Tag Archives: obamacare

Universal Health Care Is Probably No More Popular Now Than It’s Ever Been

by LucilleMickle Posted on May 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Harold Pollack says that Bernie Sanders has started a political revolution:

Not enough of one to win the Democratic presidential nomination, but enough to put the dream of single-payer health care back on the national political agenda in a way few would have expected five years ago….Just this week, Gallup released a poll indicating that “58% of U.S. adults favor the idea of replacing the Affordable Care Act with a federally funded healthcare system that provides insurance for all Americans.” Politico Magazine reports that Sanders’s health plan “is the most popular of the three remaining candidates.”

I’d be thrilled about this if it were true, but I have my doubts. The problem is that Americans have a long history of supporting things in the abstract but not so much when they become concrete partisan proposals. Take Obamacare. In 2013, a CNBC poll showed 37 percent unfavorability toward the “Affordable Care Act,” but 46 percent toward “Obamacare.” In 2014, a Morning Consult poll showed 71 percent support for offering Medicaid to all adults under the poverty line, but only 62 percent support for expanding Medicaid “as encouraged under the Affordable Care Act.” A Marist poll in Kentucky showed 57 percent disapproval of Obamacare but only 22 percent disapproval of kynect—Kentucky’s version of Obamacare. And of course, we have years of polling showing that lots of people like nearly all the individual elements of Obamacare, but then turn around and insist that they hate Obamacare itself.

As for universal health care, a Harris poll last September found 63 percent approval. A Kaiser poll in December found 58 percent support for Medicare-for-all. Gallup polls going back 15 years show higher support for government guarantees of health care during the Bush years than they do now.

So color me skeptical that Bernie Sanders has really had much effect on the health care debate. Gallup’s poll last week didn’t so much as breathe the word “taxes,” and if it did, support for the universal health care option would sink like a stone. Americans have long had mixed feeling about universal health care, and those feelings are deeply tied up in partisan attitudes and willingness to pay. Unfortunately, Sanders doesn’t seem to have moved the needle on this at all.

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Universal Health Care Is Probably No More Popular Now Than It’s Ever Been

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High-Risk Pools Don’t Work, Have Never Worked, and Won’t Work in the Future

by GaryULNmsilfnrv Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Even among conservative voters, Obamacare’s protection of people with pre-existing conditions has always been popular. In a recent Kaiser poll, it garnered 74 percent approval from Democrats, 70 percent approval from independents, and 69 percent approval from Republicans.

Technically, this protection is guaranteed by two different provisions of Obamacare: guaranteed issue, which means that insurance companies have to accept anyone who applies for coverage, and community rating, which means they have to charge everyone the same price. But popular or not, Paul Ryan wants nothing to do with it:

In election-year remarks that could shed light on an expected Republican healthcare alternative, Ryan said existing federal policy that prevents insurers from charging sick people higher rates for health coverage has raised costs for healthy consumers while undermining choice and competition.

….”Less than 10 percent of people under 65 are what we call people with pre-existing conditions, who are really kind of uninsurable,” Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, told a student audience at Georgetown University. “Let’s fund risk pools at the state level to subsidize their coverage, so that they can get affordable coverage,” he said. “You dramatically lower the price for everybody else. You make health insurance so much more affordable, so much more competitive and open up competition.”

It’s true that the cost of covering sick people raises the price of insurance for healthy people. That’s how insurance works. But there’s no magic here. It costs the same to treat sick people whether you do it through Obamacare or through a high-risk pool—and it doesn’t matter whether you fund it via taxes for Obamacare or taxes for something else. However, there are some differences:

Handling everyone through a single system is more efficient and more convenient.
High-risk pools have a lousy history. They just don’t work.
Implementing them at the state level guarantees a race to the bottom, since no state wants to attract lots of sick people into its program.
Ryan’s promise to fund high-risk pools is empty. He will never support the taxes it would take to do it properly, and he knows it.

This is just more hand waving. Everyone with even a passing knowledge of the health care business knows that high-risk pools are a disaster, but Republicans like Ryan keep pitching them anyway as some kind of bold, new, free-market alternative to Obamacare. They aren’t. They’ve been around forever and everyone knows they don’t work.

