“Defiant Obamacare Defense”: A New World Where Insurers Have To Cover Categories Of Treatments They Never Had To Before
President Obama’s speech at Faneuil Hall was probably his most passionate and unapologetic defense of the health-care law in ages, maybe since its passage. At times like this in the past, Old Mr. Reasonable has hemmed and hawed, ceding that his opponents had a point, but insisting—reasonably, of course—that he had a better one if you just stopped and thought about it. But Wednesday afternoon in Boston gave us a different Obama. He took a page out of the Bush playbook or, dare I say it, even the Cheney one. If things are going a little rocky at the moment, it doesn’t matter; cede nothing. Stick to plan. No matter the merits or facts, it’s the only approach that our political culture respects.
The money moment of the speech, of course, came when he answered the questions raised by the NBC report Tuesday. According to NBC, people who had bought insurance on the private market who don’t have either employer or government coverage were getting hammered by Obamacare. They were getting letters telling them their coverage had expired and then finding that the new coverage available to them was going to cost more. It flew in the face, said NBC’s Lisa Myers, of Obama’s promise that if you had coverage now and liked it, nothing would happen to you.
She was right. He shouldn’t have said it. And in Boston he didn’t exactly say, “I shouldn’t have said it.” But he did turn it around and say for that small percentage of people, the coverage they’re going to end up with is better! It also just might be cheaper, he said, and they are going to have peace of mind: “They can’t use allergies or pregnancy or sports injury or the fact that you’re a woman to charge you more. They can’t do that anymore!”
It’s an interesting, by which I mean preposterous, meme that’s developing on the Republican side. On Wednesday morning, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on the issue. Some people, Blackburn said, “would rather drive a Ford than a Ferrari.” No denying that; in my younger and single and childless days, I certainly would have opted for a Ford plan instead of a Ferrari plan, so up to a point, Blackburn is making sense.
But Obamacare creates a world where insurers have to cover several categories of treatments that they never had to cover before, and since people with those conditions are now going to sign up and use those services, it’s going to cost more in some cases. And it’s understandable if people are upset about that. But Blackburn’s analogy, of course, breaks down because any citizen, at some unknowable future point, may be hit with one of those conditions. A person might develop mental illness. Or their child might. No imaginable circumstance could make a reasonable Ford-owner think, “Damn, I should have bought that Ferrari.” But numerous circumstances could make the self-employed citizen or parent think, “Damn, I’m glad I bought that Ferrari plan.”
What’s most fascinating to me about the whole thing is that the experience is training, or is going to train, Americans to rethink the really fundamental questions about how life and society are organized in a way politics rarely does. One of the major differences between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives believe in the primacy of the individual, while liberals want people to think about the community. Another difference, related, has to do with the two creeds’ opposing conceptions of individualism. Conservatives go for the whole rugged individualism thing, whereas the liberal view of the individual is closer to “there but for the grace of God go I.”
Well, the nature of health-care coverage is it has the power to bring consideration of these questions to the fore. A country where people have to sit down and choose how best to protect themselves and their loved ones against pain and death, and where they have to think about the trade-offs between paying more and having better coverage, is a country where people are being forced, in a way, to think about the most profound questions of community and the individual—of how much responsibility we ought to be forced to shoulder for each other.
I used to think, “This is just like auto insurance; you’re a safe driver, but you insure yourself against the unsafe drivers, and everybody understands that, so why should this be different?” But it is, somehow. It’s so much more personal. It’s about our frailty as human beings, and contemplation of our frailty makes us both obstinate and individualistic (“I can take of myself, Jack!”) and, in our more honest moments, vulnerable and communitarian (“What will I do if I really get sick?”). Forcing people to think about their coverage forces them to think about all that.
