“Purposeful Republican Misrepresentation”: Read This Before You Believe The Obamacare Premium Spike Hysteria
While some states are reporting lower than expected health care premiums in the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act, a growing number of Republican-controlled states — like South Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Florida and Georgia — are garnering screaming headlines about huge premium spikes under the law.
Calculating premium rates is a complicated and tedious task that will vary greatly among states and is open to interpretation and manipulation by both supporters and opponents of President Obama’s health care law. Generalities are particularly hard to draw, as the law will impact Americans differently: the new regulations will lead some younger people to may pay more than they’re contributing now, but will save older and sicker people hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a month.
Still, since Republicans are politically motivated to portray the proposed premium increases in a negative light and the media is far more interested in sensational claims about Obamacare failing, coverage of the new rates often leads readers with the mistaken perception that the law is coming off the tracks. Below is a short guide that will help you identify if someone is misrepresenting how much premiums will increase under Obamacare:
1. Do the premiums account for subsidies?
Most articles about premiums for health insurance in the exchanges relegate information about the Affordable Care Act’s tax credit subsidies to the lower two thirds of the piece, thus presenting the top rates as the actual amount families and individuals will be required to pay.
In reality, the number of applicants who are eligible for sliding-scale tax credits will vary — the credits are available to people making less than four times the poverty line — but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that out of the 7 million Americans expected to enroll in coverage in 2014, 6 million will be eligible for subsidies. Those with incomes up to 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Line (FPL) will also see reduced the out-of-pocket limits.
Maryland officials, for instance, project that three-fourths of enrollees will receive assistance. In 2014, the average subsidy will be $5,510 and will increase in the years ahead.
2. What is the state comparing the new premiums to and does it break down the increases by the available levels of coverage?
While states like New York or California have already enacted strict regulations that mirror many of the new rules in the Affordable Care Act, others (like Indiana or South Carolina) allow insurers to sell skimpy bare-bones high deductible plans that provide little actual coverage.
Comparing the comprehensive plans that will be available in the exchanges (and the individual market) to the existing coverage is like likening a Lexus to a bicycle — yes, the car is more expensive, but it is in a whole different category of transportation. Under the law, all new insurance plans have to offer essential health benefits like prescription drug and mental health services.
3. Are cheaper coverage options mentioned?
Last month, state officials in Indiana announced that premiums for individual policies would be 72 percent higher than the premiums people currently play. But a closer look at the data revealed that the state wasn’t issuing actual premiums, but calculations for “allowed cost” or “the cost of insurance before calculating how much individuals would pay out-of-pocket, because of co-payments and deductibles.” The actual premiums turned out to be much lower.
What’s more, the numbers were averages of all plans in the exchange — from bronze plans that cover 60 percent of health care costs to platinum plans, which pay for 90 percent — and were not representations of the prices actual families will pay. Past experience in Massachusetts shows that consumers are very price conscious and will gravitate towards the cheaper bronze or silver plans. (In Massachusetts, 84 percent enrolled in bronze or silver policies.)
A catastrophic plan will also be available to those up to age 30 in the individual market. In Nevada, this coverage will be available for less than $100.
4. Has the state done all it could to reduce premiums?
Approximately two dozen states allow the state insurance department or commission “the legal power of prior approval, or disapproval, of certain types of rate changes” and under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government has offered grant funding “to help with rate review activities.” States like Maryland — which has some of the strongest rate-setting laws in the country — claims to have used its authority to deny rate increases to reduce the proposed premiums by “more than 50 percent.” Oregon regulators also slashed carriers’ rate requests by as much as 35 percent.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, August 5, 2013
“Political Skullduggery”: Indiana Fudges Truth On Health Exchange Rates To Make Obamacare Look Bad
Sometimes, the political urge simply overwhelms anything resembling common sense and appropriate behavior.
Witness the latest example of political skullduggery playing out in the great State of Indiana where GOP Governor Mike Pence has found it necessary to take extreme liberties with the reporting of the state’s healthcare exchange data—all to justify his anti-Obamacare political positioning.
