The Brilliance of Obamacare

[sirs]

If true, then if this doesn't fully highlight just how horrible Obamination care is, and the epitome of the liberal mindset of applying rules to everyone else, while exempting themselves from the same rules.........then folks, that has to be the greatest tasting cool-aide to ever touch the lips of a blinded partisan
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Lawmakers, aides may get Obamacare exemption

Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.

The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said.

A source close to the talks says: “Everyone has to hold hands on this and jump, or nothing is going to get done.”

Yet if Capitol Hill leaders move forward with the plan, they risk being dubbed hypocrites by their political rivals and the American public. By removing themselves from a key Obamacare component, lawmakers and aides would be held to a different standard than the people who put them in office.

Democrats, in particular, would take a public hammering as the traditional boosters of Obamacare. Republicans would undoubtedly attempt to shred them over any attempt to escape coverage by it, unless Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) give Democrats cover by backing it.

There is concern in some quarters that the provision requiring lawmakers and staffers to join the exchanges, if it isn’t revised, could lead to a “brain drain” on Capitol Hill, as several sources close to the talks put it.

The problem stems from whether members and aides set to enter the exchanges would have their health insurance premiums subsidized by their employer — in this case, the federal government. If not, aides and lawmakers in both parties fear that staffers — especially low-paid junior aides — could be hit with thousands of dollars in new health care costs, prompting them to seek jobs elsewhere. Older, more senior staffers could also retire or jump to the private sector rather than face a big financial penalty.

Plus, lawmakers — especially those with long careers in public service and smaller bank accounts — are also concerned about the hit to their own wallets.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) is worried about the provision. The No. 2 House Democrat has personally raised the issue with Boehner and other party leaders, sources said.

“Mr. Hoyer is looking at this policy, like all other policies in the Affordable Care Act, to ensure they’re being implemented in a way that’s workable for everyone, including members and staff,” said Katie Grant, Hoyer’s communications director.
Several proposals have been submitted to the Office of Personnel Management, which will administer the benefits. One proposal exempts lawmakers and aides; the other exempts aides alone.

When asked about the high-level bipartisan talks, Michael Steel, a Boehner spokesman, said: “The speaker’s objective is to spare the entire country from the ravages of the president’s health care law. He is approached daily by American citizens, including members of Congress and staff, who want to be freed from its mandates. If the speaker has the opportunity to save anyone from Obamacare, he will.”

Reid’s office declined to comment about the bipartisan talks.

However, the idea of exempting lawmakers and aides from the exchanges has its detractors, including Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), a key Obamacare architect. Waxman thinks there is confusion about the content of the law. The Affordable Care Act, he said, mandates that the federal government will still subsidize and provide health plans obtained in the exchange. There will be no additional cost to lawmakers and Hill aides, he contends.

“I think the law is pretty clear,” Waxman told POLITICO. “Members and their staffs should get their health insurance through the exchange; the federal government will offer them health insurance coverage that they obtained through the exchanges because we want to get the same health care coverage everybody else has available to them.”

Waxman has been working on this issue with congressional colleagues and the Obama administration.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said if OPM decides that the federal government doesn’t pick up “the 75 percent that they have been, then put yourself in the position of a lot of entry-level staff people who make $25,000 a year, and all of a sudden, they have a $7,000 a year health care tab? That would be devastating.”

Burr added: “And that makes up probably about 30 percent of the folks that work on the Senate side. Probably a larger portion on the House side. It would drastically change whether kids would have the ability to come up here out of college.”

Yet Burr, a vocal Obamacare opponent, is also flat-out opposed to exempting Congress from the exchange provision.

“I have no problems with Congress being under the same guidelines,” Burr said. “I think if this is going to be a disaster — which I think it’s going to be — we ought to enjoy it together with our constituents.”

The developing narrative is potentially brutal for congressional Democrats and the White House. The health care law, controversial since it was passed in 2010, has been a target of the right and, increasingly, the left. There are concerns about its cost, implementation and impact on small businesses. If the two sides agree on a fix, leadership is discussing attaching it to a must-pass bill, like the government-funding resolution or legislation to hike the nation’s debt limit.

