Freedom Line Blog

Today, the Obama administration announced $67 million in grants to 105 groups nationwide who will assist people trying to find health insurance on an ObamaCare exchange, according to Politico.

The groups are non-insurance organizations that will in turn employ so-called “navigators” to help insurance seekers fill out an ObamaCare application, obtain insurance, and yes, even register to vote.

Some of the groups receiving grants include Planned Parenthood affiliates and various community organizers and activists. Care to speculate which political party they’ll steer registrants to?

The likely pay isn’t bad either.

In a proposed regulation issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid two weeks ago, it is suggested that the groups employing navigators pay between $20 and $48 an hour. (Navigators are prohibited by law from being paid by insurance companies, so compensation is expected to come from grant recipients.)

You’ve got to hand it to liberals. Not only do they manage to find a way to pay themselves to grow an entitlement, they get to grow their political support too.

What’s that line about democracy lasting only until the people discover they can vote themselves the treasury…?

Today, I’m up with a column that identifies what ObamaCare’s employer mandate really means for small businesses.

Note to Members of Congress and HR consultants – it’s not what you think.

Most of the attention on this particular mandate has focused on the idea that employers can avoid the twin threats of costly insurance or hefty fines if they pare back full-time employees to part-time status.

By not employing 50 full-time employees a small business can avoid triggering the mandate, or so the thinking goes.

But the reality is that ObamaCare adds up the total amount of part-time hours worked to create “full-time equivalent” (FTE) employees that count toward the 50 employee total. Meet or exceed the threshold, and say hello to huge compliance costs.

This is why a proposed legislative fix won’t actually solve the underlying problem, which is capping the amount of hours a small business can pay out to 50 FTEs – whether they are full-time, part-time or some combination of both.

It’s time for Congress to take a closer look at how ObamaCare’s employer mandate works and repeal it.

With just eight weeks to go until ObamaCare’s October 1 enrollment, the Health and Human Services department is scrambling to meet the deadline.

Its first order of business: A log-in portal where users can create a personal account.

In a few clicks you can get a sense of the kind of information you’ll be sharing via your account: family size, personal income, health history, age, gender and employment status.

Yes, some level of government likely has access to most if not all of this information, but it is ObamaCare’s user account that will, for the first time, house all of it in one place.

It will then be the Federal Data Hub’s job to share this information with the applicable state-based insurance exchange, and check your entries against another federal database to ensure accuracy.

As I’ve written before, the two federal databases will attract attention from hackers and identity thieves.

The ObamaCare user account creates a third inviting target.

Enjoy your privacy, while it lasts.

In a last ditch effort to shield Members of Congress and their staff members from having to pay the same outrageous premiums set to hit everyday Americans under ObamaCare, President Obama personally intervened to ensure that the government would instead pay the bill.

The deal preserves a 75 percent contribution by the federal government for Congress and its staff toward the price of the new, costlier health insurance premiums available under ObamaCare, according to Politico.

The decision flies in the face of an amendment attached to ObamaCare that requires Congress and staff to use the same health insurance exchanges as everyone else with the same rules. Until today, that meant that a person’s salary – from a Senator’s to an entry-level staff member’s – would determine whether a person qualifies for a federal subsidy and if so for how much.

But now we see that, once again, Congress and this President are choosing to operate by a different set of rules than the ones they enforce on everyone else.

ObamaCare will kill the Teamsters union, and Jimmy Hoffa’s son is an accomplice.

Now, Hoffa’s heir is in full damage-control mode.

In an open letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), James P. Hoffa – son of the famous Teamsters boss and the union’s current General President – blasts the Obama White House for “shatter[ing] not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy[ing] the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”

Hoffa is upset that after lending his union’s money and muscle to get ObamaCare passed, the Obama administration is refusing to carve out an exception for union-run health insurance providers. Absent the special treatment, union-run health insurance will become too expensive to offer. Without an attractive health insurance plan to offer its members, the Teamsters and every other union in their situation will lose one of the biggest incentives they have for retaining members.

Having exhausted their pleas to the White House for special treatment, Hoffa and company are turning their unfriendly fire on congressional Democrats. “Time is running out: Congress wrote this law; we voted for you. We have a problem, you need to fix it. The unintended consequences of [ObamaCare] are severe.”