How will it turn out? Who knows. It has the positive potential of making people, a majority of people, see that this all makes a kind of sense, that they are not, whether they like it or not, autonomous actors. That, come to think of it, is what terrifies conservatives. Since 1980, they have trained people to think chiefly about themselves, unburdened of the context of society. Obamacare will force them to think of society. And most people, not being selfish asses (and most people aren’t), will, once the kinks are worked out, accept it. Polls are already indicating that. No wonder Ted Cruz is losing it.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 30, 2013
“Anecdotal Journalism At Its Worse”: Every News Story Has Two Sides, Except, Apparently Obamacare
The rocky rollout of Obamacare has prompted commentators to attack the president and his team for having three years to plan for the launch and still not getting it right. That’s a legitimate critique as problems persist. But the same can be said for an awful lot of reporters doing a very poor job covering Obamacare. They also had three years to prepare themselves to accurately report the story.
So what’s their excuse?
The truth is, the Beltway press rarely bothers to explain, let alone cover, public policy any more. With a media model that almost uniformly revolves around the political process of Washington (who’s winning, who’s losing?), journalists have distanced themselves from the grungy facts of governance, especially in terms of how government programs work and how they effect the citizenry.
But explaining is the job of journalism. It’s one of the crucial roles that newsrooms play in a democracy. And in the recent case of Obamacare, the press has failed badly in its role. Worse, it has actively misinformed about the new health law and routinely highlighted consumers unhappy with Obamacare, while ignoring those who praise it.
As Joshua Holland noted at Bill Moyers’ website, “lazy stories of “sticker shock” and cancellations by reporters uninterested in the details of public policy only offer the sensational half of a complicated story, and that’s providing a big assist to opponents of the law.”
It’s part of a troubling trend. Fresh off of blaming both sides for the GOP’s wholly-owned, and thoroughly engineered, government shutdown, the press is now botching its Obamacare reporting by omitting key facts and context — to the delight of Republicans. It’s almost like there’s a larger newsroom pattern in play.
And this week the pattern revolved around trying to scare the hell out of people with deceiving claims about how Obamacare had forced insurance companies to “drop” clients and how millions of Americans had “lost” their coverage.
Not quite.
Insurance companies informed some customers that plans that didn’t meet minimum standards required by Obamacare would be phased out. But the part often obscured or downplayed in breathless “cancellation” news reports is that consumers are able to shop for new plans that in many cases are superior to the old ones, and often less expensive (or partially paid for by subsidies). In other words, they’re transitioning from one plan to another.
It’s understandable why right-wing partisan voices only interested in trashing Obamacare and damaging the president would push claims, as Breitbart.com recently did, that nearly one million Californians have “lost” their insurance because of the new law. (They didn’t.) It’s less clear why mainstream reporters would traffic in that same kind of misleading claims.
Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher has been methodically dissecting erroneous and painfully misleading Obamacare reports this week. He concluded one big problem is “a reliance on consumers who aren’t insurance experts, and reporters who aren’t much better.”
Reporters, and especially television reporters, seem anxious to interview consumers who have been notified by letter that their insurance policy has been canceled and who say they’re shocked to find out how expensive purchasing a new plan will be.
But as Christopher discovered, that’s often not the case and that consumers and reporters either don’t understand the options that are available, or haven’t researched the issue enough. (Christopher was able to find much less expensive plans for several consumers touted in TV reports.) That’s because (surprise!) the cost of new insurance plans quoted in letters sent by insurance companies often don’t represent the lowest option available via the open exchange.
Just look at the now-infamous CBS report about Florida resident Dianne Barrette who complained her premium under Obamacare would increased tenfold, from $54 a month to $591 a month. (She was quickly invited onto Fox News to tell her tale.) But a woman paying just $54 a month for health insurance didn’t set off any red flags among editors at CBS News? Barrette’s health plan — the best she could afford — was a barely-there “junk health insurance” policy that didn’t cover hospitalization, ambulance service, or prescription drugs.
