“Can A Cure Be Found For Obamacare Brain Meltdown Syndrome?”: Putting The Lie To The Anti-ACA Talking Heads
As we launch into 2014, I must regrettably report that we have yet to develop a vaccine or cure that can assist those who have contracted the insidious Obamacare Brain Meltdown Syndrome (OBMS)–a tragic illness affecting roughly 50 percent of Americans who now lack all ability to review ACA data with any measure of balance and reason.
While we await the critically needed medical advances and discoveries that can bring relief to the afflicted—assuming such a program has not been ground into the dust as a result of sequestration cuts to medical research—we continue in the attempt to bring actual data to the attention of the long-suffering, in the hope that the rumors, half-truths and outright lies can be retired through the presentation of the facts.
One of the more pervasive rumors, half-truths and outright lies making the rounds these days is the meme that more people have lost their insurance as a result of Obamacare than have gained coverage thanks to healthcare reform.
As the story goes, some five million people have had their insurance cancelled because of the ACA while the numbers of those who have gained coverage currently stands somewhere around two million—and we don’t even know how many of those who have enlisted will actually bother to pay the first premium for their newly acquired insurance policy. Based on these numbers the math is simple—the law has hurt three million more than it has helped.
This line of reasoning makes for a terrific story as it is a tale both easy to understand and clear in its result.
The problem is, the story is clearly not true.
A report out this week from the Minority Staff of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce reveals that 99.8 percent of those who received an insurance cancellation can now either re-up their existing plans for another year, as a result of the changes made in recent weeks, or, alternatively, obtain a catastrophic coverage policy. As a result of these changes, the report finds that about 10,000 Americans —representing 0.2 percent of those who received cancellation notices—will actually find themselves without access to an affordable health insurance alternative.
That said, I recognize that the report was issued by the Democrats on the committee— making the study something less than the best possible authority for those suffering from OBMS. I also recognize that 10,000 people lacking the access they once had to affordable health care insurance are 10,000 people too many.
Accordingly, let’s just pretend that the Minority staff report never happened and that we are still working off the suggestion that five million people really have been left fully exposed as the metric that should be used for comparison.
With that as our comparison point, surely the argument suggesting that Obamacare has hurt more Americans than it has helped can be justified, yes?
Actually, no.
In fact, based on the hard data, we are now able to see that at least 9.4 million Americans have health insurance coverage as a result of Obamacare.
Let’s go to the numbers—
We know that approximately 2.1 million people have purchased a health insurance policy from either a health care exchange operated by the federal government or from one of the 14 state operated exchanges. Indeed, even the harshest ACA critics appear to have accepted this number—although they insist on noting that, somehow, many of these people went to the trouble of buying a policy but will refuse to pay the first premium by January 10th, as required.
While I don’t doubt that there will be a few purchasers who will fall into this category, it would require the most extreme case of Obamacare Brain Meltdown Syndrome to imagine that the number of those who went to the bother of signing up—but won’t pay up—will be statistically significant.
Next, I remind you that, as of November 30, 2013, 3.9 million new participants were enrolled in Medicaid as a result of the program’s expansion. These are 3.9 million who were not previously qualified. As reported by Michael Hiltzik over at the Los Angeles Times and Josh Marshall—using the data that has been compiled by Charles Gaba who has been carefully tracking the Obamacare math (I strongly recommend you review Mr. Gaba’s spreadsheet) since the beginning—the number of Medicaid sign-ups through the end of the year have now risen to a total of 4.3 million.
As you add up these numbers, you quickly arrive at 6.4 million Americans who now have insurance as a direct result of the ACA—a number, while in excess of the 5 million allegedly left without insurance coverage as a result of Obamacare, thereby disproving the meme—does not equal the 9.4 million Americans being served by Obamacare that I suggested earlier.
Clearly, this can only be the math of an Obama loving liberal, yes?
Or might you be missing something? Might that something be the roughly 3 million young Americans who have yet to reach 26 years of age who remain on their parents’ health insurance policy thanks to Obamacare?
Because this provision has been in effect for a few years, those afflicted with OBMS have managed to simply erase this number from their minds as if these young Americans either do not exist or simply do not “count”.
They very much do count as, prior to the ACA, these were precisely the people who were among the least likely to purchase a health insurance policy yet, thanks to the law, now have healthcare insurance. They are also the people who add the badly needed healthy participants to the insurance pools.
Add these people to the mix and you reach 9.4 million Americans with insurance as a result of the Affordable Care Act.
What’s more, the number is probably higher given that that we are not taking into consideration those who are purchasing their individual Obamacare policies off the exchanges by going to their insurance agent or directly to their insurance company. These are the folks who are not qualified for subsidies and, therefore, have no reason to deal directly with the exchange if they choose not to do so.
None of this data, by the way, proves that Obamacare is necessarily working. As I have long noted, success is far more tied to the composition of the insurance pools resulting from the ACA (the ratio of healthy to unhealthy) than it is tied to the raw number of sign-ups. This is data we do not yet have.
What this data does prove is that there are clearly far more Americans benefitting from Obamacare than those who are claimed to be losing coverage as a result of the law. The data also highlights that those with Obamacare Brain Meltdown Syndrome must fight through the fog that has descended upon them and try to face up to the actual numbers as, only then, can we continue a rational conversation about this law.
Until we find that cure for OBMS, we can only hope that those afflicted with this tragic illness will turn to that famous old saw that instructs, “then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, January 4, 2014
“The Scourge Of The Wingnut Hole”: Coverage Totals Would Be Far Greater If Not For “Red” States Refusing Medicaid Expansion
We have a reasonably good sense of how many Americans have enrolled in the health care system in recent months, signing up for coverage made available through the Affordable Care Act. For a more ambitious tally, Josh Marshall includes exchanges, Medicaid, young adults staying on their family plans, and those who were able to bypass exchanges to buy ACA-compliant policies directly from insurance carriers, for a grand total of about 10 million.
But every time these numbers are culled, it’s worth remembering that the coverage totals would be far greater were it not for “red” states refusing to accept Medicaid expansion.
The original plan, you’ll recall, was to simply mandate the greater access. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, said states must have a choice as to whether or not to accept the good deal. Most Republican-led states, naturally, rejected the policy, leaving millions behind for no particular reason.
But how many million? The Associated Press published a report this week with a striking figure.
About 5 million people will be without health care next year that they would have gotten simply if they lived somewhere else in America.
They make up a coverage gap in President Barack Obama’s signature health care law created by the domino effects of last year’s Supreme Court ruling and states’ subsequent policy decisions.
This coverage gap clearly needs a name. Ed Kilgore started calling it the “wingnut hole” months ago, and it’s certainly a descriptive phrase. Ryan Cooper added the other day:
It’s worth remembering that the federal government will pay 100 percent of the cost of the Medicaid expansion through 2016 and 90 percent of the cost afterward. It could very well work out that refusenik states will not even save money because of additional spending on the uninsured in emergency rooms and elsewhere.
But regardless of the pitiful sums involved, make no mistake: This action is utterly gratuitous.
Quite right. In fact, as we’ve discussed many times, Republicans at the state level who refuse Medicaid expansion generally struggle to explain their position in any kind of coherent way.
What’s more, let’s not forget the irony of the larger context: congressional Republicans spent most of their waking hours complaining about a sliver of the population receiving “cancellation notices” through the Affordable Care Act because of changes to the individual market. Indeed, GOP officials routinely claim this will leave 5 million Americans behind with nothing (a total that appears to have been exaggerated by a factor of 500).
And yet, if their concern were genuine, wouldn’t Republicans necessarily be outraged by these 5 million Americans who are suffering because some red-state policymakers are acting out of petty partisan spite?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 3, 2014
“The Fight Is History, Done, Finito”: The Affordable Care Act Is Here To Stay
Now that the fight over Obamacare is history, perhaps everyone can finally focus on making the program work the way it was designed. Or, preferably, better.
