“The Last People We Should Take At Their Word”: In Shocking Development, Health Insurance Companies Still Suck
The Affordable Care Act was designed to solve the big problem of health security—namely that nobody in America had it—and find a way to get coverage for the 50 million Americans who were uninsured. It also attempted to address lots of other problems, and this week it’s a good time to remind ourselves that many of its provisions came about because, to put it bluntly, health-insurance companies are despicable scum who will literally kill people (more on this below) if it makes them more money. I bring this up because now, people in the news media are learning about a scam insurance companies are trying to pull on some of their customers, and are not only not portraying it as such, but are simply taking the insurance companies’ word and blaming the whole thing on the Obama administration.
I realize that part about “despicable scum” is a little intemperate, and without question there are employees of the insurers who are good people. But as a whole, outside of the tobacco companies or gun manufacturers it’s hard to find an industry that so frequently destroys people’s lives when they’re at their most vulnerable and fools so many people into thinking they’re safe when they aren’t. Because of the shocking behavior insurance companies are capable of, the ACA had a number of provisions meant to rein in the companies from their most horrific abuses. It made lifetime caps on coverage illegal, meaning that people with the worst illnesses and accidents won’t go bankrupt because their insurance companies abandon them. It outlawed denials for pre-existing conditions. It banned “rescission”—remember that one? That’s when you get the worst news of your life, for instance that you have cancer, and the insurance company swings into action. They start poring over every document you’ve ever signed to see if they can come up with a reason to kick you off your coverage and avoid paying for that expensive treatment. Like the woman who got a cancer diagnosis and was scheduled for a double mastectomy, then got booted from her policy because her insurance company’s diligent efforts unearthed that she had forgotten to tell them she had once been treated for acne, which allowed them to claim that her original application for insurance was fraudulent and therefore they could rescind her whole policy.
That’s what I mean when I talk about them literally killing people. If someone has a life-threatening illness and will die without treatment, and then the insurance company to which they’ve been dutifully paying premiums decides to say “screw you” and make it impossible for them to get treated, then that’s an accurate way to describe it.
And as you’ve heard, these very same companies are now sending letters to thousands of their customers, telling them that the policies they’re on (which in many cases are junk insurance that covers virtually nothing) are being cancelled, and they’ll now have to pay hundreds of dollars more every month. Those customers are naturally aghast. And reporters are running to find them and air stories about the horrible “rate shock” Obamacare is producing. What those reporters aren’t doing is asking what you’d think would be relevant questions, particularly since it’s health insurance companies we’re talking about. Questions like: Is this letter accurate? Is there something the insurance company isn’t telling this customer? Might they be trying to pull a fast one, to maximize their profits at this person’s expense?
Even though it was only last week, I think I was among the first to raise the possibility that these cancellation letters are a scam, and now it’s looking more and more like that is indeed the case. One after another of the people who have been featured on breathless news stories about insurance cancellations turns out to have much better options on the new health insurance exchanges, in many cases for better coverage at lower prices than they’re paying now. The letters appear to be an effort to lock customers into high-priced policies before they discover that they have other options available to them. But we aren’t finding out about that from the big media outlets, who just prefer to run the same credulous story over and over about the 60-year-old Florida woman with a $54 a month joke of an insurance plan whose insurance company is trying to sell her a plan for many times as much.
This whole thing should serve as a reminder that while the ACA tried to create a regulatory framework that would curb the worst abuses of the insurance industry, the whole thing was also engineered to maintain the position and profits of that very industry. And if you think they suddenly decided to value their customers’ physical and financial health over their own profits, you’ve got another thing coming.
While we’re on the topic, Brian Beutler gives us something else to think about:
Let this be a reminder to the Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the White House who killed the public option. It could’ve been designed as a default plan for cancelees. And its very existence would have imposed discipline on the system — if everyone knew they can enroll in a plan modeled on Medicare, insurers would be less inclined to swindle their customers. Ironically, but predictably, the Democrats who will face the greatest political consequences of the turbulent final throes of the old individual market are in many cases the ones responsible for leaving it in the hands of for-profit insurers. But there’s plenty of blame to go around here, including to reporters treating missives from health insurance companies as reliable testimony.