Anyone paying attention to data projecting what a health insurance policy will likely cost on the newly formed individual policy insurance exchanges could hardly miss the headlines late last week announcing that premiums for health insurance policies stood to rise to an average monthly price of $570—a 72 percent increase over current rates in Indiana.
Of course, if this data is correct, it would be quite a blow to Indiana residents at the hand of the dreaded Obamacare.
At first glance—the only glance the Indiana officials intend for you to see—this is certainly disturbing news. Even those willing to accept the projections and claims made by the President during last week’s health care address—where he referred to the ‘good news’ in California, Oregon, Washington and, particularly, New York—would have to come to the understanding that there may, indeed, be states where the law is going to badly hurt consumers.
Fortunately, there are those whose job it is to dig below the surface of that ‘first glance’ to discover the truth of any situation—and, in this situation, we learn that Indiana has sought to play cute in its efforts to present a grim picture of the healthcare reform law, even when the data reveals otherwise.
You see, while the states that have already released their projections have based their price expectations on what insurance company filings suggest will be the cost of a ‘Silver’ plan (the second least expensive option to be offered on the exchanges), Indiana decided to publish their projections based on a calculation that took all the levels of plans to be offered—ranging from the less expensive Bronze and Silver plan to the most expensive Gold and Platinum plans—and averaged them all together to come up with their projected rates.
As Sy Mukherjee points out, “That’s like saying the average cost of a car in an Indiana dealership is $100,000 because it sells $20,000 Fords, $60,000 BMWs, and $220,000 Lamborghinis — technically true, but highly misleading.”
Exactly.
What possible benefit can there be to taking an average of costs ranging from most expensive to least expensive when we know full well that the overwhelming majority of those living in Indiana—and, for that matter, everywhere else—will purchase the policies in the lower cost ranges?
How do we know this?
We know this because we have the evidence of buying patterns provided by the State of Massachusetts, a state that has been utilizing this system for quite some time now.
As Sarah Kliff at the Washington Post reports—
“In Massachusetts, 8 percent of enrollees bought a gold plan. Eighty-four percent chose bronze or silver. At least one carrier in Indiana seems to agree with this distribution. In state rate filings, Physicians Health Plan of Indiana estimates that 45 percent of its enrollees will pick bronze and 38 percent take up silver. It is expected that the average mix of Individual Market will be more toward less rich benefit plans and credit should be given for the associated reduction in induced utilization,” the company wrote in its filing. In other words, the average plan cost isn’t a great estimation of what the average person will pay.”
Ms. Kliff also did a little digging to discover that the actual prices for Bronze and Silver plans in Indiana are going to be far below the $512 a month estimate provided by the state’s government.
“Anthem’s rate filing includes projections for health insurance costs in their bronze plans. A 47-year-old male who does not smoke would be charged, on average, $307 per month. Sample plans from another plan, MDWise, predict a 47-year-old man will be charged $294 and $391 for a bronze and silver plan, respectively.”
While you may find the actual rates of the policies to be made available on the Indiana individual exchange to be good news or bad— depending on what you currently pay for health coverage—one would at least hope that the state would want to put out an honest analysis.
“The Snake Is Eating Fluffy In Little Bites”: The Press Is Missing The Sequester’s Evil Genius
Love it or hate it, there’s a certain genius to the sequester. No, it’s not the notion of including cuts aimed at offending folks on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Nor is it its purported ability to force a budget deal. No, the genius is in the seven months it will take to unfold.
Why? Because $85 billion in budget cuts should cause outrage from coast to coast. But spread it out over seven months, and you might just get away with it.
Take a look at what’s happening in Indiana. The Associated Press reports that Head Start programs in Columbus and Franklin Counties have “resorted to a random drawing” to figure out which three dozen kids to drop from their early childhood education program because of sequester budget cuts. Those will be the first children to lose what is anticipated to be about 1,000 slots statewide.
It’s one of the opening skirmishes in a slow rolling war of attrition that will eventually play out across the country. The 600 families who’ve already learned they’re losing rental assistance in King County Washington. The 418 who’ve lost their jobs at an Army Depot in Pennsylvania. The Kentucky hospital that fired 28 workers.
