“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 Turtle Vs The Con Man”: Mitch McConnell Gets A Tea Party Challenger
After years of speculation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is finally getting a Republican challenger in his 2014 re-election bid. Louisville businessman Matt Bevin is expected to officially announce his primary challenge to McConnell this week, with the hope of consolidating Tea Party support to depose the four-term incumbent from the right.
Bevin, who is currently a partner at the Louisville-based investment firm Waycross Partners, will formally declare his electoral plans on Wednesday, according to a Monday press release. Given that Bevin’s campaign has already announced a planned three-day tour of the state, all signs point to him joining the race.
Bevin has long hinted at challenging McConnell from the right. Tea Party groups reportedly began recruiting Bevin into the race in February, and in March he told the right-wing news organization The Daily Caller that he was considering a run.
“If I can be a part of the dialogue that leads to a reversal of the downward economic spiral that faces us as a state and as a nation, then I am willing to do so,” Bevin said at the time. “The people of this state are self-reliant, hard-working and strongly principled citizens and many of us are disheartened by the idea that the values we hold dear are being left behind at the state border by some of those who are representing us in Washington…We deserve better.”
Politico reports that Bevin has recently been meeting with influential right-wing groups such as the Club for Growth, the Senate Conservatives Fund, and the Madison Project, hoping to marshal support for a serious challenge to the deep-pocketed, well-connected McConnell.
McConnell, who is an obvious target for a Tea Party challenge due to his image as the consummate Washington insider, has long prepared for a primary battle — and is highly unlikely to lose such a contest, despite his low poll numbers. McConnell has an intimidating war chest of nearly $10 million in cash on hand that he can spend to fight off opponents, and he has gone out of his way to forge a close relationship with the Tea Party’s favorite politician in the state, Senator Rand Paul. McConnell — who initially opposed Paul’s Senate run, instead backing then-Secretary of State Trey Grayson — even hired longtime Paul ally Jesse Benton to manage his re-election campaign.
On Friday, Benton served notice that McConnell is not overlooking Bevin, and that his famously vicious political operation would not shy away from attacking a fellow Republican. In a statement, Benton dismissed the Connecticut-born businessman, saying “Matthew Griswold Bevin is not a Kentucky conservative, he is merely an East Coast con man.”
The winner of the Republican primary is expected to face Democratic Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes in the general election.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, July 22, 2013
“Political Regression”: 40 Years After Roe, Reproductive Rights Are In Grave Danger
Dr. John J. Sciarra remembers his time as a young doctor in New York City nearly half a century ago. He remembers watching young women die from botched, illegal abortions because they had no safe options. At the time, he felt powerless to help them, and that fact haunted him.
That’s why he decided to join 99 of his fellow OB-GYNs to express his support for legal abortion. In 1972, that group of doctors published a statement in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology to make the case that giving women the means to end their pregnancies is a public health issue. Their timing was prescient; Roe v. Wade ended up legalizing abortion just one year later.
But, in the 40 years since, Sciarra has been surprised to see the state of reproductive rights moving backward instead of forward. “We did not anticipate the backlash that has turned abortion into an ideological battleground,” the retired doctor writes in a op-ed published in the Chicago Tribune on Friday. “So I have again joined 99 of my fellow professors of obstetrics and gynecology in another statement on the issue, published earlier this year, in the very same American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.”
In the new statement, Sciarra and 99 of his colleagues point out that even though abortion has been legalized and medical practice has evolved to accommodate a new range of reproductive care, the politicization of the issue still threatens to derail women’s reproductive rights. When Sciarra first advocated for abortion rights back in the 1970s, he and his fellow OB-GYNs imagined that the “increasingly liberal course of events” in the U.S. would create a rising demand for abortion care. They thought the biggest problem facing the country would be a shortage of doctors available to perform abortions. It turns out they were wrong — the biggest problem is actually the web of state-level abortion restrictions that come between women and their doctors.