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High-Risk Pools Don’t Work, Have Never Worked, and Won’t Work in the Future

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Obamacare Enrollment Up About 15 Percent This Year

by Dorcas8538 Posted on February 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Open enrollment for Obamacare is over, and HHS announced yesterday that 12.7 million people signed up via the exchanges plus another 400,000 via New York’s Basic Health Program. So that gives us 13.1 million—up from 11.4 million last year. And since HHS is getting better at purging nonpayers, this number should hold up better throughout the year than it did in 2015. Charles Gaba has more details here.

Add to that about 15 million people enrolled in Medicaid thanks to the Obamacare expansion, and the total number of people covered this year comes to 28 million or so. This means Obamacare has reduced the ranks of the uninsured from 19 percent to about 10 percent. Not bad.

Obamacare’s raw enrollment numbers remain lower than CBO projected a few years ago, but that’s partly because employer health care has held up better than expected—which is a good thing. The fewer the people eligible for Obamacare the better. More on that here. Generally speaking, despite the best efforts of conservatives to insist that Obamacare is a disastrous failure, the truth is that it’s doing pretty well. More people are getting covered; costs are in line with projections; and there’s been essentially no effect on employment or hours worked. The only real problem with Obamacare is that it’s too stingy: deductibles are too high and out-of-pocket expenses are still substantial. Needless to say, though, that can be easily fixed anytime Republicans decide to stop rooting for failure and agree to make Obamacare an even better program. But I guess we shouldn’t hold our collective breath for that.

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Obamacare Enrollment Up About 15 Percent This Year

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Mitch McConnell Has Met The Enemy, and It Is Him

by StepanieM07 Posted on December 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Politico has a fascinating story today. It’s all about Mitch McConnell’s months of LBJ-worthy maneuvering to get legislation passed that would repeal Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood, thus paving the way for a clean budget bill later this year. But here’s the kicker: he wasn’t engaged in Herculean negotiations with Democrats. He was engaged in Herculean negotiations with his own party. The goal was to somehow trick them into supporting the Obamacare/PP bill, which was entirely symbolic since President Obama would veto it instantly, paving the way for a budget bill later this month that Obama could sign.

How did he do it?

McConnell marshaled a secret weapon that ultimately would work in his favor: Anti-abortion groups.

Since the summer, the Senate majority leader had spoken with influential organizations opposing abortion such as National Right to Life and the Susan B. Anthony List to ensure they would back his move to link the Obamacare repeal with a measure to defund Planned Parenthood….Anti-abortion groups vowed to score against any senator who rejected the anti-Planned Parenthood provision, exerting additional pressure on conservative lawmakers who would have seen their sterling pro-life ratings tarnished if the defunding language was dropped.

Apparently McConnell persuaded the anti-abortion folks that their cause was better served by electing a Republican president in 2016, and the best way to do that was to avoid a protracted government shutdown over a budget bill that Democrats would fight if it included the PP defunding language. Instead, he proposed a symbolic standalone bill that allows everyone to vote against Obamacare and Planned Parenthood. Obama will veto it; everyone will shrug and say “we tried”; and then a clean budget bill will be negotiated and signed.

This is a strategy that firebrand conservatives opposed, but apparently they aren’t willing to risk their 100 percent scores from anti-abortion groups. So they caved.

And that’s that. In today’s Washington, passing bills isn’t a matter of getting Republicans and Democrats to agree. They can usually manage that. The trick is somehow neutering the wingnut faction of the Republican Party. Once that’s done, negotiations between the two parties are (relatively speaking) a piece of cake. Welcome to 2015.

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Mitch McConnell Has Met The Enemy, and It Is Him

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Shopping Around Is the Key to Low Prices in Obamacare

by EulaFBBDfchcqb Posted on November 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Abby Goodnough writes today about switching health care coverage each year during Obamacare’s year-end open enrollment period:

The Obama administration is encouraging switching as a way to avoid steep increases in premiums — and to promote competition among insurers, as the law intends. Next year will be no different: The price of plans will rise in most states, and the administration says that 86 percent of people who currently have coverage through the federal exchange can find a better deal by switching.

“This may be just one of those environments where there’s a new normal,” said Sabrina Corlette, a professor at the Health Policy Institute of Georgetown University.

For many consumers, the volatility in the markets has been a source of anxiety and disruption. To have any choice at all is a welcome development, many say. But switching plans is also becoming an unwelcome ritual, akin to filing taxes, that is time-consuming and can entail searching for new doctors and hospitals each year.

This is unquestionably a downside to encouraging competition in the health insurance marketplace. As carriers jostle for position, the lowest-price coverage is going to change from year to year—and if you’re a price-sensitive shopper, that means your coverage is going to change from year to year too.

