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When Stewart Baker blogs on Volokh, I tend to skip it. I know what I’m going to get, and there is not much room for discussion or thought. But I’ve been amused at his recent posts about his Privies Awards for dubious achievements in privacy law. So I indulged, and clicked onto the survey.

The first question asks “Are you voting as a privacy professional?” If you select yes, it asks for your name, affiliation/employer, and email address. Only if you provide accurate information can you vote (providing false information no doubt violate the CFAA).

Huh, I thought? Why in the world is he asking that question. But then I looked at the “privacy policy” on the nomination page.

We’ll use the information provided by privacy professionals to verify that you are a privacy professional and to send you email about the results of the vote — and other issues, if we have the energy.  If we do manage to send you email, we’ll include an unsubscribe link.  Surveymonkey runs the voting site.  If you don’t like their privacy policies, take it up with them.

So it turns out there are two ways to vote:

1. The Privy Council. You can participate as a Privy Council member if you’re a privacy professional with expertise in the field. The Privy Council is roughly analogous to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Votes from Council members will be weighted more heavily in choosing the winners in each category. To qualify for the Privy Council, you’ll be asked to provide your name, title, and email address, and we may check back with you to verify that you qualify.

So how do you qualify? Simple, you are a privacy professional if as part of your job you provide advice about privacy and security issues to the public or to government, private, or nonprofit enterprises.

2. The People’s Choice. If you don’t qualify or don’t want to participate as part of the Privy Council, you are still free to vote on an anonymous basis. People’s Choice votes will determine the winner in each category in the event of a close vote in the Privy Council.

Is Baker trolling? He is asking “privacy professionals” to vote in his survey by disclosing their contact information? And he is trying to build up a mailing list of privacy professionals? Is this even a joke? He suggests he will use this list for “email about the results of the vote — and other issues, if we have the energy.”

This entire experiment must be some sort of parody that I’m not in on.

TPM reports:

The White House had been under fire for months over the widespread reports of canceled policies, but rather than assuage those concerns with the new exemption, it runs the risk of opening one of the law’s most important (and most unpopular) features to more political meddling.

Congressional Republicans have already used it as an excuse to call for a blanket delay of the individual mandate, and some of the law’s most ardent supporters acknowledge that the administration seems to have cracked open a door that could be difficult to close.

“I think by itself this is a not a huge problem. This group should be relatively small,” Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who helped craft Obamacare, told TPM. “But I think that the administration has to hold the line here. More widespread cracks in the mandate could start to cause enormous problems for insurers.”

…

Senior administration officials had estimated Thursday that the number of Americans whose policies had been canceled and were struggling to find a new affordable health plan was less than 500,000.

That number shouldn’t be enough to disrupt the market, wrote Tim Jost, a health law professor at Washington and Lee University who supports Obamacare, for Health Affairs. But the insurance companies themselves disagree. They issued a warning, without much elaboration, that the decision could be a big problem.

“This latest rule change could cause significant instability in the marketplace and lead to further confusion and disruption for consumers,” Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans said in a statement.

The potential problem is this: Insurance companies priced their catastrophic plans with the assumption that only people under 30 would purchase them. By opening that product to an older population, it puts them at a financial risk that they didn’t account for — which, if that ends up costing them more than they expected, could hurt the market broadly.

Sometimes I pine for the good ‘ol days when the only pandora’s box I wrote about was the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Such simpler times.

Can they now seek an exemption hardship? And wouldn’t this decrease the number of those who are already *enrolled*?

Think about it. The President last week decreed that people did not have to actually pay their premiums till next year. So we should assume that a lot of people have signed up for policies, but haven’t paid yet. What is to stop those people from now dropping coverage, and seeking exemption hardships? This would even further mess up the small number of those enrolled.

This question was prompted by this tweet.

@BrianFaughnan @instapundit @JoshMBlackman They are not signed up until they pay money. They have time to change their minds.