Republicans, though, haven’t been able to coalesce around a legislative health care plan of their own, either. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) pushed a bill this week that would shift funds from a health care prevention fund to create a high-risk pool for sick Americans. That bill couldn’t even get a vote on the House floor as conservatives revolted, embarrassing Cantor and his leadership team. GOP leadership pulled the bill.

But the secret talks about exempting Capitol Hill hands from the exchanges has the potential to be even more politically risky. During the 2009-10 battle over what’s now dubbed Obamacare, Republicans insisted that Capitol Hill hands must have the same health care as the rest of the American people. The measure was introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who spent months negotiating the details of the health care law but later became a major Obamacare critic.

The mandate on health exchanges doesn’t cover everyone. Aides in lawmakers’ personal offices must obtain health care through the exchanges but not committee staff. Lawmakers and aides older than 65 are covered by Medicare.

OPM also has to decide where the members and staffers would be covered. According to several people who have spoken with OPM officials, lawmakers would probably be in the exchange of the state they represent. But staffers would sign up in the state where they usually live — that means district office employees would join home state exchanges, and Capitol Hill staffers would mostly be in Washington, Virginia or Maryland.


Article

[Plane]

"Waxman thinks there is confusion about the content of the law."

Oh?

Does Waxman know someone that isn't confused by the "affordable Healthcare Law"?

[sirs]

Remember.....they had to pass it, on a pure party line vote, that a majority of the country did NOT want, in order to "see what was in it".  I doubt Waxman isn't confused in the slightest

[sirs]

With the polar opposite of transparency, the ongoing hypocrisy of trying to highlight sequestration "problems" while taking lavish vacation after party after vacation, the continued use of nearly all of Bush II's foreign policy tactics minus the "cowboy cahones" to make other countries take us seriously,  and the upcoming nightmare of Obamacare, I'm guessing there's a lot of "buyer's remorse" out there, and soon to be an exponential addition to those #'s

[sirs]

The Trainwreck Called Obamacare

"I just see a huge trainwreck coming down." That's not a quote from one of our old editorials or from any of the other critics of what has become known as Obamacare. It's a quote from one of its key backers, one of its designers, one of its advocates and defenders. It's a quote from Max Baucus, senior senator from Montana and Democratic stalwart on the Senate Finance Committee.

The committee was taking testimony last week from Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, though her portfolio seems to include General Confusion, too, at least where Obamacare is concerned. And what she said was enough to open even Max Baucus' eyes. For a moment, anyway. To say he sounded unhappy with Madam Secretary would be an understatement.

Among other criticisms the senator had to offer the secretary: "The administration's public-information campaign on the benefits of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare in the American vernacular) deserves a failing grade. You need to fix this."

But is it fixable? . .

At another point, dissatisfied with the secretary's answers/excuses, the senator told her: "You haven't given me any data; you just give me the concepts, frankly." Why do some people feel obliged to add "frankly" to some of their assertions? Because they're not always frank, and want to distinguish this statement from their usual less than candid ones?

Ah, well, at least the senator wanted to make it clear he was being frank on this occasion. Some of us wish senators were frank all the time so they wouldn't have to mention it when they were. It would just be understood that they were leveling with the public all along. . .

The secretary of H. and H.S. responded to the senator's complaints by playing dumb: "I don't know what he's looking at," she said of his remarks once the hearing was safely over. "But we are on track to fully implement marketplaces (the insurance exchanges that are supposed to give the poor the chance to buy health insurance at competitive rates) by January 2014, and to be open for open enrollment...."

On track? Sidetracked might be more like it. Remember those subsidies that were going to help small businesses provide health insurance for their employees while Obamacare was gearing up? The process of applying for the subsidies has proven so cumbersome, so time-consuming, and generally so inefficient that, of the $40 billion set aside for this purpose, maybe only 1 percent of the money has been doled out.

By now Secretary Sebelius' department has missed one deadline after another when it comes to putting Obamacare in place. She fits right in with this administration. The president himself neglected to submit a federal budget on time for years, even if the law requires him to do so. Deadlines, shmedlines. But that's all right, it'll all turn out to be the Republicans' fault. Just you wait and see. Our chief executive is quite remarkable in that regard; he can turn any failure of his own into -- abracadabra! -- another partisan talking point.