I suspect this problem will settle down after a couple more years, as insurance companies get more experience with the Obamacare pool and get better at pricing their policies. In the meantime, though, it really does pay to shop around. A new Kaiser study of 2016 rate increases provides some concrete numbers. If you bought the cheapest silver plan in 2015 and then you stick with it in 2016, your premium may go up quite a bit. But if you shop around for the plan that has the lowest price in 2016, your premium will barely change at all. The chart on the right tells the story. For low-income buyers, shopping around means virtually no premium increase at all. For middle-income buyers, it means a larger but still pretty modest increase.

Moral of the story: If price is a major issue for you, shop around! It’s a pain in the ass, but it pays off.

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Shopping Around Is the Key to Low Prices in Obamacare

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Obamacare Co-Op Closures: A Headache, Not a Catastrophe

by Amy3756yyoaopho Posted on November 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Six years ago the Obama administration backed away from offering a public option in Obamacare. In its place, we got nonprofit co-ops. Paul Krugman was not impressed:

Let’s be clear: the supposed alternative, nonprofit co-ops, is a sham. That’s not just my opinion; it’s what the market says: stocks of health insurance companies soared on news that the Gang of Six senators trying to negotiate a bipartisan approach to health reform were dropping the public plan. Clearly, investors believe that co-ops would offer little real competition to private insurers.

Well, both Krugman and the market were right: co-ops never signed up all that many patients, and now they’re failing. By next year there could well be none left.

This has led to a round of breathless news reports. The failures have “handed Republicans a new weapon in their campaign against the health law.” Patients are “scrambling” to find new coverage. The closures have left behind a trail of “human wreckage.”

Fair enough, I suppose. Co-ops probably were never a good idea, and their bankruptcies really are causing a lot of grief for the people who had signed up with them. Still, in the midst of all this, it’s worth pointing out what we’re talking about:

Roughly 500,000 co-op customers will have to switch insurance plans.
That’s out of 30 million people who already switch insurance plans each year.1
And because of Obamacare, co-op customers can shop for a new plan pretty easily.

It’s not unfair to make political hay out of this, especially if you thought co-ops were a bad idea to begin with. But the bottom line is that instead of 30 million people switching plans, about 30.5 million will switch plans next year—and they’ll be able to do it more easily than they could in the past. It’s a headache, but hardly a catastrophe.

1Mostly against their will. About 68 percent are forced to switch because they changed jobs or their employer decided to change carriers. Another 16 percent switched because their plan was too expensive. Less than 10 percent switched because their new plan offered better service.

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Obamacare Co-Op Closures: A Headache, Not a Catastrophe

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John Oliver Explains Why Tuesday’s Elections—Not Trump or 2016—Demand Your Immediate Attention

by KenReesemy Posted on November 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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As he bluntly told Stephen Colbert a few weeks ago, John Oliver truly couldn’t “give less of a shit” about Donald Trump or the 2016 election.

Yet, as the Last Week Tonight host lamented on Sunday, the national conversation remains fixated on presidential candidates, largely ignoring several key races that could ultimately determine the expansion of Medicaid and Obamacare in their states. It’s an issue, according to Oliver, all Americans should pay close attention to, even if you don’t live in one of these three states.

“There are American lives at stake here, because a number of these elections could determine whether hundreds of thousands of people remain in or even fall into what’s known as the Medicaid gap,” Oliver said.

“I know that sounds like a terrible clothing chain where you can buy khaki hospital gowns sewn by children in India, but amazingly, it’s even worse than that.”

Continued here – 

John Oliver Explains Why Tuesday’s Elections—Not Trump or 2016—Demand Your Immediate Attention

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Obamacare Performs Miracle Time Machine Destruction of Past Economy

by Stephanie5550 Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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In Wednesday’s debate, Carly Fiorina said this: “We have 400,000 small businesses forming every year in this country….The bad news is, we have 470,000 going out of business every year. And why? They cite Obamacare.”

Later that night, I spent more time than I’m willing to admit trying to track down that number for business closures. Today, via Steve Benen and the Washington Post, I found it: it’s from a 2014 Brookings study about business dynamism. Annotated chart below. So there we have it. Mystery solved. Small business closures have been rising steadily since Reagan was president, and in 2011 the number hit 470,000. And the reason they closed is because of Obamacare. Who would have guessed?

