Con spotting for election 2020 should include the red flag of the regurgitation of old-time failed Obamacare ideas as "great news." Yet, there are still those whose own self-interests prompt them to seek to distract consumers from the worsening cost barriers of USING our INSURANCE (underinsurance) as a tool to regain or maintain health, for NEEDED health care.
These individuals are those who apparently are willing to tolerate the peril in which they place others and perpetuate the risks consumers face from the health industrial complex in order to promote their own political or other agenda, because their claim that "having health insurance" alone is some sort of societal victory has already been proven to be an INVALID measure of access to needed health care.
This is the distraction put forth in Politico's opinion piece 1/27/2020, "Obamacare’s Secret Success: With little notice, the ACA has racked up a big win – near-universal coverage," by Ezekiel Emanuel, Cathy Zhang, and Aaron Glickman.
The proper answer to this distraction is: "Obamacare's partnership with insurance companies and forcing people to purchase health insurance with the governmental imposition of the individual mandate has increased those who have insurance, but has neither protected most Americans from financial ruin when facing the costs of needed healthcare services, nor prevented the endless increased costs consumers face in attempting to obtain those needed services, and in fact,has made cost barriers worse for consumers in many ways."
From enormous and rising deductibles, increased consumer payments for coinsurance and copayments, as well as the now decade-long trend in DECREASED coverage, and the increased costs we pay for excluded drugs and services, we know that merely "having" a product that calls itself health insurance often DOESN'T WORK as insurance, protecting consumers from the devastating risk of cost barriers and inevitable choices that must be made for regaining and maintaining health.
The increasing costs of obtaining and using health insurance magnifies the danger we face if we believe those who persist in weirdly tooting Obama's "universal coverage" horn, resorting to the fallacy that having insurance is progress no matter how much the cost, the exclusions and the limitations of that product leave us in physical and financial jeopardy.
Certainly by now, before swallowing Obama's untruthful claims yet again, we should discern who's repeating that lie. You can bet your boots it's being put forth by a partisan individual whose own health insurance is better than yours and who has a higher income to go along with that better coverage.
Why my use of the word "weirdly"? Because we've got 10 years' worth of experience proving that merely HAVING INSURANCE does nothing for consumer health UNLESS they can afford to use that insurance for regaining/maintaining health with NEEDED medical services and care coverage, which Obamacare made decidedly worse.
Yes, worse. By focusing on minimum standards for non-insurance checkups and preventive medicine and incentivizing insurers and employers to merely meet this new lower minimum coverage standard, we have seen deductibles, copays, and coinsurance go up in costs to consumer astronomically AND premiums have gone up as well, the worst of both worlds.
Don't think so? Just remember, the advocates and lawmakers made very sure that their insurance wasn't this coverage.
Still not persuaded? Obama's own government stated in 2015, "Over the period from 2005 to 2014, premiums for employment-based insurance grew by 48 percent for single coverage and by 55 percent for family coverage. CBO and JCT expect them to grow at similar rates over the next decade," https://www.cbo.gov/publication/51130.
Worse coverage by insurance policies as they all race to the bottom of minimum standards under Obamacare and at best according to Obama's own government, with a similar pace of increased pre-Obamacare costs in premiums--More cost for less coverage. That is not success.
'Universal coverage' is the positive spin on stakeholders explaining what's good enough for you, hoping you don't notice that it's not good enough for them.
'Universal coverage' is the fallacy that having any crummy health insurance improves access to NEEDED health care services, when actually, having health insurance means NOTHING if you can't afford to use it because of high deductibles, copays and coinsurance, especially with providers requiring upfront down payments on their services and ever-climbing government established out-of-pocket maximums.
'Universal coverage' is a fallacy based on an assertion that in today's census environment governments and politicians KNOW how many people are uninsured in the first place.
The Politico "opinion" asserts the fallacy that any government, the federal or states, especially with increasing populations of undocumented and illegal immigrants, can tally the total number of their population and determine the percentage of that unknown population is now insured (in their minds thanks to Obamacare.) Not true. Even Obama's government admitted that this number is guesswork.
