“At The Intersection Of Calendars And The ACA”: The Success Of The System Will Not Rise Or Fall Based On Monthly Tallies
The Affordable Care Act enrollment figures for February were released yesterday afternoon, and for the most part, the numbers looked pretty good for those hoping to see the U.S. system succeed.
But news consumers can be forgiven for thinking the opposite. The Hill ran this headline: “ObamaCare enrollments dip.” The Washington Post had a similar message: “Obamacare enrollment drops off in February.” The conservative Washington Examiner told readers: “Obamacare signups slow down in February.”
Sounds discouraging, doesn’t it? January’s enrollment totals were heartening, but if you just skimmed the headlines out of D.C., you’d think February represented a step backwards.
The months HHS has been using for tabulation don’t correspond precisely to the calendar, because of state reporting methods and where weekends fall. As it turns out, “February” is actually February 2 through March 1. That’s 28 days. “January” is actually December 29 through February 1. That’s 35 days. Plug in the numbers, and you’ll see the average daily enrollment for January was 32,744 and for February it was 33,673. As you can see in the graph, the pace actually increased a bit. Among the very few who noticed were Charles Gaba of ACASingups.net and Sy Mukherjee of ThinkProgress.
At a superficial level, the raw monthly totals offer a misleading picture. Someone sees 1.2 million sign-ups in January, followed by 943,000 in February. That looks like a drop.
Until we’re reminded that February is the shortest month.
Stepping back, it’s worth noting that these month-to-month totals are interesting, but their broader importance is limited. I always make a point to highlight the totals as a way of documenting ACA progress, and there’s a political salience as more Americans get invested – literally and figuratively – in the law’s future, but the success of the system will not rise or fall based on monthly tallies and the degree to which they meet preliminary projections.
As Rachel has noted on the show more than once, when a very similar system was established in Massachusetts eight years ago, officials worked under the assumption that enrollment would be slow at first and would then improve in time. In the very first month of the state’s open-enrollment period, a grand total of 123 residents of Massachusetts actually signed up.
And while that may sound like a disaster, no one much cared – in fact, no one even bothered to acknowledge the total at the time, and the figure was only dug up later.
The Affordable Care Act is following a similar trajectory. And since the Massachusetts system is working quite well, that’s probably a pretty good sign.
By most estimates, by the end of March, a little over 5 million consumers will have enrolled through exchange marketplaces, and a similar number will have gained coverage through Medicaid. That’s not quite what the CBO projected before the process began – whether the 7 million figure could have been reached if healthcare.gov worked from the outset we’ll never know – but it’s a perfectly fine number when it comes to sustainability.
Keep this in mind the next time you’re perusing the Beltway media’s headlines about the system’s progress.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 12, 2014
“Don’t Buy It”: The “Paid-What-You’re-Worth” Myth
It’s often assumed that people are paid what they’re worth. According to this logic, minimum wage workers aren’t worth more than the $7.25 an hour they now receive. If they were worth more, they’d earn more. Any attempt to force employers to pay them more will only kill jobs.
According to this same logic, CEOs of big companies are worth their giant compensation packages, now averaging 300 times pay of the typical American worker. They must be worth it or they wouldn’t be paid this much. Any attempt to limit their pay is fruitless because their pay will only take some other form.
“Paid-what-you’re-worth” is a dangerous myth.
Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker got paid $35 an hour in today’s dollars. Today, America’s largest employer is Walmart, and the typical Walmart workers earns $8.80 an hour.
Does this mean the typical GM employee a half-century ago was worth four times what today’s typical Walmart employee is worth? Not at all. Yes, that GM worker helped produce cars rather than retail sales. But he wasn’t much better educated or even that much more productive. He often hadn’t graduated from high school. And he worked on a slow-moving assembly line. Today’s Walmart worker is surrounded by digital gadgets — mobile inventory controls, instant checkout devices, retail search engines — making him or her quite productive.
The real difference is the GM worker a half-century ago had a strong union behind him that summoned the collective bargaining power of all autoworkers to get a substantial share of company revenues for its members. And because more than a third of workers across America belonged to a labor union, the bargains those unions struck with employers raised the wages and benefits of non-unionized workers as well. Non-union firms knew they’d be unionized if they didn’t come close to matching the union contracts.
Today’s Walmart workers don’t have a union to negotiate a better deal. They’re on their own. And because fewer than 7 percent of today’s private-sector workers are unionized, non-union employers across America don’t have to match union contracts. This puts unionized firms at a competitive disadvantage. The result has been a race to the bottom.
