“It’s Not All Doom And Gloom On Obamacare”: Just A Matter Of Time Before Republicans Start Criticizing Something New
Condemning the Affordable Care Act and its problem-plagued rollout is easy, but when the White House insists things are getting better, that’s not just spin. Brett Norman reports this afternoon:
Tech surge czar Jeff Zients said that HealthCare.gov will be able to handle 50,000 users at a time by the end of this month – up from 25,000 now, thanks to hardware additions and software additions the team is putting in this weekend and next week.
He said that will enable the site to handle 800,000 people a day – “a conservative estimate,” he said in a conference call with reporters.
It’s important to note that handling increased traffic, while clearly important, is not the resolution to all of the website’s troubles. Accurately connecting consumers to insurers and providing reliable data on subsidies is just as important, and to date, these are areas with which healthcare.gov has also struggled.
That said, Zients told reporters all of these issues are being addressed, and the increased website capacity should – should – keep the larger enrollment system on track towards its 2014 goals.
Indeed, even before Zients’s media briefing, Sarah Kliff highlighted reports of a “November surge” in enrollments.
By the end of October, the federal government had counted 106,000 people enrolled into private coverage through the new health insurance marketplaces, a small percentage of the projected half-million sign-ups.
By mid-November, though, with the 14 state-based marketplaces reporting fresh data, that number had just about doubled to more than 200,000…. State officials say they are seeing an uptick in sign-ups this month. California, which has had about 80,000 sign-ups, is now reporting about 2,000 enrollments per day. New York and Washington reported double-digit enrollment numbers as of this week.
Kaiser Family Foundation President Drew Altman told Kliff, “It’s not all doom and gloom.”
Reports from several states where officials want the system to work are reporting impressive numbers for the first half of November. California, in particular, appears to be leading the way – and given that the Golden State is the nation’s largest, that’s good news for the overall totals.
The law’s proponents shouldn’t be Pollyannaish about any of this, and we have not reached the point at which the system can fairly be described as “adequate.” It’s just not there yet.
But the administration can credibly say they’re putting out the fires; they’re making steady progress; and they’ve moving closer to their goals. The panic is subsiding. The recent chatter that “Obamacare” is going to destroy the president, Democrats, the health care system, and the idea of progressive governance on a conceptual level hasn’t quite gone away, but it’s looking increasingly silly.
And while I’m reluctant to look too far ahead with so much uncertainty still surrounding the system’s functionality, I can’t help but wonder about what the political world’s conversation will look like if, in the near future, healthcare.gov is working as it should, enrollment is strong, costs are contained, millions are gaining coverage they previously lacked, and millions more enjoy health care security that previously didn’t exist.
I have a very strong hunch we would, under this scenario, see very few headlines that say “Obama fixes problems, brings health care security to nation.” Rather, folks would just move past the hysteria of the last month, start criticizing something new, and Republicans could return to saying, “Now, about Benghazi….”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 22, 2013
“What A Shocker”: Obamacare Is Working Best In States That Aren’t Trying To Sabotage It
The disappointing Affordable Care Act (ACA) numbers the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released on Wednesday revealed that the law is working best in the states that are — shockingly — implementing the law as it was designed.
Of the 106,185 people who have completed an application for health insurance, nearly 75 percent came from 14 states and the District of Columbia that both set up their own exchanges and expanded Medicaid.
Unsurprisingly, California and New York combined for the bulk of the enrollments, 51,769. But the most promising news from the Golden State wasn’t even included in this report.
Peter Lee, the executive director of Covered California, reported Wednesday that as of Tuesday, 60,000 Californians had signed up for insurance. Signups have increased to a rate of almost 2,500 enrollees per day in November. At that pace, the state could be expected to enroll 402,500 people by March 31 but Lee says that he expects to hit a goal of 500,000 to 700,000 people by then, which means he expects the pace to pick up by at least 640 people a day to over 3,000 enrollees.
Lee’s optimism is linked to more than the enrollment numbers. It seems California’s consumers are happy with the state’s website.
“Overall, nearly 70 percent of consumers who completed the survey found the application process easy to complete, and 88 percent of customers visiting CoveredCA.com found the information needed to choose a health plan that was right for them,” Covered California reported in a statement released Wednesday, giving Republicans another reason to hope that California isn’t a bellwether for the rest of the nation.