Left unsaid by CBS, as Holland reported, was the fact that under Obamacare Barrette qualified “for a bronze plan, which guarantees free preventive care and coverage for hospitalizations, for only $97 per month — one-sixth of that headline number that’s making the rounds.”
Meanwhile, NBC Nightly News profiled another so-called Obamacare “sticker shock” victim and detailed how Deborah Cavallaro’s monthly premium would go up from $293 to $484. (She appeared on CNBC to repeat her Obamacare complaints.) But then American Prospect‘s Paul Waldman did some online shopping and found a plan that Cavallaro qualified for and cost $258 per-month, $35 less than the plan that’s being canceled.
“If you find someone who’s going to end up paying more thanks to Obamacare, fair enough,” wrote Waldman. “Run with the story. But first, you’d better perform the due diligence to find out what a comparable plan really costs.” (Still, lots of reporters don’t.)
Christopher noted another glaring omission from the ongoing reporting: “None of these reports take the extra step of explaining the tremendous benefits of the Affordable Care Act, for which most reasonable people wouldn’t necessarily mind a bit of a tradeoff.”
Also, absent from virtually all the reports is the acknowledgement that insurance companies canceling existing plans in the individual market and consumers being forced to join new ones is not an unusual occurrence. At all.
Obamacare coverage has often been anecdotal journalism at its worst, simply because it’s been the same one anecdote told over and over and over.
One CBS report acknowledged, “Industry experts say about half the people getting the letters will pay more — and half will pay less, thanks to taxpayer subsidies.” If that’s the case, where are the television news reports featuring the “half” who will soon be paying less for health insurance thanks to Obamacare?
Maybe I’ve just missed them all? But for this news viewer the pattern seems unmistakable: Consumers who might have to pay more (or more accurately, consumers who think they might have to pay more) are welcomed before the cameras to tell their understandably frustrating tales.
In his bad-news Obamacare report featuring three frustrated health care consumers, CNN’s Drew Griffin admitted that he didn’t even bother looking for success stories. Instead, as host Anderson Cooper explained, because Obama had given a speech extolling the benefits of Obamacare, it was CNN’s and Griffin’s job to “counter against that.”
And then there was the absurd CBS report which highlighted one man’s complaint that under Obamacare all insurance plans must provide maternity care coverage. As Media Matters noted, instead of interviewing a beneficiary of the maternity coverage, CBS highlighted a man upset that his plan included the key benefit.
The media rule has been hard to miss: Consumers who have complaints about Obamacare are much, much more newsworthy than those who have praise.
By the way, in case anyone is interested, here are some examples of Obamacare fans (who have been highlighted by local media outlets and personal online postings):
* Phil Sherburne in Salt Lake City purchased health insurance for his family of five for just $123 per-month.
* California mechanic and small business owner Rakesh Rikhi purchased $500-a-month health insurance, helping him save $5,000 each year.
* Katie Klabusich sometimes paid more for health insurance each month than she did for rent, and bounced around from bad plan to bad plan. Now thanks to Obamacare she has solid health insurance. Or, “HOLY SHIT I HAVE COMPREHENSIVE MEDICAL COVERAGE STARTING IN TEN WEEKS!”, as Klabusich wrote on her blog.
Every news story has two sides. Except, apparently, Obamacare.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters For America, October 30, 2013
“Solely An Oppositional Movement”: Why Winning Elections Is The Last Thing The Tea Party Wants
Keith Humphreys asks a provocative question: Does the Tea Party even want to win elections? This comes up in response to a long article in the National Review by Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry telling the Tea Party to get its head out of the clouds and start doing things that will help Republicans win. While it’s tricky to ascribe specific desires and intentions to a large, complicated collection of people like the Tea Party, to the extent we can, I think the answer to whether they want to win is pretty clearly no. And there’s a certain logic to it.