By the same token, today’s CEOs don’t rake in 300 times the pay of average workers because they’re “worth” it. They get these humongous pay packages because they appoint the compensation committees on their boards that decide executive pay. Or their boards don’t want to be seen by investors as having hired a “second-string” CEO who’s paid less than the CEOs of their major competitors. Either way, the result has been a race to the top.
If you still believe people are paid what they’re worth, take a look at Wall Street bonuses. Last year’s average bonus was up 15 percent over the year before, to more than $164,000. It was the largest average Wall Street bonus since the 2008 financial crisis and the third highest on record, according to New York’s state comptroller. Remember, we’re talking bonuses, above and beyond salaries.
All told, the Street paid out a whopping $26.7 billion in bonuses last year.
Are Wall Street bankers really worth it? Not if you figure in the hidden subsidy flowing to the big Wall Street banks that ever since the bailout of 2008 have been considered too big to fail.
People who park their savings in these banks accept a lower interest rate on deposits or loans than they require from America’s smaller banks. That’s because smaller banks are riskier places to park money. Unlike the big banks, the smaller ones won’t be bailed out if they get into trouble.
This hidden subsidy gives Wall Street banks a competitive advantage over the smaller banks, which means Wall Street makes more money. And as their profits grow, the big banks keep getting bigger.
How large is this hidden subsidy? Two researchers, Kenichi Ueda of the International Monetary Fund and Beatrice Weder di Mauro of the University of Mainz, have calculated it’s about eight tenths of a percentage point.
This may not sound like much but multiply it by the total amount of money parked in the ten biggest Wall Street banks and you get a huge amount — roughly $83 billion a year.
Recall that the Street paid out $26.7 billion in bonuses last year. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or even a Wall Street banker to see that the hidden subsidy the Wall Street banks enjoy because they’re too big to fail is about three times what Wall Street paid out in bonuses.
Without the subsidy, no bonus pool.
By the way, the lion’s share of that subsidy ($64 billion a year) goes to the top five banks — JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo. and Goldman Sachs. This amount just about equals these banks’ typical annual profits. In other words, take away the subsidy and not only does the bonus pool disappear, but so do all the profits.
The reason Wall Street bankers got fat paychecks plus a total of $26.7 billion in bonuses last year wasn’t because they worked so much harder or were so much more clever or insightful than most other Americans. They cleaned up because they happen to work in institutions — big Wall Street banks — that hold a privileged place in the American political economy.
And why, exactly, do these institutions continue to have such privileges? Why hasn’t Congress used the antitrust laws to cut them down to size so they’re not too big to fail, or at least taxed away their hidden subsidy (which, after all, results from their taxpayer-financed bailout)?
Perhaps it’s because Wall Street also accounts for a large proportion of campaign donations to major candidates for Congress and the presidency of both parties.
America’s low-wage workers don’t have privileged positions. They work very hard — many holding down two or more jobs. But they can’t afford to make major campaign contributions and they have no political clout.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the $26.7 billion of bonuses Wall Street banks paid out last year would be enough to more than double the pay of every one of America’s 1,085,000 full-time minimum wage workers.
The remainder of the $83 billion of hidden subsidy going to those same banks would almost be enough to double what the government now provides low-wage workers in the form of wage subsidies under the Earned Income Tax Credit.
But I don’t expect Congress to make these sorts of adjustments any time soon.
The “paid-what-your-worth” argument is fundamentally misleading because it ignores power, overlooks institutions, and disregards politics. As such, it lures the unsuspecting into thinking nothing whatever should be done to change what people are paid, because nothing can be done.
Don’t buy it.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, March 13, 2014
“Those Lazy Inner-City White Folks”: The Terrible Tyranny Of Federal Assistance
Unlike Rick Perry, Paul Ryan is a master of subtlety in his double-talk on the future of the New Deal/Great Society legacy under Republican governance. Conservative activists may understand that his budget proposals for turning Medicare into a defined-contribution premium support program, or for block-granting Medicaid, represent way stations to a return to the glorious days before 1933. But the out-front rhetoric is always about “saving” Medicare and “reforming” Medicaid. Similarly, Ryan has invested heavily in concern-trolling poor people by suggesting that their “moral fiber” and prospects for upward mobility are being threatened by the tyranny of federally subsidized food, health care, and income support. That all these crocodile tears happen to coincide with the policy predilections of conservatives who view poor people as looters and constitution-destroyers (following the explicit views of Ryan’s muse Ayn Rand) is just a coincidence, it seems.
But even Ryan screws up now and then, and he’s furiously back-peddling from comments made in the friendly confines of Bill Bennett’s radio show about the non-existent work ethic of “inner-city” men. Gee, wonder who he could be talking about? Lauren Victoria Burke asked him about that, and he was just stunned anyone could think it was a racial dog-whistle:
When I asked Ryan if he’d like to “revise and extend his remarks on black men” as he left he House floor after last votes on Wednesday he said, “it was taken out of context — it was, that was — out of left field — out of context.”