As I explained in a recent column, the problem for Hoffa and his union brethren is that they failed to get the kind of concrete assurances from the Obama administration that are standard operating procedure when it comes to negotiating with private businesses.

That failure will cost them dearly.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is using a populist line of attack to show how delaying ObamaCare’s employer mandate will harm individuals and families that don’t get an exemption, according to Politico.

“If you’re a software company making billions in profits, you’re exempt from Obamacare next year,” he said. “But if you’re a 28-year-old struggling to pay off your student loans, you’re not.”

“If you’re a big bank or financial company, you don’t have to comply with Obamcare,” Boehner added. “But if you’re a single parent trying to make ends meet, there’s no exemption for you.”

To level the playing field, Boehner is scheduling back-to-back floor votes in the House next week to delay both the employer and the individual mandate. The move would pose a dilemma for Democrats looking to support President Barack Obama’s policy, but unable to justify exempting businesses but not families and individuals too.

This strikes me as a good strategy. It’s past time for Democrats to own ObamaCare and all its flaws.

Thanks to a little-noticed Republican amendment, ObamaCare puts Members of Congress and their staffers under the same insurance rate-shock being anticipated by the private sector.

Reporting in Politico gives a useful summary:

“Currently, aides and lawmakers receive their health care under the generous Federal Employee Health Benefits Program. The government subsidizes upward of 75 percent of the premiums for the health insurance plans. In 2014, most Capitol Hill aides and lawmakers are expected to be put onto those exchanges, and there has been no guidance whether the government will subsidize those premiums. This is expected to cause a steep spike in health insurance costs.”

The source of the heartburn is the Grassley Amendment. Added to ObamaCare in 2010 during Senate debate, the amendment requires aides and lawmakers to use insurance plans that are either “created” by the law or “offered through an exchange.”

Partisans on both sides agree that the text and the intent of the amendment ensure that Congress and its employees will be subject to the same regulatory pain ObamaCare imposes on everyone else.

So, unless the feds carve out an exemption for Congress, there could be a sudden burst of retirements as staff members try to avoid paying higher premiums on lower incomes than they could get in the private sector.

If that happens, the coming brain drain in Congress will negatively impact the quality of work it produces. But unlike every other employer in America, the national legislature has only itself to blame.

Despite initial reports that California’s ObamaCare health insurance exchange will offer plans that are cheaper than currently available, a closer look at the data shows that the state specializing in concocting fake budgets also lied about the supposed cost savings.

Initially, Covered California, the state’s ObamaCare-ready exchange, announced that insurance rates would drop up to “29 percent below the 2013 average,” prompting many of the health law’s defenders to claim victory over critics who estimate double-digit increases.

But the bloom fell off the rose fast. In order to make the new prices look as favorable as possible, Covered California didn’t compare current individual insurance rates to future individual rates. Instead, it compared current small business rates to future individual rates, and reported the “savings” of 29 percent.

Many conservative analysts caught the switch, and deconstructed the ploy. Avik Roy compared current individual rates in California to future individual rates under ObamaCare and surprise, surprise, confirmed that rates will increase between 64 – 146 percent.

Of course, much of the damage from the false information has already been done. I was in a meeting hours after the rates were announced and was greeted by a liberal friend smiling and saying something along the lines of, “Well, how about that; it looks like ObamaCare is better than your side thought all along. Have you seen the California numbers yet?”

At the time I’d only heard the summaries, none of which drew attention to the obvious apples-and-oranges comparison by Covered California. A week later, none of the liberal cheerleaders for the California miracle are going out of their way to correct the record.

At least now we know the truth. Too bad the left and their friends in the media don’t seem to be interested.

The Hill reports that the plot is thickening as key members of Congress ask 15 insurance companies to turn over any records related to potentially illegal fundraising to support ObamaCare by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

The request went to industry giants Aetna, Blue Shield of California, Cigna, Coventry Health Care, H&R Block, HCSC Group, Highmark, Humana, Independence Blue Cross, Kaiser Permanente, United Healthcare, WellPoint, America’s Health Insurance Plans, BlueCross BlueShield Association, and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield.

