The Affordable Care Act Surges Forward

[rubato]

Why bother? He will never learn a new fact or entertain a new idea. He is stupid.

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[Crackpot]

Jim

Andrew is begging me to make you read his posts.

Crackpot:

You quoted one of my postings so that Lord Jim could respond to it.

How about quoting my responses to him so that he can confront them?

[Lord Jim]

LOL

Don't bother CP...(that's priceless...I put him on ignore so I could enjoy this place without his repetitive trolling, so now he's trying to enlist someone else's help to be able to do it... )

I'm sure it's more of the same misleading Obama kiss ass stuff that was in his first post, and I'm getting enough of delusion and deflection about the situation with Obamacare from his tag-team partner rube, there's no need to read the same nonsense in stereo...

If his blind hatred of Conservatives has led him to make a fool out of himself over this so he can find himself in the same category of respect around here that rube enjoys that's his business... obviously this is not something he can be even minimally rational or objective about. (Rube's excuse for that is stupidity; since Andrew isn't stupid I suspect his excuse is pathology.) In any event, my dance card is filled...

If any thing he said in this thread had any significance beyond "same shit different post" somebody else would respond or comment on it. I've noticed over the past couple of years that it has become obvious that except for his non-political posts, (or to poke fun at him) the number of folks around here who make it a habit to ignore Andrew at this point is fairly substantial. (I'm just the only one doing it formally.)

Econo:

I know that rube has a Pavlovian response to pie charts that say what he already believes, (they make him sit up, salivate and wag his tail) but I'm a little more skeptical...

Especially when they use slanted language and claim things as facts that (at least at this point) are completely unknowable...

The overall percentage of how many folks currently have coverage with their employers is obviously knowable, and I'm prepared to accept the 80% figure, (it jibes with pretty much everything I've seen on the subject.) And of course the percentage of uninsured is knowable, and the percent of of those who have their own non-employer insurance is knowable...

But that's the extent of the utility of that pie chart. The subsets and descriptions of the categories are frankly, pure ass gas...

What percentage of people are going to be "losers" or "happy" with their new insurance is obviously completely unknowable both because so few have gone through the process, and because we have absolutely no idea whether or not the targets for enrollment that are essential to the validity about the assumptions regarding premiums and deductibles will be met. Whoever cooked up this chart is attempting to assign numerical values to things that (unless he has a time machine) he can't possibly know, so his numbers on those scores are entirely the work of his own biases and POV.

In other words, they're worthless...

Moreover, he also can't possibly know how many of his "winners" (people who didn't have insurance before and will now get it for free) are going to be replaced with new Jessica Sanford types who used to be able to afford insurance but now will join the ranks of the uninsured.

So that number is also a work of fiction...

And on top of all of this, he cannot possibly know how many of those who currently have insurance they are happy with through their employers, will continue to do so after the employer mandate kicks in. This is because there are an enormous number of variables involved there relating to the Obamacare standards and the pricing that will be available to businesses (that I've already posted about) that are not known yet...again, he would need a time machine.

But that doesn't stop the creator of the pie chart from blithely asserting that as a fact...

So in summary what we have with this pie chart is not something that tells us anything useful; it just a piece of propaganda made to look like something data based. (And a very clumsy and blatant piece of propaganda at that.)

[Lord Jim]

Here are some more numbers, taken from internal Administration estimates:

Mid-range estimate: 51% of employer-sponsored plans will get canceled

“The Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013,” wrote the administration on page 34,552 of the Register. All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their “grandfather status” and become illegal. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americans—more than half the population—was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013.

Another 25 million people, according to the CBO, have “nongroup and other” forms of insurance; that is to say, they participate in the market for individually-purchased insurance. In this market, the administration projected that “40 to 67 percent” of individually-purchased plans would lose their Obamacare-sanctioned “grandfather status” and become illegal, solely due to the fact that there is a high turnover of participants and insurance arrangements in this market. (Plans purchased after March 23, 2010 do not benefit from the “grandfather” clause.) The real turnover rate would be higher, because plans can lose their grandfather status for a number of other reasons.

How many people are exposed to these problems? 60 percent of Americans have private-sector health insurance—precisely the number that Jay Carney dismissed. As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) amounts to 93 million Americans.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapotheca ... obamacare/

I excerpted those figures from a longer article, that I've linked to above. Here also is a link to a PDF of the document quoted:

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-06 ... -14488.pdf

Obamacare is going to have an enormous impact on the employer based insurance market, so claims that 80% of the people are going to be sitting there fat and happy, completely unaffected are pure BS.

[Andrew D]

I am not trying to "make" anyone do anything.

Considering that Crackpot quoted one of my postings explicitly so that Lord Jim could peruse it, it seems to me that fairness requires giving Lord Jim, by the same means, the opportunity to respond to my demonstration that all of Lord Jim's arithmetic conclusions are wrong. (And it bears noting that Crackpot has also not responded to that demonstration.)

But if Crackpot wishes to quote for Lord Jim only those postings of mine which Crackpot believes (s)he can find fault with, that is her or his problem, not mine.

[Andrew D]

The most important word in the Forbes quotation is "relinquish".

Nothing in the Affordable Care Act requires employers to "relinquish their grandfather status". Nothing in the Affordable Care Act requires the insurers of employer plans to "relinquish their grandfather status".

Employers will "relinquish their grandfather status," because those employers choose to give it up. Insurers of employer plans will "relinquish their grandfather status," because those insurers choose to give it up.