The fight is history, you realize. Done. Finito. Yesterday’s news.
Any existential threat to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) ended with the popping of champagne corks as the new year arrived. That was when an estimated 6 million uninsured Americans received coverage through expanded Medicaid eligibility or the federal and state health insurance exchanges. Obamacare is now a fait accompli; nobody is going to take this coverage away.
There may be more huffing, puffing and symbolic attempts at repeal by Republicans in Congress. There may be continued resistance and sabotage by Republican governors and GOP-controlled state legislatures. But the whole context has changed.
Now, officials in states that refused to participate in Medicaid expansion will have to explain why so many of their constituents — about 5 million nationwide — remain uninsured when they could have qualified for coverage. More than 1 million of these needlessly uninsured Americans live in Texas, which is targeted by Democrats as ripe for inroads because of its rapidly changing demographics. Will Gov. Rick Perry (R) be forced to reconsider his Obamacare rejectionism? Or will he ultimately be remembered for speeding the state’s transition from red to blue?
Performance of the federal insurance exchange Web site, HealthCare.gov, will continue to improve, if only because the initial flood of applicants is bound to subside. Meanwhile, insurance costs and benefits in states that refused to set up their own exchanges will be compared with those in states that did. There will be questions about how the new law is performing — but no one will be able to pretend it does not exist.
And we will surely hear more stories about individuals taking advantage of the law’s consumer benefits, especially the fact that preexisting conditions can no longer be used to deny coverage. This is life-changing for insurance seekers who suffer from chronic illnesses such as diabetes or who have survived cancer.
Opponents of the law can hardly advocate going back to a system in which those who really need insurance can’t get it. What they can do, and surely will, is make lots of noise by pretending that any problem with anyone’s health insurance is due to the Affordable Care Act. Before Obamacare, millions of Americans had their policies canceled by the insurance companies every year. Millions more had their premiums raised, their coverage reduced or both. Now when these things happen, critics will try to blame the new law.
Increasingly, though, the GOP will sound foolish and irrelevant if it continues to put all of its eggs in the “repeal and replace” basket. The problem is that the Affordable Care Act is a set of free-market reforms based on ideas developed in conservative think tanks. Republicans who want to repeal Obamacare would have to replace it with something suspiciously similar.
If Republicans in Congress would work with the administration to make technical corrections to the Affordable Care Act, they could claim a victory of sorts: Obama gave you this mess and we cleaned it up. But after demonizing the program — and the president — for so long, the party has painted itself into a corner.
Note to the GOP: “We refuse, under any circumstances, to make the law work better for the citizens we represent” is perhaps not the ideal campaign slogan for the midterm election.
The real problem with the ACA, and let’s be honest, is that it doesn’t go far enough. The decision to work within the existing framework of private, for-profit insurance companies meant building a tremendously complicated new system that still doesn’t quite get the job done: Even if all the states were fully participating, only about 30 million of the 48 million uninsured would be covered.
But Obamacare does establish the principle that health care is a right, not a privilege — and that this is true not just for children, the elderly and the poor but for all Americans.
Throughout the nation’s history, it has taken long, hard work to win universal recognition of what we consider our basic rights. Perhaps future legislation will expand and streamline the ACA reforms until everyone is covered. Or perhaps we’ll move toward a single-payer system, possibly by expanding Medicare and Medicaid until they meet in the middle.
I don’t know how we’ll get there, but we’re now on the road to universal health care. There’s no turning back.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 3, 2014
“Republicans Could Care Less”: Millions More Denied Coverage By GOP Refusal To Expand Medicaid Than Obamacare Cancelations
For weeks as HealthCare.gov foundered, Republicans focused on President Barack Obama’s claim that “if you like your plan, you can keep it,” which was dubbed PolitiFact‘s Lie of the Year. Republicans purposely neglected to differentiate between the number of Americans whose plans were being canceled and those whose entire coverage was lost.
Now it turns out that the millions of notices that were sent out will result in just thousands of Americans losing access to affordable insurance.
