Tag: Affordable Care Act
An Inescapable Fact of Politics
In politics, when you have to eat shit, you don’t nibble.
— Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis, quoted by CBS News, saying that President Obama “would be wise to admit his like-your-plan-keep-your-plan dodge was a mistake and apologize immediately and conspicuously.”
Dems Increasingly Anxious Over Botched Obamacare Rollout
I believe that there’s been a crisis of confidence created in the dysfunctional nature of the website, the canceling of policies, and sticker shock from some people.
— Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), quoted by Roll Call, signaling increasing Democratic anxiety over the botched rollout of Obamacare.
Health Insurers Caught Lying to Customers about Policy Cancellations
Talking Points Memo investigated the rash of policy cancellations by heath insurers as a result of implementation of the Affordable Care Act. TPM reporter Dylan Scott found that insurers are routinely not informing customers that cheaper but better policies are available on the insurance exchanges:
If Donna had taken the default option that LifeWise offered outside of the marketplace, she would have paid nearly $1,000 more per month for a worse plan than she was able to obtain on the marketplace.Before Obamacare, Donna paid a $724 monthly premium for $10,000 deductible, catastrophic health coverage from LifeWise, a subsidiary of the state’s Blue Cross/Blue Shield affiliate. She asked that TPM withhold her last name because she was disclosing personal financial information.
The Sept. 16 letter from LifeWise told her that her existing plan was being canceled to comply with the new requirements of Obamacare and that she would automatically be rolled over into a new plan that was the “closest match” to her old plan. “If we don’t hear from you, we’ll automatically move you to this plan and you’ll be covered starting January 1, 2014,” the notice read.
Romneycare Architect: 3% of Americans Will Lose Their Junk Health Insurance Plans
University of Michigan professor and senior Brookings fellow Justin Wolfers on Thursday created a chart depicting the “winners and losers” under the Affordable Care Act, sourced to a Ryan Lizza article that used estimates from M.I.T. economist Jon Gruber, a former adviser to Mitt Romney.
The chart portrays the degree to which Republicans and critics of Obamacare have amplified the media’s coverage around the relatively small percentage of Americans who have received cancellation notices for stripped-down individual market plans that failed to meet the benefit requirements of the ACA.
Gruber, called the architect of Romney’s successful health care plan in Massachusetts, argues that of the six percent of Americans who buy their own health care on the individual market, three percent would have negligible change to their policies.
Ted Cruz Is Covered under His Wife’s Goldman Sach’s Gold-Plated Health Insurance Policy
$40,000
Annual cost of health-insurance premiums paid by Goldman Sachs to cover Canadian Sen. Ted Cruz (TP-Texas) and his family. Cruz’s wife, Heidi, is the managing director of the Houston branch of Goldman Sachs, which received a $12.9 billion payout from the government’s bailout of AIG in 2008. The New York Times reported in 2009 that Goldman Sachs’ plans for executives and managing directors are worth $40,000.
Clinton Rips Republicans As Ideologues, Rather Than Pragmatists, on ACA Rollout
Everybody’s forgotten, by the way, that when President George W. Bush and the Republicans put that Medicare Part D drug program in, it was more unpopular than the health care law and they had terrible problems with the computers. Some seniors couldn’t even get medicine they had been getting, and the local pharmacists basically got together and made sure they stayed alive until the computers got fixed. But our side, we’re not so ideological. So, instead of bashing them and screaming about how incompetent they were, most of our people just tried to help people understand the law and make it work and then wait for it to get fixed.
– Pres. Bill Clinton, during remarks at a campaign rally for Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race.
Klein: Obamacare is a ‘Highly Moral Piece of Legislation’
This is not health care for deadbeats, as many Republicans assume. It is a highly moral piece of legislation: the people most affected will be the working poor and lower middle class, people who have jobs, often at small businesses, but don’t have health care. (The unemployed and unemployable poor already have health care via Medicaid.) It is a matter of simple fairness that if we, as a society, provide health insurance to those who don’t work, we also provide it to those who do.
— Joe Klein, writing in Time’s Swampland Blog, noting the importance of Obamacare “should not be lost in the Administration’s failure to implement it.”
Fox News Shares an Obamacare Success Story
By accident, I’m sure, Fox News Online was fair and balanced. The site ran a story by Sally Kohn — a self-described Obamacare guinea pig — about her experience of purchasing insurance through the New York state exchange. It took her a few frustrating days, but in the end she got better coverage for her family and saved money.
Here’s an excerpt:
In other words, there’s still plenty of time to fix the websites and for more Americans to enroll — and save. Meanwhile, we know that in a state like Oregon, ObamaCare has already reduced the number of uninsured individuals by 10%. Glitches aside, that’s a great start.
We’ve suffered through four years of outlandish attacks against ObamaCare — that it will kill our grandmothers, or at least just kill our economy. But the fact is that ObamaCare has created a private marketplace so that millions of American families like mine can get affordable, quality health insurance while keeping more of our hard-earned money.
Read the rest of the story here.
For Tea Partyists Who Still Don’t Believe Obamacare Is a Republican Invention, Here Is Ultimate Proof
Transcript:
MITT ROMNEY: When [the uninsured] show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care, paid for by you and me. If that’s not a form of socialism, I don’t know what is. So my plan [Romneycare] did something quite different. It said, you know what?, if people can afford to buy insurance, if they can afford to buy insurance, or if they can pay their own way, then they either buy that insurance or pay their own way, but they no longer look to government to hand out free care. And that, in my opinion, is the ultimate conservatism.
That’s why the Heritage Foundation worked with us and was at the celebration of the signing — the Heritage Foundation, as you know, a quintessentially conservative group, recognized that the principles of free enterprise and personal responsibility were at work. You know, I’m proud to talk about what we did. We did not need to raise taxes. We did not need to have the government take over healthcare. Instead we rely on private market dynamics to get people in our state insured and for individuals to finally take responsibility for some portion of their healthcare rather than expecting government to give ’em a free ride.
From a report by Michael Issikoff, NBC News, on Oct. 11, 2011:
