question brought me quickly to this Robert Frost poem, "Departmental":

An ant on the tablecloth
Ran into a dormant moth
Of many times his size.
He showed not the least surprise.
His business wasn't with such.
He gave it scarcely a touch,
And was off on his duty run.
Yet if he encountered one
Of the hive's enquiry squad
Whose work is to find out God
And the nature of time and space,
He would put him onto the case.
Ants are a curious race;
One crossing with hurried tread
The body of one of their dead
Isn't given a moment's arrest-
Seems not even impressed.
But he no doubt reports to any
With whom he crosses antennae,
And they no doubt report
To the higher-up at court.
Then word goes forth in Formic:
"Death's come to Jerry McCormic,
Our selfless forager Jerry.
Will the special Janizary
Whose office it is to bury
The dead of the commissary
Go bring him home to his people.
Lay him in state on a sepal.
Wrap him for shroud in a petal.
Embalm him with ichor of nettle.
This is the word of your Queen."
And presently on the scene
Appears a solemn mortician;
And taking formal position,
With feelers calmly atwiddle,
Seizes the dead by the middle,
And heaving him high in air,
Carries him out of there.
No one stands round to stare.
It is nobody else's affair
It couldn't be called ungentle
But how thoroughly departmental

Put that in your Rawlsian/Posnerian analysis.