A new report, however, from the minority staff of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce shows that only 0.2 percent of the approximately five million cancelations – the number often referenced by the Republican Party – will lose coverage because of Obamacare, and be unable to regain it.
In other words, only 10,000 people will lose complete coverage.
The report assumes that 4.7 million people will receive cancelation letters about their current plans. It then finds that half of that number will have the option to renew their 2013 plans, due to an administrative fix to the health law. Of the remaining 2.35 million Americans, 1.4 million would be eligible for tax credits through the ACA exchanges or Medicaid coverage, and out of the 950,000 individuals left, according to the report, “fewer than 10,000” people would lack access to an “affordable catastrophic plan.”
As the Washington Post notes, “there’s no doubt that for those 10,000 people, the health care law left them worse off than before.” Still, that number is significantly less than the amount of people who did not have access to any coverage prior to Obamacare.
“This new report shows that people will get the health insurance coverage they need, contrary to the dire predictions of Republicans,” says Democratic representative Henry Waxman (CA). “Millions of American families are already benefitting from the law.”
Ironically, as Republicans fret over the approximate 10,000 people who will lose coverage in 2014, they are to blame for the nearly five million Americans who will not have any health insurance this year because of the GOP’s refusal to expand Medicaid in various states across the country.
Though the Affordable Care Act provides complete funding through 2016 for Medicaid expansion in all states – and 90 percent funding in the following years – 25 Republican-controlled states have still refused to expand the program that offers coverage to the poor.
As a result, approximately 4.8 million people will find themselves inside the so-called “coverage gap,” which one report suggests could cost 27,000 Americans their lives in 2014.
By: Elissa Gomez, The National Memo, January 1, 2014
“Stunning New Report Undermines Central GOP Obamacare Claim”: The Arguments Made By Republicans Simply Lack A Firm Factual Basis
A crucial GOP line of attack against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is that millions of people will supposedly lose coverage thanks to shifting requirements on the health insurance exchanges — a flagrant violation of President Obama’s infamous “if you like your plan, you can keep it” proclamation. The truth has always been more complicated, of course. Republicans are constantly blurring the line between people who lose a plan and people who lose coverage. That is, many people might lose a particular insurance plan but immediately be presented with other options.
Now, a new report from the minority staff of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has destroyed the foundation of that particular GOP claim. It projects that only 10,000 people will lose coverage because of the ACA and be unable to regain it — or in other words, 0.2 percent of the oft-cited 5 million cancellations statistic.
The report starts with an assumption that 4.7 million will receive cancellation notices about their 2013 plan. (Notably it doesn’t endorse that figure, just takes it on for the sake of argument.) But of those, who will get a new plan?
- According to the report, half of the 4.7 million will have the option to renew their 2013 plans, thanks to an administrative fix this year.
- Of the remaining 2.35 million individuals, 1.4 million should be eligible for tax credits through the marketplaces or Medicaid, according to the report.
- Of the remaining 950,000 individuals, fewer than 10,000 people in 18 counties will lack access to an affordable catastrophic plan.
“This new report shows that people will get the health insurance coverage they need, contrary to the dire predictions of Republicans,” said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the ranking committee member. “Millions of American families are already benefiting from the law.”
The report is somewhat speculative, of course, since there is no central repository of data on the individual health insurance market. But the methods are clear, and the onus is now on Republicans to explain why it isn’t true.
As we’ve noted, Republicans have had an awful hard time finding people who completely lost coverage because of the ACA. (Think of the man who starred in Americans for Prosperity ads last week and whose story still hasn’t been fully explained.) Perhaps it’s because there just aren’t that many of them.
Of course, there’s no doubt that for those 10,000 people, the health-care law left them worse off than before. And by no means is the rocky political ride over for Democrats — back-end problems still present a serious threat to implementation. But as is sadly too often the case, the arguments made by Republicans simply lack a firm factual basis — and deserve much more scrutiny that they’ve received in many sectors of the mainstream press.
By: George Zornick, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, December 31, 2013
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