None of these examples, on their own, are enough to garner national headlines. At least at this early stage, it can be hard to get your head around the impact of a policy that costs thirty jobs here, kicks another hundred people out of a program there, dribs and drabs of misfortune that can easily get lost in the shuffle.
Eventually, of course, the depth of the sequester cuts will add up to major setbacks for countless Americans across the country. But by then, Republicans hope the waters will be sufficiently muddied, the connection between pain and the sequester sufficiently attenuated in the public’s mind, the cuts themselves sufficiently entrenched that mounting an effort to roll them back will fall to nothing. Genius.
Now, as it happens, there’s an entity well-positioned to foil the Republican plan: It’s the media. And a media committed to methodically reporting not only the day-to-day impact of the sequester on ordinary lives, but also the big picture of what the little examples are adding up to would do us all a real service.
Instead we get this: An examination by ThinkProgress found that the suspension of White House tours “were mentioned 33 times as often (Fox News had 163 segments, CNN had 59, and MSNBC had 42)” on cable news “as mentions of other sequester impacts hitting the poor. Any discussion of sequestration’s steep cuts to housing assistance, food stamps, and Head Start early education was virtually nonexistent on all 3 networks in the same time frame.” And as you’ve no doubt seen, it’s not just cable. White House tours have been everywhere, from the Washington Post editorial pages to the nether reaches of talk radio.
So when Michigan Republican Rep. Candice Miller urges the President to “stop trying to justify the unjustifiable,” or Kansas Republican Sen. Jerry Moran says, “We can and must be smarter with our spending decisions and make cuts in ways that do not intentionally and unnecessarily inflict hardship and aggravation upon the American people,” or when South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune asserts that White House tours are “not the kind of duplicative and wasteful spending that we should be looking to target,” the media plays right along. This despite the fact that by any rational analysis, the cut that unjustifiably inflicts hardship on the American people is the one that denies underprivileged children an entrée to critical early education services.
Seriously. What must you think of the government if, after taking a full view of the sequester, you hone in on the suspension of White House tours as the element deserving of such disproportionate attention? That the other programs really aren’t very significant at all. For Republicans, that’s really the point. We might have expected the media to take a more critical view of the matter. No such luck.
Look, I like a good White House tour as much as the next person. And if you have a child who was looking forward to one, that can be a hard thing. But I think I may have a solution: tell them why they can’t go, and be ready with an alternative thing to do. There are lots of other fun and educational activities in Washington, after all.
Here’s a harder question: what do we say to the Indiana Head Start mother who told the AP that “[my son] loves school…I don’t know how I’m going to tell him he’s not going back.”
I’ve come to think of the sequester in the following (admittedly gruesome) way: it’s something like a snake eating a hamster. If it gobbles up fluffy all in one bite, you can see that hump moving all the way down the line as the snake digests his delectable treat. Hard to miss. But if snake eats fluffy one little bite at a time, the hamster’s still dead, and nobody notices. Unless someone calls the snake out.
Hey media: your move.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, March 21, 2013
“Racing To the Bottom In Michigan”: And A Fine “Happy Holidays” To Michigan Workers Too
It won’t be formal until next Tuesday (thanks to a five-day delay requirement for bills passed by both Houses), but the Michigan legislature has indeed approved “right-to-work” legislation in a lame-duck session blitzkrieg of enormous audacity. There were no hearings, no public debate, and virtually no warning before the famously pro-labor state joined the Greater South in declaring itself union-unfriendly territory, as Gov. Rick Snyder abruptly reversed his prior opposition to consideration of such legislation. That very day the hammer came down in a series of votes.
One of the right-to-work bills (the one affecting public-sector workers) passed the Michigan House by a 58-52 margin, just one vote below the number of Republicans who will serve in the next session. This reinforces the impression that GOpers feared they wouldn’t have to votes to enact right-to-work had they utilized the normal legislative process and waited until representatives elected on November 6 were in place.
The panic-stricken nature of the GOP coup wasn’t much reflected in the bland and empty public rationales offered for it by Snyder:
In an interview with The Associated Press, Snyder said he had kept the issue at arm’s length while pursuing other programs to bolster the state economy. But he said circumstances had pushed the matter to the forefront.
