“The Obamacare Bait And Switch”: America’s Beloved Health Insurance Industry Demonstrates Why We Needed Reform All Along
So here’s my advice: If you’re somebody who’s smoking hot about the Big Lie of the Affordable Care Act — you know, how President Obama told everybody that if they liked their current health insurance policy they could keep it — do yourself a favor. Avoid the county fair midway.
Because if you go, you’re apt to encounter a quick-handed scoundrel running a shell game, and that boy will take your money. Doubtless Obama should have said almost everybody could keep their current plan, or that 95 percent could, but he apparently found that too, um, subtle for the campaign trail.
So now old Mitt “47-percent” Romney gets to call him a liar.
But while your attention’s fixed on the president’s “mendacity,” and “paternalism,” to quote one characteristically overwrought scribe, America’s beloved health insurance industry is demonstrating exactly why we needed reform all along. Certain companies are taking advantage of the political confusion to sell people in the “individual market” far more expensive plans than they need and blame “Obamacare.”
As usual, the nation’s esteemed political media have gone along for the ride. CBS News, rapidly morphing into Fox News Lite, presented the heartbreaking tale of one Diane Barrette, a 56 year-old Floridian who got a letter from her insurance company cancelling her $54 a month policy and offering a replacement for $591 a month—a lot of money to her.
CBS correspondent Jan Crawford, deemed smart enough to cover the U.S. Supreme Court, took Barrette’s story at face value. The idea that health insurance worth having could be purchased at a monthly cost of less than a steak dinner apparently failed to arouse her reporter’s curiosity.
Poor Barrette choked up telling CBS her story, leading to several appearances on Fox News itself.
Had CBS done elementary due diligence, they’d have learned why Ms. Barrette’s plan was so cheap. Reporters who did learned that among other shortcomings, it didn’t cover hospitalization. In reality, she had no health insurance at all. A serious accident or illness might have bankrupted her—precisely the kind of ripoff the Affordable Care Act makes illegal.
Also, Barrette was taking the insurance company’s word about the cost of a replacement policy. Writing for BillMoyers.com, Joshua Holland ran her numbers through Kaiser Permanente’s subsidy calculator. With assistance from Obamacare, she can have a real policy covering preventive care and hospitalization for an out-of-pocket cost of $97 monthly, or a more generous “Silver” level plan for $209.
Now she calls it “a blessing in disguise.”
In short, CBS News couldn’t have gotten the story more backward had they tried. For its part, NBC News featured Los Angeles real estate agent Deborah Cavallaro, whose similar experience led her to conclude that “there’s nothing affordable about the Affordable Care Act.”
However, LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik found that Cavallaro had simply failed to consult Covered California, the state’s health plan exchange. When he did so, he quickly found that “better plans than she has now are available for her to purchase today, some of them for less money.”
No doubt some among the three to five percent of Americans whose individual health care policies have been cancelled are experiencing genuine sticker shock. However, nobody should take his insurance company’s word at face value without double-checking—a task admittedly made harder by Healthcare.gov’s website meltdown.
See, when you read a story about a couple like Dean and Mary Lou Griffin of Chadd’s Ford, PA, who told the Associated Press they’d expected to be able to keep the policy they bought three years ago, what reporters aren’t asking is where they’d gotten that idea.
From President Obama? Possibly.
More likely, however, from an insurance broker. See, all providers have known about new coverage standards ever since the Affordable Care Act passed in March 2010. Since then some have clearly been “churning” the market, offering low-risk, healthy customers bargain policies they knew perfectly well would no longer pass muster come January 1, 2014.
So now come the inevitable cancellation letters, and guess what? If they were lucky—and health-wise the Griffins have been fortunate—here comes the bad news. “We’re buying insurance that we will never use and can’t possibly ever benefit from,” Dean Griffin complains. “We’re basically passing on a benefit to other people who are not otherwise able to buy basic insurance.”
Two thoughts: One, don’t get cocky, you never know.