Despite her talk about being on track, Ms. Sebelius' department has just announced that, even though a wide choice of insurance policies was supposed to be available for employees of small businesses, only one policy is offered for now. The others, the department tells us, won't be ready till 2015.

The board of experts that is supposed to reduce the cost of Medicare? It hasn't even been appointed yet, much less met. Look for it to be put on hold, too.

But the administration does seem in a hurry to hire hordes of "navigators" to recruit enrollees for the insurance exchanges that Obamacare is supposed to set up. These new hires are expected to cost the government -- that is, the taxpayers -- some $54 million, which is a hefty amount of patronage to distribute.

The word is the administration wants even more money to hire even more of these helpers. After all, you can't have enough navigators when you're navigating an unmapped sea of bureaucracy. Which is a pretty good summation of Obamacare at this point.

Meanwhile, the kind of professionals who may actually know what they're talking about -- actuaries -- have estimated that Obamacare is likely to mean higher costs for insurers, 32 percent more, to pay off claims under individual health-care policies. That's according to the Society of Actuaries. Those insurers in turn will doubtless have to charge higher premiums to cover their higher costs.

Conclusion: Buckle your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride. And an expensive one. . .

What, Kathleen Sebelius worry? It's nothing to be concerned about, she explains, because the insurance policies Obamacare will offer through these exchanges will cover so many more benefits than just the basics. Which is the big problem with Obamacare. Somewhere in all its reams of elaborate provisions there was once the germ of a good idea: Cover everybody in the country by having the government provide the now uninsured with just the most basic health coverage -- protection against "catastrophic illness," for example. Instead, Obamacare has grown like kudzu, covering everything from elective abortion to, well, you name it. (Liposuction, anyone?)

Sen. Baucus, who's just announced he won't seek re-election after six terms in the U.S. Senate, may have been reflecting his constituents' growing dissatisfaction with Obamacare as it is shaping up, or rather not shaping up. That dissatisfaction is scarcely limited to the good people of Montana. More and more folks all over the country may catch on to Obamacare before this not-so-grand experiment is concluded. Which means more and more politicians will echo their constituents' complaints about Obamacare as election year approaches. . .

Senator Baucus still contends that Obamacare was a good idea in its conception. Only its implementation, he explains, is faulty. Well, he's half right. For it was misconceived, too. In place of simplicity, Americans got complexity. Instead of a clear, simple reform, Americans are getting a vast bureaucracy that would make one of Rube Goldberg's machines look like a model of efficiency. Ol' Rube specialized in contraptions designed to accomplish some simple chore in the most complicated way, all for comic effect.

Only there's nothing funny about this one.

[sirs]

A perfect bookend to the week, particularly in light of yesterday's news.  Maybe all those discussions between Rubio and Schumer are paying off after all:

Sen. Schumer Admits ObamaCare Is Partly To Blame For Increasing Insurance Premiums

SCHUMER: Our insurance department is in power to protect families. We’re going to watch them like a hawk to make sure they do that. And if they don’t, those rates could go through the roof.

REPORTER: Is it because of Obamacare?

SCHUMER: It’s in part because of Obamacare, but healthcare costs have been going up in double digits for years and years.

Considering Schumer's role as Senate Democrats' chief messaging guru, this is big.  Still, I feel compelled to deconstruct his Obamacare goalpost shifting, which is now par for the course on the Left, out of necessity.  The first part of his answer is all about coercive government price controls. 
- In short, Obamacare places all sorts of costly mandates on private insurers. 
- To comply with said mandates, insurers raise premiums in order to stay in business. 
- Then "insurance departments" step in and veto the hikes, in order to "protect families." 
- Lawsuits, disruptions, and an exodus from the market ensues. 

If liberals are intent on driving private insurance into the grave -- and they are -- this is how they'll do it, absent a "public option," which would speed the process along. 

