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| Obamacare Makes States Sick, Too! (Source: Zazzle.com) |
At first, limited government advocates may fear that the states are giving up their power because they have surrendered their health insurance exchanges. On the other hand, the whole insurance exchange folly was a federal mandate which has done nothing but push the limits of the what the federal government should be doing in the first place.
Despite the most desperate pleadings of progressives, the United States Constitution exists as an instrument of law which binds the federal government to a clear set of enumerated, delineated powers. If the Constitution were a living, as in easily transformative document, then the Framers would have never framed such a document in the first place.
Nor would they have accommodated a Bill of Rights, an invention and instigation from the several states which automatically recognized that more concentrated power could cause more trouble than the states or their citizens were willing to tolerate.
The several states also act as laboratories for good or bad ideas. Not just Massachusetts, but also Tennessee experimented with statewide health insurance coverage provided by taxes and bureaucracy. The measure created cost overruns in both states.
Vermont has tried to set up their health care exchange to implement a single-payer system, and already Democrats along with Republicans are running from the scheme.
Now about those Obamacare state health insurance exchanges.
Oregon has spent $200 million on the state health care exchange Cover Oregon (with calls to stop the spending. Only so much good money can go after bad and "cover" for the failures of a failing system). The state has fired the second administrator for the site, as well. How many people have they managed to cover? Nobody! The Democratic Governor is appalled and frustrated, while Oregon GOP, along with four US Senate candidates, are rearing up to take back the Beaver State. The media frenzy has established the legacy for this state exchange: one big joke.
Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber (D) released a blistering report about Cover Oregon's numerous failures, yet refused to cover questions relating to corruption.
Then there's Maryland, which was one-party Democratic long before California began drifting left. Let us not forget that before she was a San Francisco liberal, Nancy Pelosi was the daughter of the Congressman then the mayor who ran Baltimore, Maryland -- not that such distinctions are noteworthy. And who can forget RINO Constance Morello, who ran as a Republican only because she could not compete with an incumbent Democrat in a primary.
Now, the current (of course, Democratic) Governor, Martin O'Malley, wanted to outflank the Obama Administration for its left-wing policies, and the state jumped head-first into setting up its own state health insurance exchange in accordance with the "Affordable" Care Act.
Just one problem: the legislation has proven to be anything but affordable, and in spite of their most liberal efforts, the Maryland exchange, Maryland Health Connection, despite over $100 million, has failed, and is beyond repair, that the state's exchange commission is seeking out the computer systems in the Connecticut exchange to start over.
What a waste of money.
O'Malley still tried put lipstick on the pig, or a ruby red coat of paint on the dilapidated jalopy:
“We still have stuck applications. We still wrestle with it every day,” O'Malley said at a news conference. “The clock was ticking, and we have been changing the flat tires on this rolling car for the last five, going on six months now. And it has gotten better with every new fix applied to it, [but it is] still not working as it was supposed to work.”
It was getting better, yet the state officials cannot get the website to work - that means it was never better to begin with. Of course, O'Malley and his irrepressible liberal caucus never let something like semantics or the truth get in the way of explaining failed policies. Was it not President Obama who asserted over and over: "If you like your health care, you can keep it"?
And how about that Connecticut health care exchange, Access Health CT? Has it worked any better? Connecticut wants more money to expand.
The Massachusetts state health care exchange is also on life-support, with rising costs (now the highest in the country). I spoke with a state assemblyman, who shared not only facts and figures relating to website malfunctions, but also cost overruns, He shared individual accounts, as did one of his constituents directly.
And in Rhode Island, both Democrats and Republicans want to end throwing what little good state revenues remain after a bad health insurance exchange, Health Source RI, which has not attracted nearly enough young people. I interviewed lawmakers, a private benefits manager, and a psychiatric administrator for one of the health insurance companies in Rhode Island, and they all had one story to tell: the state health care exchange is too costly. Instead of wasting state dollars on the bloated and costly system, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle want to block any state funds from bolstering the failed system.
The state exchanges have gone bust in three states, with Vermont teetering on the brink because of their progressive overachieving. Not just individuals, patients, and doctors are caring less for Obamacare, but entire states are finding this law to be a lawless (not flawless) waste of time, energy, and money.
When half the government is hellbent on destroying the law of the land, it's not surprising the roll-out of landmark legislation has some bumps. Only the simplest of simpletons can't grasp that basic truism.
ReplyDeleteTake Kentucky, which runs one of the most trouble free sites. It has registered consumers for private insurance at a steady clip of nearly 1,400 a week, and enrolled 29,000 people in Medicaid during the first month. Per capita, Kentucky has registered more people for private insurance and Medicaid than any other state.
"Our system doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles," said Carrie Banahan, executive director of the Kentucky exchange, which is known as Kynect. "There aren't a lot of graphics that would take a lot of bandwidth."
Kentucky and other top-performing states enable consumers to browse the various plans available on the exchange without first having to set up a password-protected account. That step alone spared those exchanges a lot of error messages and screen freezes experienced by people using the federal site.