You’ll remember the absolute horror with which Republicans greeted the possibility of a public option being included in the law. They were terrified that if Americans were allowed to choose to enter a Medicare-like program, lots of them would do it, and the insurance companies would lose customers. This was a perfectly legitimate fear; if Medicare is any indication, a public option would have likely been less expensive than private insurance and produced happy customers, and every person who chose to get their insurance from it would represent a rejection of conservative ideology. President Obama claimed he favored the inclusion of a public option, but never displayed any enthusiasm for it and seemed eager to drop it as one of the many failed gestures intended to win the Republican support that never materialized.
That may be a topic to revisit on another day. But if there’s any rule that reporters should follow when reporting on the rollout of the ACA, it’s this: Don’t take insurance companies at their word. They’ve already shown us who they are, and there’s no reason to think they’ve changed.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 5, 2013
“Small Towns Have Their Darkside Too”: Maryville, Missouri Is A Lawless Hellhole
Earlier this week, the New Republic’s Michael Schaffer published an immensely satisfying smackdown of the frustrating double standard the media tends to invoke when it comes to reporting about small towns. Culture war rules have firmly established that it’s fine for “real Americans” to slander cities as ungodly, anti-American dens of crime and iniquity.
Yet it’s all but compulsory for reporters writing about small town life to glop on the pious cliches about the honest, pure-hearted folk who allegedly populate these places, with their supposedly unwavering fidelity to family values, tradition, and the simpler things in life. These sepia-toned journalistic portraits of small-town life can be so treacly they run the risk of sending you into a diabetic coma.
But in reality, small towns are no simpler than anywhere else. And as anyone who grew up in such a place can tell you, small towns have their dark side. They can be vicious, bigoted, hateful places, and every bit as corrupt as cities. There’s a reason why Shirley Jackson set her chilling short story “The Lottery” in a small town. The town in the story was based on the place she was living in at the time; she and her family experienced ugly acts of ostracism and anti-Semitism there.
Thus we come to Maryville, Missouri, site of a now-infamous rape case, and various journalists’ not terribly persuasive attempts to whitewash the place, most notably the New York Times. But all the air freshener in the world can’t perfume the overpowering stench which practically wafts off my computer screen every time I read about the godforsaken place. As Schaffer usefully points out:
There are two ways the town could have lived up to the Times’ rose-colored description of its status quo ante:
1. Beforehand, by not sexually assaulting ninth-graders, videotaping the incident, and leaving a victim asleep on her front lawn in freezing weather.
2. After the fact, by not ostracizing the victim’s siblings, firing her mom from her job, dropping the case inexplicably, and burning the family’s house down.
Schaffer goes on to argue, persuasively, that both of the above scenarios are actually more likely, not less so, in a small town than in a more densely populated urban area. Among other things, there’s the problem of the quasi-feudalistic nature of rural life:
Turns out all that “close knit” small-town stuff turns out to kind of suck if you’re trying to get justice: When you’re so close-knit that your boss knows some of the families whose kids you’re trying to put in jail, and you just happen to get fired—that’s not a good thing.
The anonymity of city life comes with its own troubles, of course, including high crime rates. I wouldn’t want, or expect, journalists to gloss over these well-known problems. Why, then, is it okay for them to create absurdly idealized portraits of small-town life? Especially when, as is the case with Maryville, such portraits sugarcoat horrendous and widespread anti-social behavior and what appears to be a systematic attempt at obstruction of justice?
By: Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 26, 2013
“Anecdotal Journalism At Its Worse”: Every News Story Has Two Sides, Except, Apparently Obamacare
The rocky rollout of Obamacare has prompted commentators to attack the president and his team for having three years to plan for the launch and still not getting it right. That’s a legitimate critique as problems persist. But the same can be said for an awful lot of reporters doing a very poor job covering Obamacare. They also had three years to prepare themselves to accurately report the story.
So what’s their excuse?
The truth is, the Beltway press rarely bothers to explain, let alone cover, public policy any more. With a media model that almost uniformly revolves around the political process of Washington (who’s winning, who’s losing?), journalists have distanced themselves from the grungy facts of governance, especially in terms of how government programs work and how they effect the citizenry.
But explaining is the job of journalism. It’s one of the crucial roles that newsrooms play in a democracy. And in the recent case of Obamacare, the press has failed badly in its role. Worse, it has actively misinformed about the new health law and routinely highlighted consumers unhappy with Obamacare, while ignoring those who praise it.