Red Kentucky is the only state in the union that voted for Mitt Romney and set up its own exchange, thanks in large part to Democratic governor Steve Beshear. The state’s site signed up a total of 32,485 Kentuckians, with 5,586 enrolling in private plans, in its first month of operation. This reduces the state’s uninsured population —estimated at 640,000 — by just over 5 percent.
Of course, it’s not hard for the states to look impressive next to the federal number that is anemically low. And not all the states that set up their own exchanges have succeeded. Oregon’s marketplace is so flawed, they didn’t even have numbers to report for October.
Implementing health care reform was never supposed to be easy.
“It’s like fixing an airplane while it’s in flight, if there is something terribly wrong with the plane,” said Timothy Jost, a health law professor at Washington & Lee University and an expert on the ACA.
And that’s without the unprecedented campaign of sabotage the right has waged. But the obstruction that has threatened the law most has been the combination of a mostly unforced error — Healthcare.gov’s disastrous launch — and Republican states refusing to launch their own exchanges. While the right is thrilled they’ve assisted in this catastrophe, it was the ancillary result of another sabotage strategy that was either masterminded or enthusiastically encouraged by Michael Cannon.
Who?
“Cannon is a health care policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute,” reports The New Republic‘s Alec MacGillis. “He is also an avowed opponent of the Affordable Care Act, and has for several years now been embarked on a legal crusade that, while a ways from triumphing, may have inadvertently played an outsized role in suppressing the number of states setting up their own exchanges, thereby greatly confounding the law’s implementation.”
Cannon believes he has found a loophole in the law that could end up undoing it in any state that didn’t set up an exchange. With that in mind, he helped successfully convince every state with a Republican governor to reject their right to build their own site.
By opting out, states made the success of the president’s signature legislative accomplishment dependent on one single portal that needed to reach its tentacles into three dozen complex insurance markets at one time.
That — it turns out — is a lot more complicated than the administration expected it to be.
The best state numbers show that the ACA can be implemented with participation rates that are in at least in the same ballpark as Massachusetts’ Romneycare or Medicare Part D.
And there were some other numbers in the HHS report that bode well for reform.
HHS reports that 26,876,527 different users accessed the site and 3,158,436 calls were made to its center. A total of 1,477,853 applications processed to the point of where eligibility could be determined. This shows that the demand for what the marketplace is offering definitely exists.
Clearly and undeniably, the fate of the law now depends most on one thing.
“The October report is clearly disappointing,” Timothy Jost wrote in his blog. ”But the really important reports will be the December report, which will tell us how many will be enrolled for coverage that begins in January, and the March report, which will tell us how many will be enrolled for 2014. If healthcare.gov is up and running by December, there is every reason to believe those reports will be much more promising.”
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, November 14, 2013
“Bringing Actual Facts To Bear”: The Truth Is, Obamacare Is Working
The Obamacare website might still not be working, but journalists are. All across the country, as Republicans try to highlight tragic tales of Americans losing their current health insurance and allegedly stuck with more expensive options, journalists are coming to the rescue. In case after case, journalists investigated these stories and called the policyholders and combed the insurance exchange websites to bring actual facts to bear in our public debate about Obamacare.
Here are just some of the mythical stories journalists have helped dispel — and the lessons we can learn from them about the reality of the Affordable Care Act:
Deborah Cavallaro was making the rounds on television complaining about how her current insurance plan was canceled under Obamacare. So Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik talked to her. Her current plan cost $293 per month but had a deductible of $5,000 per year and out-of-pocket annual limits of $8,500. Also, the current plan covered just two doctor’s visits per year.
But in the California insurance exchange, which Hiltzik helped Cavallaro check, she could get a “silver” plan for $333 per month — $40 more than she’s currently paying. But the new plan has only a $2,000 deductible and maximum out-of-pocket expenses at $6,350. Plus all doctor visits would be covered. Hiltzik writes, “Is that better than her current plan? Yes, by a mile.”
Dianne Barrette also popped up on television on a CBS news report in which she lamented that her $54-per-month insurance plan had been canceled under Obamacare. But Nancy Metcalf at Consumer Reports investigated Barrette’s story and found that her current policy was a “textbook example of a junk plan that isn’t real health insurance at all.” According to Metcalf, if Barrette had ever tried to use her insurance for anything more than a sporadic doctor’s visit, “she would have ended up with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt.”