Two, boo-hoo-hoo. You can afford it.
Meanwhile, Dylan Scott at Talking Points Memo has documented companies sending “misleading letters to consumers, trying to lock them into…more expensive health insurance plans rather than let them shop for insurance and tax credits on the Obamacare marketplaces.” Authorities in four states have disciplined Humana affiliates for exactly that.
It’s a classic bait and switch: luring customers with unsustainably low rates, and then blaming the White House for their chicanery.
That’s basically why we needed Obamacare to begin with.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, November 6, 2013
“Portrait Of A Man Republicans Can’t Trust”: Four Basic Problems Stand Between Chris Christie And The 2016 Nomination
The emergence of Chris Christie as one of America’s most popular national figures comes as a godsend to the Republican Party. Having angrily turned down every opportunity to compromise with an electorate that spurned them a year ago, they now see the enticing chance, in the form of Christie’s all-but-declared presidential candidacy, to right their course without veering left. “The road to Republican political redemption may well run through Trenton, N.J,” says Politico’s Ben White. Savvy operative Ralph Reed, whose ties run from the Grover Norquists of the party to its Christian wing, gave the governor his blessing, seemingly paving the way for Christie to clear the party’s ever-more-stringent ideological purity tests. Christie used his acceptance speech to establish the themes for this run, repeatedly highlighting his support from Democratic constituencies and his record of cutting taxes and spending.
There is only one flaw with the plan: Shepherding Christie through a competitive Republican primary will be vastly more difficult than anybody seems to be figuring at the moment. Four basic, interrelated problems stand between Christie and the 2016 nomination:
1. His ideological deviations are not fake. They’re real. Christie has openly endorsed gun control, called for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and conceded the legitimacy of climate science (“But when you have over 90 percent of the world’s scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and that humans play a contributing role it’s time to defer to the experts.”)
The largest, and least appreciated, of Christie’s betrayals of party doctrine is his decision to participate in the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare. Some other Republican governors have made the same decision, but they have all faced unrelenting and bitter opposition from legislators of their party and conservative activists. Unyielding hatred to every aspect of Obamacare, regardless of its practical impact, has become the main doctrinal tenet of conservative thought. That alone could potentially disqualify him.
2. Christie’s popularity is somewhat fluky. Christie has some real political talent. But he has benefitted from his juxtaposition against a corrupt, divided, ineffectual state Democratic Party that consistently allowed him to claim the good government high ground. Even so, Christie’s approval ratings hovered in the low-to-mid-fifties, until he achieved beatification through Hurricane Sandy.
Christie benefitted in two ways from Sandy. One was through the kind of active, sleeves-rolled-up response to disaster that can lend politicians stratospheric approval (like the sort Rudy Giuliani won after 9/11, and sought, unsuccessfully, to leverage into higher office.) Second, and more significantly, Christie defined himself as above partisanship by metaphorically and literally embracing President Obama.
In a bitterly partisan era, Christie’s cooperation and apparently warm personal relations with Obama made him a uniquely appealing figure. In particular, it is the key to his lofty standing in the African-American community: In pointed contrast to the ceaseless rage and contempt displayed by his party, Christie treated the nation’s first black president with open respect and affinity.
Of course, having safely won reelection, Christie can undertake a campaign of vilification against Obama. He’ll have to – the taint of collaboration with the hated Obama, if not scrubbed away, would prove as fatal as Joe Lieberman’s kiss proved to his plane crash of a presidential campaign in 2004.
But in so doing, he’ll undercut the bipartisan appeal that is the source of his national standing, eroding the incentive for party elites to rally around him as the sole electable nominee. It’s not an impossible line to walk, but it will require a very deft touch.
3. Christie lacks a deft touch. The Christie method for retaining the goodwill of his party has been, whatever he loses through policy squishiness, he wins back in personal abuse. In the past I have heavily discounted the possibility that this kind of style can translate beyond New Jersey. It is possible that I am underselling Christie’s personal appeal in states that have not spawned The Sopranos and Jersey Shore. Maybe America is truly ready for a loud, angry man in the White House.
