Saturday, October 19, 2013

Matt Kibbe's Brilliant Tweet

Matt Kibbe, the President and CEO of Freedomworks posted this unintentionally hysterical tweet.

why the government shutdown and the debt ceiling crisis were brilliant Republican strategy shar.es/EO7lQ via ShareThis

The blog post by moderate libertarian economist Tyler Cowen. The blog post was written in jest. Cowen credits the post to his evil twin brother Tyrone.Kibbe's justification for turning the Republican Party into the Black Knight from The Holy Grail is a comedy post.

Cowen's gives Republicans more credit, in their strategic thinking, than they deserve. Cowen does make a good point about the exchanges.

Or the New Year’s resolution that after you have been billed three times for the same policy, you vow to pay for only one of them and live with the bad credit rating until it gets straightened out. How about extreme adverse selection into the exchanges, resulting in 50-100% premium hikes in the first year of operations? (The lower premia are now, the better! Bread, peace, land! Ach du grüne Neune!) That’s what will get further traction for the Tea Party on Obamacare, not a bunch of bad reviews on opening day, as if the policy were no more than a mid-tier Jennifer Aniston movie (I can no longer refer to Sandra Bullock in this context), to be swatted down by mild tut-tuts of disapproval and inconvenience.

It has been a neoliberal dream to increase health insurance profits and cut entitlements. President Barack Obama has mandated millions of Americans into private health insurance and has been trying to cut Medicare. It will be interesting to see what kind of cost controls are placed on health insurance premiums. The insurance industry will lobby to water down cost controls.

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