The plan, for instance, only pays for hospitalization in cases of “complications of pregnancy.” Instead, Metcalf found that Barrette could get a “silver” plan in the state insurance exchange for $165 per month that would actually cover Barrette in the case of any sort of serious or even moderate illness. Which is the very definition of insurance, isn’t it?
Edie Littlefield Sundby, a stage-four gallbladder cancer survivor, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal blaming the Affordable Care Act for her canceled insurance policy. In her essay, Littlefield wrote that because of Obamacare, “I have been forced to give up a world-class health plan.” But, according to Igor Volsky of Think Progress, Sundby’s insurer, United Healthcare, “dropped her coverage because they’ve struggled to compete in California’s individual health care market for years and didn’t want to pay for sicker patients like Sundby.”
Earlier this year, United, which has publicly supported the Affordable Care Act, announced that it would pull out of the individual market in California. A company representative said it withdrew because its individual plans have never had a huge presence in the state. According to United, and in compliance with state law, the company won’t be able to re-enter the California individual market until 2017.
By then though, competitors will get stuck with sicker patients like Sundby signing up in the first wave of Obamacare. This means that companies like United can cover cheaper patients if it decides to go back to the California individual insurance market.
According to a report by Dylan Scott at Talking Points Memo, a Seattle woman named Donna received a cancellation letter from her insurance company regarding her current plan. The letter steered Donna and her family into a more expensive option and said, “If you’re happy with this plan, do nothing.” The letter made no mention of the Washington State insurance exchange, where Donna could find plenty of other more affordable choices, because the company wanted a convenient excuse to jack up Donna’s rates.
Had Donna “done nothing,” she would have ended up spending about $1,000 more per month on insurance than the cost of insurance she ultimately chose through the Obamacare exchange. In fact, the practice of trying to mislead customers has become so widespread that Washington state regulators issued a consumer alert to customers.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Republicans who have been desperate from the very beginning to destroy Obamacare at any cost, regardless of facts or the urgent health care crisis facing America, will continue to dig up stories of people supposedly harmed by the law. And journalists will hopefully continue to investigate these allegations, helping us all sort fact from fiction.
In the meantime, there’s a side benefit to all this: If you are one of the small fraction of Americans who currently relies on the individual insurance market and has seen your current policy canceled, call a journalist — like one of those in the stories above. Reporters all across the country are hungry for real-life stories about how Obamacare is working.
Plus, most reporters have access to high-speed Internet. If you can’t get through to the Obamacare exchange site, there’s a journalist standing by willing to help you navigate the exchange options and explore your pros and cons in terms of costs and benefits. The website might still be glitchy, but old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting is as reliable as ever.
By: Sally Kohn, Special To CNN, November 8, 2013
“No Unchecked Corporate Power”: If Republicans Love Competition, Why Do They Still Hate Obamacare?
When asked what makes the world work, any self-respecting right-wing Republican knows the politically correct answer: competition! (With at least one exclamation point.) It is the paramount principle and universal solvent perennially touted by the right to cure whatever ails us – in the abstract.
What they don’t seem to like so much, in reality, is the competitive impact of the Affordable Care Act, which is forcing health insurance companies into a contested marketplace – and seems to be driving down rates, state by state. The latest data arrived this week from New York, where insurance regulators announced that the new rates approved for 2014 will be 50 percent lower, on average, than current rates.
That stunning report follows similar news from California, where rates may drop by as much as 29 percent, as well as Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and several other states where the early indications show rates declining. Based on data compiled from 10 states and the District of Columbia, the Department of Health and Human Services says that 2014 premiums for mid-range (or “silver”) health care plans in those states will be nearly 20 percent lower on average than its own earlier estimates.
The reason is simple, as anyone familiar with the American health care marketplace knows. Most states until now have had no meaningful competition among insurance companies — and certainly nothing like the health insurance “exchanges” created by Obamacare to guide consumer choices.
In states that have actively promoted the exchanges, real competition is arising thanks to a marketplace that allows consumers to examine and understand choices, plans, and prices with ease. “That’s a very different dynamic for these companies, and it’s prodding them to be more aggressive and competitive in their pricing,” explains Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reform.
For those of us who preferred (and still favor) a single-payer system providing Medicare to everyone, the compromises of Obamacare always provoked doubts about efficiency and fairness. Many liberals supported the Affordable Care Act reluctantly as a bad deal that was acceptable only in lieu of no deal.