“We have had 40 years of medical progress but have witnessed political regression that the 100 professors did not anticipate,” their official statement noted. “Forty years later, the change is not liberal. Its effects will threaten, not improve, women’s health and already obstruct physicians’ evidence-based and patient-centered practices.”
Sciarra is just one of two OB-GYNs who signed both statements — the original one before Roe v. Wade, and the new one earlier this year — because most of the doctors who signed on four decades ago have since passed away. Sciarra notes that none of the doctors who signed the 1972 statement ever changed their minds and rescinded their support for legal abortion rights. And now, a new generation of medical professionals is reaffirming that position with the 2013 statement.
The doctors’ new statement is well-timed. Despite the fact that Roe marked its 40th anniversary recently, reproductive rights are being chipped away from every angle. And 2013 is shaping up to be one of the worst years for reproductive freedom since abortion was first legalized. State legislatures have enacted a record-breaking number of new abortion restrictions this year, including some of the harshest bans ever seen in the past four decades.
Sciarra and his colleagues aren’t the only medical professionals coming out against the mounting pile of politically-motivated abortion restrictions. The nation’s largest group of OB-GYNs, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, also recently condemned anti-abortion laws for “imposing a political agenda on medical practice.”
By: Tara Culp-Ressler, Think Progress, July 11, 2013
“Just A Bunch Of Nativists”: Making Laws No Longer Part Of The Lawmaking Process
Reading through some headlines today, I came across one link that began, “House Votes To…” and I realized that no matter what the end of the headline was, you can almost always insert, “…Make Pointless Statement As Sop to Conservative Base” and you’ll be on target. In this case it happened to be a vote to block energy-efficiency standards for light bulbs, but it could have been any of a thousand things. You could argue, as Jonathan Chait does, that Republican lawmakers have basically given up on lawmaking altogether, and you wouldn’t be far off. But it’s more than that. They’ve reimagined the lawmaking process as a kind of extended ideological performance art piece, one that no longer has anything to do with laws in the “I’m Just a Bill” sense. It’s not as though they aren’t legislating, it’s just that laws have become beside the point.
Granted, the lawmaking process has always involved a lot of grandstanding and occasional votes taken more to make a statement than to alter the rules under which American society operates. Congress passes plenty of resolutions that do nothing more than express its sentiments, like saluting the patriotism of the East Burp High students who raised money to buy a new flag for their school, or declaring August to be Plantar Fasciitis Awareness Month. But those things always went alongside with actual lawmaking.
We’re now in a situation where the lawmaking process—you know, bills being written, introduced, voted on, that sort of thing—has, in the House at least, been given over almost entirely to this legislative kabuki, where the point of the exercise isn’t passing laws but making statements and taking positions. The current Congress is on pace to be the least productive in history when you measure by actual laws passed.
And it is really all about the House. Whenever you see someone say that “Congress” or “Washington” is stuck in gridlock or can’t get its act together, the underlying truth is almost always that it’s the Republican House gumming things up. There are more than a few crazy Republicans in the Senate, but as a group they’re willing to legislate, and sometimes even compromise with Democrats. Not so in the House. I think this reached its apogee when they took their 37th vote to repeal Obamacare a couple months back, in part because freshman Tea Party members hadn’t had the chance to perform the ritual. “The guys who’ve been up here the last year, we can go home and say listen, we voted 36 different times to repeal or replace Obamacare,” said South Carolina Representative Mick Mulvaney, with a touching compassion for his colleagues. “Tell me what the new guys are supposed to say.” There was a time when members of Congress would want to go to their constituents and tell them about funding they’d obtained for projects in the district or reforms they’d fought for and passed. These days, Republicans in the House know that none of what they vote for with such enthusiasm will ever even be considered in the Senate, much less voted on, passed, and sent to the president for his signature. But they don’t seem to care.
