“Oh, you mean those policies….”
In responding to the growing, nationwide outrage, as hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their health insurance, the Obama administration has elevated mendacity to an art form.
No humility. No contrition. And certainly no responsibility. For Team Obama, governing is never having to say your sorry.
So what to do when confronted by five years of definitive, no-wiggle-room promises by the President of the United States guaranteeing that if you liked your health insurance and doctor, you could keep them – period?
Obstruficate.
Surely it was understood that POTUS’ solemn word did not apply to “sub-standard” policies offered by “predatory” insurance companies.
The official narrative to refute the on-going, mass cancellation of individual insurance policies – and watching Jay Carney try to construct a sentence without using that word ‘cancellations’ is both deeply amusing and painful – is that for terminated policy holders, this isn’t the end of anything, but rather the beginning of a bright, new health insurance future that will raise the bar for quality healthcare nationwide.
Anyway, the “insurance policy transition notices” only effect a paltry five percent of the population, hardly anything to get upset about. For the majority of Americans, those who get their health insurance from their employers, the important Americans apparently, the President’s word is as good as gold.
But of course none of this is accurate.
POTUS never parsed his promise to the American people. This idea that there was some magic asterisk, the equivalent of a radio announcer speed-talking the terms and conditions that make the “really-great-deal” not so great, was created from whole cloth.
And these “sub-standard” policies? It is generally an iron rule that you don’t win a governance argument by implying that the American people are stupid. These citizens (this writer among them) aren’t rubes. They entered the private market for health insurance products – offered in good faith by companies, the vast majority well-known and in good standing, who responding to a market need – that were within their budget and met their customized coverage needs.
The Administration’s trash-talking of existing plans is all the more incomprehensible since the President’s solution are policies that cost significantly more, and mandate coverages that the insured may not need or ever use.
How is that a solution to anything? How is that economically attractive? Having “more” is only beneficial if it fits your needs. And these new policies simply don’t. It is a one-size-fits-all formula that failed in the past, and is failing now.
And Carney’s cynical attempt to down-play the cancellation crisis through a population proportionality argument is insolence pure and simple.
Five percent may not initially sound like a lot, but that works out to about 15 million Americans, who are currently in the individual market. For the purposes of comparison, let’s remember that we are in the colossal mess because President Obama was determined to provide health insurance to the 30 million Americans who did not have it.
15 million is a rounding error while 30 million is reason enough to take a wrecking ball to the American healthcare system?
Really?
But the whopper here – and it has stiff competition for the title amid the frenzied Administration response – is the representation that citizen with employer-based plans are safe. They are not. And the Administration knows it. Indeed it has known it for years.
A shocking but informative article in Forbes lays it out:
“It turns out that in an obscure report buried in a June 2010 edition of the Federal Register (two months after passage of Obamacare), administration officials predicted massive disruption of the private insurance market…Section 1251 of the Affordable Care Act contains what’s called a “grandfather” provision that, in theory, allows people to keep their existing plans if they like them. But subsequent regulations from the Obama administration interpreted that provision so narrowly as to prevent most plans from gaining this protection.
‘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.
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.”
93 million Americans losing their current health coverage, ostensibly so that 30 million can get insurance. Think about that when you consider that the Obama administration knew this almost immediately after Democrats passed the law.
And as with the individual market, the Obamacare insurance alternatives for businesses will be more expensive and restrictive. Don’t believe it? Then explain why the unions – among Obama’s most stalwart supporters, are up in arms about the loss of their “Cadillac” insurance plans that must be phased out by 2017? The unions know that what replaces their coverage is materially worse in all categories than what they spent decades extracting from management. And pricier as well.
In the private sector, businesses will have to make the agonizing choice, before January 2015, whether to assume the increased costs of Obamacare minimums, or simply pay a fine and send their employees to the individual market to fend for themselves. Right now, the economic incentive is to pay the fine.
This is a cascading catastrophe, playing out day-to-day.
But it gets worse.
Preliminary estimates show that Medicaid applications make up the majority of enrollees in Obamacare thus far. For O-Care to be successful, it must attract a significant cohort of healthy young Americans who will join the exchanges and pay the trumped-up premiums for services they will never use, precisely because the funding will be used to finance the expanded Medicaid rolls. Thus far, those healthy bodies haven’t showed up. So, at least for early October, O-Care has led to the expansion of the financially unstable Medicaid program, without the new exchange revenue to pay for it. The ten-year cost estimate of O-Care has already tripled since the law was passed in 2010, and that was based on assumptions that the right people would sign up.
Consider the cost consequences that result here.
The lack of healthy bodies also has impacts beyond Medicaid. If private insurers are unable to create balanced risk pools from the O-care insured, rates will necessarily sky-rocket, making distasteful O-Care policies financially ruinous for Americans. It also threatens the viability of private insurance itself.
Without thinking through and creating an economic incentive for young, healthy people to join the exchanges, “adverse selection” is undermining Obamacare, and the American healthcare system with it.
In a particularly revealing moment near the end of the 2008 campaign, President Obama stated, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Now five years later, we see the full extent of that ambition and its ruinous results, bleeding into the very fabric of American life.
What we are seeing in the healthcare crisis today is not an outcome beyond the Administration’s control. This is the conclusion they sought. The prevarications and outright lies have been an intentional means to an end.
The credibility or our nation’s governance is in collapse as a result.
This is not the “new normal.”
We deserve better. Never forget, and insist upon it.