In a bleakly repetitive rehashing of the President’s talking points of years ago through today, Sally Kohn’s article, “6 Other Obamacare promises-and these are very much coming true,” (11/4/13) mirrors the smugly self-satisfied words of the President himself, sadly out of touch with the reality of Obamacare.
Rising to the defense of Obamacare, Ms. Kohn does nothing more than dust off and repackage the same old “selling points,” that scammed Americans who never got the legitimate answer to the real question, “How does Obamacare accomplish that?”
Ms. Kohn’s article is some recycled propaganda that is good for a laugh and will bring you back in time, where you can delude yourself into Pre-Obama as President days and consider Obama’s first campaign, trying on your Obama T-shirts and recalling with nostalgia a time when the President was believed.
There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia, unless it’s being published like news, a friendly reminder to people frustrated by system challenges in enrolling in the government entitlement for individuals without employer-provided insurance who are eligible for handouts for health insurance premium payments.
She plunges right in, talking about the millions of young Americans getting health insurance because the law provides that they can be carried on their working parents’ insurance plans. Here’s a secret, there was never anything that barred a parent from paying for an insurance policy for their child or anyone else.
By allowing parents to carry their grown children on their insurance, sure, many times those plans provided better coverage than those on the open marketplace would, but Ms. Kohn, time for an update…The cost of that insurance coverage for dependents is rising under Obamacare because there are limits under Obamacare as to how much can be charged to employees, not their dependents. Likely, parents will have to drop the better coverage and choose a lower quality plan for their dependents.
She perseveres, and you can guess what’s next, pre-existing conditions. No one can argue the meanness of insurance companies charging more to people with pre-existing conditions. But here’s the thing, Ms. Kohn, Obamacare did not sprinkle magic dust on insurers, requiring them to now embrace those with pre-existing conditions and not make them pay more for premiums, No.
What Obamacare did was two things to make three groups of individuals finance the cost of those with pre-existing conditions, the young, the old and the smokers. They are the groups that by the PPACA are permitted to be charged much higher insurance rates than anyone else, regardless of pre-existing condition.
BY LAW, you know Obamacare is a law, right? By law the age band ratios of how much can be charged to young people are changed from 1:5 which formerly permitted insurers to charge older people five times more than younger people in premiums to 1:3, where they can only charge older people three times as much as younger people. Younger people can be charged more.
Not only that, but the law provides for two categories for legal premium overcharging, the old and the smokers. If the old can be charged more and the young are charged based on a 1:3 rather than a 1:5 ratio, that’s two ways the Act charges young people more.
Your insurance will no longer have lifetime limits. Ah, true again, Ms. Kohn. On the other hand, copayments and coinsurance rates as well as premiums are going up. Did you think it was magic? Do you not know that insurance works by charging more or reimbursing less? Again it’s a shift not a solution.
Now Ms. Kohn, your hyperbole regarding “much more comprehensive coverage” is an interesting way of describing the focus on prevention and the goal of making insurance health plans more uniform. You’ll notice that even on your beloved exchange that this means higher deductibles for many plans and that those who don’t qualify for the government handout on the exchanges in the form of rebates and credits for premiums will pay more for insurance coverage, forcing many into WORSE insurance coverage including high-deductible health plans even if they’re men and would have sacrificed maternity coverage to save a few bucks. Again one must ask, you do know how insurance works, don’t you? And here, I’m hoping you won’t argue sexism, because certainly age, is also a protected class in traditional discrimination law yet that is perfectly acceptable under Obamacare.
For number five, rah, rah, “millions of Americans will have insurance,” but in your truly progressive soul, even you cannot applaud the fact that once the Medicaid provisions of the Act were changed to optional that in states that opted out of the Medicaid expansion, our neediest Americans, those who are unemployed will have NO new options for health insurance. They are shut out.
You do realize that Obamacare is ONLY available to a band of Americans whose income falls between certain amounts, or that they can fudge to make it appear it falls between certain amounts, and only to those who have jobs that pay amounts to get them into income qualification for Obamacare, and only to those without employer options, don’t you.
In your fantasy prediction of in-the-future how the deficit will go down, I’ll leave that to the “Fun With Numbers” crowd.
I take this kind of “reporting” personally. We have devalued readers to the point of bumper stickers, marketing campaigns, and carefully chosen half-truths designed to deceive. Obamacare is an inelegantly crafted law that was disingenuously sold that has proven sloppily implemented that fulfilled NOTHING of what the President promised, (see my post of 10/22/13, “Empowerment: Obamacare and Redefinition of ‘Success’) and created a new government entitlement program for those who are or can manipulate eligibility onto the exchange off the backs of everyone else. And for some reason, for you, this is nicely done?
