Well, political junkies, here it is: Politifact’s Lie of the Year. (One could bicker about which year it really belongs to, but it’s certainly a whopper, and had a major effect on the course of events.)
Of course there are far bigger specimens out there — submerged monsters big enough to affect the very currents of the oceans. But they have yet to be brought to the surface for dissection, and so for now one doesn’t speak of them in polite society. Poltifact’s catch of the year — roughly the size, for comparison, of a Mekong catfish, or a substantial alligator gar — will have to do.
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What Obama should have said is this:
“If you get your health insurance from your employer, then nothing will change as a result of Obamacare (except insofar as your premiums will decrease due to the lowest rate of health care inflation in fifty years).
“If you are in the 5% of the population which gets insurance on the private market and you had a policy in effect the day that the law was passed, nothing will change as a result of Obamacare.
“If you are in the 5% of the population which gets insurance on the private market and you didn’t have a plan the day the law passed, or if you were insured and your insurance company subsequently changed the terms of your policy, then your insurance company will terminate a non-compliant policy and offer you a replacement policy (or you can choose a different insurer through the health exchange).”
The only people who come out behind are the portion of the 5% who are ineligible for subsidies and who remain healthy (because under status quo ante, insurers would often drop people who developed serious medical problems). Maybe 2% of the population.
Obama should have said “98% of you will get the same or better insurance at a lower cost. Many of you will be able to get health insurance for the first time. 2% of you will pay more for a better policy.” He could have been more precise. I hope I don’t disillusion anyone by revealing that politicians do not always adhere to a strictly precise use of language. Politifact notwithstanding, his imprecision is hardly the “lie of the year.” It’s not a lie at all.
* * * *
I have been getting health insurance on the private exchange for years. My ability to keep my insurance is at the sole discretion of the insurer, so I always worried that I would develop a serious medical condition and my insurer would find an excuse to cancel my policy. Fortunately, I am a perfect physical specimen. Many who are not as lucky couldn’t get insurance for themselves or their kids due to pre-existing conditions.
My old policy was non-compliant, so I got a letter from Kaiser informing me that it terminates on 12/31, but they would automatically swap my policy for one which is compliant. Same doctor, same insurer, but different terms (non-cancellable, no lifetime cap, no co-pay for check-ups). That is the policy “cancellation” which the Obama critics have been harping on incessantly. My insurance coverage was not cancelled, although its terms had changed (for the better).
Of course, in the bad old days before Obamacare, if your policy was cancelled you were forced to find a new one, assuming that another insurer would cover you with the same medical condition which forced the first insurer to dump you. That’s what it means to have your policy cancelled. Not having the terms changed (which happened all the time anyway before Obamacare).
Now that all Americans have guaranteed access to health insurance (more precisely: everyone except those who live in states where Republican governors refused the Medicaid expansion), there are millions of people who can get insurance for the first time, Many of them will live longer, healthier lives, and many of them will be spared an early death.
Let’s review. Under the old system — which ACA opponents seek to revive — people on private exchanges could lose coverage and be frozen out of the insurance market. People with pre-existing conditions were also unable to get insurance. I have yet to see an ACA critic explain why having people live one serious condition away from bankruptcy is preferable to a system where health insurance is universally available. Nor have I seen an alternate plan with a plausible solution for insuring people with pre-existing conditions or who develop serious medical problems.
* * * *
In any major social program, there will be winners and losers. Here are the winners:
1) People with employer-provided insurers who have lower premiums
2) People who want to change jobs but couldn’t because they were stuck to their health insurance
3) People who can get insurance for the first time
4) People who are eligible for Medicaid due to the expansion
5) People who buy their insurance in the private market and are eligible for subsidies
6) People who buy their insurance in the private market who are ineligible for subsidies but would have lost coverage due to a medical condition
7) People from age 18 to 26 who can stay on their parents’ policy
Here are the losers:
1) People who buy their insurance in the private market who are ineligible for subsidies and remain healthy
2) People in high income homes who pay a surtax on investment gains above $250K
The benefits accrued to the first group are measured in healthier (or saved) lives and lower insurance costs. The liabilities accrued to the second group are higher insurance premiums and (for a very few) higher taxes. Not only do the number of winners dwarf the number of losers, but what they gain – their health and, often, their lives – is of far greater value than paying a few extra bucks every month for insurance. Anyone who wants to make a case against Obamacare has the burden of explaining why the incremental costs borne by the latter group are more important than the lives which are saved or enhanced within the former group.