The controversy first surfaced when the Washington Post confirmed that HHS Secretary Sebelius is personally contacting private members of the health care industry – including insurance providers – to ask that they donate six- to seven-figure sums to Enroll America, a pro-ObamaCare non-profit advocacy group running a national summer and fall ad campaign to promote enrollment in state-based insurance exchanges.

H&R Block, one of the companies contacted by both Sebelius and Congress, has already committed to donating $500,000 to fund Enroll America’s efforts, according to the New York Times.

With its records request, you can bet that Congress wants to know what exactly was said/indicated/promised in the Sebelius-H&R Block conversation, as well as any other communications between top health insurance companies and their chief regulator.

If those requests aren’t honored voluntarily, expect to see subpoenas follow very quickly.

How big is a “gap” in coverage when it affects 840,000 people?

The Los Angeles Times says that California is racing to pass a “bridge” program into law that helps individuals and families likely to be caught between qualifying for Medi-Cal (the state’s version of Medicaid), and ObamaCare’s new state-based health insurance exchange.

In California, residents earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level, or about $15,000 a year, will be eligible for Medi-Cal next year. Individuals earning up to 400% of the federal poverty level, or about $46,000, will be eligible for subsidies through the exchange, known as Covered California.

The Covered California board approved a plan in March to help patients expected to jump between the two. The “bridge plan” would enable patients now on Medi-Cal managed care whose incomes rise to continue to stay with their health plan once they move to the exchange.

The program, which still needs federal approval and state legislation to take effect, could serve as many as 840,000 people next year. The plan should streamline the process, keep out-of-pocket premiums low and make it easier for people to keep their providers, said David Panush, external affairs director with Covered California. “It is better for their quality of care, it is better for continuity of care,” he said.

While it’s refreshing to see California taking steps to protect people from being penalized for working more, what the article doesn’t mention is how related government policies are putting the squeeze on the state’s working poor.

California’s anti-business climate – coupled with ObamaCare’s perverse incentive structure that makes it more affordable for businesses to cut hours rather than pay hefty premium increases for employee’s health insurance – are underreported tax increases on the working poor.

By diminishing the number and quality of jobs available to people at the bottom of the employment ladder, certain public policies make it exceedingly difficult for people to work their up into a better standard of living.

Because of this, one way to think of the constant tinkering and enlargement of public benefits is as a way to compensate the working poor for taking away their access to an abundance of jobs where they can get the experience and skills needed to move upward an onward.

Under the current regime, a “bridge” program between Medi-Cal and Covered California is the least state policymakers can do. Still, those entangled in the state’s safety net deserve better.

Sally Pipes identifies an “escape hatch” for small businesses trying to avoid the costly employer mandates threatening employers with costly insurance premiums or fines:

A RAND analysis found that a fifth of firms with 50-200 workers had self-insured by 2010, the year Obamacare became law — up from 14 percent of such companies in 2006.

A survey by Munich Health North America found that 82 percent of health insurance executives report seeing growing interest in self-funded coverage among employers. A California-based benefits consulting firm that helps companies self-insure told Kaiser Health News that its business has doubled in the past six months. And Cigna says that it saw self-coverage for small businesses grow by a fifth last year.

Companies with younger, healthier workforces are leading the way. After all, with their population of low-risk employees, they have the most to gain. And that’s bad news for Obamacare’s exchanges.

The problem for ObamaCare is that the only way health insurance premiums will be (theoretically) affordable is if legions of young, healthy people join the exchanges’ insurance pools. That’s because they are needed to pay into the system so that older and sicker people can draw down the benefits.

But if small businesses opt to self-insure – especially if they are newer businesses more likely to employ younger and healthier workers – then that will drain the ObamaCare pools of the very people who will make them (barely) affordable.

With this in mind, don’t be surprised to see an IRS or HHS rule come down that prohibits self-insurance to prop up ObamaCare’s exchange pools.

As with the so-called “family glitch,” it’s a ploy the Obama administration will be ready to use if its slapdash law continues to produce embarrassing unintended consequences.

And the hits just keep on coming.

After news broke that the leadership in both the House and Senate were conspiring to exempt themselves from ObamaCare’s costly insurance exchanges, we’re told that the problem isn’t Congress shirking responsibility for a law it passed.

It’s worse.