But are Republican voters? They may like the spectacle of Christie heaping verbal punishment upon random Democrats who challenge him. It’s another thing altogether if he gives this treatment to Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, or other fellow partisans. If Christie tries to bully fellow Republicans in good standing, it would seem more likely to confirm the accusation that Christie, not them, is the cultural and ideological alien. And if he can’t use bluster, what tools are available to him? It’s not like Christie can cut legislative deals with his primary opponents the way he did in New Jersey.
It is easy to forget how culturally foreign the northeast is to a Southern-dominated party, and how Christie’s belligerent tone may confirm the worst suspicions about him. Conservative columnist Phillip Klein once reported the frequent murmurings of disapproval he found among primary voters when he was covering Giuliani’s race: “one thing I kept running into among voters in early states when covering the campaign was that his background as a New Yorker was a real turnoff and made voters view him as rude and somehow shady.”
4. Christie may actually be shady. Mitt Romney wanted to make Christie his vice-presidential nominee, but took a close look at what the vetters came up with and, my colleague John Heilemann and Mark Halperin report in their new book, promptly changed his mind. Romney’s prudish disdain for Christie’s weight commanded gossipy attention, but the sheer breadth of the potential issues surrounding Christie suggests serious trouble:
The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record. There was a 2010 Department of Justice inspector general’s investigation of Christie’s spending patterns in his job prior to the governorship, which criticized him for being “the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without adequate justification” and for offering “insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification” for stays at swank hotels like the Four Seasons. There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official—and sought an exemption from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. There was Christie’s decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies like former Attorney General John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a defamation lawsuit brought against Christie arising out of his successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race. Then there was Todd Christie, the Governor’s brother, who in 2008 agreed to a settlement of civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission in which he acknowledged making “hundreds of trades in which customers had been systematically overcharged.”
That’s … a lot of potential scandals. On top of all that, the report about Christie’s expenses “raised questions for the vetters about Christie’s relationship with a top female deputy who accompanied him on many of the trips.” That detail, published in the book but not the excerpts, seems very potentially troublesome.
All these potential problems – Obamacare, Obama, Christie’s exotic cultural background, and the swirl of scandal – all feed into each other. Collectively they form the portrait of a man Republicans fundamentally can’t trust.
Am I suggesting Republican voters would never trust Christie? No. Under the right circumstances, Christie could overcome his many hurdles. After all, Mitt Romney also possessed enormous ideological baggage, and overcame it. But Romney benefitted from enormous luck: his only opponents were staggeringly incompetent, broke, repellant to the party establishment, or all three. Romney staggered to a drawn-out victory while running virtually unopposed.
Christie seems likely to face off against real opponents with credibility and money. The case they have to make against him is strong.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, November 6, 2013
“What If We Just Called It NixonCare?”: Republicans Have No Business Being Upset About Obamacare
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says Republicans will seek to delay a requirement of the 2010 Affordable Care Act that all Americans obtain health insurance or face a tax penalty. “With so many unanswered questions and the problems arising around this rollout, it doesn’t make any sense to impose this one percent mandate tax on the American people,” Cantor said last week.
While Republicans plot new ways to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, it’s easy to forget that for years they’ve been arguing that any comprehensive health insurance system be designed exactly like the one that officially began October 1st, glitches and all.
For as many years Democrats tried to graft healthcare onto Social Security and Medicare and pay for it through the payroll tax. But Republicans countered that any system must be based on private insurance and paid for with a combination of subsidies for low-income purchasers and a requirement that the younger and healthier sign up.
Not surprisingly, private health insurers cheered on the Republicans while doing whatever they could to block Democrats from creating a public insurance system.
