“Wildly Misleading Pernicious Ads”: Sabotaging Health Care, One Lie At A Time
A Koch-brothers funded conservative group, Generation Opportunity, is out with a wildly misleading, pernicious set of ads aimed at sabotaging the Affordable Care Act by discouraging young people from signing up for health insurance exchanges.
One’s aimed at young men, the other at young women. In the “for him” version, an actor tells his doctor that he saw an ad for the Affordable Care Act and “figured, why not?” The doctor tells him to take his pants off, “hop up here, lay down and bend your knees to your chest.” He leaves the room. Then a man wearing an Uncle Sam mask snaps on a blue glove. As if the message weren’t perfectly clear, the ad states: “Don’t let government play doctor.”
The “for her” version is much the same, except in that case Uncle Sam’s performing a gynecological exam.
The ads are as offensive as they are derivative.
During the 2012 campaign, the reproductive rights site Lady Parts Justice released a web video attacking laws requiring women to undergo medically unnecessary ultrasounds before receiving abortions. In that spot, a woman with her feet in stirrups explains that she wants an abortion because she’s “just not emotionally or financially ready to have kids right now.” The doctor, sitting between her legs, responds, “OK, well, just so you know, the law says that before I can do that, I need to do some things to you that you need to pay extra for. You know, just some things that will help you better understand what it is you really want.” These “things” include inserting a camera into her vagina and looking at pictures of what’s inside her uterus.
But that video made sense—states actually did pass laws interfering with the doctor-patient relationship—whereas the Generation Opportunity ads perpetuate outright lies. Young people who sign up for exchanges won’t be getting access to government-run healthcare (if only they were!), but to privately run insurance. Nor does the A.C.A. force doctors to ask patients about their sex lives or perform unwanted exams—as Politifact explained recently. Under the A.C.A., government doesn’t “play doctor,” it merely enables access to doctors who then decide, using their professional judgment, the best course of action.
Signing up for an exchange isn’t an act of political (or sexual) submission. It’s just a way to get insurance if you don’t have a job or your employer doesn’t provide it. The Generation Opportunity crowd surely knows that and obviously doesn’t care because its priority now, as ever, is bringing down President Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment. The group also doesn’t care about the possibility that some number of young people, scared by its ads, will forego access to affordable care, get sick, and go bankrupt paying their medical bills.
By: Julie Lapidos, Opinion Pages Editor’s Blog, The New York Times, September 23, 2013
“Money For Medical Bills Grows On Trees”: New Koch-Funded Front Group Tells Youth They Are Better Off Uninsured
For a new Koch-funded front group for young people, money for medical bills apparently grows on trees.
Generation Opportunity, a nonprofit financed with $5.04 million from a fund controlled by the Koch brothers’ lobbying team, just launched a new television advertisement to kick off an anti-Obamacare campaign. The ads, which provides no actual information about healthcare reform and instead seem designed to scare people away from doctor visits, have already been dissected by many in the media. What’s more revealing is Generation Opportunity’s real agenda, which was explained to Yahoo News in a story unveiling the new campaign (emphasis added):
Their message: You don’t have to sign up for Obamacare. “What we’re trying to communicate is, ‘No, you’re actually not required to buy health insurance,’” Generation Opportunity President Evan Feinberg told Yahoo News in an interview about the campaign. “You might have to pay a fine, but that’s going to be cheaper for you and better for you.”
So, the big idea here is that young people should decline health insurance? Having no health insurance is “better for you?” When a car accident happens, or someone is sent to the hospital needing critical care, who picks up the bill? For slash-and-burn Koch groups, that doesn’t seem to matter.
Notably, the young men and women hired by Generation Opportunity are provided health insurance, says organization’s communications director David Pasch, who spoke to TheNation.com over the phone. Lucky them.
Ethan Rome, the executive director of Health Care for America Now, says young Americans without health insurance will be “buried by bills and unable to recover for the rest of their lives.” “What they’re advocating is seriously unconscionable,” says Rome in response to Generation Opportunity’s call for youth to go uninsured.
Generation Opportunity also told Yahoo News that it will be passing out pizza and hosting tailgate parties to promote its campaign of opposing health insurance.