The real issue, according to reporting by health policy expert Ezra Klein, is that Congress is too stupid to write a law clear enough to know what it does.

Per Klein:

“Here’s how it happened: Back during the Affordable Care Act negotiations, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) proposed an amendment forcing all members of Congress and all of their staffs to enter the exchanges. The purpose of the amendment was to embarrass the Democrats. But in a bit of jujitsu of which they were inordinately proud, Democrats instead embraced the amendment and added it to the law.
…
“So Grassley’s amendment means that the largest employer in the country is required to put some of its employees — the ones working for Congress — on the exchanges. But the exchanges don’t have any procedures for handling premium contributions for large employers.

“That’s where the problem comes in. This was an offhand amendment that was supposed to be rejected. It’s not clear that the federal government has the authority to pay for congressional staffers on the exchanges, the way it pays for them now in the federal benefits program. That could lead to a lot of staffers quitting Congress because they can’t afford to shoulder 100 percent of their premiums.”

Got that?

Rather than think through how an amendment would alter the structure of a law that, as one of its architects put it recently, “is probably the most complex piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress,” Democrats opted to play games. No wonder the lead author of the law sees “a huge train wreck coming down.”

Whether it’s a fine that’s really a tax, a “family glitch,” or now an ambiguous gap in coverage, ObamaCare’s so-called drafting errors are making it one of the worst written laws ever.

Fox News is reporting that the implementation of one of the two state-based, federally-regulated health insurance exchanges is being delayed for an entire year (2015 instead of 2014).

The decision applies to the exchange that will be created to let small businesses shop for affordable insurance policies, not the similar and more well-known exchange for individuals and families looking for insurance.

While it would be easy to blame poor planning and bad execution on the part of the federal government, another explanation seems just as likely.

As originally written, ObamaCare contained a so-called “public option” that would have been offered by the federal government on the exchange as competition with private alternatives.  Conservatives opposed the public option because it threatened to undercut private competitors with an artificially low price since the government, unlike a private business, doesn’t have to make a profit.

After a few years of running private businesses out of the market with artificially low prices, conservatives reasoned, the public option would become the only option as more and more consumers opted for a deal that would be too-good-to-be-true.  When that happened, government could claim the market failed, paving the way for a government-run, single-payer health system.

Of course, the public option was stripped out of the final version of ObamaCare.  But the intent to move America toward government-run health care did not.  Since there’s no requirement under the law for small businesses to provide health insurance, many may now stop bothering if the small business exchange is delayed.  That puts their employees on the individual and family exchange, which as estimates are showing, will cost people much more than originally advertised, even including the government subsidy.

With private insurance unable to deliver a product that covers the heightened floor created in ObamaCare that is also affordable for the people required to buy it thanks to the individual mandate, don’t be surprised if activists and policymakers start clamoring for government to declare a market failure and nationalize the system.

Such a scenario may sound far-fetched, but can anyone seriously say that with the Obama Administration in charge that it’s not at least possible?

The Indianapolis Star reports that Indiana Republican Governor Mike Pence, a possible 2016 presidential candidate, cleared an important hurdle today when the state’s House Public Health Committee approved a bill to expand Medicaid eligibility without relying on ObamaCare’s open-ended spending incentives.

Pence’s plan would increase Indiana’s Medicaid enrollment by an estimated 400,000, but within the state’s Healthy Indiana initiative begun in 2007.  As a health savings account, Healthy Indiana allots a certain amount of money to qualifying Hoosiers who then shop for doctors and treatment options within their budget.  In effect, it transfers the decision making process for health care away from government bureaucrats to private citizens.  By capping the amount, Healthy Indiana also gives state budget writers more certainty about the cost of Medicaid expansion in future years.

Contrast this with the unlimited spending commitment envisioned by the Medicaid expansion system under ObamaCare, and conservatives will see why Pence’s proposal should be watched closely.  Under ObamaCare, states would pay no cost for expanding their eligibility pool up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line.  But starting in 2017, those that expanded enrollment would pay for 10 percent of the increase.  Though seemingly a small percentage, the costs will run into the billions, with even more likely if the federal government decides to reduce its 90 percent subsidy, as President Barack Obama has already hinted at doing.

