If you're distracted by the language of "fix" or "replace" Obamacare, you're being foolish because both concepts are designed to change the awful healthcare law in fundamental ways that will make it at most Obamacare in name only as it becomes possibly even worse.
There's a red flag in the word "context." Since when do today's Democrats care about "context," the surrounding facts and circumstances to help provide a complete picture of a situation? Under Obama, context has taken a hit in favor of "spinning," cherry-picking facts (which makes them falsehoods) to justify his most unpopular moves. The rest of the time he's resorted to lecturing or attempting to humiliate and discredit his critics.
So when I see a Democrat public relations publication like Salon that entertains us with substandard reporting that is neither neutral nor accurate but by a technicality, for instance sporting headlines like "12 Accusers and Counting, Former Miss Finland says Donald Trump Assaulted Her, http://www.salon.com/2016/10/28/12-accusers-and-counting-former-miss-finland-says-donald-trump-sexually-assaulted-her/, equating these grown women's interactions with the well-known billionaire never having filed a police report or tried to sue him (as President Clinton's victims did and won), who in many cases sought out Trump to promote their careers, with "victims" of sexual assault, it makes my flesh crawl and I KNOW there's something even more ridiculous than usual going on.
So it is with Salon's "article," by Simon Maloy, "Obamacare’s 2017 rate hike coverage has been simplistic and possibly misleading," which seeks to "handle" rather inform readers concerned about Obamacare by adding "context."
Simon Maloy resorts to Obamacare's fallacy of the single risk pool and assures us that "Put simply, too many old, sick people were buying plans and not enough young, healthy people were signing up," Oct 26, 2016, "Obamacare’s 2017 rate hike coverage has been simplistic and possibly misleading,"
What Mr. Maloy doesn't share is that the law of Obamacare CANNOT fix this problem of not enough young-healthy tools to support the scam of Obamacare without MAJOR changes to the Affordable Care Act which would render it not Obamacare but some other new Democratic experiment.
Here's why:
Obamacare, by design and in fact, EXCLUDES the poorest young-healthies from the "single risk pool": Obamacare requires most wage-earners to purchase the consumer financial product of health insurance or face a penalty. Those exempted from the penalty include the poorest among us (see healthcare.gov) singling out the impoverished, the homeless, those who have been evicted, those who have medical bills they can't pay, for EXEMPTION from the tax penalty for failing to purchase health insurance, because quite frankly, they can't. So, even if they're healthy, the poorest among us won't sign up for Obamacare because they're EXCLUDED, they are not within the eligibility requirements.
Obamacare, by design and in fact, provides young people with options that PROMOTE young people's departure from the "single risk pool," which the inaccurate Mr. Maloy explains is the "simple" problem, perhaps in the hopes of further scamming the American people that Democratic "fixes" are any different from Republican "replacement" which both modify the law that would change Obamacare into some new national health law.
Obamacare, by design and in fact, allows young-healthies can choose a catastrophic only plan until the age of 30 if they have a hardship exemption, again removing the poorest young-healthies from exchange metal-level plans and the fake "single risk pool."
Obamacare, by design and in fact, allows young-healthies can choose a cheaper bronze plan that still provides premium assistance but does not include cost-sharing the other government entitlement that pays certain costs for medical services. These plans are less likely to be chosen in favor of the more expensive silver plans by people who know or anticipate higher health expenses during the year.
Obamacare, by design and in fact, allows young-healthies to choose a school health insurance plan if they're in school also removing them from the "risk" pool insurers want where they're the tools, balancing out the older-sicker folks who are more likely to use their health insurance.
Obamacare, by design and in fact, allows young-healthies up until the age of 26 whose parents are working and have health insurance can get on their parents' plans, again removing them from the "single risk pool" fallacy of Obamacare.
But the sinister changes to Obamacare that are designed to further use young-healthies as tools to pacify the government insurance company partners have gone further and under the irrational grant of power given to HHS and CMS under the Affordable Care Act should stand as a warning to the young-healthies.
Last year, 2016, Obamacare exchanges accepted insurance company strategies to increase the cost of bronze plans MORE than they increased the cost of silver plans in the hopes that the smaller increase would make silver plans more appealing to young-healthies as a better deal, since if worse insurance goes up 10 percent and better insurance goes up 8 percent, for example, then the better product becomes more of a value. It didn't work because the prices are exorbitant.
This summer, 2016, HHS (and it's CMS folks) changed the availability of short-term insurance plans specifically stating, " Some issuers are now offering short-term limited duration plans to consumers as their primary form of health coverage for periods that last nearly 12 months, allowing them to target only the healthiest consumers…such abuses of limited duration coverage increase costs for everyone else."
As for the "fixes" being recommended by Democrats? It should bring goosebumps to the skin of those with any intelligence at all:
From Jonathan Gruber, the man who brought us the statement that revealed what the President adopted as his approach to selling Obamacare to the American public, that "lack of transparency" would work because of the "stupidity of the American people," we got this week's Gruberism that the way to fix Obamacare was to INCREASE penalties under the law (search anywhere for a cite).
From Obama, clearly out of ideas whose ego rather than intelligence has made him an offender in creating the unprecedented government partnership with health insurance companies in order to improve the bottom lines of both government and insurance companies in defiance of the American people, we now get his latest resurrection of his own stale idea of a public option which Obama so cavalierly sacrificed in the earliest days of his Obamacare scam in 2009.
Resurrecting the old failed idea of the public option is not the only stale set of solutions Democrats are advocating.
Hillary Clinton advocates resurrecting the payoffs at their highest levels for states that buy into expanded Medicaid, turning that provision of Obamacare that provided superior federal payouts to states on behalf of their new Medicaid populations as a declining formula for later adopters.
The Washington Post recommends resurrecting the risk corridors provisions, called TEMPORARY and that have expired under the law which were payoffs to insurance companies in order to get them to be willing to participate on exchanges.
Democrats have other even more sinister plans: Reduce options further for consumers by forcing health insurers who offer out of exchange plans to offer them only inside the exchange, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/10/25/obamacare-has-some-problems-heres-how-we-can-fix-them/?utm_term=.7a1d5db7d961, which means that those individuals, including young-healthies over the age of 26, who are EXCLUDED from the exchange because they don't fall within income parameters would have NO OPTION for even somebody else to purchase them a health insurance policy.
So, "context" doesn't help, it's just a Democratic ploy to "explain" falsely how Obamacare "could," work. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be Obamacare, but some new convoluted strategy for improving government and insurance company bottom lines at the expense of the American people.