The second statement Schumer makes is a straight-up bogus excuse.  Sure, Obamacare plays a role in this, but "costs have been going up in double digits for years and years."   It's absolutely true that healthcare costs have risen steadily for quite some time.  But it's also true that Obamacare was ostensibly passed to reverse this trend.  Not slow it.  Not curb it.  Reverse it, by $2,500 per family.  Now Democrat after Democrat after Democrat is acknowledging what virtually every analysis has projected: The law won't contain costs as promised. The "Affordable Care Act" is nothing of the sort.  Welcome to reality, Sen. Schumer.  Parting quotations:

Obama Promises To Lower Health Insurance Premiums by $2,500 Per Year

Now move along and enjoy your awesome benefits, you ignorant ingrates.

[sirs]

We pass it it, you pay for it

President Obama's health care law was projected to spend $898 billion over ten years when it was passed. That price tag largely masked the true ten-year cost because of the delayed implementation of the law, and the CBO revised its cost estimate in 2013 to show that the law will spend $1.85 trillion in the next ten years.

Obamacare is already experiencing cost overruns, and the Obama Administration expects the states to pick up the tab.

One of Obamacare's provisions, the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, has nearly run out of its $5 billion budget, and HHS Secretary Sebelius has proposed that the states that run the administration of the program find a way to pay for it themselves.

The root of the problem is that the federal health care law capped spending on the program at $5 billion, and the money is running out because the beneficiaries turned out to be costlier to care for than expected. Advanced heart disease and cancer are common diagnoses for the group.

Obama did not ask for any additional funding for the program in his latest budget, and a Republican bid to keep the program going by tapping other funds in the health care law failed to win support in the House last week.

State officials say one likely consequence of the money crunch will be a cost shift to people in the program, resulting in sudden increases in premiums and copayments. Many might just drop out, said Keough.

Republicans should have pushed harder to fix this program, but the issue brings up that Obamacare was poorly designed and poorly implemented from the start. It turns out that if legislation relies on moving pieces, state partnerships, and delayed implementation, the legislation is just poorly designed

[sirs]

[kimba1]

Agree things will be costly but for the person who has a heart condition and coudn't get insurance two years ago how s this a badthing?  Step back and note people with fatal health conditions and relative of those people are now influencing this outcome. Deny it all you want this is the issue thats swaying the matter.

[sirs]

Kimba, its a bad thing when the quality of the care being provided, is stripped away for the mere "appearance" of access.  We, as healthcare providers, under the conditions of Obamacare, can NOT provide the same quality of care, as we once could.  Its logistically and financially impossible.  So, that person with the "heart condition" may have improved "access", but access to what??

[kimba1]

Test,doctors visit and medication that does not cost $500 a month and three month refills.

Lets just say experience is saying this not research data.

[sirs]

...and I appreciate the reference to experience, since its my ongoing experience of the unfortunate destruction in the once outstanding quality of our healthcare system, via Obamacare.  It's common with most liberal "well intentioned" ideas.  Helping out a few by screwing it for the vast majority.  And the "help" is so good, that unions and legislators alike are trying every which way write themselves out of it

Bt has alluded to this multiple times, it was a poorly written, vastly egregious piece of legislation, that had no bipartsian support at all, never had a majority of the populations' support, nor the support of any majority of Doctors in this country.  So, while it might provide a few perks for a few folks, that they may not have had before, the healthcare being provided for the rest of us, gets exponentially more expensive, while the quality of that care goes down the drain. 

1st hand experience is saying this

[sirs]

Another Cost of Obamacare: Biotech

Biotech company Excelixis CEO George Scangos likes to quote oil wildcatter JP Getty when asked about his philosophy for success: “Get up early; work hard; find oil,” he deadpans.

And under the direction of dry-humored Scangos, the San Francisco-based company is drilling a lot of research holes, so to speak.

They have to: Success in the biotech industry is measured incrementally, not in big steps. It’s a cash-and-time intensive industry where success is painstaking, rare and, because of Obamacare and other regulatory burdens from the administration, likely to become even rarer.   

According to Plunkett Research, Ltd in 2010 it cost $1.2 billion to develop each and every biologic drug. That’s because while the government currently tracks 124,932 trials for new drug application in 179 foreign countries, only a tiny fraction of those drugs will ever see the marketplace.     

In the United States, for example, there were only about 114 FDA approvals for new drugs last year.  That’s a success rate of 0.091256. If that were a batting average for a baseball player, it would belong to a player who would never see the minor leagues, yet alone the Biggies.