But why do self-styled conservatives continue to hate health care reform with such ferocity? They may not care that it is truly “pro-life” and “pro-family,” with the clear promise of saving thousands of lives annually among families that were previously uninsured. Yet they should surely appreciate a statute that promotes competition where there was none, improving services and reducing prices through freer enterprise.
Solving that conundrum exposes one of the ugly little secrets of the Republican right today – and one of many reasons why that movement no longer merits the honorable title of “conservative.” For what we can now observe in practice is that the Republicans perversely prefer a corporate marketplace without competition over a marketplace with competition overseen by government. While European conservatives have long accepted the need for strictly regulated markets, especially in health care, their American counterparts would rather allow corporate power to run unchecked at whatever cost.
It is an ideological preference that damages public health, ruins finances both public and private, and actually kills people every day, but it also swells corporate profits – which seems to be the primary value cherished by Obamacare’s partisan opponents. Such destructive irrationality is what passes for “conservatism” in our time.
So the congressional Republicans persistently attack and undermine reform, as they did by passing a resolution this week to delay the law’s individual mandate. Rather than do anything productive, they proceeded with that meaningless action. And they did so despite warnings from the insurance industry that a delay would only increase rates for everyone.
Supporters of the Affordable Care Act have long reassured each other that the law would gain popularity someday. But if present trends continue, the public may come to realize as early as next year that the benefits of Obamacare greatly outweigh the flaws – and that the law’s opponents offer nothing to most Americans except higher rates, less coverage, and a sicker, sadder, harder life.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, July 19, 2013
“Vulnerable And Voiceless”: Forced Sterilization Is Still Happening, Is Still Repugnant
As Christina Cordero remembers it, the doctor would not take no for an answer.
“As soon as he found out that I had five kids, he suggested that I look into getting it done. The closer I got to my due date, the more he talked about it. He made me feel like a bad mother if I didn’t do it.”
The “it” is tubal ligation. He wanted to sterilize her.
Cordero, who is now 34, was serving time for auto theft at a California prison. She finally said yes, a decision she regrets seven years later. “I wish I would have never had it done.”
We are indebted to the Center for Investigative Reporting, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated content provider, for the preceding account. It is contained in a troubling report, released last week, documenting that the California prison system sterilized as many as 250 women from 1997 to 2010, in violation of state rules. Women who had the procedure say they were pressured to do so.
The state reportedly paid doctors $147,460 for this service. Dr. James Heinrich, who operated on Cordero, says it’s a bargain. “Over a 10-year period,” he told CIR, “that isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children — as they procreated more.”
Maybe you think that makes perfect sense. Indeed, it’s not hard to imagine someone saying the same thing on Fox “News” next week. After all, character assassination of the less fortunate has become commonplace. A certain wealthy presidential candidate famously described them as the 47 percent of us who are irredeemable.
But maybe you know enough of history to hear the awful parallel embedded in Heinrich’s calculation. You see, this is not the first time Americans have had the bright idea of breeding out undesirables. Indeed, laws mandating forced sterilization were all the rage in America in the early 20th century. Even the Nazis were impressed. They modeled their statutes on ours.
The idea was to keep the nation’s gene pool from being polluted — and its economy burdened — by the “feeble-minded,” the habitually criminal and by families that produced generations of prostitution, promiscuity, alcoholism, poverty or disability. Some sought to do this through immigration restrictions designed to bar the racially inferior, others argued for killing mentally and physically defective children and still others favored forced sterilization.
The Supreme Court sanctioned the latter in a 1927 ruling against Carrie Buck. She was a “feeble-minded” 17-year-old daughter of a “feeble-minded” mother and an unwed mother herself. The court never met her. It relied on the testimony of an “expert,” Dr. Harry Hamilton Laughlin, who himself never met her.
Buck was, in fact, a Virginia girl of normal intelligence who had been raped. But Laughlin, after reviewing test results, claimed that she was typical of the “shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” The court approved her sterilization 8-1.
“It is better for the world,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” That ruling has never been overturned.
It is not such a prodigious leap from Holmes to Heinrich, who says women who claim he pressured them to be sterilized just “want to stay on the state’s dole.” Or to Michelle Malkin, who calls the poor “takers,” or Ann Coulter, who calls them “animals.” We have traveled far, only to wind up in this familiar place where the vulnerable and voiceless, the ones most deserving of our compassion, are regarded instead as inferiors and allowed to be victimized.
It is not happening again.
It is happening still.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, July 15, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 