The reason is that the Tea Party is an oppositional movement, and oppositional movements only thrive when they’re in the opposition. They can talk all they like about both Republicans and Democrats being part of the problem, and being opposed just to “Washington,” but we all know that at its heart it’s about Barack Obama and everything he represents. If Hillary Clinton or another Democrat becomes president in 2016, most of the anger and resentment that gives the movement life will get transferred to that person, and it will continue. But as I’ve held for a few years now, as a movement the Tea Party has a firm expiration date, which is the inauguration of the next Republican president.
The movement also holds a contempt for compromise of any sort as one of its fundamental pillars, which is fairly easy to stick with when your side is out of power. It’s not like you’re going to be getting much of what you want anyway, so you can scoff at the half-loaves your more reasonable colleagues are offering up. But when there’s a Republican administration the gifts to conservatism will be showering down from every cloud, and they’ll be much tougher to say no to. How about we give you an appointment at the EPA, where you can destroy the agency from the inside instead of railing at it from the street? What say we do the same to the Labor Department? Now that our bills won’t get vetoed, let’s start slashing away at food stamps and CHIP and all those other programs the “takers” suckle on. It’s time to party! In that atmosphere, there’s so much to say yes to that saying no to everything isn’t so attractive anymore.
And when it can’t shout “No!”, the Tea Party will have no more reason for being. Obviously, even if it’s dead as a movement, many of the people who championed it will still be in Congress. But saying no won’t be as attractive for them either. It’s one thing to imagine yourself a brave warrior standing up against Barack Obama and his plan to turn America into a nightmare of socialist misery. It’s another to, say, fight against cuts to Medicaid because you want even bigger cuts to Medicaid. That’s far less romantic.
So no, as a whole the Tea Party doesn’t have much of an interest in winning elections, because if it helped Republicans have a resounding win, it would literally be the last thing the movement ever did.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 31, 2013
“A War On The Poor”: This Is Now The Central And Defining Issue Of American Politics
John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, has done some surprising things lately. First, he did an end run around his state’s Legislature — controlled by his own party — to proceed with the federally funded expansion of Medicaid that is an important piece of Obamacare. Then, defending his action, he let loose on his political allies, declaring, “I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor. That, if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy.”
Obviously Mr. Kasich isn’t the first to make this observation. But the fact that it’s coming from a Republican in good standing (although maybe not anymore), indeed someone who used to be known as a conservative firebrand, is telling. Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate has now reached such a fever pitch that the party doesn’t really stand for anything else — and only willfully blind observers can fail to see that reality.
The big question is why. But, first, let’s talk a bit more about what’s eating the right.
I still sometimes see pundits claiming that the Tea Party movement is basically driven by concerns about budget deficits. That’s delusional. Read the founding rant by Rick Santelli of CNBC: There’s nary a mention of deficits. Instead, it’s a tirade against the possibility that the government might help “losers” avoid foreclosure. Or read transcripts from Rush Limbaugh or other right-wing talk radio hosts. There’s not much about fiscal responsibility, but there’s a lot about how the government is rewarding the lazy and undeserving.
Republicans in leadership positions try to modulate their language a bit, but it’s a matter more of tone than substance. They’re still clearly passionate about making sure that the poor and unlucky get as little help as possible, that — as Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, put it — the safety net is becoming “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.” And Mr. Ryan’s budget proposals involve savage cuts in safety-net programs such as food stamps and Medicaid.
All of this hostility to the poor has culminated in the truly astonishing refusal of many states to participate in the Medicaid expansion. Bear in mind that the federal government would pay for this expansion, and that the money thus spent would benefit hospitals and the local economy as well as the direct recipients. But a majority of Republican-controlled state governments are, it turns out, willing to pay a large economic and fiscal price in order to ensure that aid doesn’t reach the poor.
The thing is, it wasn’t always this way. Go back for a moment to 1936, when Alf Landon received the Republican nomination for president. In many ways, Landon’s acceptance speech previewed themes taken up by modern conservatives. He lamented the incompleteness of economic recovery and the persistence of high unemployment, and he attributed the economy’s lingering weakness to excessive government intervention and the uncertainty he claimed it created.