"That means that enormous fortunes are going to be made in the sector," Jonathon Lach, CEO of BlueStar Capital Management, a biotech hedge fund headquartered in Westport, Connecticut told me in 2006. He pointed out, however, that the industry’s staggering failure rate makes some other long-odds stock market sectors look like safe bets in comparison. "Conversely, that means that enormous fortunes will also be lost in the sector."

But under the greatest capital markets in the history of the world, biotechnology has thrived despite the long odds, because the enormous profit potential has attracted quite a bit of capital over the last 25 years. 

25 years ago there were roughly 700 biotech companies. Now, worldwide there are 3853 companies with about half of those concentrated in the United States. U.S. companies account for about 75 percent of all revenues in biotech. But not for long.

The combination of free markets and efficient capital markets compared to other countries has allowed the Unites States to lead the way despite some bumps and bruises along the way. Market crashes, like the ones experienced in 1987 and 2008 make even viable biotech companies with a good pipeline of drugs hard to finance because they always need money.           

Research and Development expenditures for new drug application in 2010 totaled $67.4 billion, according to Plunkett, in an industry that generated of about $81 billion in total revenues. That’s because biotech companies typically generate little revenue. Instead the companies rely on the stock markets to fund R&D. Then they usually sell out their discoveries to large pharmaceutical companies once they have successfully brought a drug to market, because biotechs are in the business of new research, not in the business of the distribution of new medicines. But, just like a wildcatter staking an oil claim, the profits are large for investors willing to be patient and work hard.

Lach once told me that investors who were willing to work hard to bring scientific insight into their investment model would necessarily do better than average.

But under Obamacare, and the other regulatory burdens on banking and investment, biotech will have a much harder time. In a quest to drive down costs in healthcare, there will be little tolerance for big profits, big losses or new discoveries in medicine under Obama’s prescription for single payer coverage for the entire universe.

Most other countries already operate under a system of nationalized healthcare and restricted capital markets.

Accordingly, investment banking activity for the biotech sector is much more robust in the United States than in the rest of the world. When the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle pointed this out, Obamacare shills like Ezra Klein of the Washington Post shouted her down, claiming that her hypothesis was a little more than a “thought experiment” because she lacked critical data to back up her assertion.

Well getting past the fact that most of Einstein’s most revolutionary concepts were little more than “thought experiments”- including the one for the photoelectric effect for which he won the Nobel Prize at a time when the Nobel Prize still meant something- here’s the hard data:

According to Indicium Data, LLC, a company that tracks biotechnology capital market trends, of the $6 billion in capital financings that happened worldwide for biotech in 2011 about $4.8 was raised in the United States. Twice as many dollars were raised in California and Massachusetts alone compared to the entire rest of the world. Of the 281 financings in biotech that happened worldwide, 211 of them happened in the US in 2011.

Experience from other countries has taught us that investors won’t continue to pour money into medical innovation when the incentive for innovation has disappeared.

Other countries like Australia can’t even raise a dime for biotech companies in capital markets.

It would be shame if the wonder drugs we rely on to help the elderly, the sick and our children stopped working wonders because a parochial and partisan prejudice against profits by liberals was allowed to outweigh the greater good.

[sirs]

One of the most serious flaws with Obamacare is that its blizzard of regulations and mandates drives up the cost of insurance for people who buy it on their own. This problem will be especially acute when the law’s main provisions kick in on January 1, 2014, leading many to worry about health insurance “rate shock.”

Last week, the state of California claimed that its version of Obamacare’s health insurance exchange would actually reduce premiums. “These rates are way below the worst-case gloom-and-doom scenarios we have heard,” boasted Peter Lee, executive director of the California exchange.

But the data that Lee released tells a different story: Obamacare, in fact, will increase individual-market premiums in California by as much as 146 percent.

Lee’s claims that there won’t be rate shock in California were repeated uncritically in some quarters. “Despite the political naysayers,” writes my Forbes colleague Rick Ungar, “the healthcare exchange concept appears to be working very well indeed in states like California.” A bit more analysis would have prevented Rick from falling for California’s sleight-of-hand.

