Let's Pretend

So here we are, it's December 13, and there's been nothing even remotely like the number of complete transactions required to make ObamaCare work properly for the insurers in terms of creating balanced risk pools or even enough completed transactions to recover from the millions who have lost their health insurance. The latest banana republic decree from La Casa Blanca by el presidente and his henchcreatures is that insurers should deem that people who have completed some minimum amount of registration on the website to have actually paid their premiums.

Sort of the way the law was deemed passed instead of actually, you know, voting on the thing.

In a nutshell, if you are, say, Aetna, you have to pretend that Jim Schwartz in Topeka has paid his first premiums not because he actually did, but because somewhere in the system someone created the vestiges of an account for Jim Schwartz. Reality has been swept away at one more layer, this time at the private sector. As I see it, the stratification is something like this.

1. Government borrowing. In reality, we don't have enough tax receipts to cover all of our "compassion." Let's pretend that handing out cash to people with no requirements on their part save need is an investment and we'll get that money back in the future somehow.
2. Government printing. In reality, there's not enough idiots in the world with dollar bills falling out of their pockets to lend us the money we need for our "compassion," so we'll just print what we need. Some day in the future, we'll sell this debt on the open market because at that point, the number of idiots with cash will be much, much larger.
3. Fake payments to private companies. In reality, we can't tell who has signed up for insurance and who hasn't, who can afford their premiums and who can't, but we have an obsessive need to show our "compassion," so we're going to pretend that the payments have been made and everyone can get the healthcare we think they should.

#3 has just been reached with the latest set of fixes to ObamaCare. The next logical step will be for the government to force banks to accept pretend deposits from the insurers so they can make payroll.

Playing "Let's Pretend" is fun.

It's real if we say it is.