Put more simply:
There is a huge difference between being denied insurance coverage because you develop a serious medical problem (or have a pre-existing condition) and having continuous coverage but with different terms.
The former is a cancellation of coverage (or with pre-existing conditions, the refusal to grant it in the first place). The latter is not. Politifact elides the distinction between the two. Moreover, those who attack Obamacare bear the burden of explaining why a system where you can lose coverage entirely (or never be able to get it in the first place) is preferable to a system which guarantees uninterrupted and lifelong coverage, albeit on different terms.
Ah, but the point is, you see, that’s not what he said.
I do have to give you top marks for loyalty, Peter. If I were an unscrupled, narcissistic, megalomaniacal despot, it’s men like you I’d want in my corner, all right.
Aside from this ACA debacle, we’ve had Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS and AP scandals, Pigford, alteration of legislation by executive fiat, “recess” appointments when the Senate wasn’t in recess, military purges, preferential treatment of political allies in the GM bailout, pervasive racial bias, arbitrary Obamacare waivers given to political donors, military intervention in Libya without Congressional approval, NSA surveillance of allied leaders, Solyndra, the awarding of the ACA website contract on a no-bid basis to one of FLOTUS’s classmates — why, I could go on for ages yet, because there’s almost no end to the good reasons a sensible person might have, at this point, for doubting this man’s competence, credibility, conscience, and character. Even among his staunchest former supporters, many are now turning away and keeping their distance.
Yet you, Peter, remain true-blue! Through and through. It’s really quite touching, and I have to say I rather admire it. You don’t see that sort of faith much anymore, in these cynical, secular times.
Scumbags of a feather …
I am disinclined to explain why your purported scandals are not scandals at all (IRS, AP, Solyndra), the work of a rogue agency (Fast and Furious), non-existent (there were no “military purges,” “arbitrary” Obamacare waivers, or “preferential” treatment of unions in the GM bailout; the meme of a no-bid contract for the ACA website is a right wing canard, as there were four bidders), the inevitable consequence of putting diplomats and spies in war zones (Benghazi), or entirely within the traditional exercise of Presidential authority (executive discretion in prosecutorial and administrative actions, military action without a Congressional declaration of war). Let’s just say that there is a world of difference between any of these events and actual scandals, such as selling arms to Iran to fund the Contras, or telling the nation that we should invade Iraq because they were trying to buy uranium from Niger. There are scandals and there are “scandals.”
Any enterprise as large as the federal government will invariably have things which go wrong. A President can properly be judged on everything he is accountable for — both good and bad — and a laundry list of right wing “scandals” is both factually feeble and inherently incomplete.
I am not blindly loyal to Obama. I have issues with NSA surveillance. I think he has been far too accommodating to the opposition party when he should have held firm, most notably when Republicans threatened to default on the debt in 2011. I don’t think he should have blocked the resolution for Palestinian statehood in the UN. He mismanaged the rollout of healthcare.gov.
However, a few years after he leaves office, I believe that historians will grade him as one of our better Presidents, and possibly one of our best ones. He will be remembered for preventing the global economy from melting down, rescuing the auto industry, reforming health care, killing bin Laden, decimating Al Qaeda, and (fingers crossed) putting into effect a series of sanctions which led Iran away from belligerency and nuclear development to fundamentally alter the Middle East in a positive direction. Hopefully doing something about global warming will be added to this list. I am hard-pressed to think of another President in recent memory with a list of accomplishments even close to Obama’s. My only concern is that there may not be enough space in Mount Rushmore for a fifth Presidential visage.
* * * *
As for le petit Henri — whose ill manner is exceeded only by his utter worthlessness — there’s no reason to waste digital ink responding to his childish nonsense.
Well, Pete, like you, I’m ‘disinclined’ to rebut, item by item, your fabulously blithe dismissal of every last one of these charges en masse (it would be easy enough, but the pile is just so huge). Nor will I explain to you, for example, why the Iran deal is such a titanic blunder.
