Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Andrew Malcolm opens up our day on healthcare with a post about how the young are abandoning the president just when they’re needed to save the healthcare plan.
You may have noticed over these past 2,501 days that Barack Obama likes to give speeches, sometimes two or more a day. It’s better than Oval Office work. And on Wednesday the poor guy gave a particularly revealing one.
He’s increasingly desperate now, the president is. So desperate that he modestly likened ObamaCare to the suffrage struggle and to the civil rights movement, when he was growing up in Indonesia.
The litany of Obama gaffes, scandals, under-achievements and downright deceits is long and messy. And topped by this ongoing ObamaCare train wreck that worsens by the day.
The website was hilariously inept, except it cost way north of $600 million of our dollars. The president’s now proclaimed it fixed for the majority of attempted users. But that’s just the front door.
Once you’re in and perhaps enter your data, it’s not only not secure. It likely won’t reach the insurers because the site’s innards are not yet built.
There are many more problems to come. Premium shock; double the price for many. Deductible shock; most must soon pay the price of a used car before the policy kicks in. Next year thousands of employers will shorten shifts to get under the 30-hour threshold for health coverage and abandon company plans, whether employees like them or not.
On the other hand, everyone — gals, guys, seniors — gets free birth control coverage.
But here’s the largest challenge for Obama’s ObamaCare: He needs to ensure that 40% of all new enrollees are under 35 and willing to pay huge premiums for coverage they really don’t need. …
American.com blog post says regardless of the PR effort, the healthcare site is not close to being fixed.
Despite optimistic sound bites from the White House about improvements to HealthCare.gov, the President’s health reform remains dysfunctional. The website now boasts that it can handle 50,000 users at a time. But HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius warns that there will still be delays and urges people to try in off-peak hours. That is an improvement over the complete failure of HealthCare.gov in October—but if amazon.com had that level of performance, it would not stay in business for long.
Even with a better-functioning website, the government is having trouble enrolling people in health plans. An anonymous source claims that 29,000 people selected a plan through the website on December 1 and 2. That does not mean they actually completed their application or paid their first month’s premium. HHS still cannot accurately transmit applicant information to insurers, including state Medicaid programs.
This is a far more serious problem than it may seem. Five million people have had their current coverage cancelled because it did not satisfy ACA requirements. They are facing higher premiums and tighter provider networks, and they want to know what the government is offering just as much as the uninsured. During the week before Christmas, millions of people will try to purchase coverage through a web site that falls far short of private sector standards.
The result will be human and political calamity. Parents bringing their sick children into the doctor in January are liable to find that there is no record that they are covered by the insurance they think they have. People with chronic conditions going in for a long-delayed checkup may be handed a bill that was supposed to be covered by insurance. These stories will play out in every community across the country, permanently undermining public belief in big government solutions.
Noemie Emery writes on why she thinks repair is impossible.
… Most social policy involves the redistribution of money, and none of the plans mentioned above were immune from that. But the costs of these plans were funded by taxes, spread out over all of the country and, due to progressive taxation, fell hardest on those who could pay. Dispersed and proportional, the cost was accepted as moral and justified.
But the costs of Obamacare fall like a hammer on discrete groups of people who face hikes of hundreds of dollars in premiums in being forced — by the collapse of their plans — to go on exchanges. And most of these people are not rich. The pain was direct, and the pain was immediate, and the pain was communicated in the press and to Congress, where it was enough to force Obama into an improvised (and unworkable) program “fix” to keep 100 House Democrats from stampeding to the Republicans’ side. And at the same time, the program costs more and causes people problems they never expected (and were promised they never would face).
The second big difference is that Medicare, et al, raised taxes on people, but otherwise left them alone. Obamacare isn’t just costing people more money, it’s vastly curtailing their medical choices in ways they perceive as a threat. They can’t keep their doctors. They can’t keep their hospitals. And some state exchanges produce “narrow networks” that put good doctors and hospitals out of their reach.
By threatening their lives as well as their budgets, Obama has created a huge class of losers, who statistically overrun the small class of winners and outweigh them in savvy, no doubt. “A significant minority of losers or self-perceived losers and a few high profile bad outcomes are more than enough to cause real political problems,” as Kaiser Foundation head honcho Drew Altman informs us. They’re not a minority, and they have, and they will. …
Debra Saunders says the next disaster will be “doc shock.”
“The bottom line is this law is working and will work into the future,” President Barack Obama said of his signature Affordable Care Act on Tuesday. It would be easier to believe the president if he hadn’t said in 2009, “If you like the plan you have, you can keep it. If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too.”
One million Californians who lose their individual plans in 2014 know that’s not true; when many saw their new premiums, they experienced “sticker shock.” Next comes “doc shock” — the revelation that many folks also won’t be able to keep their doctors.
Meet Chico, Calif., attorney Kenneth Turner. His wife found out that she has breast cancer two days before they received their cancellation notice. She’s scheduled for surgery Dec. 20 and will hear the prognosis Dec. 30. Two days later, she loses the doctor who will have operated on her, as well as other doctors she has seen for decades. …
The Hill has more on the youth deficit.
Mounting opposition to ObamaCare among young adults is creating a new crisis for the White House.
While the federal enrollment website HealthCare.gov appears to be improving by the day, polls show the “young invincibles” key to making the law work are becoming less likely to enroll.
Younger people were skeptical of the healthcare reform law even before its troubled rollout, despite their support for President Obama.
But polling indicates the problems facing HealthCare.gov — a site the administration initially touted as a hip, tech-friendly experience — have reinforced their doubts about the need to have health insurance at all.
“The trend is daunting for the White House but not necessarily surprising,” said Pew Research Center Director Michael Dimock.
“Younger folks are part of Obama’s base … but the rollout confirmed concerns that were already in their minds.”
A poll released Wednesday by HarvardUniversity’s Institute of Politics found that more than half of 18- to 29-year-olds disapprove of ObamaCare and believe it will raise their healthcare costs.
Even more troubling for the administration is that less than one-third of uninsured young people said they plan to enroll in coverage.
Without a large number of young, healthy people in the insurance exchanges, it could create a “death spiral” of high premiums that could threaten the long-term viability of the marketplaces. …