Obamacare Still Hasn't Caught on
Yes, if you're using the Obamacare exchanges, the healthcare.gov marketplace, you can still use it this year, because Republicans have accomplished embarrassingly little.
Sure, there are peripheral tweaks, the substantive expansion of the types of organizations NOT required to offer birth control services, which naturally will not impact exchange users.
The cessation of cost sharing payments, NOT premium payments, but the additional federal entitlement dollars given to some smaller percentage of the lackluster 11 million (at most) estimate of enrollees on exchanges, 85 percent of whom get premium assistance and then, whoever among those 9.35 million who qualify for additional federal entitlement dollars when they USE their health insurance, specifically, deductible, copay and coinsurance IF they choose a silver plan on the exchanges (as opposed to a cheaper bronze plan).
But what really is ridiculous are the complaints that cutting in half the amount of MARKETING of Obamacare is tragic for consumers.
It's fair to say, we've been sold and sold and sold. From the first days of lying by President Obama, we've been sold Obamacare and like the healthcare.gov registration itself, it's usually just selling and not near what the actual experience of either the law or the policies are. There are a lot of caveats dealing with healthcare.gov, among which the outreach folk are woefully incompetent. Incompetence ranges from the determination of qualification, to accurate information about billing, to the amount you'll be paying to the delays and impossibility of disentangling form healthcare.gov. But, good news if you like the exchanges…go for it.
Advertising, marketing is not and should not be a consumer concern, though anti-Trump folk will say it is. If the billions in advertising produced the 11 million (at best enrollment last year) and even Dems will confess that enrollment dropped last year, (primarily because of price increases because payoffs by the Federal government to insurance companies ended under Obamacare last year), then the "outreach," like every other red herring is not the consumer issue with Obamacare, it's Obamacare itself.
Some of the other red herrings? Insurers are losing money so they're "forced" to charge more. Yeah, not the case and as I've pointed out before, even the NY Times acknowledge the insurers have gotten rich, just not off the exchange plans, but off the other provisions of the law. How about that "covering the poorest?" Again, nothing to do with the exchanges which cover WORKING Americans, the poorest were supposed to be protected by expanded Medicaid which was declared unlawful by the Supreme Court in terms of being mandatory for states and therefore is only present in states that adopted it. Medicaid, is UNAFFECTED this benefits season.
If you hate Trump, hate Trump, but let's not make the mistake that every policy that comes from your non-preferred President is bad, that can be as dangerous and ridiculous and anti-consumer as the fraud of Obamacare where consumers assumed wrongly that because they "liked" Obama that his ideas were "good."
The fanboys and fangirls of Obamacare betrayed consumers that believed their hype as they twisted and confused and lingoized their justifications to prove Obamacare was "working." No, it didn't, it never reached the enrollment numbers in exchange plans anticipated, it never shored up its loopholes and sloppiness that resulted in fraudulent payments that were then "forgiven" instead of collected, it never saved Americans money, but only disguised increasing insurance policy prices for those receiving exchange entitlement dollars.
For Democrats, backwards is the only thing they're selling, and even those goals are based on rewriting recent history. Obamacare exchange have been the source of trouble for many more millions of Americans than those "eligible" for the federal entitlement payments for premiums and cost-sharing. Obamacare was, is and will be in "trouble," because it's simply bad law.