What impresses me so is that the aggregate of all those things — the sheer number of them, if not the seriousness of them as taken individually — hasn’t even begun to shake your faith. Your becomingly modest protestations are charming; you remind us, for example, that He disappoints you by being “too accommodating” (no doubt due to His Christlike mercy, transhuman compassion, and stainless ideological uncontamination). But what shines through is that you really are a True Believer — and I stand in awe. I really mean it.
(“Fundamentally alter the Middle East in a positive direction…” Not to mention “fundamentally transforming” America, too! And there may still be time for Him to adjust the sea levels, to heal the planet, and — who knows? — maybe even ride the fearsome shai-hulud.)
All I can say is: wow. You really are something special, my friend. I think you should give Chris Matthews and this guy a call. The three of you are probably starting to get a little lonely.
That’s rich, coming from the poster boy for Oral Diarrhea.
http://www.ibtimes.com/bush-defends-auto-bailouts-amid-growing-political-debate-id-do-it-again-407114
http://web.mit.edu/mitir/2009/online/finding-bin-laden.pdf
(On that one One-Eye, I’m “pretty sure” you email our host – he’ll email you back I’d given “a pretty close” estimation back at least as far as 2006 where that would end. I think I typed something like, “he’s sipping tea on a rooftop veranda near Islamabad.”)
https://www.fpri.org/articles/2013/11/how-think-about-middle-east-arab-spring-and-after
See Malcolm’s follow-on post;
That Ol’ Midas Touch
To assist you One-Eye (I’m actually a pretty charitable guy once you meet me, providing I’m carrying no “fireworks”) there’s a telling bit of text within that FPRI article that gets to the heart of the matter – maybe saving you from reading the whole thing before typing [or as recent example illustrates: ignoring completely] which I do not prefer incidentally as I actually “admire” (in the old sense of the word) your propositions.
You are too charitable, JK.
Some people are not deserving of anything other than their just deserts.
Some people confuse deserts with desserts.
JK: There is nothing I disagree with in your excerpt. Well, one thing. All this talk of an Arab spring is so two years ago. They skipped the summer and fall, and are now in an Arab winter:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/13/cairo-snow_n_4441049.html
Pound sand (not cake) up your one-eye, One-Eye.
Quite.
Though I’ll not be judging wise to invest in any “safe bet.”
To whoever it is you are quoting there, JK:
Why, it just did reassemble, you blockhead, right before our eyes — after a catastrophic experiment with democracy.
If you’ve heard that’s a “safe bet”, you should fire your bookie. Unless by “very, very different”, you mean “poorer, angrier, more violent, and more dysfunctional”.
This is standard universalist claptrap. Absolute pie-in-the-sky rubbish.
Oh — just found it. Ha! Should have realized.
Quite a memory you have, JK.
Isn’t that tautologically true of everybody?
Oddly enough Duff’s made the same observation.
However … I’ve got a fairly straightforward, reliably reproducible method where that particular commentor is concerned.
If he mentions a timeframe – I simply hit the Waka archives.
Over on D&N it’s a little less straightforward.
Well, yes, if you insist on deserts that are just.
In any case, tautology is sometimes appropriate, for emphasis as well as for irony. If it weren’t useful at all, would the term have been coined, I wonder?
Off-topic (as if that’s ever stopped me before) but I simply wish to illustrate the method works on places other than here.
http://duffandnonsense.typepad.com/duff_nonsense/2013/05/everyone-should-have-a-jk.html
I did a Google search for “unscrupled, narcissistic, megalomaniacal despot.” I added crony, corrupt, bellicose, and condescending. Guess what I got?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/nyregion/cornered-by-accusations-christie-parries-with-jokes-and-stonewalls-with-snarls.html?_r=1&
Did you send him your rÁ©sumÁ©?
This is absurd. From the beginning, liberals have been in denial, ignorant of, or lying about the inevitable rise in premiums that will come for a significant portion of the population with Obamacare. You just can’t add that many charity cases to the insurance rolls without it. The idea that this 2% of people is going to successfully pay off the whole thing is beyond belief. Structural reforms may help somewhat, but if liberals would just be honest about what they are doing it would have made this whole thing easier.
I’m not even against the goal of giving charity cases healthcare, but Obamacare is a stupid way to do it, and then they weren’t even honest about what it does. Can’t admit that though, because then the “other side” wins (they don’t really, but that is the asinine narrative we all have to deal with).