Assigning blame to the Affordable Care Act for employers' and insurers' choosing to relinquish their insurance plans' grandfather status is simply dishonest.

[Andrew D]

Something which Forbes and Lord Jim fail to mention is that the quoted government document says explicitly that the estimates quoted by Forbes and Lord Jim are probably too high:

Estimates are provided above for the percentage of employers that will retain grandfather status in 2011. These estimates are extended through 2013 by assuming that the identical percentage of plan sponsors will relinquish grandfathering in each year. Again, to the extent that the 2008–2009 data reflect plans that are more likely to make frequent changes in cost sharing, this assumption will overestimate the number of plans relinquishing grandfather status in 2012 and 2013.

Under this assumption, the Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013. The low-end estimates are for 49 percent and 34 percent of small and large employer plans, respectively, to have relinquished grandfather status, and the high-end estimates are 80 percent and 64 percent, respectively.

Forbes and Lord Jim both trumpet the estimates. But neither of them mentions the fact that, by the estimators' own reckoning, the estimates are probably too high.

Why am I not amazed?

[rubato]

Employer-provided health insurance is being gutted anyway. Try talking with a few people who work for large US corporations about how their HI has changed in the last few years and you'll see. Huge deductables which are followed by coverage which is only 80% of costs. 1 health emergency can bankrupt a family even with this kind of coverage.




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[Big RR]

That's true, but from what I read, the cheapest of the ACA compliant policies have fairly high deductibles as well and coverage as low as 60% (i.e. the insured is liable for 40% coinsurance), with out of pocket limitations approaching $8000 per person (not sure what per family), at least on some exchanges. You can trade up, but it costs much more.

Sadly, that's what relying on the insurance marketplace gets us; clearly better for the uninsured than no coverage, but much more like the run of the mill corporate policies. The ACA is a start, but it has its problems.

[Andrew D]

Sadly, that's what relying on the insurance marketplace gets us; clearly better for the uninsured than no coverage, but much more like the run of the mill corporate policies. The ACA is a start, but it has its problems.

True. The Republican idea of the individual mandate to purchase from private insurers is demonstrably inferior to the single-payer system used by most civilized nations.

[rubato]

http://obamacaresignups.net/

1,614, 900

% enrollment vs goal varies a lot from state to state. Some of the highest are: NY 18.8% Conn. 24.2% Wa. 12.9% A few at 5-6% like Ca and overall its 3.26% but many states have not updated numbers in 1-2 weeks so this is a snapshot of where we were rather than are at the moment.


It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next election cycle.

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[Gob]

As so often, President Barack Obama recited case studies of those who will be helped by the Affordable Care Act.

But the standing ovation, from the carefully invited audience, came when he said, "We are not going back," and that while he was president, the law would not be repealed.

It is his strongest argument. At the moment Obamacare is still very vulnerable and Republicans will not let go of a good thing - they are expected to roll out a series of attacks, responding to fresh glitches or new weaknesses.

But they don't have a coherent plan. They look like "the party of 'no'".

They hate Obamacare, but they don't say what they would put in its place.

Few objective observers think the American healthcare system was working well before Obama. It is too expensive and too many people are uncovered.

Even if the new law turns out to be really flawed, the people who've been given free care under states' expanded Medicaid schemes won't look kindly to anyone who wants to take it away from them.

It is maybe the wrong time in the political cycle to expect conservatives to come up with their own plans, but not having one may prove to be a liability.

Obamacare will probably suffer a lot more problems, but for now Democrats may feel confident enough to return to the attack.

Call it what you like, but this was a relaunch. President Obama apologised for the "poor execution" of the healthcare website, and said that any start-up this big would face problems - and they would be fixed.

But his main aim was to divert our gaze from the messy problems of the past onto the prize.

"Nobody should have to choose between taking their kids to the doctor and putting food on the table," he declared.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25209914

[rubato]

Worse than McCarthyism. Back then, there were Republicans who opposed and repudiated McCarthy. Now even the speaker of the house is too fwightened to oppose them at all.


http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/obamacare-mccarthyism

"... Since then the phenomenon has grown and taken hold in the 2014 primaries as Republicans accuse their opponents of privately harboring sympathies for Obamacare.

"I've not seen anything like this before," said Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "It is just such an interesting phenomenon -- call it anthropological or sociological or pathological. An obsessive hatred with all things Obamacare that has infected everybody on the Republican side. They can't say anything positive about any element of a law that is based on their own fundamental ideas. It means that when anybody says something that could in any way be construed as positive regarding Obamacare it becomes fodder for attacks. ... Conservatives are eating their own."

In a way, the phenomenon is reminiscent of McCarthyism, named after Sen. Joe McCarthy, who in the 1950s accused U.S. government officials and others of secretly sympathizing with communism. But Obamacare McCarthyism takes that to a new level, Ornstein argued.

"Even then it was pretty clear that you had a lot of Republicans -- it was very clear that President [Dwight D.] Eisenhower viewed what McCarthy was doing as appalling," he said. "We call it McCarthyism when you're basically slimed for something you said or did. But even that was different because you had a party that was divided -- not on the issue of communism, but on whether it was fair to [attack people as communist sympathizers]." ... "

We'll see what happens with the primaries; we'll see if the old-school Republicans have the stones and the means to take back their own party. If they fail the consequences will be dire either for them or for the whole country.




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