“Deja vu On Obamacare”: In The Crossfire Tonight, Americans Begin Signing Up For FDR’s New “Social Security” Program
Voiceover: It’s December 1, 1936 — in the Crossfire tonight — Americans begin signing up for FDR’s new “Social Security” program — but can the post office handle the volume? And is it essential protection for seniors — or the slippery slope to socialism? In the Crossfire — Frances Perkins, secretary of labor, who supports the program — and congressman Daniel Reed, Republican of New York, who opposes it.
Good evening, I’m Upton Sinclair, on the left.
And I’m Freddy Hayek, on the right.
Sinclair: After 18 months of planning, President Roosevelt’s breakthrough Social Security program to ease poverty among senior citizens recently began its rollout, with application forms sent to post offices across the country — and with employers forced to register as well. Freddy, I think it’s a milestone for a civilized nation. After all, two dozen countries already have systems of social insurance on the books. And the whole idea was invented by a conservative, Otto von Bismarck, back in the ’80s as a shrewd way to assure social peace. Can’t you concede that morality, not to mention the survival instincts of the ruling class, requires a decent society to offer something like Bismarckcare to protect against destitution in old age?
Hayek: Spoken like a communist out to weigh the economy down, Up. Don’t you lefties see that your taxing and spending will put us on the road to serfdom?
Sinclair: Catchy phrase, Fred — might want to hold onto that for a book at some point. Let’s bring in our guests. Congressman Reed, here’s what you said about Social Security during the House debate over the legislation: “The lash of the dictator will be felt, and 25 million free American citizens will for the first time submit themselves to a fingerprint test.” One of your Senate colleagues said the new program would “end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with the average European. But isn’t this rhetoric a bit over the top?
Reed: Not at all, Upton. This is simply the reality. As another Republican in our caucus says, “Never in the history of the world has a measure been . . . so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers, and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people.”
Hayek: Secretary Perkins, you don’t look convinced.
Perkins: It’s always the same sob story from the party of wealth. The sky is falling, the lights of freedom are being extinguished, blah blah blah blah blah.
Reed: Plus, the darn thing doesn’t cover enough people.
Perkins and Upton: What?
Reed: It’s only slated to reach a couple hundred thousand Americans in 1940. And with very modest benefits.
Perkins: So your beef with a program you want to kill is that it doesn’t do enough for enough people in need?
Reed: Well, that, plus it’s very complicated and hard to sign up for. Have you seen the lines at the post office? People have no idea what to do. The wait can take hours.
Sinclair: You can’t blast a program for existing and also for being inadequate.
Perkins: Sure you can, Upton, if you’re a Republican. But my real problem with the GOP is different. More than 50 percent of our seniors live in poverty. You see them in the street every day. Charities are overwhelmed. These poor souls have nowhere to turn. They can’t afford food or medicine. And Republicans say there’s nothing the government of a great nation can do.
Hayek: Congressman, what say you?
Reed: Isn’t this socialism, Frances?
Perkins: Absolutely not.
Reed: Come, Secretary Perkins. Isn’t this a teeny-weeny bit of socialism?
Perkins: It’s a load of common sense and decency, is what it is.
Reed: It will discourage people from saving for their own retirement. And it creates incentives for employers to drop any pension coverage they offer now. They’ll assume everyone can just be dumped into the government system.
Perkins: No, congressman, it’ll save companies money by letting them tailor any pensions they offer to work atop the national minimum that Social Security provides. Some basic level of government-funded retirement security is good for business.
Reed: Then why does every thinking businessman in America oppose it?
Perkins: Don’t throw oxymorons at me, Dan. Mark my words: Social Security will end up bigger than anyone today can imagine, even as America grows much, much richer — proving that social insurance and capitalism are mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive.
Hayek: Such poetry, Frances — such misguided but lovely-sounding poetry!
Upton: After the break — some Democrats are urging FDR to go big on basic health coverage for every American, too — but the president says we can come back and address that question in a few years. Who’s right? Answers just ahead — when Crossfire returns . . .
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 30, 2013
“The GOP’s Hypocrisy On Obamacare”: Republicans Get The Vapors And Become Outraged About The Problems They Created
Last spring, the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on implementation of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. Sen. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and the chairman of the committee, was not pleased with how things were going.
