Dan Mangan isn’t alone in his silliness but he’s my pick this week to use as an example of hysterical partisan storytelling in his article, “Obamacare bills may soar by $3,300 if court kills subsidies,” 6/17/2015, CNBC.com.
I understand the hysteria in these storytellers of the death spiral, or as in this case the $3,300 soaring rates as the TOO BIG TO FAIL argument is hammered into our heads. Because without the use of premium assistance payments to pacify the public and distract us from the stark failure of Obamacare to reduce health insurance plan costs, Obamacare will likely become even more unpopular.
What are Mr. Mangan and the Obamacare fan base truly afraid of?
They’re afraid that enrollment which has never been as high as hoped or anticipated will drop further if people don’t get government money for participating in exchange plans.
Worse yet, they worry that more people will notice the utter failure of Obamacare to curb the cost of health insurance plans to consumers except through the use of the old-time methods of cover less-charge more in the form of increased deductibles, copays, coinsurance, to keep costs manageable…In other words, worse insurance slows the increases we pay.
Pay more-cover less has ALWAYS been identified as one of the key contributors to our healthcare crisis which Obamacare did not address and possibly worsened by requiring insurers to cover non-insurance items, those costs that are known and finite (checkups, preventive care) rather than the costs that are unknown (needed medical care and services for illness or injury) for which we’re now paying more and which traditionally was the justification for insurance of any kind…covering the costs of something IF IT happened.
I understand Mr. Mangan’s hysteria. After all, June 1st 2015 CMS reported rate increases proposed by insurance companies exceeding 10 percent and in the words of Mr. Mangan and others, proposed increases by insurers are “eye-popping.” (Mr. Mangan’s article is in cnbc.com, 6/1/2015, “Will these big Obamacare rates get approved?”) The “eye-popping” language is also used in an article by Paul Demko, 5/30/15, “Experts see big price hikes for Obamacare,” politico.com.
Naturally, if people keep getting government payouts in the form of premium assistance which maxes out the percentage of their income that can be spent on health insurance and leaves the feds picking up the rest, these increases will not matter to those people. Their Obamacare plans will simply cost the federal government more, perpetuating the Obamacare fantasy that health insurance costs are stable.
BUT, if the government loses its King v. Burwell argument with itself that what it wrote was not what it meant and that not all enrollees in Obamacare get paid but only those who enrolled in a state exchange as provided under section 1311 of the Act, then those people who no longer receive federal dollars will have no reason to enroll in Obama plans with their “eye-popping” increases.
But in his hysteria Mr. Mangan’s article is ultimately an admission of Obamacare’s failure to rein in costs of health insurance absent the use of the old-time parlor game of keep costs down by providing less and making people pay a bigger share of coverage costs through deductibles, copays and coinsurance. Silly.
As he claims to worry about the people who will lose their subsidies, Mr. Mangan ignores the issue in King v. Burwell which will decide whether the government complied with its own writing of the law which made one of the elements of eligibility for premium assistance that enrollment in Obamacare plans occur through an “Exchange established by the state under section 1311 of the Affordable Care Act.”
While the Supreme Court will likely find some way for the government to continue paying, if it didn’t it would be based on the fact that those people never should have received subsidies to begin with. In the illogic of his argument Mr. Mangan is not alone.
We read similar headlines when other people who managed to wrongfully get federal money were described as potentially "losing" it…Remember September 2014 when the LA TIMES reported “Many May lose Obamacare coverage because of missing paperwork,” by Noam N. Levey, http://www.latimes.com/nation/healthcare/la-na-obamacare-terminations-20140916-story.html? They did not meet the requirements for getting the federal dollars in the first place, specifically completing required paperwork. But no matter, they were still “losing” their Obamabucks. Silly.
Mr. Mangan throws around numbers of how much more people will be paying but that’s not really his point, in my opinion, his point is how many people will not use the federal exchange without federal money attached to it which will jeopardize his precious Obamacare.
It’s not about people, otherwise when Medicaid expansion didn’t occur people wouldn’t have been given the solution of NOT having to comply with the individual mandate rather than making sure that some kind of insurance coverage was available for them. That’s right, the solution was to say, “Too bad, you don’t have insurance but we won’t make you pay a tax for not being able to afford health insurance.”
Read through the hardship exemptions under the PPACA giving the government solution to all the millions of people who cannot afford health insurance today because of unemployment or some other circumstance. The solution, “You won’t be held to the additional tax to punish you,” (the individual mandate).
But ultimately I side with Mr. Mangan in terms of desired outcome. Though I don’t like the illogical twists and turns Obamacare fans take and make to justify the law as they wish it was, I support the continued payments of premium assistance to individuals enrolled in Obamacare plans.
Why? Because as reported last summer by the government accountability office, “Eleven out of 12 fake applications for government-subsidized health insurance got through a verification process and the bogus beneficiaries are still covered, the Government Accountability Office said…” (NBC news, nbc.com, 7/22/14). So why shouldn’t real people take part?