Successful states also devoted months, not weeks, to exhaustive, round-the-clock testing. Kentucky tested for three months, while the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reportedly devoted only the last two weeks of September to testing healthcare.gov before its Oct. 1 launch.
Dan Schuyler of Leavitt Partners, a consulting firm that helped design an early exchange in Utah in 2009, also pointed out that state exchanges fared better if they screened for Medicaid eligibility and linked to the state's existing Medicaid enrollment site, rather than attempting to enroll consumers directly from the exchange.
There's much more, Art--I know you are a Koch Brothers/Americans for Prosperity property--it's all over your talking points, various "headlines", etc. You are as basic and simple as black & white TV. About as current, too.
Please keep posting anecdotal "evidence", Arthur. We, too, love these human interest tales. Shall we fact-check them, or shall we hire a third party?
ReplyDeleteWashington Times reported both sides of Obamacare in Kentucky: Kynect.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/26/kentucky-a-strange-example-of-obamacare-done-right/?page=all
More have enrolled on Medicaid than private insurance. I spoke with a medical administrator in Rhode Island, who has acknowledged that poor and sick (with pre-existing conditions) love Obamacare. That fact does not downplay the cost issue, which will come home to roost soon enough.
Health insurance does not equal access to health care. I have written about doctors in California who have opted out of the exchange and will not take patients with Obamacare insurance. I just commented on a column in the liberal Jewish Journal, in which Cedars-Sinai has refused to take Obamacare insurance, unless the patients has the plan with the highest deductible. Not affordable at all.
Once again, health insurance is not health care access, and expanding dependents on Medicaid is an unwise policy, to say the least.
I will be investigating Kentucky's system at length next.
You "commented"? You will be "investigating"? You? Art COSTANZA? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!
Delete"Commented". "Investigating".
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!
The Las Vegas Review-Journal has offered that Nevada should scrap their own health care exchange if the state government cannot fix it.
ReplyDeleteWill the Silver State be joining Maryland, Oregon, and Rhode Island in scrapping their state health insurance exchange, too?
http://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/editorial-if-nevada-exchange-can-t-be-fixed-get-rid-it
Art the Fart, you are entitled to your own opinion but you aren't entitled to your own facts.
ReplyDeleteMaryland's exchange isn't shut down:
http://marylandhealthconnection.gov/
Oregon's exchange isn't shut down: https://www.coveroregon.com/individual/browse/medical
Rhode Island's exchange isn't shut down:
http://www.healthsourceri.com/
As to the Las Vegas Review-Journal? Who gives a shit what they say? Theirs is a conservative editorial board who endorsed Romney--he lost, remember?--in 2012 and
McCain in 2008--who also lost and who saddled the country with the Alaskan Asshat.
Get some goddamn facts, you drooling moron.
Lee, I imagine you know that Arthur is conflating those states' exchange WEBSITES with their actual EXCHANGES---two totally separate things. Right-wingers specialize in conflation, and although I doubt Art is smart enough to recognize that he's actually conflating; he probably actually thinks those states will refuse to allow their citizens to take advantage of the ACA by somehow banning the accessibility in their states. Art also isn't of sufficient historical depth to realize that all huge endeavors have hiccups at their outset. His fervent wish--like all right-wing idealogues--is for the program to fail so that health insurance in the U.S. remains the most inefficient in the industrialized world. Arthur also believes the ACA is "government healthcare", when thinking people all know it is private health insurance available to all under a set of federal guidelines. Arthur just isn't very bright.
ReplyDeleteThanks to my buddy Jim for pointing out this ridiculous, half-assed blog. It proves the Internet-age adage that even the illiterate will have a blog.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, despite the best efforts of the Koch Bros and the rest of the righties' "dark money" sugar daddies, the righties have lost and everyday Americans have won!
*As the law's initial enrollment period closes, at least 9.5 million previously uninsured people have gained coverage. Some have done so through marketplaces created by the law, some through other private insurance and others through Medicaid, which has expanded under the law in about half the states.
• At least 6 million people have signed up for health coverage on the new marketplaces, about one-third of whom were previously uninsured.
• A February survey by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found 27% of new enrollees were previously uninsured, but newer survey data from the nonprofit Rand Corp. and reports from marketplace officials in several states suggest that share increased in March.
• At least 4.5 million previously uninsured adults have signed up for state Medicaid programs, according to Rand's unpublished survey data, which were shared with The Times. That tracks with estimates from Avalere Health, a consulting firm that is closely following the law's implementation.
• An additional 3 million young adults have gained coverage in recent years through a provision of the law that enables dependent children to remain on their parents' health plans until they turn 26, according to national health insurance surveys from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• About 9 million people have bought health plans directly from insurers, instead of using the marketplaces, Rand found. The vast majority of these people were previously insured.
• Fewer than a million people who had health plans in 2013 are now uninsured because their plans were canceled for not meeting new standards set by the law, the Rand survey indicates.
