Be careful what you’re being coaxed into…That was my feeling as I read through Thomas B. Edsall’s opinion piece that asks: “Has Obamacare Turned Voters Against Sharing the Wealth?” THE NEW YORK TIMES, 4/15/15.
Edsall uses Obamacare and changing American views about healthcare as signifying Americans’ “…decline in support for redistributive government policies,” and specifically warns that traditional champions of redistributive policies, the Democrats, “…will confront serious hurdles if it attempts to deliver material support to working men and women and the very poor.”
Mr. Edsall seems distressed that people have a REACTION to the problems created by and perpetuated by Obamacare and the President’s approach and policies in general that IN REALITY have decimated many in the middle class leaving us distrustful of dishonesty from politicians and government policies primarily designed to support and strengthen the government class at the expense of private citizens.
Mr. Edsall’s distress is his choice, but trying to turn people’s reaction to reality into some negative change in the hearts and morality of the American people is a stretch and it angers me that rather than look at bad law, bad policy and bad communication as part of the problem that Mr. Edsall seems to worry that it will be harder to manipulate us into supporting more bad policy and bad law.
For me, we’ve been called to perform due diligence. If Obamacare proved it’s that government dropped the ball, from the President’s cherry-picking “speeches” about Obamacare to Congress failing to read the law to Republicans failing to publicize the weaknesses in the law indicating that we’d better act smarter and do the research for ourselves.
Calling something redistributive without asking for whose benefit, financed by whom, how much and how long would be like…Well like believing in an Affordable Care Act that doesn’t ask AFFORDABLE FOR WHOM?
I am often FOR redistributive policies that address a concrete challenge in a limited way for the direct benefit of a particular segment of society that requires equivalent participation from all groups in society. As a member of the middle class, I have yet to see anything Obama work this way and the facts bear me out.
President Obama cannibalized the private sector middle class: “Wealth gap between middle class and rich widest ever,” CNN, 1/30/2015…
…while protecting the government class: “US Federal Employment Related to Higher Financial Well-Being,” March 5, 2015, Jessica Mangskau and Steve Ander,http://www.gallup.com/poll/181820/federal-employment-related-higher-financial.aspx.
Wages for working Americans are stagnant: “Job Growth Looks Great; Wage Growth Less So,” 1/9/2015, The UPSHOT, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/10/upshot/job-growth-looks-great-wage-growth-less-so.html?abt=0002&abg=1).
The worker participation rate in the United States is at its lowest since 1978, (“…the civilian labor force participation rate between 1948 and 2015. As the graph shows, the participation rate in February 2015 (62.8 percent) is the lowest since March 1978,” factcheck.org.
And who’s getting rich in healthcare? Healthcare stock holders: “Thanks, Obamacare! Health insurer stocks soar,” http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/21/investing/unitedhealth-earnings-obamacare/.
Now back to Mr. Edsall’s lament.
Mr. Edsall holds forth Gallup Poll shifts indicating that in 2006 most people (69%) that the federal government should guarantee health care coverage for all citizens of the United States compared to 2014 where only 48 percent felt that way. He used this information to conclude there’s been an “…erosion of the belief in health care as a government-protected right.”
It doesn’t matter whether someone believes in health care as a government-protected right in an environment that has codified HEALTH INSURANCE AS A REQUIREMENT through Obamacare without any consideration of the RIGHT to health CARE.
What Mr. Edsall seems unable to grasp is that ONLY Obamacare’s expanded Medicaid provisions have “worked” for consumers because it provides for federal government providing near-free health insurance for people who will have to pay near-free costs for needed medical services…NOT the case for most Americans.
With Obamacare the government has not “protected” health CARE as a right but has made it ILLEGAL not to have a health INSURANCE product. That’s why only Medicaid has arguably “worked” at all under Obamacare, because it FACILITATES health care by paying for both the health insurance policy and most of the health care services for its members.
Not so for the rest of us facing INCREASES in what we pay for NEEDED healthcare services…Additional BARRIERS to health CARE under Obamacare.