The Obama administration originally had asked for more than half a billion dollars to spend on public relations and outreach for the law. House Republicans had returned with an offer of nothing. That’s right: zero dollars. Without necessary funds, the Department of Health and Human Services worried it would not have the necessary money to pay for navigators to help people enroll in health care, for the technology needed to implement the exchanges and for the public relations campaign that was required to inform citizens about what the law actually did.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made the controversial move of asking insurance companies and nonprofit organizations to donate money and help. Republicans were outraged. She asked for more money. She was refused.
Then, when she tried to move some money from the PR budget to replace cuts to other areas, Baucus became quite upset. He was concerned that if the administration did not do more to inform people about the law and get implementation going, there would be problems:
“A lot of people have no idea about all of this,” he said. “People just don’t know a lot about it, and the Kaiser poll pointed that out. I understand you’ve hired a contractor. I’m just worried that that’s gonna be money down the drain because contractors like to make money. … I just tell ya, I just see a huge train wreck coming down.”
As I’ve said before, it’s important to note that the “train wreck” Baucus was describing was a botched implementation because not enough was being done to make things go smoothly.
It wasn’t a description of the law itself but of what might occur if the government did not devote enough resources to making it work. Sebelius’ response was not surprising to those who were paying attention. She said that she was “incredibly disappointed” that all her requests for resources were being denied by Republicans.
That was then. Today, implementation has arrived, and if it’s not a train wreck, then it’s certainly close. The administration is still under fire because people cannot get the insurance they want through the exchanges. But while I will continue to point out the problems with implementation and fault the administration for mistakes they’ve made, how does one ignore the apparent hypocrisy from many politicians who are now “outraged” about the very problems they’ve helped to create.
Republicans refused to appropriate money needed to implement Obamacare. When Sebelius tried to shift money from other areas to help do what needed to be done, she was attacked by Senate Republicans. At every step, Republicans fought measures to get money to put towards implementation.
Is it really a surprise then that implementation hasn’t gone smoothly?
Federal legislators aren’t the only ones to blame. Let’s remember that original versions of the bill called for one big national exchange. This would have been much easier to implement. But conservatives declared that insurance should be left to the states and kept out of the hands of the federal government. So as a compromise (yes, those did occur), exchanges were made state-based instead of national.
As a precaution, the law stipulated that if states failed to do their duty and enact exchanges, the federal government would step in and pick up the slack. This was to prevent obstructionism from killing the law. Surprisingly, it was many of the same conservative states that demanded local control that refused to implement state-based exchanges, leaving the federal government to do it for them.
That made implementation much harder.
There have been books, webinars and meetings explaining how to sabotage the implementation of Obamacare. There have been campaigns trying to persuade young adults not to use the exchanges. It is, therefore, somewhat ironic that many of the same people who have been part of all of this obstructionism seem so “upset” by the fact that people can’t easily use the exchanges.
For goodness sake, the government was shut down just a few weeks ago because some of the same people who are now bemoaning poorly functioning websites were determined to see that not one dime went to Obamacare.
Lest you think I’m defending this month’s rollout, I encourage you to review my last article here. I still maintain that the administration has had a failure in management in overseeing and reporting on progress towards October 1. But I’m also sympathetic that they’ve had a hard job to do. I would like to see this go better. I’d like to see millions more get insurance. I’d like to see the law of the land function as well as it can, and if it doesn’t, I’d like to see Congress continue to amend it to make it work better. I’d like a better health care system.
What I cannot ignore, however, are the many people who actively worked to see implementation fail now get the vapors over its poor start. The truth is, they got what they wanted. A victory lap is somewhat warranted, not concern-trolling.
If, on the other hand, their concern is real, then I’m sure the administration would welcome their help in making things right.
By: Aaron Carroll, Director, Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research, Indiana University School of Medicine, Special to CNN, October 28, 2013
“Purposeful Lying”: Time To Investigate Those Health Insurance Company Letters
As a follow-up to this post, I want to talk about the thing that spawns some of these phony Obamacare victim stories: the letters that insurers are sending to people in the individual market. People all over the country are getting these letters, which say “We’re cancelling your current policy because of the new health-care law. Here’s another policy you can get for much more money.” Reporters are doing stories about these people and their terrifying letters without bothering to check what other insurance options are available to them.