These antics, of course, are nothing new for the Koch brothers and their endless array of front groups. In the nineties, Koch-funded fronts fought healthcare reform by sponsoring a “broken-down bus wreathed in red tape symbolizing government bureaucracy and hitched to a tow truck labeled, ‘This is Clinton Health Care.’ ” They also fought environmental regulations, from acid rain to industrial air pollutants, not through sound policy arguments but by sponsoring populist-appearing agit-prop. More recently, Koch fronts have paid for moonbounces and other festival-type forms of outreach to lobby on issues critical to Koch Industries’ bottom line, like weakening the Environmental Protection Agency rules that affect Koch-owned facilities.
In the end, Koch operatives seem willing to use any marketing device that works, regardless of the truth or how it might affect regular people. In this case, encouraging young Americans to abandon health insurance is worth scoring political points against healthcare reform.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, September 19, 2013
“You’re Not Invincible”: Young Adults Can’t Afford To Tune Out Obamacare Insurance Requirement
Before passage of the Affordable Care Act, becoming an adult meant getting kicked to the curb when it came to health coverage.
“Our gift when people turned 19 was to take away their health insurance,” said Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Turn 19 and we kick them out.”
If you were in college, you could usually stay on your parents’ insurance until you turned 22. But until health-care reform came about, young adults who didn’t find jobs with health coverage or qualified for government insurance were often left uninsured and vulnerable to massive medical bills.
Now there’s a present awaiting young adults.
Thanks to the ACA, commonly referred to as Obamacare, you may now be able to get insurance or continue to be covered under a parent’s plan up to the age of 26. And this coverage is available even if you’re married, not living at home, attending school or are financially independent. Starting next year, young adults up to 26 can stay on their parents’ employer plan even if they have another offer of coverage through an employer.
The downside for some parents is that they might have to pay extra to keep young adult children covered. But at least they will have insurance.
And, in just a few weeks, a new marketplace will open at www.healthcare.gov, giving young adults, particularly those older than 26, another option for obtaining health insurance. Trust me, this is one shopping trip that you need to go on.
There is concern that not enough young healthy adults will buy insurance, which will help offset the cost of those who are older and sicker and will need a lot of health-care services. Some experts believe these concerns are overstated. They note that insurance plans in the new marketplace will cover a core set of benefits such as hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance-use disorder services, and prescription drugs.
With the help of trained personnel called navigators, insurance shoppers will be able to compare plans based on factors including price and benefits. They’ll also be able to determine if they qualify for subsidies to help pay for the coverage.
When you’re young and healthy, you may think you can put off getting insurance. Maybe money is tight and you figure this is something you can delay until you get older, like contributing to a retirement plan.
“Health insurance is something at the moment I feel I can’t afford,” said Josh Nece, 29, a restaurant server in Oakland, Calif.
Nece, who suffers from severe eczema, says with rent, transportation, student loan payments and other expenses, he couldn’t afford the cost of insurance on his own. But he needs insurance to help pay for the medication and doctor visits when his eczema breaks out. He says he often goes without treatment or medication because he can’t afford it.
He plans to check out the marketplace in his state. I’m going to follow up with him to see if he does.
“I’m pretty sure I’m going to get health insurance,” he says. “Going into my 30s, I know it’s one of the adult things I need to do.”
In June, Kaiser asked young adults whether they wanted and valued health insurance. The answer was a resounding yes, contrary to the conventional wisdom about young adults feeling they are invincible.
Still, for those who think they can wait, here’s something to ponder: A tumble off a skateboard could end up costing you $20,000, as it did for Pollitz’s 22-year-old son, who works part time in a day-care center.
“He hit a rock, and the skateboard slid under him,” she said. “He broke his wrist.”
Pollitz said the bill was a “teachable moment.” Thankfully, he was covered on his parents’ plan. Otherwise, “that would have been a financial catastrophe for him.”
It is stories like hers that make Pollitz passionate about getting out the word to young adults to get health insurance. Although most young adults already have coverage, more than 19 million lack basic health insurance. In 2011, 27.9 percent of Americans ages 19 to 25 were uninsured. About the same percentage in the 25-to-34 age bracket also didn’t have insurance, according to Kaiser.
Some young adults might not get health insurance because the penalty for not buying it isn’t stiff enough. If the government determines that you are in the financial position to pay for coverage and you don’t fall under an exemption, you’ll have to pay a penalty for being uninsured when you file your federal income tax. The penalty starts next year at $95 annually for an individual and can go up to $285 for a family, or 1 percent of a family’s household income, depending on which is higher.