Here’s what happened. Last week, Covered California—the name for the state’s Obamacare-compatible insurance exchange—released the rates that Californians will have to pay to enroll in the exchange.

“The rates submitted to Covered California for the 2014 individual market,” the state said in a press release, “ranged from two percent above to 29 percent below the 2013 average premium for small employer plans in California’s most populous regions.”

That’s the sentence that led to all of the triumphant commentary from the left. “This is a home run for consumers in every region of California,” exulted Peter Lee.

Except that Lee was making a misleading comparison. He was comparing apples—the plans that Californians buy today for themselves in a robust individual market—and oranges—the highly regulated plans that small employers purchase for their workers as a group. The difference is critical.

Obamacare to double individual-market premiums

If you’re a 25 year old male non-smoker, buying insurance for yourself, the cheapest plan on Obamacare’s exchanges is the catastrophic plan, which costs an average of $184 a month. (That’s the median monthly premium across California’s 19 insurance rating regions.)

The next cheapest plan, the “bronze” comprehensive plan, costs $205 a month. But in 2013, on eHealthInsurance.com (NASDAQ:EHTH), the average cost of the five cheapest plans was only $92.

In other words, for the average 25-year-old male non-smoking Californian, Obamacare will drive premiums up by between 100 and 123 percent.

Under Obamacare, only people under the age of 30 can participate in the slightly cheaper catastrophic plan. So if you’re 40, your cheapest option is the bronze plan. In California, the median price of a bronze plan for a 40-year-old male non-smoker will be $261.

But on eHealthInsurance, the average cost of the five cheapest plans was $121. That is, Obamacare will increase individual-market premiums by an average of 116 percent.

For both 25-year-olds and 40-year-olds, then, Californians under Obamacare who buy insurance for themselves will see their insurance premiums double.

Impact highest in Bay Area, Orange County, and San Diego

In the map below, I illustrate the regional variations in Obamacare’s rate hikes. For each of the state’s 19 insurance regions, I compared the median price of the bronze plans offered on the exchange to the median price of the five cheapest plans on eHealthInsurance.com for the most populous zip code in that region. (eHealth offers more than 50 plans in the typical California zip code; focusing on the five cheapest is the fairest comparator to the exchanges, which typically offered three to six plans in each insurance rating region.)



As you can see, Obamacare’s impact on 40-year-olds is steepest in the San Francisco Bay area, especially in the counties north of San Francisco, like Marin, Napa, and Sonoma. Also hard-hit are Orange and San Diego counties.

According to Covered California, 13 carriers are participating in the state’s exchange, including Anthem Blue Cross (NYSE:WLP), Health Net (NYSE:HNT), Molina (NYSE:MOH), and Kaiser Permanente.

So far, UnitedHealthCare (NYSE:UNH) and Aetna (NYSE:AET) have stayed out.

Spinning a public-relations disaster

It’s great that Covered California released this early the rates that insurers plan to charge on the exchange, as it gives us an early window into how the exchanges will work in a state that has an unusually competitive and inexpensive individual market for health insurance. But that’s the irony. The full rate report is subtitled “Making the Individual Market in California Affordable.” But Obamacare has actually doubled individual-market premiums in the Golden State.

How did Lee and his colleagues explain the sleight-of-hand they used to make it seem like they were bringing prices down, instead of up? “It is difficult to make a direct comparison of these rates to existing premiums in the commercial individual market,” Covered California explained in last week’s press release, “because in 2014, there will be new standard benefit designs under the Affordable Care Act.” That’s a polite way of saying that Obamacare’s mandates and regulations will drive up the cost of premiums in the individual market for health insurance.

But rather than acknowledge that truth, the agency decided to ignore it completely, instead comparing Obamacare-based insurance to a completely different type of insurance product, that bears no relevance to the actual costs that actual Californians face when they shop for coverage today. Peter Lee calls it a “home run.” It’s more like hitting into a triple play.