— Brad Orton (@BradANGSA) December 20, 2013

From Politico Magazine:

The Obamacare Rollout Will be Great

Slate writer Matt Yglesias: “I wanted to once again take the opportunity to lay down a marker and say once again that Obamacare implementation is going to be a huge political success.” And here: “…conservatives are certainly fooling themselves if they’re expecting a backlash driven by problems around implementation. … Snafus will be real enough, but broadly speaking, the rollout is going to be a huge success.” Slate.com, July 17

MSNBC host Ed Schultz: “If you go to this Web site, you will find out how easy it is to read, how easy it is to navigate all the information, all the basic questions, and all the direction you need to take to get involved, to get health care.” MSNBC, Sept. 30

President Barack Obama: “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. (Applause.) If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.” Chicago address, June 15, 2009

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: “[E]verybody will have lower rates, better quality care and better access.” Meet the Press, July 1, 2012

The roster of mistaken predictions about the Oct. 1 launch of HealthCare.gov, the federal website where Americans can shop for health care plans, would fill an error log that would make Kathleen Sebelius blush. Suffice it to say that the implementation of Obama’s signature health law was a universally acknowledged fiasco that has taken the president’s approval numbers to new lows. His credibility also took a major hit as insurance companies notified millions of Americans that their plans would be canceled to meet the health law’s requirements, forcing Obama to apologize on Thursday, Nov. 14: “There is no doubt that the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate. It was not because of my intention not to deliver on that commitment and that promise.”

As I noted last night, the Administration cut the taxes for 500,000 people (by their estimate, probably somewhere in the millions)  who had their insurance policies cancelled. How you ask? Well, we all know that there is no Obamacare mandate. There is just a tax on going uninsured. So, because Secretary Sebelius determined that Obamacare was a hardship, and made it too expensive to buy Obamacare, she waived the tax imposed on those who do not sign up for Obamacare. By pure executive fiat, perhaps millions of Americans got a a tax cut! Huzzah!

But why stop here?

And if President Obama can exempt people from taxes, he shouldn’t stop with just this one.

— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) December 20, 2013

They won’t stop here. This improvisational government will soon be nudged to give hardship exemptions to millions of others who cannot afford Obamacare, because of Obamacare.

Update: Politico offers six questions POTUS should be asked during a press conference. Man, when you lose Politico:

2) Why did you exempt so many people from the individual mandate after your administration fought all the way to the Supreme Court to protect it? And then why wait until Dec. 19 after families worried for months about losing their coverage?

In a surprise announcement late Thursday, the administration issued a ruling that people who had their health plans canceled would be exempt from the individual mandate under Obamacare.

The move aimed to further defuse some of the public anger over Obama’s failed pledge that Americans who like their insurance plans can keep them. But it raised serious questions about the strength of the individual mandate, which is the glue that keeps the law together.

Making catastrophic health plans more broadly available poses problems for insurers. It could disrupt the insurance pools, since insurers and actuaries had assumed that people shifting from the old individual market would go into the new bronze, silver or gold plans on the Obamacare exchanges.

A senior administration official described the move as a transition policy. The administration does not expect many people will take up the new option, but wants to ensure that it is available to those who had plans canceled.

But it immediately provided new ammunition to Republican opponents of the health law who will want to hear why Obama initiated this change with only four days until the deadline for obtaining coverage Jan. 1.

Update: And more questions from Seth Chandler:

2. Your Solicitor General argued to the Supreme Court that the individual mandate, what you called the minimum coverage provision, was crucial to the Affordable Care Act, that it, unlike other provisions of the ACA were inseverable.  Here are quotes from pages 46 and 47 of the brief filed by your Solicitor General:

It is evident that Congress would not have intended the guaranteed-issue and community-rating reforms to stand if the minimum coverage provision that it twice described as essential to their success were held unconstitutional.

It is well known that community-rating and guaranteed issue coupled with voluntary insurance tends to lead to a death spiral of individual insurance.

Given the arguments made on your behalf, which may well have been correct, why are you not concerned that exempting more individuals from the individual mandate will not, as the insurance industry is complaining, destabilize the insurance markets and threaten the success of your legislation?