The future of health insurance reform looks like it will include some mix of government-regulated exchanges, subsidies, and cost controls.  The question dividing conservatives like Mike Pence and Paul Ryan on one hand from liberals like Obama on the other, is who gets to make the lion’s share of the decisions on how health insurance dollars are spent.  Conservatives value individual choice, while liberals favor centrally planned mandates.

Ironically, if the President wants ObamaCare to be fiscally sustainable, he’ll have to accept that the only way to do it is allowing conservatives like Pence and Ryan to inject into it as much personal freedom as possible.

Kudos to Sarah Kliff at Wonkblog for tracking down a draft copy of an ObamaCare application. It’s the one a person would use to get access to a state-based health insurance exchange, and the subsidies to buy coverage that go along with it.

At 21 pages and asking for lots of sensitive information, the document is likely to be much more cumbersome than most people bargained for. That’s one of the biggest hurdles facing implementation, according to Kliff:

The administration is caught in a bit of a bind here. On the one hand, Obamacare is tricky business. In order to figure out how much Americans will pay, the federal government needs to collect lots of information, everything from the size of the family to its income to whether any family members are Alaska Natives (which would make them eligible for additional services through the Indian Health Service). It’s hard to collect all that data in a way that isn’t a bit complex.

At the same time, the whole goal of the Affordable Care Act is to maximize health insurance enrollment. That puts a premium on making the applications simple and easy to use—not the kind of documents that you’d get half way through and give up on.

To find a space between the two of these, there are likely a lot of support services that will start springing up over the next few months. This could include traditional agents and brokers, whose whole line of business is understanding applications like this one.  The Affordable Care Act also envisions a group of navigators, financed by state exchanges, who will—as the name implies—help navigate the insurance system.

Meet the new middle men, the same as the old middle men.

True, cost-efficient health insurance reform would reduce reliance on “navigators” in order to eliminate the transactions costs they generate. If a product is so hard to buy that it requires help to do so, you can bet that the cost of said product will go up. And up, up, up…

The bright side? At least there will be thousands of health insurance broker jobs that the Obama Administration can claim credit for creating or saving.

According to America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), ObamaCare’s health insurance tax needs to be repealed as soon as possible:

• Starting next year the ACA imposes a new $100 billion tax on health insurance.  The tax will start at $8 billion in 2014, increasing to $14.3 billion in 2018, and will continue to increase each year.

• The health insurance tax is larger than the device tax and the prescription drug tax combined.

• The health insurance tax will increase costs for individuals and families purchasing coverage on their own, small businesses, seniors and people with disabilities enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan, and state Medicaid managed care plans.

• The health insurance tax is far greater than the minimum penalty for those who choose not to buy health insurance – further incentivizing young, healthy people to forgo purchasing insurance until they need medical care.

The health insurance tax is just one of twenty-one new taxes imposed by ObamaCare on the health industry and its consumers.  Thankfully, there is already bipartisan legislation filed in the House of Representatives to repeal this monstrosity, but unless there is a major breakthrough to convince liberals how bad ObamaCare will hamper health care, it looks unlikely to become law.

Unless the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) decides to once again bump back the deadline that passed yesterday, as of right now 24 states have told the Obama Administration they will not create a state-based health insurance exchange.

Under the terms of ObamaCare, this means that HHS will now take over the process in these states, adding hundreds of millions in new costs to federal taxpayers.  Moreover, the short time horizon between now and October when the plans must be available on the exchanges (they’ll be effective next January), means that there is likely to be an enormous push to hire more HHS bureaucrats to get the job done.

It’s been said that when it comes to something being fast, accurate, and cheap, you can have any two but not all three.  If history is any guide, the feds will go oh-for-three.

H/T: Washington Times

The Wall Street Journal shows us that the price of “affordable” health care is a reduced standard of living:

The Affordable Care Act requires large employers to offer a minimum level of health insurance to employees who work 30 hours a week or more starting in 2014, or face a penalty. The mandate is a particular challenge for colleges and universities, which increasingly rely on adjuncts to help keep costs down as states have scaled back funding for higher education.

A handful of schools, including Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania and Youngstown State University in Ohio, have curbed the number of classes that adjuncts can teach in the current spring semester to limit the schools’ exposure to the health-insurance requirement.

