Agree Completely On Man-Camps -- April 11, 2016; Seeing Things That Aren't There -- Or Making Mountains Out Of Molehills

Updates

April 12, 2016: see stories below regarding ObamaCare. The Boston Globe, today, has an op-ed on this very issue, validating what I said below. 
 

Original Post

From The Williston Herald:

Nearly six years ago, as Williston strained to accommodate a flood of workers descending on the area in the hopes of finding work in the oil patch, city officials voted to allow crew camps as a solution to meet immediate needs. But, from the beginning, company-run housing was not meant to be permanent.

“I think that has gotten lost a little bit in the story,” said Ward Koeser, who served as Williston’s mayor for 20 years, and was in office when ordinances allowing man camps, followed by ordinances setting expiration dates for them, were enacted.

“I think we somehow forgot down the line that man camps were always temporary,” he said.

Gasoline demand, from John Kemp: is US gasoline consumption being overstated? Or making a mountain out of a molehill.

The EIA's weekly and monthly surveys both showed domestic gasoline consumption was subdued in January, most likely because of bad weather affecting large parts of the country at the beginning and end of the month.

But consumption reportedly rebounded to record seasonal rates in weekly surveys for February and March leading some analysts to question whether the EIA is under-estimating exports.

This is certainly possible. The EIA's estimating procedure has a backward-looking component so it can miss sudden changes in the rate of exports and only responds with a lag.

The question is how large these errors in estimating exports tend to be and how much of an error they impart to estimates of domestic consumption.

U.S. gasoline exports are very small in relation to domestic consumption so even relatively large errors in estimating exports have only a small impact on consumption estimates. 

In 2015, the country exported an average of 475,000 barrels per day (bpd) of finished gasoline and another 150,000 bpd of blending components compared with domestic consumption of nearly 9.2 million bpd.

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Others Will Follow

The Fiscal Times reports:

The Affordable Care Act suffered another jolt late last week with the news that UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest health insurer, was making good on its threat to pull out of Obamacare, beginning with its operations in Georgia and Arkansas.

UnitedHealth roiled the market last November when it revealed that it was considering exiting Obamacare after incurring hundreds of millions of dollars in losses related to ACA business. Then UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley confessed to investors meeting in New York in December that the company should have stayed out of the program a little longer to better gauge its profitability potential.

The company had cautiously tiptoed into the market in January 2015 after sitting out the first full year of Obamacare operations in 2014. “It was for us a bad decision,” Hemsley admitted to his investors. “In retrospect, we should have stayed out longer.”

So it wasn’t a huge surprise on Friday when UnitedHealth spokesperson Tyler Mason confirmed to The Washington Post that the company, indeed, was pulling out of Georgia and Arkansas, two relatively small states that proved to be highly unprofitable terrain for the company.

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Just How Bad Is The Trainwreck? Pretty Bad

Investor's Business Daily is reporting:

To little fanfare and virtually no media coverage, the Congressional Budget Office sharply downgraded its forecast for ObamaCare in its latest report, issued in late March. By just about every measure, things are looking worse than they did a year ago.

First, the CBO has cut enrollment goals for the ObamaCare exchanges. Its March 2015 report projected that enrollment would top out at 22 million. Now it puts the ceiling at 18 million. And given ObamaCare’s track record so far, even that’s optimistic.

Lower enrollment numbers should mean lower taxpayer costs, since fewer people will be getting taxpayer-subsidized insurance. But higher-than-expected insurance subsidies are soaking up much of those savings.

Last year, CBO projected that the average subsidy would be $4,040. Turns out, it was $4,240. CBO now thinks subsidies will average $4,550 next year instead of $4,250. That is likely a reflection of the fact that premiums leapt upward this year, and are likely to make another big jump for next year.

As a result, even though the CBO expects that 4 million fewer people will be getting insurance subsidies in 2024, the total cost of those subsidies paid out that year will stay exactly the same: $99 billion.

ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion is also turning out to be far more expensive than planned, forcing the CBO to hike its 10-year Medicaid cost projection by $146 billion. That’s largely the result of far more people signing up for Medicaid — 2 to 4 million more — than the CBO had previously expected.

In addition, far more workers will find themselves without employer-provided benefits than promised. In its initial report on ObamaCare in 2010, CBO said 3 million workers at most would lose their employer health benefits because of the law. Last year it claimed that 7 million will have lost workplace coverage in a decade. Now it says 9 million will likely be forced off employer plans.

And what about the uninsured? When Democrats shoved ObamaCare onto President Obama’s desk in 2010, the public was told that it would cut the number of uninsured by 32 million. That number has since dropped 25%.

By any measure ObamaCare is a debacle. Anyone still supporting ObamaCare is a) not paying attention; b) is a bit dull-witted; c) is making money off the scam; d) is a political demagogue; and/or e) is gaming the system.