The kicker to this is that it’s only going to get worse, because the GOP is poised to erect a giant wall around the House of Representatives as its last redoubt of national power. As we’ve been discussing, the party is split between those who worry about their prospects in future presidential elections and therefore want to reach out to growing minority populations and soften the GOP’s hard-earned image as a bunch of nativists, and those who not only can’t stand the immigration reform currently on offer but fear only threats from their right in primary campaigns, since they’re in safe Republican districts. Most everyone in Washington now believes that immigration reform is all but dead, which is bad for the party’s next presidential nominee, but perfectly fine with House Republicans.
Although I’m always wary of assuming that the way things are in politics is the way they’ll remain for too long, we could well see an extended period in which a Democratic president is stymied by a Republican House dominated by legislators who couldn’t care less about legislating. It’s almost enough to make you cynical about politics.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 10, 2013
“Trapped In A Conservative Box”: The Cost Of The GOP’s Redistricting Wins Presents A Real Problem
Sometimes in politics you can lose by winning. Witness the problems the Republican Party is experiencing trying to govern with a majority that is widely believed to be unshakeable in the near future thanks to the redistricting job GOP state legislators did after the 2010 census.
Politico’s Alex Isenstadt has a report today suggesting that the party’s success has trapped Republicans in a conservative box, “narrowing the party’s appeal at a time when some GOP leaders say its future rests on the opposite happening.”
This isn’t necessarily a new thought. As I wrote back in early March:
In a sense the GOP’s success in the last round of redistricting – creating what the Cook Political Report sees as over 200 safe GOP districts – is proving Pyrrhic. If you’re a Republican member of Congress your greatest existential threat comes from primary challenges, so that’s what shapes your agenda, even if it comes at the cost of national political viability.
I was writing then about the GOP’s doubling down on the same policy agenda that voters rejected last November. That hasn’t changed in the intervening months. In fact, if you watched most House Republicans (and more than a few senators and other elected officials) you would not know that the party lost last year on multiple fronts: The presidential race wasn’t close and Obama became the first candidate since Dwight Eisenhower to crack 51 percent two elections in a row; Democrats picked up seats in both chambers of Congress and won more House votes than did the GOP, though Republicans held the lower chamber because, in large part, of their redistricting success. Meanwhile, the national GOP brand remains terrible.
Isenstadt is writing about “recurring drama within the House Republican Conference – from the surprise meltdown on the farm bill to the looming showdown over immigration reform,” but it’s the same basic problem: Conservatives unchecked by practical considerations such as what will help the party nationally.
The Politico piece has a couple of telling nuggets:
Of the 234 House Republicans, just four now represent districts that favor Democrats, according to data compiled by The Cook Political Report. That’s down from the 22 Republicans who resided in Democratic-friendly seats following the 2010 midterms, prior to the line-drawing.
They’re also serving districts that are increasingly white. After redistricting and the 2012 election, according to The Cook Political Report, the average Republican congressional district went from 73 percent white to 75 percent white. And even as Hispanics have emerged as America’s fastest-growing demographic group, only about one-tenth of Republicans represent districts where the Latino population is 25 percent or higher.
The piece also has the obligatory conservative quote about how what the party really needs is not to broaden its appeal but more starkly state its case. But this proceeds from an incorrect assumption of conservatism’s nationwide appeal. I am always reminded of this passage from Ryan Lizza’s Eric Cantor profile a few months ago. Lizza spoke with Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price, a conservative leader:
He explained how surprised he was when one of his colleagues from a Northern state told him that he favored a tax increase on millionaires. “It hit me that what he was hearing when he’s going home to a Republican district in a blue state is completely different than what I’m hearing when I go home to a Republican district in a red state,” he said. “My folks are livid about this stuff. His folks clearly weren’t. And so we weren’t even starting from the same premise.”
Price is no tea party freshman just finding his way around the Congress. He’s the vice chairman of the House Budget Committee and has been in Congress for eight years. And yet it only just recently occurred to him that not every district holds the same political beliefs as his. That’s a real problem for Republicans and it’s one their redistricting success is only exacerbating.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, July 1, 2013
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