The question has become, WHY? Isn’t it ridiculous to politicize and use legislation that impacts every Americans’ access to health care? Hasn’t it worked to our detriment having the legislation used as a political tool by either side? In my opinion the answer to both is, “Yes.”
Unfortunately, from its earliest days health care reform and its end result the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has seemed to have to do less with either patient protection or affordable care and more about misquoting, lying to and manipulating the American public to influence VOTES.
Having the well-being of Americans taking such a distant and lesser importance than the political aims of Republicans and Democrats has already resulted in a tremendous amount of untruth around the law. It has also led Democrats to be blindly loyal to an obviously flawed piece of legislation and has led Republicans to be arbitrarily dismissive of the legislation.
After we survived the “surprise” of the changes of Obamacare that became effective this year, we citizens looked forward to the dust settling and now that we realized we were badly informed or deliberately misinformed we could deal with needed changes to the law. Not so. It’s still the same old spinning around the drain with Democrats exaggerating the law’s success and Republicans exaggerating the law’s failures.
This has not so far been and is not helpful for consumers.
So, just as I did in my postings about Michael Hiltzik and Michael Cannon, where on behalf of consumers I advocate a direct link between the establishment of out of pocket limits (which have been raised) and income of US families (which has dropped), http://conoutofconsumer.blogspot.com/2014/06/michael-hiltzik-and-michael-cannon.html, again I’ll try here and in subsequent posts to encourage writers to address issues without the hyperbolic stretching of the truth to further their own political goals.
In a 6/22/2014 article by Jonathan Chait, “Republicans Finally Admit Why They Really Hate Obamacare,” http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/06/republicans-finally-admit-why-they-hate-the-aca.html, Mr. Chait asserts, “The right’s ideological objections to Obamacare remain, but I can’t think of a single practical analytic claim they made that still looks correct.” REALLY?
Mr. Chait chooses some examples that he feels most strongly support his smug claim of “success,” a chant of victory that reflects neither today’s reality nor what is likely to occur in the future. He identifies Republican claims that he believes he proves INCORRECT in his article.
Today we’ll cover the first claim Mr. Chait makes that Republicans wrongly asserted that Obamacare was signing up people who already had health insurance. This claim was critical for Democrats because the law was designed to address the 47 million uninsured and therefore enrollment numbers had to reflect NEWLY insured people to show the “law is working.”
If the eight million people who enrolled under Obamacare were ALL previously uninsured then to date Obamacare would have slashed the number of uninsured in our country by 17 percent. OK, we get why NEWLY INSURED is important for Democrats.
But for the law to have “WORKED,” is 17 percent really a justification for the law? Oh, and it's not 17 percent since only 57 percent of the eight million enrollees according to the new survey are NEWLY INSURED. As Mr. Chait points out, 57 percent of the new enrollees are considered NEWLY INSURED so that means a slash of only a little over 4 and-a-half million of the 8 million enrolled in Obamacare are newly insured.
Hard to see why this is significant in terms of proving "SUCCESS." However, we’ll give it that this shows a good trend if 57 percent of enrollees are NEWLY INSURED and we’ve reduced our uninsured Americans number to 47 million less the four-and-a-half million. Certainly not enough to declare victory, unless you’re a Democrat. But, we’ll move on.
Mr. Chait draws support for his reporting by citing a survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation but provides a link to a summary of that survey covered by VOX. Skipping over the citation to the actual survey is a clue that perhaps Mr. Chait’s interest is less about where we’re at with Obamacare and more about pushing his criticism of Republicans.
Enrollment is significant because a key purpose of the PPACA was to get uninsured people insured. NEWLY INSURED are significant because that means that those are individuals who didn’t have insurance before the PPACA, the group the spurred on the creation of the PPACA.
To further reduce the number of uninsured, obviously Obamacare is going to have to do a lot better than reduce the number of uninsured by four and a half million. That means not only will new enrollees have to enroll in a health insurance plan, but those that do will have to remain insured. Here’s where Mr. Chait’s omissions of the survey findings might be more meaningful.
Mr. Chait so narrowly identified the “issue,” that technically he did report what Kaiser Family Foundation reported, that 57 percent of enrollees did NOT have insurance before so they met the NEWLY INSURED criteria, 57 percent of the eight million enrolled are newly insured, a little more than four-and-a-half million.
But the survey said more. I’ll use the Kaiser Family Foundation cite rather than the secondary cite used by Mr. Chait, “Survey of Non-Group Health Insurance Enrollees,” 6/19/14, Liz Hamel, Mira Rao, Larry Levitt, Gary Claxton, Cynthia Cox, Karen Polllitz, Mollyann Brodie, http://kff.org/private-insurance/report/survey-of-non-group-health-insurance-enrollees/.
All references regarding the Kaiser Survey are to the cite in the above paragraph, shortened here to KFF, 6/2014. The first section of the survey is what Mr. Chait relies on, “The ACA motivated many non-group enrollees to get coverage and nearly six in 10 Exchange Enrollees were Previously Uninsured,” KFF 6/2014.
Mr. Chait asserts the heading without informing us that the survey was of 742 adults who purchase their own insurance. It is true that the Kaiser survey said that of those they surveyed “nearly six in ten (57 percent)…were uninsured prior to purchasing their current plan,” KFF 6/2014. OK, so not a huge study.
Mr. Chait OMITTED key findings also reported by KFF that “…those with Exchange coverage, among whom 20 percent rate their health as fair or poor,” KFF, 6/2014. This is a number that should concern everyone moving forward because obviously the sicker people are the more healthcare they use. Even Democrats worried about this which was their reason for pushing young/healthy people to enroll through exchanges for health insurance, to balance out the sicker people.
In terms of AFFORDABILITY, also an issue for not only continued enrollment but in terms of who will remain enrolled, the KFF survey reports, “Nearly half of those in ACA-compliant plans say they’re not confident they would be able to afford to pay for a major illness or injury, over four in ten say it is difficult to afford their monthly premiums, and over six in ten say they are worried that their premiums will become unaffordable in the future,” KFF 6/2014.
Perhaps it’s less splashy if Mr. Chait had given the real headline: “57 percent of 742 individuals surveyed say they enrolled in Obamacare plans and were not previously insured though they find the limitations of coverage and the cost of the plans to be high and worry they won’t be able to afford the coverage in the future.”
Such a headline would have not suited an agenda of proving that worries about Obamacare were incorrect, actually it validates such conclusions indicating that though 57 percent of those who enrolled on Obamacare are newly insured the other 43 percent already had insurance, so in terms of capturing the 47 million uninsured Americans at best we’ve only reduced the number of uninsured by four-and-a-half million (57 percent of the eight million enrolled). Not great.
The true headline would have also indicated that in terms of moving forward, the survey confirms worries already identified by BOTH sides that to maintain health insurance via the exchanges might be too costly for individuals and that many enrollees will drop out AND that many people worry that they’re UNDERINSURED.
These problems are there and by trying to pull the wool over our eyes, Mr. Chait does a disservice to citizens who need to push our lawmakers to address these real problems.
When it comes to our healthcare system it’s time for POLITICS OUT.