It goes deeper than that. The left can’t admit anything because, consciously or subconsciously, they understand that to admit is to accept accountability for espousing an idealogy that is perversely un-American, politely Jew-hating, and simply wrong.
Employer based insurance – or at least every plan I have been on – charges every employee the same premium, regardless of age or medical condition. The younger and healthier members of the risk pool subsidize the older and sicker ones. (For some reason, conservatives never attack these plans as “redistribution,” while Obamacare is such an egregious example of socialist tyranny that Obama should be deported back to Kenya.)
In the bad old days before Obamacare, the private insurance market worked differently. Insurers cherry picked young and healthy people, and refused to write policies for those with existing or pre-existing conditions. Great if you’re healthy, and not so great if you or your child had a medical condition which made you uninsurable. Moreover, people who bought health insurance when they were healthy often found that their policies would be cancelled if they developed a serious or expensive medical condition.
In order to provide coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, Obamacare mandates that coverage must be universally available, but insurers are allowed to charge older people higher premiums than younger people, with a limit of 3:1. Unless you want the government to provide for universal health care, this is the only way that people with medical conditions who are not covered by employer health plans can get coverage.
You may feel that keeping rates low for those who are presently healthy is more important than enabling people who are not (or have not been) healthy to get medical coverage. The comparison, of course, is between saving money for some and saving lives for others.
Health care expenses is the largest cause of bankruptcy, and 75% of those who declared bankruptcy had health insurance. By eliminating lifetime caps and mandating coverage for expensive medication, Obamacare takes that threat off the table. This costs money. Perhaps you feel that it is better to have people go bankrupt because they have sub-standard plans than for people to be protected against bankruptcy because of the more robust protections in ACA-compliant plans.
If that is your belief: fine. However, this belief has integrity only if it is taken from John Rawls’s veil of ignorance, when you don’t know if you will be fit as a fiddle or have a child with a chronic condition you can’t insure. When viewed from behind that veil, I doubt many people would vote for status quo ante over universal coverage.
It does indeed, which is why liberals should have been upfront from the beginning. Or hell, even upfront now that the truth is out there. Anything but continuing this foolishness that everyone’s gonna save big.
The rest of what you said is beside the point, and must have been aimed at someone else. I’m not opposed to the goal of universal healthcare, nor do I carry any water for the status quo. I am opposed to mass deceit and stupidity, and to doubling down on bad laws in order to save face. So don’t try to stuff me in your box, bro.
Insurance is the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another in exchange for payment. It is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss. Insurance against catastrophic loss, in the event of a life-threatening desease, for example, is a proper form of insurance. Liability insurance is another, especially in our litigious society.
Any kind of “care insurance” is a perversion of the concept of insurance, because any kind of “care”, involving, as it does, ordinary living expenses (i.e., for the maintenance of normal functionality) does not involve uncertain loss (i.e., catastophic loss). “Car maintenance insurance” (i.e., reimbursements for oil change, wheel alignment, etc.) would not be proper insurance. Neither would be “grocery insurance”, “rent insurance”, and “replacement of worn-out clothing insurance”.
Obamacare is a monstrous perversion of the concept of insurance.
“Obamacare is a monstrous perversion of the concept of insurance.” Actually, Henry, you just showed that health insurance, as currently conceived, is a perversion. Long before Obama, health insurance included office visits, etc, which corresponds to oil changes in cars.
Insurance implies the voluntary sharing of risks. Obamacare, like all socialized systems, is not voluntary. That is why it is expensive, it will become more expensive, and in time it will cause disruptions in the marketplace.
I’m still confused by the “98%” thingy. Only 2% of the population will pay for the subsidies? Or only 2% of the already insured? Or only 2% of those in the individual market? If the latter, I bet it is a lot more than 2%, and in any case it is grossly unfair. Why are the employer-insured not paying for it? I think the only way out is single-payer service, with government taking on the role of the insurance companies. Or was that the plan all along ….
Yes, Dom, “health” insurance, or more specifically “health care” insurance, is a perversion of the concept of insurance. And Obamacare is one example of it, albeit a monstrous one.