I like to believe millennials are smart enough to recognize they can’t afford not to get health insurance. It’s a gift that can keep them not only healthy, but out of medical debt.
By: Michelle Singletary, Columnist, The Washington Post, September 13, 2013
“Ideology Meets Idiocy”: The GOP’s Obamacare Youth Hoax
It’s rare for a political party to trumpet a position that unintentionally reveals its myopia, incoherence and expediency. Yet such is the trifecta with the Republican campaign to call attention to Obamacare’s young “victims.”
Republicans are obsessed with the supposed injustice being done to some healthy young people who will effectively subsidize their sicker elders when Obamacare’s individual mandate takes effect.
The crusaders are nothing if not convinced of the righteousness of their cause. “The whole scheme is enlisting young adults to overpay, so other people can have subsidies,” Dean Clancy, a vice president at FreedomWorks, told my Post colleague Sarah Kliff. “That unfairness reminded us of the military draft.”
Conservatives are therefore urging young Americans to resist. “I’m burning my Obamacare draft card,” runs one theatrical riff from a group called Young Americans for Liberty, “because I’m too busy paying student loans to pay for somebody else’s health insurance.” Republican policy advisors have urged the party to make such child abuse a big part of their anti-Obamacare message.
Sounds like a sexy argument, except for one thing. Republicans seem to have forgotten where most people aged 19 to 34 get health coverage: from their employer. And at virtually every company, young people pay the same premiums as employees who are much older than they are and who get more expensively sick than they do. In other words, the evil cross-subsidy Obamacare’s foes are storming the barricades to roll back already exists, at vastly larger scale, in corporate America.
These youngsters are already in chains! They’ve been put there by the private sector! And, inexplicably, young employees have entered this servitude of their own volition. (To extend the GOP’s draft analogy, it turns out there’s a voluntary army of health care masochists from sea to shining sea.)
How could injustice on this scale escape the GOP’s searing moral scrutiny?
After all, the president is only hoping that about 2.7 million young people will purchase coverage in the new exchanges. But 20 million Americans between the ages of 19 and 34 get coverage from their employer right now, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
If you’re keeping score, that makes employer-based health care’s cross-subsidy about eight times more evil than Obamacare’s.
How does it work? Compare a typical, strapping young employee of 28 to her broken- down 58-year-old colleague. These two employees have very different annual health expenses. Yet under the nefarious plot known as “group health insurance,” they basically pay the same premiums. It turns out every big company in America is essentially a socialized health care republic, in which the young subsidize the old, and the healthy subsidize the sick — all of whom pay the same premiums for the same plans.
Similar dynamics explain why, in the federal health-care plan, spry 42-year-olds like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz subsidize 79-year-old geezers like Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch.
Maybe that’s why Cruz always seems so angry.
Of course, most people in civilized nations know and accept that this is how insurance works. But Republicans nowadays aren’t like most people in civilized nations. They think Obamacare is a form of injustice akin to slavery. Which makes employer-provided health care slavery on steroids. Where’s the outrage? If conservatives were consistent and principled, they would devote far more time and effort to liberating 20 million young Americans from the socialism baked into employer-based insurance and look past the Obamacare exchanges as a puny sideshow.
But, alas, conservatives are not consistent and principled, save for their consistent determination to hurt the president politically.
It would be better if all those smart GOP thinkers devoted their talent and energy to the question of how they would expand coverage to the 50 million uninsured — but to raise that question is to enter the policy cul de sac in all its delicious irony.
Because the answer to that question is RomneyObamacare, the only sound way (as Republicans rightly taught us) that a country can move toward universal coverage using private health plans. The GOP could offer a tweaked version with slightly fewer regulations. Or structure it to offer universal catastrophic coverage to save money. But if Republicans were serious, they’d offer the same basic reform architecture.
So Republicans choose not to be serious. And it shows.
In the end, the GOP’s Obamacare youth hoax shows how silly a party can look when a political focus on one corner of a policy leads it to latch on to “insights” that utterly miss the big picture. It’s a reminder, if we needed another, of how close the connection can be between ideology and idiocy.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 21, 2013
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