In 2015, Obama's Congressional Budget Office, after five years of Obamacare revealed a, “…[S]lightly lower estimate of the number of people who will gain insurance coverage because of the ACA,” (CBO, Pub. 49973, page 19). Naturally, this little tidbit was only revealed after years of less-than-anticipated enrollment in Obamacare exchange plans.
We also know that the numbers of people who had insurance that was no longer available after Obamacare and therefore were forced onto exchange plans were not even addressed, so these double-counted individuals were used to pad numbers of insured with Obamacare.
In 2014, on behalf of Obama's HHS, Gary Cohen responded to the issue of previously insured versus newly insured with the statement, “That's not a data point that we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way."(http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2014/03/07/Gallup-Majority-of-uninsured-say-theyll-get-insurance/35011394207335/#ixzz3MLXDSS9C).
'Universal coverage' pretends that we're all in it together, and now "we all have insurance," as if this faux-community argument would ever inspire its proponents to face the choices the rest of us face.
Most significantly, 'universal coverage' PREVENTS consumers from advocating for a consumer financial product of health insurance that works as insurance, giving us peace of mind that WE PAY FOR IN PREMIUMS OR TAXES that in the event of NEEDED MEDICAL SERVICES AND CARE we won't face financial ruin as well as the suffering of illness or injury. To the extent we continue to face this added stress on top of injury or illness even when we have insurance is the underinsurance problem.
Health insurance is a TOOL we purchase to make sure we can afford the care we need when we need it without facing financial ruin. To the extent the tool doesn't work it is the wrong tool. Arguing that everyone should have a hammer when a screwdriver is what's needed is as idiotic as claiming that universal coverage solves the problem of ever-worsening cost barriers to obtaining needed medical services.
In the US, around 66 percent of bankruptcies cite medical expenses. That's a universal indictment of our health industrial complex and an indictment of Obamacare proponents and con artists, especially by pretending that "achieving" "universal coverage," on its own is a success in the environment of worsening underinsurance.
Actually, such bragging about universal coverage, meaning people having insurance, is a tremendous mark against Obamacare, since even going along with the unproven claims of lots of people having insurance we also know that 66 percent of our US bankruptcies are attributable to medical expenses illustrating how bad that insurance is…Underinsurance.
These universal coverage con artists ignore the crisis and growing underinsurance problem, reported periodically in articles like NPR's, "When Insurance Won't Cover Drugs, Americans Make 'Tough Choices' About Their Health," 1/27/2020, Patti Neighmond.
Worse yet, to belabor the health-insurance-as-wrong-tool analogy, when stakeholders defend universal coverage, merely having coverage, they consider it a success that everyone has a hammer even though that hammer is useless for the screwdriver's job.
It does not appear that this strategy is accidental when put forth by stakeholders, but instead is a sneaky way of trying to convince everyone that now we've all got the same shot at obtaining needed medical care and services, a claim which even the most gullible among us should suspect as a con put forth by partisan or health industrial complex stakeholders in keeping things as they are now, or making them worse.
Beware the damaging con of partisan brags about "universal coverage," such as that put forth in "Politico," "Obamacare’s Secret Success: With little notice, the ACA has racked up a big win – near-universal coverage."
The Politico article is all about those "enrollment" numbers, because after all, in a faux display of, "We're all in it together," much like Obama, the partisans will neither discuss nor attempt to address the excruciating, persistent, and known inhumane failures of Obamacare and our health industrial complex.
They ignore the increased underinsurance faced by consumers from Obamacare's deal with lobbyists and ignore or support provider charges that are through the roof, drug prices through the roof, exclusions increasing, ever-increasing out-of-pocket maximums established by government, Obama's legacy of making it harder to get the medical expense tax deduction by allowing the 7.5 percent threshold to lapse and thus raising that to 10 percent, balance billing, Congress' de facto exemption of themselves from the law, to name just a few of Obamacare's intended menu of brutal results.
In arguing some throwback fallacy of enrollment as success, these partisans argue the imagined and never existent good ol' days of Obama and Obamacare where by partnering with insurance lobbyists Obama's government increased the number of those who had insurance by forcing people to purchase the consumer financial product of health insurance. Why are they still arguing enrollment? Because after 10 years of relentless failure, what else do they have?
