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“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

November 1, 2013 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Obamacare | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“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

November 1, 2013 Posted by | Media, Obamacare, Press | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Grow Up And Get Over It”: Enough Already On HealthCare.Gov, Don’t You Remember Medicare Part D?

OK. I’ve officially had enough of this Republican gloating about HealthCare.gov. Yes, it was a major and inexcusable fiasco, as I wrote last week. So they were entitled to a week of “we told ya so.” Or even two. But really, it’s practically a month now. Enough already. I know that we expect no decency from these people, so this will sound naïve, but truly, what they should be doing now is helping their constituents figure it all out. That’s what the Democrats did in a similar situation.

I refer, of course, to the Medicare Part D implementation in late 2005 and early 2006. That was the big prescription drug bill passed in 2003. You remember—it’s the one where the Republicans didn’t have the votes in the House, even though they controlled the House, and Speaker Tom DeLay held the floor open for 15 minutes after the bell rang as his lieutenants went around and badgered and threatened some GOP members until they changed their vote from nay to aye. My, how at home DeLay would have been with the Tea Partiers.

Anyhow. Most Democrats voted against the bill. In the House just 16 of 203 Democratic members voted yes. In the Senate, however, 11 of 48 Democrats voted for the new Bush entitlement. First, let’s just stop right there. Could you imagine 16 and 11 Republicans ever voting for an Obama legislative priority, something that was clearly Obama’s “baby” in the same way that the Part D bill was Bush’s? There’d be no end to the slobbering over Republicans for being so reasonable. As I recall, the Democrats were attacked at the time for not supporting the bill enough.

So they didn’t. And then, two years later, the rollout came. It was a mess. In mid-October 2005, the Bush administration announced a delay. Reason? It was Yom Kippur, and evidently no one wanted to offend elderly Jews who wouldn’t be using their computers. Right. So it was delayed. But a month later, as Jon Perr noted recently at Crooks & Liars, the planned comparison-shopping website still wasn’t up and running. Even after it finally was, it was confusing and a mess. Some sample headlines: “Web-based Comparison of Prescription Plans Delayed,” The Washington Post; “Glitches Mar Launch of Medicare Drug Plan,” The Wall Street Journal; “President Tells Insurers to Aid Ailing Medicare Drug Plan,” The New York Times.

Needless to say, some of the same people now trying to put the hex on Obamacare spent 2006 pooh-poohing—you guessed it—“glitches,” as Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) put it back then. I’m sure they’d say they’re different things, and it’s true the Affordable Care Act is a bigger undertaking. But they’re precisely similar in spirit—big, new government programs that depended largely on citizen interaction via personal computer. And the ACA fixes what was the biggest problem created by Part D, the so-called doughnut hole in prescription drug coverage. So the Obama bill corrects what was conspicuously awful about the Bush bill. Yes, they are different!

But the biggest difference is not how Republicans behaved back then but how Democrats did. Most Democrats voted against the law. But they did not then sue the Bush administration and try to take the thing to the Supreme Court and get it invalidated. And then, when the start-up was a cock-up, Democrats didn’t go around saying it was proof the law had to go. They tried to fix it. Hillary Clinton, then a senator, said: “I voted against it, but once it passed I certainly determined that I would try to do everything I could to make sure that New Yorkers understood it, could access it, and make the best of it.”

Interesting, no, that we have this quote, this wholly unremarkable quote, from someone the press has described over the years as one of the most polarizing women in America. Here she was being the exact opposite of polarizing, just doing what was then her job, being a normal and rational human being and public servant. She was deciding, amazingly enough, that the needs of her senior-citizen constituents who might benefit from the law once the kinks were worked out were more important than any grudge or animus she might bear toward the sitting administration.

Her husband said it well Sunday, while campaigning with Terry McAuliffe: “But our side, we’re not so ideological. So instead of bashing them and screaming about how incompetent they were, most of our people just tried to help people understand the law and make it work, and then wait for it to get fixed.”

And yet here was Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) on TV on Sunday spouting the same oogedy-boogedy that’s been gushing from their mouths for a month. And there was Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), having no earthly idea what she was talking about on CNN. Have Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell or Sen. Rand Paul had one kind word to say for Kentucky’s by all accounts excellent implementation of the law under Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear? About 15,000 Kentuckians had enrolled as of last week. I just wonder if a single one of them got a helping hand from staffers for McConnell or Paul.