There’s something fishy going on here, not just from the reporters, but from the insurance companies. It’s time somebody did a detailed investigation of these letters to find out just what they’re telling their customers. Because they could have told them, “As a result of the new health-care law, your plan, StrawberryCare, has now been changed to include more benefits. The premium is going up, just as your premium has gone up every year since forever.” But instead, they’re just eliminating those plans entirely and offering people new plans. If the woman I discussed from that NBC story is any indication, what the insurance company is offering is something much more expensive, even though they might have something cheaper available. They may be taking the opportunity to try to shunt people into higher-priced plans. It’s as though you get a letter from your car dealer saying, “That 2010 Toyota Corolla you’re leasing has been recalled. We can supply you with a Toyota Avalon for twice the price.” They’re not telling you that you can also get a 2013 Toyota Corolla for something like what you’re paying now.
I’m not sure that’s what’s happening, and it may be happening only with some insurers but not others. But with hundreds of thousands of these letters going out and frightening people into thinking they have no choice but to sign up for a much more expensive plan, it’s definitely something someone should look into. Like, say, giant news organizations with lots of money and resources.
Now, it should be said that when President Obama said during the debate over the Affordable Care Act in Congress that if you like your health coverage you can keep it, he was only half right. The reason he repeated it so many times was that he and his advisors firmly believed that one of the main reasons Bill Clinton’s health-care reform failed was that it changed things too much for too many, and people fear change. In Clinton’s plan, pretty much everybody not on Medicare or Medicaid would have had to go into a new insurance plan. That those plans might be better than what they had didn’t matter; the idea frightened people. So the Obama administration took pains to emphasize that the government would not require anyone to change their insurance. That didn’t mean they were guaranteeing that no insurance company would ever make changes to anyone’s plan, because insurance companies do that all the time. But the law wouldn’t mandate that, say, you leave Aetna and join Blue Cross.
The more complex reality is that because the law imposed new requirements on insurers for what they have to cover and what they can charge, the insurers were inevitably going to make changes to their existing plans in response. And yes, that means many people’s insurance is going to change. In most cases it will change for the better, and the effect all this is going to have on premiums is yet to be seen. But it sure looks like insurance companies are trying to make sure anyone who’s displeased aims their ire at the government, and if they can get people to buy a more expensive product along the way, they’ll be happy to do that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 29, 2013
“Getting Better Coverage”: Obamacare “Sticker Shock”? What Under-Insured Think They Have Versus What They Actually Have
In a comment on resurgent talk of “sticker shock” for premiums on insurance bought through the Obamacare exchanges, Kevin Drum makes two points that are important to keep in mind. The first is that the number of people likely to see a major increase in net insurance costs–in excess of the subsidies they may qualify for–is not as large as you might think:
This probably doesn’t describe a huge demographic—people who are just barely above the subsidy threshold and currently have individual coverage and are young enough to see premium increases—but there’s no question they exist.
Those who do fit into this relatively narrow band of people will typically get better coverage for their additional dollars, but they may not appreciate it just yet. Kevin points to a woman quoted in an L.A. Times article on “sticker shock” as illustrative:
“Fullerton resident Jennifer Harris thought she had a great deal, paying $98 a month for an individual plan through Health Net Inc. She got a rude surprise this month when the company said it would cancel her policy at the end of this year. Her current plan does not conform with the new federal rules, which require more generous levels of coverage.
“Now Harris, a self-employed lawyer, must shop for replacement insurance. The cheapest plan she has found will cost her $238 a month. She and her husband don’t qualify for federal premium subsidies because they earn too much money, about $80,000 a year combined.
“‘It doesn’t seem right to make the middle class pay so much more in order to give health insurance to everybody else,” said Harris, who is three months pregnant. “This increase is simply not affordable.'”
I don’t know for sure how this plays out in the real world, but I’d be shocked if Harris’s $98 plan covers expenses related to pregnancy. If it does, the out-of-pocket max is probably astronomical. A bronze plan under Obamacare is still no picnic, but I’m willing to bet it covers a whole lot more of Harris’s maternity expenses than her current plan. In other words, there’s a pretty good chance that she’ll make up for her extra annual expense of $1,700 by sometime around, oh, April or so.
And even if she doesn’t, she now has insurance that will protect her from unforeseen medical conditions and out-of-pocket expenses even if they don’t occur. It is sometimes forgotten that every kind of insurance involves the potential of “excessive” premiums if you get lucky and don’t need it.
But more basically, the politics of Obamacare will indeed be affected by the attitudes of people who do or don’t view their enhanced insurance as having value, and do or don’t think they’re just shelling out dollars to “give health insurance to everybody else.”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 28, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 