The Big Story This Week? WTI Nears The $40 Mark -- November 12, 2015

Jobs: Initial claims for state unemployment benefits were unchanged at a seasonally adjusted 276,000 for the week ended Nov. 7, the Labor Department said on Thursday. The prior week's claims were unrevised.

The four-week moving average of claims, considered a better measure of labor market trends as it strips out week-to-week volatility, rose 5,000 to 267,750 last week, still close to a 42-year low.

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The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Updates

November 16, 2015: The New York Times is reporting what we've talked about for months (years?) -- high deductibles make health insurance all but useless --

Obama administration officials, urging people to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, have trumpeted the low premiums available on the law’s new marketplaces.

In many states, more than half the plans offered for sale through HealthCare.gov, the federal online marketplace, have a deductible of $3,000 or more, a New York Times review has found.

Those deductibles are causing concern among Democrats — and some Republican detractors of the health law, who once pushed high-deductible health plans in the belief that consumers would be more cost-conscious if they had more of a financial stake or skin in the game.

This is what happens when people don't pay attention.... "causing concern among Democrats -- and some Republican detractors of the health law ..." My hunch is that most Americans confronted with these high deductibles are not making this a political issue -- it is simply something ruining their lives.

Original Post

Headline from today's Fiscal Times: millions Face Premium and Deductible Sticker Shock under Obamacare.

Millions of Americans who recently began shopping for new health insurance coverage under Obamacare may be suffering from sticker shock.

Increases in 2016 premiums for health insurance coverage -- ranging from basic to top-flight policies -- will be in the double digits and easily eclipse premium hikes recorded between 2014 and 2015, according to a new analysis from consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

The median cost of the Bronze plans, one of the most popular offerings because of its relatively low premiums, will rise by 13 percent in 2016, compared to the 7 percent increase in this year’s premium. As for the high-end health insurance coverage for wealthier consumers, Gold’s median premium rate will jump 15 percent compared to 8 percent last year while Platinum’s rate will rise by 12 percent, compared to 10 percent this year.

For the least expensive bronze plans, the average deductible for individuals is $5,731—and 11 percent increase.

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Notes for the Granddaughters

I hope you get the chance some day to read Edmund Wilson, either his biography or some of his works. If you read his biography you will be drawn to read some of what he wrote. I am nearing the end of reading his favorite book he wrote, The Memoirs of Hecate County. I can only read a few pages at a time. I can't imagine (m)any people enjoying this book today; even when it was published in 1946 (or thereabouts) it was a huge commercial failure.

Edmund Wilson was in the very center of American literature in the first half of the 20th century. He personally met most American authors alive at that time.

He was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway, born 1899; and F. Scott Fitzergerald, born 1896. Wilson was born in 1895. My grandmother, Reka Flessner, was born the same year as Hemingway.

Wilson writes very, very well about prohibition, the repeal of prohibition,  and the changing reading habits of Americans as the movie industry begins to take hold. 

In Memoirs of Hecate County, Wilson recalls some of the personalities he was most intimate from the late 1920s to the late 1930s. There is no plot, but the writing is of the "old" style when describing the setting and describing personalities was most important. His ability to describe people was uncanny.

Near the end of the book he is describing a woman brought to a small party. It is not quite clear why she is there but she was most likely part of the literary circle to which Wilson and his publishers belonged. Wilson writes two or three pages of her monologue, likely enhanced by her use of Benzedrine. Wilson writes: "As I looked at her, I saw that she herself was desexed in the way that the insane sometimes are, so that her feminine features were shrunk to an unfeminine pinchedness and dryness. She was holding us, I realize, by the spell that the lunatic is able to impose, sweeping one along with a furious force that has no natural origin or object."

And I thought of Hillary.