It’s yet another stomach-turning state of affairs. I’m sick and tired of hearing it. Obamacare is an existential threat to their Weltanschauung, their idea of America? Grow up and get over it. It’s just politics. You lost a political fight. You may someday win it, but until the day you do, behave like adults. And like democrats (and Democrats, the 2006 variety). And for God’s sake, put your sick constituents’ needs ahead of your racial paranoia about the president. Enough, enough, enough.

 

By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 29, 2013

October 31, 2013 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, Republicans | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“The Uproar Over Insurance “Cancellation” Letters”: Offering Terrible Products To Desperate People Is No Longer Acceptable

Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary, took a lot of grief this morning from Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who were outraged that some people’s individual insurance policies had been “cancelled” because of health care reform.

Some of the rants bordered on the comical. Cory Gardner, Republican of Colorado, brandished his “cancellation” letter and demanded that Ms. Sebelius nullify the health law for all residents of his congressional district.

Most lawmakers mentioned President Obama’s unfortunate blanket statement that all Americans would be allowed to keep their insurance policies if they liked them. He failed to make an exception for inadequate policies that don’t meet the new minimum standards.

But in between lashings, Ms. Sebelius managed to make an important point. Yes, some people will be forced to upgrade their policies, she said. But that’s preferable to the status quo before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, when insurers could cancel policies on a whim.

“The individual market in Kansas and anywhere in the country has never had consumer protections,” she testified at the hearing. “People are on their own. They could be locked out, priced out, dumped out. And that happened each and every day. So this will finally provide the kind of protections that we all enjoy in our health care plans.”

A true cancellation is when someone gets a letter saying that she’s losing her insurance and cannot renew. That was common practice in the individual market for people with expensive conditions. Under the new law, no one will ever get a letter like that again. They cannot be turned down for insurance.

The so-called cancellation letters waved around at yesterday’s hearing were simply notices that policies would have to be upgraded or changed. Some of those old policies were so full of holes that they didn’t include hospitalization, or maternity care, or coverage of other serious conditions.

Republicans were apparently furious that government would dare intrude on an insurance company’s freedom to offer a terrible product to desperate people.

“Some people like to drive a Ford, not a Ferrari,” said Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. “And some people like to drink out of a red Solo cup, not a crystal stem. You’re taking away their choice.”

Luckily, a comprehensive and affordable insurance policy is no longer a Ferrari; it is now a basic right. In the face of absurd comments and analogies like this one, Ms. Sebelius never lost her cool in three-and-a-half hours of testimony, perhaps because she knows that once the computer problems and the bellowing die down, the country will be far better off.

 

By: David Firestone, Editors Blog, The New York Times, October 30, 2013

October 31, 2013 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Health Insurance Companies, Obamacare | , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Obamacare Witch Hunt”: Republican Halloween Witch Trials About Obamacare Avoid The Facts

Watch out for the hobgoblins! The knives are out. The hearings are on. The charges are flying. Obamacare is on the hot seat … again!

The sad result is that as we get these unconfirmed anecdotes, these stories about problems with insurance companies, these people who face hardship supposedly because of Obamacare, few Republicans think back to pre-2010. Then the costs of health care were skyrocketing – from $1,000 per person in 1980 to about $3,000 in 1990 to $4,000 in 2000 to nearly $8,000 before the Affordable Care Act was passed. The next highest nation for cost: Norway at $5,352.

According to the Commonwealth Fund, 49.9 million Americans were without health insurance in 2009, up 13 million from 2000. Houston, we have a problem.

And remember the stories of pre-existing conditions? Getting kicked off your health insurance or unable to get coverage? How about caps on your care? Or huge deductibles, especially for women? Horror story after horror story.

The facts are clear: 17 million Americans had pre-existing conditions; 34 percent lacked coverage for mental health; 62 percent lacked maternity coverage.

How soon we forget the problems that the ACA was written to solve. Right now, only 5 percent of Americans are covered by individual plans – if you had your plan prior to 2010, you are grandfathered in and can keep it. If the insurance companies want to kick you off they have to alter your plan, but they can no longer kick you off because of a pre-existing condition or because you cost them too much.

Most of these individual plans are renewed yearly and,  according to current figures, 48 percent of those with individual plans would get a tax credit under the Affordable Care Act. The average “rebate” would be $5,500, not exactly chump change. Nearly half of those who believe they are suffering sticker shock from their insurance companies would get better coverage for less money.

So, before more and more people are dragged up before Republican-led congressional committees and berated, maybe it is time to get the facts. Maybe it is also time to work to fix what problems may exist and to offer solutions and not engage in more Salem-like witch trials just before Halloween.

 

By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, October 30, 2013

October 31, 2013 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, GOP, Obamacare | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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