Palinobama.

From the Washington Post:

The Obama administration's controversial birth control health insurance coverage rule will not apply to a type of plan used by about 200,000 college and graduate students, officials said Friday.

The administration's authority to issue the rule stemmed from the 2010 health-care law. Officials said they have concluded that for technical legal reasons the law's reach does not extend to "self-insured" student plans, meaning those for which a college or university collects premiums directly from students, then uses the pool to pay for their health care.

As I understand it, self-insured plans, no matter the business or institution - are not subject to federal regulation - and never have been - so all this mandated coverage cannot be enforced for employers with self-insured plans - religiously-affiliated or otherwise.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, consider how the administration proposes to work around the problem (my emphasis):

Such employers [those that are self-funded] generally hire a third party -- often an insurance company -- to administer such plans. Officials said they are likely to require the third-party administrator to cover a worker's birth control in cases where the employer refuses to do so.

It is still unclear how the administrators would pay for the coverage or what it would cost. And the administration floated three options for public comment. One idea is to require administrators to draw on revenue from other businesses they often also engage in -- running disease management or drug benefit programs for instance.

Another is to grant them rebates from a special re-insurance fund that all administrators must pay into under a separate provision of the health-care law.

The final option is for the federal government to incentivize private, multi-state health insurance plans to step in with birth control coverage in cases where an employer refuses to do so.

Yeah, I'm sure these will go over real big.

The more of this kind of thing we run into - and I've no doubt we will see more and more of these kinds of glitches - and the more complicated it gets trying to work within a private insurance system that is still geared to finding ways to avoid regulation and increase profit, the less sense it makes why there was no consideration given to implementing a single-payer health system.  If one's priority is about the people, that is.

I'm sure we all remember that when single-payer was raised in that initial "summit," Obama dismissed it because we have an employer-based system in place on which to build - and we needed something "uniquely American."  Well, guess what?  Via this chart from the National Institute for Health Care Reform - via Krugman - the number of Americans with employer-based health insurance has dropped from nearly 70% in 2001, to a projected less-than-50% in 2012.  So, while fewer and fewer people were getting insurance coverage through their work, Obama decided to spend a year and a half coming up with a plan that was based on the employer model.  

Didn't make sense to me then, doesn't make sense to me now.  All I know is that if we had applied our time and energy to creating a single-payer, Enhanced Medicare for All, we wouldn't be having to do what most of us saw ahead - adding more contorted and patched-together work-arounds to an already broken system.

And for those who are inclined to respond with some variation of "it would never work because they didn't have the votes" talking point, let me respond right back: there's a reason for the expression "you never know until you try."  In this case, not only was there no effort to explore the single-payer model, every effort was exerted to make sure the voices of single-payer were never heard.

#7 Florida beats # 15 Norfolk St 50 - 84

#1 Michigan ST. over St. Louis 61 - 65

#1 North Carolina defeats #8 Creighton 73 - 87

Money quote from the boy...

"It's not ok to gamble," he told the paper. "It's like illegal, sort of."

I heard this story on NPR this morning - interesting to hear what the legal eagles here think. On the surface of it it seems like a slam dunk to me - survivor benefits are for children the father created while he was alive, not for children the mother already knew would not be supported by the father.

ESPN's Adam Schefter and Chris Mortensen are reporting that free agent quarterback Peyton Manning has told his agent, Tom Condon, to open contract negotiations with the Denver Broncos.

And barring an "unexpected snag" in contract talks, Schefter and Mort are reporting that Manning will become the next quarterback of the Broncos.

The Broncos will try to trade Tim Tebow.

The AFC South breathes a sigh of relief, well except for Tennessee.