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Obamacare Performs Miracle Time Machine Destruction of Past Economy

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GOP’s Budget-Deal Win Over Obamacare Is an Empty One

by Jamie01L805961 Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Congress announced a budget accord on Monday night to keep the government funded for the next two years, Republicans boasted that they scored a victory against the plague of President Obama’s health care reform law by striking a section of the original law. “By eliminating the law’s auto-enrollment mandate that forces workers to automatically enroll into employer-sponsored health care coverage that they may not want or need, we will repeal another major piece of ObamaCare,” soon-departing House Speaker John Boehner crowed in a press release.

But dig into the details, and that supposed victory doesn’t amount to much in terms of policy. “It’s not a big deal,” says Gary Claxton, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit focused on health care, noting that it’s “nothing that you’ll ever notice” if the budget deal becomes law.

The provision in question is a small section from the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. It would require companies with over 200 full-time employees that offer insurance to enroll all new employees onto the company’s health plan automatically. Employees would still be able to decline the insurance if they preferred. Currently, employees usually must actively opt into employer-based health care plans.

But the auto-enrollment provision has never gone into effect. The Department of Labor has continually punted on writing the actual regulation, and all the stalling has led experts to doubt whether the policy would be implemented anytime soon—with or without this proposed budget deal. Employers expressed dissatisfaction with the rule after the Affordable Care Act became law, and confusion over auto-enrollment ran the risk of placing workers in plans they didn’t want or enrolling their spouses who already had coverage. “Employers didn’t like it, a lot of labor organizations don’t like it,” Claxton says. “And there are some messy issues associated with it. I don’t think there’s a lot of people clamoring to keep it.”

Much like the budget bill’s supposed cuts to entitlements, which leave beneficiaries largely untouched, this reversal of a portion of Obamacare will have little impact in practical terms, even if it’s likely to be used for political ends. Republicans gain a rhetorical victory they can sell to the conservative base, while Democrats don’t lose anything on the substance of the policies.

The change will help offset the costs that the budget deal added by lifting earlier caps on government spending. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that 750,000 more people would end up with insurance each year thanks to auto-enrollment. Because expenditures on employer-provided health care are exempt from taxes, auto-enrollment reduces federal tax revenue. Eliminating auto-enrollment is estimated to raise an additional $8 billion over the next decade.

But Claxton doubts the figure is that high. The CBO used acceptance rates for auto-enrollment of 401(k) plans as the baseline for its projections, he says, and decisions about health insurance are far more complicated than those about setting money aside for retirement. “Maybe it’s estimated too high,” he says. “I don’t think people should give CBO too much of a hard time about things like this, because there’s just no data to do a decent job of estimating this.”

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GOP’s Budget-Deal Win Over Obamacare Is an Empty One

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Red States Spent $2 Billion in 2015 to Screw the Poor

by RashadPettis352 Posted on October 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Medicaid funding is shared by the states and the federal government. Between 2000 and 2013—the most recent year reported by the CMS actuaries—the share of Medicaid spending shouldered by the states increased by an average of 6.1 percent per year. This is not total spending. It’s just the portion the states themselves paid for.

In 2015, according to a survey by the Kaiser Foundation, spending by states that refused to expand Medicaid grew by 6.9 percent. That’s pretty close to the historical average. However, spending by states that accepted Medicaid expansion grew by only 3.4 percent. Obamacare may have increased total Medicaid enrollment and spending, but the feds picked up most of the tab. At the state level, it actually reined in the rate of growth.

In other words, the states that have refused the expansion are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. They’re actually willing to shell out money just to demonstrate their implacable hatred of Obamacare. How much money? Well, the expansion-refusing states spent $61 billion of their own money on Medicaid in 2014. If that had grown at 3.4 percent instead of 6.9 percent, they would have saved about $2 billion this year.

Here’s what this means: the states that refuse to expand Medicaid are denying health care to the needy and paying about $2 billion for the privilege. Try to comprehend the kind of people who do this.

POSTSCRIPT: Actually, there’s more. The residents of every state pay taxes to fund Obamacare, whether they like it or not. Residents of the states that refuse to expand Medicaid are paying about $50 billion in Obamacare taxes each year, and about $20 billion of that is for Medicaid expansion. Instead of flowing back into their states, this money is going straight to Washington DC, never to be seen again.

So they’re willing to let $20 billion go down a black hole and pay $2 billion extra in order to prevent Obamacare from helping the needy. It’s hard to fathom, isn’t it?

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Red States Spent $2 Billion in 2015 to Screw the Poor

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