My point is that what properly belongs in the realm of insurance is protection from catastrophic loss in dealing with catastrophically expensive treatments of certain life-threatening illnesses. An example of such an insurance policy would be one that had a large enough deductible to exclude reimbursement for ordinary health-maintaining care.
Obamacare is that perversion that not only aims to include reimbusement for ordinary health maintainace but also trivia, albeit very contentious trivia, such as reimbursement for buying condoms. It might as well include reimbusement for spaying your cat, even if you don’t have one.
Yes, it would be nice if everyone had access to all medical treatment that is known to the medical care industry. I am sure that someone like Michael Douglas would have succumbed to cancer by now, if not for the millions he has at his disposal to pay for all his treatments. But ordinary folks can not reasonably have such expectations. Nor should they. Neither should they expect the right to own a yacht.
If, however, there can be a national consensus that something akin to the prevention of starvation for every American, which presumably the food-stamp program addresses, then lets go ahead and implement a “health-maintainance”-stamp program for the needy. If the needy feel they need to use some of those stamps to buy condoms, that would be fine with me. Go ahead and use them to spay your friend’s cat, for all I care.
Matt: the vast majority of people do “save big.” Health care inflation is at the lowest rate in a half century. Aside from the benefits individuals receive, the macro economy also “saves big” because a major cost of doing business is increasing at a much more benign rate.
In any major social change, you will never get 100% of the people to be winners. In this case, 98% are winners (or, at least, not losers). Should Obama have highlighted the one in fifty people who have higher out-of-pocket costs? As noted above: yes.
Dom: The 98% thingy is this: 5% of the US population currently is insured on the private market. The remaining 95% is covered through an employer plan, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, or is uninsured. Nobody in that 95% is adversely affected by Obamacare.
Within the 5% using the private market, roughly 40% of them (so far) are ineligible for subsidies and will pay more for insurance than before, although their new (compliant) policies have much stronger protections than their old policies (e.g., greater coverage of medical expenses, cannot be cancelled, no lifetime cap).
So ACA will shift costs only within the private insurance market. Is that fair? Why aren’t the employer-provided insurance buyers a part of this cost shifting? Oddly enough, pre-ACA we all shared in the cost of providing medical care to the uninsured. No patient was refused emergency care, and hospitals made the rest of us undergo unnecessary tests to pay for it. It was dishonest, but it worked better than ACA. Others will notice this soon. In no time flat, we will see a single-payer system, and that, I think, was the point all along.
Concerning your belief that ACA will realize a lowering of medical costs — no, it won’t, and it can’t, and it wasn’t designed to. There is nothing in the act that even addresses the cost of health care. It does not, for example, address the fact that the AMA has capped the number of doctors that practice in the country.
The cost of anything, even healthcare, is determined by supply and demand. Governments try to change this by executive fiat, but it always causes problems elsewhere in the economy. The home mortgage deductions actually raised the cost of housing. Minimum wage increaseds unemployment among those who can least afford it, the unskilled. And so on. WIll medical costs go down? If so, we will see fewer doctors.
Health care inflation refers to the costs of the procedures, not the total amount paid for them. Health care costs could remain flat, but in the wake of Obamacare total amount paid goes up because more people are consuming. More people will consume, because there’s not much point in giving insurance to the uninsured if they don’t use it.
Incidentally, Obamacare would be amazing indeed if it were having such effects before it were even fully implemented. Maybe there are other factors at work?
Since those people will be on subsidized plans, and insurance companies have to balance the books, they will have to be paid for by others. And that will not be limited to 2% of the population by any means. Everyone’s costs, as in costs for insurance, will go up. When they do, it will be written off as “prices rose before Obamacare so you can’t prove nuthin’!” Which is true enough.
I do wish we could dispense with this new left though that institutes welfare while pretending that only the indolent rich will have to pay.
It is, IMHO, a complete waste of time&energy to wade through the nitty shitty weeds of that gigantic pile of horseshit, AKA the ACA. It is so, IMHO, because the left enjoys mucking around in that shit ad infinitum to further confound the sheeple.
I await with bated halitosis the next episode of oral diarrhea from that spewer of sewage, AKA the one-eyed libturd.
Matt, really the cost of a procedure is more important to an individual than the total cost. Your second point is better – ACA did not yet effect the costs. When it does, it will certainly raise the cost in ways that we can not yet fathom. Socialism does that.