In February 1974, Republican President Richard Nixon proposed, in essence, today’s Affordable Care Act. Under Nixon’s plan all but the smallest employers would provide insurance to their workers or pay a penalty, an expanded Medicaid-type program would insure the poor and subsidies would be provided to low-income individuals and small employers. Sound familiar?
Private insurers were delighted with the Nixon plan but Democrats preferred a system based on Social Security and Medicare and the two sides failed to agree.
Thirty years later a Republican governor, Mitt Romney, made Nixon’s plan the law in Massachusetts. Private insurers couldn’t have been happier although many Democrats in the state had hoped for a public system.
When today’s Republicans rage against the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, it’s useful to recall this was their idea as well.
In 1989, Stuart M. Butler of the conservative Heritage Foundation came up with a plan that would “mandate all households to obtain adequate insurance.”
Insurance companies loved Butler’s plan so much it found its way into several bills introduced by Republican lawmakers in 1993. Among the supporters were Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA). Both now oppose the mandate under the Affordable Care Act. Newt Gingrich, who became Speaker of the House in 1995, was also a big proponent.
Romney’s heathcare plan in Massachusetts included the same mandate to purchase private insurance. “We got the idea of an individual mandate from [Newt Gingrich] and [Newt] got it from the Heritage Foundation,” said Romney, who thought the mandate “essential for bringing the health care costs down for everyone and getting everyone the health insurance they need.”
Now that the essential Republican plan for healthcare is being implemented nationally, health insurance companies are jubilant.
Last week, after the giant insurer Wellpoint raised its earnings estimates, CEO Joseph Swedish pointed to “the long-term membership growth opportunity through exchanges.” Other major health plans are equally bullish. “The emergence of public exchanges, private exchanges, Medicaid expansions … have the potential to create new opportunities for us to grow and serve in new ways,” UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen J. Hemsley effused.
So why are today’s Republicans so upset with an Act they designed and their patrons adore? Because it’s the signature achievement of the Obama administration.
There’s a deep irony to all this. Had Democrats stuck to the original Democratic vision and built comprehensive health insurance on Social Security and Medicare, it would have been cheaper, simpler and more widely accepted by the public. And Republicans would be hollering anyway.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, October 29, 2013
“A Pliable Opportunist”: Spinning With The Political Winds, Marco Rubio Is Becoming The Next Mitt Romney
The Great Marco Rubio Recalibration continues.
Months after helping the Senate pass a sweeping immigration reform bill, the junior Republican senator from Florida has dropped his support for the legislation, saying he now favors a targeted, piecemeal approach to the issue.
It’s a stunning about-face from earlier this year, when Rubio’s soaring rhetoric and tireless efforts helped propel a comprehensive, bipartisan bill to a successful vote. And with that, Rubio risks appearing to have flip-flopped on a defining issue even faster than you can say “Mitt Romney.”
With the House resistant to take up a comprehensive immigration bill, Rubio’s spokesman on Monday said he believes a piecemeal approach is the only way anything will get done.
“The point is that at this time, the only approach that has a realistic chance of success is to focus on those aspects of reform on which there is consensus through a series of individual bills,” Rubio spokesman Alex Conant told Politico. “Otherwise, this latest effort to make progress on immigration will meet the same fate as previous efforts: Failure.”
Of course, a piecemeal approach will almost surely doom meaningful reform. The whole point of a comprehensive approach is give each side something they want, such as a pathway to citizenship for Democrats and tougher workplace enforcement for Republicans.
Conant added that Rubio always preferred a piecemeal approach (though many would debate that), but worked with the Gang of Eight anyway “despite strong opposition within his own party and at a significant and well documented political price.”
That gets at another force pushing Rubio away from his own bill: Public opinion. Or, more accurately, Republican public opinion.
Rubio’s standing within the GOP eroded all year as he was unable to convince skeptical conservatives the immigration bill was more than just amnesty for undocumented workers. Once one of the most popular GOP senators in the country, his approval rating slid into negative territory in his home state, and he fell to the middle of the pack in hypothetical polls of the 2016 GOP field.