“This has nothing to do whatsoever with race,” Ryan added as we spoke in an elevator. He also indicated that it was Bennett that raised the initial issue over the course of a lengthy discussion.
“It was a long talk and he asked about the culture and I just went off of that,” Ryan said. “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever,” he repeated.
This sort of assertion, backed up when necessary by the claim that the questioner is “playing the race card,” is common enough on the Right that Ryan will probably get away with it unscathed. And that’s a shame: it would be instructive and entertaining to force him to produce some examples of inner-city white folks suffering from the terrible tyranny of federal assistance.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 13, 2014
“An Inconvenient Constitution”: Fighting Obama On Immigration Is Not Enough, GOP Wants To Sue Him Too
The House Republican caucus wants to sue President Barack Obama.
They say he isn’t living up to his constitutional obligations on a range of issues—and in particular, that he’s not faithfully executing immigration laws. They cite his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, put into place by executive order in 2012, which halted deportations of people who were brought to this country as children—the so-called “dreamers.” There are roughly 1.1 million of them, according to the best estimates.
To gut that measure, along with parts of the Affordable Care Act and a grab bag of other administration policies, House Republicans crafted and passed what they are calling the “ENFORCE the Law” Act. It would create what amounts to a legal shortcut. House members could file a lawsuit against the president, and it would go directly to three-judge panel of a federal district court—and from there, could be appealed straight to the Supreme Court.
The measure is unlikely to become law, since Senate leaders have declared it dead on arrival. Even if they hadn’t, it might not survive a court challenge: Experts say it openly tampers with the constitution.
Still, the vote for ENFORCE is a statement, and one that directly violates the immigration principles Republicans outlined in January. At the time, the leadership professed support for a pathway to “legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children through no fault of their own, those who know no other place as home.” But that was nearly two months ago—and ENFORCE represents the House’s first vote of the year on immigration.
It makes the vote Democrats have been demanding, on the reform bill that passed the Senate last year, seem a lot less likely. (And it’s not like prospects were good in the first place.) “It doesn’t require much to look at what House Republicans are doing today and question whether or not they’re serious about moving forward on comprehensive immigration reform,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday. That’s a departure from statements that both the president and House Speaker John Boehner have made this winter, insisting legislative reform still stands a chance. Last month, Carney called a meeting about immigration between the two men “constructive”; Boehner called it “healthy.”
Republicans may have been trying to underscore a message with the vote: that Obama should not even consider addressing deportations with executive authority, as he did with DACA, and as immigrant-rights groups are demanding he do again. “If he stopped deporting people who are clearly here illegally, then I think any chance of immigration reform is dead,” Senator Lindsey Graham warned in February. But as the prospects for immigration reform dim, Obama may wonder why he’s waiting for the House to meet him partway.
By: Nora Caplan-Bricker, The New Republic, March 13, 2014
“Punish Them At The Polls”: Michigan’s Sweeping “Rape Insurance” Law Goes Into Effect
A new Michigan law forcing individuals or businesses to purchase costly additional insurance to cover abortion care went into effect Thursday.
The law applies to private health plans in the state, including plans secured through the state health exchange and employer plans. If a person does not purchase the additional insurance, then they will be forced to pay out of pocket for the procedure if they need to access abortion care. As it stands, very few insurance plans cover abortion care; the new law will likely further drive down the already tiny fraction of abortions covered by health insurance in the state, potentially putting the procedure financially out of reach for many people.
There were approximately 23,000 abortions performed in Michigan last year, and barely 3 percent of them were covered by insurance.
As Jessica Valenti at the Nation rightly pointed out at the time the measure first passed the Republican-controlled Legislature, eliminating insurance coverage for abortion will have devastating consequences for all people who need abortion care, which is essential and basic medical care. There is no hierarchy of “good” abortions or “bad” abortions. But pro-choice lawmakers in Michigan and much of the national coverage has focused on what many see as the most extreme feature of the law — its lack of exceptions for survivors of rape or incest.
The lack of exceptions has led many to call the law “rape insurance.”
At the time of the vote, Senate Majority Leader Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said she was raped as a college student and couldn’t imagine having to face the additional trauma of such a law had she gotten pregnant. She asked her “Republican colleagues to see the face of the women they’re hurting by their actions today.”
“Thank God I didn’t get pregnant as a result of my own attack,” she continued, “but I can’t even begin to imagine now having to think about the same thing happening to my own daughters.”
By: Katie McDonough, Assistant Editor, Salon, March 13, 2014
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