As Joshua Holland noted at Bill Moyers’ website, “lazy stories of “sticker shock” and cancellations by reporters uninterested in the details of public policy only offer the sensational half of a complicated story, and that’s providing a big assist to opponents of the law.”
It’s part of a troubling trend. Fresh off of blaming both sides for the GOP’s wholly-owned, and thoroughly engineered, government shutdown, the press is now botching its Obamacare reporting by omitting key facts and context — to the delight of Republicans. It’s almost like there’s a larger newsroom pattern in play.
And this week the pattern revolved around trying to scare the hell out of people with deceiving claims about how Obamacare had forced insurance companies to “drop” clients and how millions of Americans had “lost” their coverage.
Not quite.
Insurance companies informed some customers that plans that didn’t meet minimum standards required by Obamacare would be phased out. But the part often obscured or downplayed in breathless “cancellation” news reports is that consumers are able to shop for new plans that in many cases are superior to the old ones, and often less expensive (or partially paid for by subsidies). In other words, they’re transitioning from one plan to another.
It’s understandable why right-wing partisan voices only interested in trashing Obamacare and damaging the president would push claims, as Breitbart.com recently did, that nearly one million Californians have “lost” their insurance because of the new law. (They didn’t.) It’s less clear why mainstream reporters would traffic in that same kind of misleading claims.
Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher has been methodically dissecting erroneous and painfully misleading Obamacare reports this week. He concluded one big problem is “a reliance on consumers who aren’t insurance experts, and reporters who aren’t much better.”
Reporters, and especially television reporters, seem anxious to interview consumers who have been notified by letter that their insurance policy has been canceled and who say they’re shocked to find out how expensive purchasing a new plan will be.
But as Christopher discovered, that’s often not the case and that consumers and reporters either don’t understand the options that are available, or haven’t researched the issue enough. (Christopher was able to find much less expensive plans for several consumers touted in TV reports.) That’s because (surprise!) the cost of new insurance plans quoted in letters sent by insurance companies often don’t represent the lowest option available via the open exchange.
Just look at the now-infamous CBS report about Florida resident Dianne Barrette who complained her premium under Obamacare would increased tenfold, from $54 a month to $591 a month. (She was quickly invited onto Fox News to tell her tale.) But a woman paying just $54 a month for health insurance didn’t set off any red flags among editors at CBS News? Barrette’s health plan — the best she could afford — was a barely-there “junk health insurance” policy that didn’t cover hospitalization, ambulance service, or prescription drugs.
Left unsaid by CBS, as Holland reported, was the fact that under Obamacare Barrette qualified “for a bronze plan, which guarantees free preventive care and coverage for hospitalizations, for only $97 per month — one-sixth of that headline number that’s making the rounds.”
Meanwhile, NBC Nightly News profiled another so-called Obamacare “sticker shock” victim and detailed how Deborah Cavallaro’s monthly premium would go up from $293 to $484. (She appeared on CNBC to repeat her Obamacare complaints.) But then American Prospect‘s Paul Waldman did some online shopping and found a plan that Cavallaro qualified for and cost $258 per-month, $35 less than the plan that’s being canceled.
“If you find someone who’s going to end up paying more thanks to Obamacare, fair enough,” wrote Waldman. “Run with the story. But first, you’d better perform the due diligence to find out what a comparable plan really costs.” (Still, lots of reporters don’t.)
Christopher noted another glaring omission from the ongoing reporting: “None of these reports take the extra step of explaining the tremendous benefits of the Affordable Care Act, for which most reasonable people wouldn’t necessarily mind a bit of a tradeoff.”
Also, absent from virtually all the reports is the acknowledgement that insurance companies canceling existing plans in the individual market and consumers being forced to join new ones is not an unusual occurrence. At all.
Obamacare coverage has often been anecdotal journalism at its worst, simply because it’s been the same one anecdote told over and over and over.
One CBS report acknowledged, “Industry experts say about half the people getting the letters will pay more — and half will pay less, thanks to taxpayer subsidies.” If that’s the case, where are the television news reports featuring the “half” who will soon be paying less for health insurance thanks to Obamacare?
Maybe I’ve just missed them all? But for this news viewer the pattern seems unmistakable: Consumers who might have to pay more (or more accurately, consumers who think they might have to pay more) are welcomed before the cameras to tell their understandably frustrating tales.