Let's fine-tune the ACA and move on to single payer!!!!
Like a doomsday cult awkwardly faced with an apocalypse that never materialized, conservatives have resorted to trotting out a variety of other reasons why the law is bound to fail. One favorite tactic: so-called Obamacare horror stories, but time and again these anecdotes have unraveled into incoherence, if not distortion. Then there’s the right-wing media’s “Yes, but…” concern trolling, which has cycled through outright falsehoods like "More people have lost their insurance than gained it," arbitrary disingenuousness á la "Medicaid enrollments shouldn’t count," clerical nit-picking with "Not all of them have paid yet!", and actuarial fear-mongering such as "Not enough young people have signed up!" and "Not enough uninsured have signed up!"
ReplyDeleteAs time has passed, these material objections have slowly wilted under scrutiny. The recent sign-up data has demonstrated that initial payment trends aren’t unexpectedly slow, more than enough young people are signing up, and the uninsured rate is dropping significantly.
Then just this week came a series of stunning, though not entirely unexpected, blows to the right-wing narrative. After six months of lagging behind, a surge of literal, last-minute interest pushed the ACA exchange sign-up figure past the CBO’s original target of 7 million enrollees. Hitting such a milestone is huge symbolically, and represents the closest thing to a public accountability moment like an election the law will ever experience. Couple that success with the fact that 9.5 million previously uninsured Americans have now gained access to healthcare. Moreover, the law’s popularity just hit all-time highs in polls from Fox News and ABC News this past week. (In the latter, the ACA’s favorability broke into net positive territory for the first time ever.) And add in for good measure a recent Kaiser poll that found 60 percent now want to keep or fix Obamacare and only one in ten Americans supports the phony Republican policy of “repeal and replace.”
Stay tuned for more good news!
Jim and Charles -- Busted! You are the same person!
ReplyDeleteWhy did you call South Bay Jane the following?
Please explain why you called South Bay Jane:
"Well SB Jane, you're one of those dense nimrods who wants to turn Hermosa Beach into a beachside oil field, so your opinion of anything is of very little value."
What is it with this war on women from the Left?
Artie's finally lost his mind. Now he thinks separate people are merging into one!
ReplyDeleteBTW, Boy Wonder--it is not a "war on women" to think a woman is an idiot. But then again, you've likely never had a date, right, buddy?
You don’t find many Obamacare opponents admitting outright that 7.1 million and counting signups is a huge victory for reform. But their reaction to the results — It’s a fraud! They’re cooking the books! — tells the tale. Conservative thinking and Republican political strategy were based entirely on the assumption that it would always be October, that Obamacare’s rollout would be an unremitting tale of disaster. They have no idea what to do now that it’s turning into a success story
ReplyDeleteThe crucial thing to understand about the Affordable Care Act is that it’s a Rube Goldberg device, a complicated way to do something inherently simple. The biggest risk to reform has always been that the scheme would founder on its complexity. And now we know that this won’t happen.
Remember, giving everyone health insurance doesn’t have to be hard; you can just do it with a government-run program. Not only do many other advanced countries have “single-payer,” government-provided health insurance, but we ourselves have such a program — Medicare — for older Americans. If it had been politically possible, extending Medicare to everyone would have been technically easy.
But it wasn’t politically possible, for a couple of reasons. One was the power of the insurance industry, which couldn’t be cut out of the loop if you wanted health reform this decade. Another was the fact that the 170 million Americans receiving health insurance through employers are generally satisfied with their coverage, and any plan replacing that coverage with something new and unknown was a nonstarter.
So health reform had to be run largely through private insurers, and be an add-on to the existing system rather than a complete replacement. And, as a result, it had to be somewhat complex.
Now, the complexity shouldn’t be exaggerated: The basics of reform only take a few minutes to explain. And it has to be as complicated as it is. There’s a reason Republicans keep defaulting on their promise to propose an alternative to the Affordable Care Act: All the main elements of Obamacare, including the subsidies and the much-attacked individual mandate, are essential if you want to cover the uninsured.
Nonetheless, the Obama administration created a system in which people don’t simply receive a letter from the federal government saying “Congratulations, you are now covered.” Instead, people must go online or make a phone call and choose from a number of options, in which the cost of insurance depends on a calculation that includes varying subsidies, and so on. It’s a system in which many things can go wrong; the nightmare scenario has always been that conservatives would seize on technical problems to discredit health reform as a whole. And last fall that nightmare seemed to be coming true.
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But the nightmare is over. It has long been clear, to anyone willing to study the issue, that the overall structure of Obamacare made sense given the political constraints. Now we know that the technical details can be managed, too. This thing is going to work.
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And, yes, it’s also a big political victory for Democrats. They can point to a system that is already providing vital aid to millions of Americans, and Republicans — who were planning to run against a debacle — have nothing to offer in response. And I mean nothing. So far, not one of the supposed Obamacare horror stories featured in attack ads has stood up to scrutiny.