But he also said this: “Out of this Depression has come, not only the problem of recovery but also the equally grave problem of caring for the unemployed until recovery is attained. Their relief at all times is a matter of plain duty. We of our Party pledge that this obligation will never be neglected.”
Can you imagine a modern Republican nominee saying such a thing? Not in a party committed to the view that unemployed workers have it too easy, that they’re so coddled by unemployment insurance and food stamps that they have no incentive to go out there and get a job.
So what’s this all about? One reason, the sociologist Daniel Little suggested in a recent essay, is market ideology: If the market is always right, then people who end up poor must deserve to be poor. I’d add that some leading Republicans are, in their minds, acting out adolescent libertarian fantasies. “It’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now,” declared Paul Ryan in 2009.
But there’s also, as Mr. Little says, the stain that won’t go away: race.
In a much-cited recent memo, Democracy Corps, a Democratic-leaning public opinion research organization, reported on the results of focus groups held with members of various Republican factions. They found the Republican base “very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority” — and seeing the social safety net both as something that helps Those People, not people like themselves, and binds the rising nonwhite population to the Democratic Party. And, yes, the Medicaid expansion many states are rejecting would disproportionately have helped poor blacks.
So there is indeed a war on the poor, coinciding with and deepening the pain from a troubled economy. And that war is now the central, defining issue of American politics.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 31, 2013
“A Very Racist Halloween”: Beneath Any Standard Of Humanity
The holidays are often a time of stress and conflict, even as people engage in celebration. It’s always at Thanksgiving or Christmas that someone reveals a family secret, or when someone gets drunk and tells someone else in the family exactly what he/she thinks of him, resulting in the excising of said drunken relative from the will.
But who knew Halloween could also bring out the worst in people?
Two adult men in Florida apparently thought it would be just a scream if they dressed up as slain African-American teenager Trayvon Martin and the man who shot him, George Zimmerman. The Trayvon costume featured a hooded sweatshirt with a bloody fake bullet hole in it, and the man who portrayed Martin, William Filene, 25, was in blackface. Meanwhile, a 22-year-old, identified by The Smoking Gun as Greg Cimeno, was wearing a sweatshirt that said “Neighborhood Watch” on it.
The woman who posted the photo on her Facebook page (before making her social media sites private) is Caitlin Cimeno, and she is shown standing between the men. Cimeno, smiling, is fashioning a gun with his hand and pointing it at the faux-Trayvon’s head.
The bigger question – what is wrong with people? – cannot be answered easily. But one has to wonder what has happened to modern culture that people are willing to expose their racism and appalling insensitivity as some sort of joke for everyone with access to the Internet to see. It’s bad enough that they did it; the lack of any shame over it is even worse.
But then, Zimmerman himself seems to have trouble equating fame with notoriety. His lawyers convinced a jury that Zimmerman had acted in self-defense, so he paid no price for taking Martin’s life. Even if that were true, wouldn’t the decent thing to do be to spend some time reflecting on the terrible tragedy of it all? To spend some time each day thinking about the profound loss Martin’s parents suffered? To examine one’s own presumptions and suspicions, asking why Trayvon – wearing a hoodie and carrying candy and iced tea – appeared so suspicious?
Instead, Zimmerman has done a little victory lap of his own, visiting a gun manufacturer and posing there among the firearms. He helped a family get out of an overturned SUV. And he was pulled over for speeding in Texas, where he asked the officer who stopped him whether he recognized him.
We are sadly in an era when people are willing to debase and degrade themselves for attention. (Count up the number of versions of “Real Housewives” to get the picture). But debasing and disrespecting the victim of a terrible tragedy – whether it was a crime or not – is beneath any standard of humanity. One wonders what Cimeno and Filene have planned for New Year’s.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, October 29, 2013
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