In his bad-news Obamacare report featuring three frustrated health care consumers, CNN’s Drew Griffin admitted that he didn’t even bother looking for success stories. Instead, as host Anderson Cooper explained, because Obama had given a speech extolling the benefits of Obamacare, it was CNN’s and Griffin’s job to “counter against that.”
And then there was the absurd CBS report which highlighted one man’s complaint that under Obamacare all insurance plans must provide maternity care coverage. As Media Matters noted, instead of interviewing a beneficiary of the maternity coverage, CBS highlighted a man upset that his plan included the key benefit.
The media rule has been hard to miss: Consumers who have complaints about Obamacare are much, much more newsworthy than those who have praise.
By the way, in case anyone is interested, here are some examples of Obamacare fans (who have been highlighted by local media outlets and personal online postings):
* Phil Sherburne in Salt Lake City purchased health insurance for his family of five for just $123 per-month.
* California mechanic and small business owner Rakesh Rikhi purchased $500-a-month health insurance, helping him save $5,000 each year.
* Katie Klabusich sometimes paid more for health insurance each month than she did for rent, and bounced around from bad plan to bad plan. Now thanks to Obamacare she has solid health insurance. Or, “HOLY SHIT I HAVE COMPREHENSIVE MEDICAL COVERAGE STARTING IN TEN WEEKS!”, as Klabusich wrote on her blog.
Every news story has two sides. Except, apparently, Obamacare.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters For America, October 30, 2013
“Purposeful Lying”: Time To Investigate Those Health Insurance Company Letters
As a follow-up to this post, I want to talk about the thing that spawns some of these phony Obamacare victim stories: the letters that insurers are sending to people in the individual market. People all over the country are getting these letters, which say “We’re cancelling your current policy because of the new health-care law. Here’s another policy you can get for much more money.” Reporters are doing stories about these people and their terrifying letters without bothering to check what other insurance options are available to them.
There’s something fishy going on here, not just from the reporters, but from the insurance companies. It’s time somebody did a detailed investigation of these letters to find out just what they’re telling their customers. Because they could have told them, “As a result of the new health-care law, your plan, StrawberryCare, has now been changed to include more benefits. The premium is going up, just as your premium has gone up every year since forever.” But instead, they’re just eliminating those plans entirely and offering people new plans. If the woman I discussed from that NBC story is any indication, what the insurance company is offering is something much more expensive, even though they might have something cheaper available. They may be taking the opportunity to try to shunt people into higher-priced plans. It’s as though you get a letter from your car dealer saying, “That 2010 Toyota Corolla you’re leasing has been recalled. We can supply you with a Toyota Avalon for twice the price.” They’re not telling you that you can also get a 2013 Toyota Corolla for something like what you’re paying now.
I’m not sure that’s what’s happening, and it may be happening only with some insurers but not others. But with hundreds of thousands of these letters going out and frightening people into thinking they have no choice but to sign up for a much more expensive plan, it’s definitely something someone should look into. Like, say, giant news organizations with lots of money and resources.
Now, it should be said that when President Obama said during the debate over the Affordable Care Act in Congress that if you like your health coverage you can keep it, he was only half right. The reason he repeated it so many times was that he and his advisors firmly believed that one of the main reasons Bill Clinton’s health-care reform failed was that it changed things too much for too many, and people fear change. In Clinton’s plan, pretty much everybody not on Medicare or Medicaid would have had to go into a new insurance plan. That those plans might be better than what they had didn’t matter; the idea frightened people. So the Obama administration took pains to emphasize that the government would not require anyone to change their insurance. That didn’t mean they were guaranteeing that no insurance company would ever make changes to anyone’s plan, because insurance companies do that all the time. But the law wouldn’t mandate that, say, you leave Aetna and join Blue Cross.
The more complex reality is that because the law imposed new requirements on insurers for what they have to cover and what they can charge, the insurers were inevitably going to make changes to their existing plans in response. And yes, that means many people’s insurance is going to change. In most cases it will change for the better, and the effect all this is going to have on premiums is yet to be seen. But it sure looks like insurance companies are trying to make sure anyone who’s displeased aims their ire at the government, and if they can get people to buy a more expensive product along the way, they’ll be happy to do that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 29, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 