For many of us the REDISTRIBUTION policy of Obamacare is obviously INCREASING the costs of needed healthcare services to INDIVIDUALS (with significant increases in the amount of money we must lay out in the form of deductibles, copayments and coinsurance) as a means of saving money for employers and payers under the law’s concept of INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY.
This is a perversion of REDISTRIBUTION concepts where the REDISTRIBUTION of citizen wealth results in a boost to employers who save money, government that saves money, and insurance companies that save money.
Mr. Edsall then convolutes the issue in King v. Burwell to again wrongfully assert that “…if the court rules against the A.C.A., public and private health care delivery would be disrupted, to put it mildly,” and then adding a warning that Republicans would “…limit coverage for the poor…”Edsall, 4/15/2015, nytimes.com, “Has Obamacare Turned Voters Against Sharing The Wealth?”
This is the worst kind of public shaming and scare-mongering. King v. Burwell considers the IRS implementation of the ACA, not the legality of the ACA.
King v. Burwell considers whether the IRS has the power to offer premium assistance and cost-sharing federal money under section 1321 of the ACA to residents who enrolled in Obamacare plans in states that failed to establish or implement an exchange under the provisions of 1311 as required by IRS 36B, section 1401 of the Act.
Mr. Edsall also seems to misunderstand that premium assistance and cost-sharing are available to individuals meeting INCOME requirements (even millionaires whose INCOME falls within eligibility since there is no assets test) and are NOT provisions for the poor…That’s expanded Medicaid which King v. Burwell does not address.
Mr. Edsall further confuses hype with reality when he talks about the “risk” that the “…younger population loses federal subsidies and drops insurance coverage.” Sorry, also false.
While the IDEA was to get additional younger and therefore presumably healthier people to purchase silver or better plans which would likely be chosen by those with health concerns because they’d want more health insurance coverage (70%) as opposed to bronze plans (60%), EVEN WITH THE AVAILABILITY OF PREMIUM ASSISTANCE AND COST-SHARING THIS HAS NOT OCCURRED.
The government has revealed that more young people are signing up for crummier bronze-level health insurance or catastrophic plans (for those under 30) simply to comply with the law leaving enrollment in silver plans and above for the sick who are more worried about paying for needed healthcare services.
In January 2015, the Congressional Budget Office reported, CBO publication 49892, “…enrollment in bronze plans…during 2014 was higher than anticipated,” noting that premium assistance and cost sharing subsidies were not enough to get people to buy more expensive plans predicting that “…in years after 2015, 3 million people who would have been eligible for cost-sharing subsidies if enrolled in a silver plan will forgo those subsidies by signing up for a bronze plan.”
EVEN WITH PREMIUM ASSISTANCE AND COST-SHARING the PRICE of Obamacare plans is predicted to go up drastically--8.5 PERCENT in the next few years for two reasons: The phasing out of government protection (money) for insurance companies for losses they incur for paying for needed medical services for sicker patients (reinsurance payments) and the UNSUSTAINABILITY OF OBAMACARE PLANNARROW NETWORKS (few choices of participating providers for enrollees).
Obamacare plan premiums will rise 8.5 percent from 2016 to 2018 because government reinsurance payments to insurers “…whose enrollees incur particularly high costs for medical care will be phased out…”
AND because Obamacare plans compared to other health insurance typically pay their providers less and have fewer providers for consumers to choose from, narrow networks, and the government,
AND “…CBO and JCT anticipate that many plans will not be able to sustain such low provider payment rates or such narrow networks over the next few years, placing upward pressure on exchange premiums,” (CBO publication 49973, March 2015).
Mr. Edsall goes into a long-winded explanation of how rising inequality encourages less trust in government conveniently skipping over the other noticeable thing that increases distrust of government in connection with Obamacare…Lying to us.
For me, ultimately Mr. Edsall’s piece is not about attitudes towards redistributive policies or about people’s beliefs, but is more advice for democrats in order to effectively manipulate voters into voting Democrat.