The scaled back hours and pay for adjunct professors is part of a larger trend in a wide variety of industries.  Faced with lower thresholds that require new benefits, employers from universities to fast food restaurants face three options: pay-up, pay-out, or tap-out.  In other words, they can increase their health care spending, be fined for not increasing such spending, or cap the hours and pay of otherwise eligible workers to avoid the spending and the fines.

Unfortunately for workers, capping hours and pay reduces their standard of living.  But don’t worry.  In 2014, Obamacare mandates that every state will have a fully functioning health insurance exchange where newly impoverished workers can get “affordable” health care – some even with government (i.e. taxpayer) subsidies – so it’s a safe bet that all will be well when the feds are in charge of at least 25 separate state programs.  Right…

God bless residents of the Pacific Northwest for casting rightful suspicion on ObamaCare’s state-based, federally-directed, health insurance exchanges:

Focus groups in Oregon expressed emotions about buying coverage that included “skepticism” and “frustration,” and some individuals and small businesses used “black hole” and other less-kind terms to refer to insurance, brand design firm Sandstrom Partners told the Oregon Health Insurance Exchange in a presentation made available by the exchange.

The word exchange “raises some suspicions of loopholes and fine print” and “implies current coverage may needed to be traded for something else,” wrote communications company GMMB in a presentation to the Washington State Health Benefit Exchange. Part of the problem, GMMB said, was that the word was “perceived as a verb and unfamiliar as a noun” and reminded people of the New York Stock Exchange or military exchange stores.

…

Washington state is leaning toward calling its program Washington HealthLink, as long as it doesn’t conflict with existing trademarks, and plans to use green and blue in its logo design because the colors are considered to be reassuring, said Michael Marchand, the state’s exchange director. The exchange’s board of directors will make the final decision on the name, he said.

Focus group participants had also been asked to consider HealthChoice but it “makes some wonder if Washington State is making the choice for them,” consultants and the exchange board concluded.

The Wall Street Journal article from which these excerpts are culled goes on to detail other stories of states trying to brand government-created “marketplaces” as something other than a first big step to government-run health care, but you get the point.

No matter what you call an ObamaCare exchange, it’s still an entry point for socialized medicine.

If the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare decision hasn’t made you so despondent as to write off the topic of health care altogether, then you owe yourself a stop by the American Enterprise Institute’s online magazine, The American, where Cliff Asness has managed the near-impossible: writing a comprehensive overview of the defects of the American system that is breezy, informative, and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny.

Asness has as his goal debunking four common myths about American health care:

1. Health care prices have soared in the recent past
2. The pre-ObamaCare system was ‘insurance’
3. Stopping insurance companies from charging based on pre-existing conditions is the one good part of ObamaCare
4. Healthcare costs are very high in the United States compared to socialist countries

Asness’ deconstruction of every point is thorough, illuminating, and crystal clear. In fact, it’s safe to say that — if you haven’t been introduced to these arguments before — you’ll never think about health care the same way again. Here’s one example, hailing from section two, on ‘insurance’:

Due primarily to the tax subsidy given to employer-provided healthcare (a bipartisan, so-far-untouchable disaster), catastrophic health insurance is not Americans’ norm. Rather, employers provide essentially all healthcare from basic health maintenance and symptom relief to the most expensive life-saving procedures, and they do it because the government massively subsidizes this approach.

This is odd. You don’t go to your car insurer to fill your car with gas or to your homeowner’s insurance company to change a light bulb. Why do you go to your health insurance company for everyday medical services? That is not insurance, it is tax-subsidized provision of all your healthcare needs, and it causes two of our system’s biggest problems. 1) Health coverage is not portable, as it’s employer-provided, and 2) consumers are insulated from the cost of basic healthcare because they don’t pay directly for services. Educated consumers spending their own money would be far better shoppers for healthcare. Also, I wish I wasn’t asked for a $5 co-pay after a doctor’s appointment. Ask me to pay at least $200 or nothing. Paying $5 for a prostate exam is demeaning to both parties.

The conservative/libertarian intelligentsia has plenty of deeply-schooled policy wonks and plenty of engaging writers. But very rarely to both skill sets belong to the same author. Cliff Asness is the rare exception. Read it and grow wise.