“It is a divisive issue,” he acknowledged. “But it was already being divisive over the past few weeks, so let’s get this resolved. Let’s reach a conclusion that’s in the best interests of all.”
Also influencing his decision, he said, were reports that some 90 companies had decided to locate in Indiana since that state adopted right-to-work legislation. “That’s thousands of jobs, and we want to have that kind of success in Michigan,” he said.
OMG, Indiana’s screwing its workers, so Michigan has to do the same right now! This is very literally a “race to the bottom” if ever there has been one.
Because Republican legislators shrewdly attached an appropriation to the bill, it will not be subject to reversal by initiative. Looks like November 2014 will be the first opportunity for some accountability, when the entire legislature is up for re-election, along with Snyder.
The Michigan Senate’s Democratic Leader, Gretchen Whitmer, had a tart description of the entire manuever:
“These guys have lied to us all along the way,” she said. “They are pushing through the most divisive legislation they could come up with in the dark of night, at the end of a lame-duck session and then they’re going to hightail it out of town. It’s cowardly.”
And a fine “happy holidays” to Michigan workers, too.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 7, 2012
“Michigan, A Right-to-Work State?”: Purely Political, Motivated By A Desire To Punish Supporters Of The Democratic Party
Labor never ruled Michigan as such. It may have been home to the best and biggest American union, the United Auto Workers, but even at the height of their power, the UAW could seldom elect its candidates to Detroit city government. Still, the UAW dominated the state’s Democratic Party and much of state politics for decades—at least, until the auto industry radically downsized.
Just how downsized union power has become is apparent from the decision of the state’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, to support a right-to-work bill that began speeding its way through the state’s lame-duck GOP-controlled legislature on Thursday. Should the bill become law—and given Republican control of state government, it’s hard to envision how it won’t—Michigan would join historically more conservative Indiana as the second state from the industrial Midwest to move to right-to-work status. Until last year, when Indiana enacted its statute, right-to-work states were confined to the South, the Plains states and the Mountain West—states devoid of a major union presence. That such laws are now coming to the industrial Midwest is just more evidence of the continual weakening of industrial unions—the unions that have taken the most direct hit from offshoring and mechanization.
But why enact such laws when most unions are no longer big enough to take any bite out of company profits? In fact, the pressure for such laws isn’t coming from companies like Ford or GM, which can how hire new union workers for half of what they pay their more veteran workers. It’s purely political. Weakened though they be in the economic arena, unions still punch well above their weight at election time. That’s one reason why President Obama carried every state in the industrial Midwest save (almost) perpetually Republican Indiana.
And if anyone doubts that politics lies behind the Michigan Republicans’ decision to enact a right-to-work bill, consider one of the bill’s particulars: the only unions it exempts from the bill’s coverage, the Wall Street Journal is reporting, are police and firefighter unions. Snyder said that the GOP had carved out that exception because their jobs needed protection from labor strife.
Think about that for a moment. The effect of the Republicans’ exemption would be to ensure police and firefighters have the strongest unions in the state, the ones most capable of taking job actions when they sought to better their pay and working conditions. Elsewhere across the U.S. today, states and cities are trying to scale back pensions and other benefits of their employees, and police and firefighters are often targeted because their pay and benefits exceed those of other public workers. Moreover, historically, governors and mayors have been wary of the power of such unions—Republican governors and mayors in particular. Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge first came to the nation’s attention by breaking a Boston police strike in 1919—“There is no right to strike against the public safety,” he proclaimed. It was his strikebreaking that won him a place on the 1920 Republican ticket.
Now, however, Snyder, like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, has created a police-and-firefighter carve out. The reason is purely political—in Michigan, as in Wisconsin, the police and firefighter unions often support Republicans for state and local office, and Republicans want to make sure that they’ll continue to do so with undiminished clout. The carve-out, said Michigan House Democratic leader Tim Greimel, “makes it very clear that this is not about sound economic policy. It’s motivated by a desire to punish supporters of the Democratic Party.”
By: Harold Meyerson, Editor-at-Large, The American Prospect, December 7, 2012
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