To stem the bleeding, Rubio tiptoed away from the bill since its passage in June, saying after the government shutdown that President Obama had “undermined” the bill’s odds of passing by refusing to negotiate with Republicans over budget matters. Even before that, he took a backseat in finalizing the bill while two other GOP senators stitched together an almost comically robust border enforcement provision to win over the necessary Republican votes.
Though Rubio may indeed have preferred piecemeal bills all along, his walk-back could wind up earning him a reputation as a pliable opportunist.
“I’m not sure it has ever happened before that an architect of major legislation in the Senate has basically opposed its passage in the House,” Rich Lowry wrote in National Review. “The politics of this aren’t great for Rubio,” he added, saying the freshman senator would surely “take another hit, understandably, for his inconstancy.”
Inconstancy, though not unheard of in politics, is not a good habit to form. Accusations of flip-flopping dogged Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns and kept him from winning over dubious voters. He tried to position himself, after years of presenting a moderate exterior, as a “severe conservative” to capture the GOP nomination. And, like Rubio, he ran away from his most visible legislative achievement: RomneyCare.
The move to the right didn’t work out so well for Romney, only further cementing his image as a man without convictions.
Rubio hasn’t earned himself quite the same reputation, and we’re a long way from 2016. But if he makes a habit of spinning with the political winds, the GOP will begin to see him less as the party’s savior, and more as the second coming of Mitt Romney.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, October 28, 2013
“A Revisionist History Mistrial”: Jim DeMint’s Silly Argument On Obamacare Was Soundly Overruled
The Heritage Foundation’s Jim DeMint – the proto Ted Cruz – has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning where he makes the case against Obamacare and explains why his organization pushed Cruz and the tea party right to shut down the government (and, presumably, why Cruz is threatening to try to do it again). Most of it is pretty standard anti-Obamacare fare, but one section is worth noting for its casual dismissal of last year’s election results.
Responding to the notion that Republicans should lay off Obamacare because the president won and they lost last November, DeMint writes:
… ObamaCare was not the central fight in 2012, much to the disappointment of conservatives. Republicans hoped that negative economic news would sweep them to victory, and exit polls confirmed that the economy, not health care, was the top issue. The best thing is to declare last year’s election a mistrial on ObamaCare.
Sorry, but you don’t get to declare a mistrial on election results because you don’t like them.
First, this raises the obvious question: Would DeMint entertain a similar argument against repealing Obamacare were Mitt Romney president right now? If negative economic news had indeed swept the GOP to victory, would anyone on the right find credible the argument that because the economy, not Obamacare, had been the big issue of the campaign, the GOP had no business trying to roll back the law?
Of course they would not – because the mistrial argument is silly. It’s true that exit polls showed the economy to be overwhelmingly the biggest issue of the campaign, with 59 percent of voters citing it as their top issue and health care a distant second at 18 percent. But there’s a difference between something being the driving issue of the campaign and being the only one. Voters didn’t cast their ballots in an issue void and it’s not like Obamacare was some sub-rosa topic that wasn’t properly litigated. It was the focus of politics for most of President Obama’s first term. Mitt Romney made it a mainstay of his campaign and ran ads on it.
So the fact that voters had bigger concerns isn’t grounds for a mistrial, but instead is a clarifying fact about their priorities. Last November, voters, having had years to digest the Obamacare wars, decided that the law isn’t the existential crisis that DeMint, Cruz and their ilk do and also decided to rehire the fellow who instituted it. Oh, and among the 18 percent of voters who did name health care as their top priority, three-quarters voted for President Obama.
I suppose there is one positive to come out of DeMint’s op-ed. By arguing that elections don’t count when it comes to secondary issues, he’s implicitly saying that elections do have consequences in regard to the top issue. That being the case, I look forward to DeMint and the Heritage Foundation graciously ending their opposition to President Obama’s economic agenda.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 18, 2013
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