Obama attacked insurers in 2010 for much smaller increases

That Obamacare more than doubles insurance premiums for many Californians is especially ironic, given the political posturing of the President and his administration in 2010. In February of that year, Anthem Blue Cross announced that some groups (but not the majority) would face premium increases of as much as 39 percent. The White House and its allies in the blogosphere, cynically, claimed that these increases were due to greedy profiteering by the insurers, instead of changes in the underlying costs of the insured population.

“These extraordinary increases are up to 15 times faster than inflation and threaten to make health care unaffordable for hundreds of thousands of Californians, many of whom are already struggling to make ends meet in a difficult economy,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “[Anthem’s] strong financial position makes these rate increases even more difficult to understand.” The then-Democratic Congress called hearings. Even California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a Republican running for governor, decided to launch an investigation.

Soon after, WellPoint announced that, in fact, because of lower revenues and higher spending on patient care, the company earned 11 percent less in 2010 than it did in 2009. So much for greedy profiteering.

So, to summarize: Supporters of Obamacare justified passage of the law because one insurer in California raised rates on some people by as much as 39 percent. But Obamacare itself more than doubles the cost of insurance on the individual market. I can understand why Democrats in California would want to mislead the public on this point. But journalists have a professional responsibility to check out the facts for themselves.
 

UPDATE 1: On Twitter, Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic argues that I’m being unkind to California (1) by not describing the mandates that Obamacare imposes on insurers in the individual market, and (2) not explaining that low-income people will be eligible for subsidies that protect them from much of the rate shock.

For an extensive discussion of Obamacare’s costly insurance mandates, such as its requirement that plans cover you whether you’re healthy or sick, read this post. For a discussion of how Obamacare’s insurance mandates dramatically increase the cost of insurance for younger workers, go here.

Jon is right that low-income individuals will be protected from these rate increases because of Obamacare’s subsidies, but if you’re not low-income, you face a double-whammy: higher taxes to pay for those subsidies, and higher indvidual-market insurance costs for yourself. A better approach would be to offer everyone access to low-cost consumer-driven health coverage.

UPDATE 2: A number of writers did call out California for the apples-to-oranges comparison last week, including David Freddoso, Philip Klein, and Lanhee Chen.

Lanhee, writing in Bloomberg View, does the useful exercise of showing that even for plans with the same generous benefit package that Obamacare requires, eHealthInsurance is significantly cheaper:

To put it simply: Covered California is trying to make consumers think they’re getting more for less when, in fact, they’re just getting the same while paying more.

Yet there are many plans on the individual market in California today that offer a structure and benefits that are almost identical to those that will be available on the state’s health insurance exchange next year. So, let’s make an actual apples-to-apples comparison for the hypothetical 25-year-old male living in San Francisco and making more than $46,000 a year. Today, he can buy a PPO plan from a major insurer with a $5,000 deductible, 30 percent coinsurance, a $10 co-pay for generic prescription drugs, and a $7,000 out-of-pocket maximum for $177 a month.

According to Covered California, a “Bronze” plan from the exchange with nearly the same benefits, including a slightly lower out-of-pocket maximum of $6,350, will cost him between $245 and $270 a month. That’s anywhere from 38 percent to 53 percent more than he’ll have to pay this year for comparable coverage! Sounds a lot different than the possible 29 percent “decrease” touted by Covered California in their faulty comparison.

While Covered California acknowledges that it’s tough to compare premiums pre- and post-Obamacare, at the very least, it could have made a legitimate comparison so consumers could fairly evaluate the impacts of Obamacare.

UPDATE 3: Yuval Levin at National Review further addresses Jonathan Cohn’s argument that people should be ok with these rate increases, because the Obamacare insurance plans are more financially generous:

Some people will receive subsidies to help cover that cost, some won’t, but whether it’s taxpayers or beneficiaries paying the premiums those premiums will be significantly higher than they are now.

The comparison offered in the California press release helps make it clear why that is: Obamacare’s new insurance rules. Those rules would certainly help some people—people with pre-existing conditions in the individual market will find it easier to buy coverage for instance—but they will also raise premium costs very significantly. (the point I was making to Kimba)

Obamacare’s defenders can certainly point to the former fact, but they cannot deny the latter one and insist the new California data show there will be no rate shock, as many tried to do over the past week.

We're so screwed

[BSB]

I love me some Obama/Romneycare.


BSB