Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Jon Stewart on Ted Cruz marathon speech

.. ooi, there is a penalty for young people not signing up by a certain date .. is
there any incentive such as a lower premium for signing up before a certain age?

under an inch down in yours .. lolol .. Stewart bastes, turns skewers Cruz .. 'Obamacare' will cost jobs! .. Sequestration, yeah, we got some there, costs more jobs, but hey we saved the runaway debt! .. hmm, guess who else cut jobs to save runaway debt .. lolol ..

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Health Care's Resistors and Adapters

Michael Tomasky Politics 03.11.14

You’ll recall that Washington state Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, in delivering one of the 17 GOP State of the Union responses, spoke of “Bette,” the Spokane woman whose premiums were going up under Obamacare by $700 a month. The state’s jackboot, according to McMorris-Rodgers, was planted right on Bette’s throat, and there was nothing she could do about it. Bette would “have no choice” but to pay the extra, socialistic freight. Awful, awful, awful.

But the Spokane newspaper tracked Bette down and got the whole story, which was that her insurer did indeed cancel Bette’s then-current plan, which didn’t meet all the new ACA coverage requirements. When she called, the insurer tried to steer her to a plan that cost around $500 a month more. However, Bette never went to the Washington state web site to check out all the options available to her. If she had, the LA Times reported, she’d have found that in fact many options were available to her, “and with a deductible far lower than the $10,000 she was paying under the old plan and broader coverage, though lacking a provision for four free doctor visits a year provided by her old plan.” But Bette just didn’t want to go on “that Obama web site at all.”

Now, the Detroit News has found another Bette. Julie Boonstra has cancer, and last month she starred in a Koch Brothers-funded ad for one of the Republican candidates for U.S. Senate. The ad claimed that Obamacare would make her medication so unaffordable that she might die. The News looked into the details of her new plan and found that she is going to save $1,200 a year. Here’s how the News summarizes the details:

Boonstra’s old plan cost $1,100 a month in premiums or $13,200 a year, she previously told The News. It didn’t include money she spent on co-pays, prescription drugs and other out-of-pocket expenses.

By contrast, the Blues’ plan premium costs $571 a month or $6,852 for the year. Since out-of-pocket costs are capped at $5,100, including deductibles, the maximum Boonstra would pay this year for all of her cancer treatment is $11,952.

Like Bette, Boonstra just isn’t buying it. It “can’t be true” and “I personally don’t believe that.” She’s the ex-wife of a former GOP county chairman who was named by the Republican governor to a seat on the state Court of Appeals, though she told the News she’s never been political.

Maybe not. And she does have cancer, so the point here is not to lay into her. The point is the way people’s views have been set in concrete because of all this hatred and all these lies coming from Republicans and groups like the Koch’s Americans for Prosperity.

Most people love the feeling of having their anger and suspicions confirmed. The chance to say “I knew it!” is rare enough in this world, and most people relish it. They relish it on some level even more than being wrong but ending up pleasantly surprised, at least in cases where for whatever reason they’ve developed some kind of emotional commitment to the outcome that confirms their worst fears.

So people were told: Obamacare is going to screw you over. Most people—conservatives, of course, but just general people with a default distrust of government—accepted this as logical. So they looked only for evidence that would support their being screwed over. Evidence to the contrary, even when it benefits them, is dismissed. Bette and Boonstra both do this. Bette wouldn’t even go look at the web site, where she’d have seen she had numerous options. Boonstra, told by newspaper reporters the objective facts of her situation, said she simply doesn’t believe it.

I wrote a piece a couple of months ago for which I went on the recently fixed up ACA web site, pretended to be a married, modest-income guy from Kansas, and found that I was offered a staggering 42 different plans, from very cheap (and really high deductible) ones to quite pricey ones, with lots of stops in between. Most people who bother to look will find the same thing.

But they have to look. The baseline question, as it so often is in politics these days, is about emotional resistance. How long will it take before people who get letters about changes to their insurance just go on the ACA web site and calmly shop around? Some smallish number does that now, but I daresay there are more Bettes and Boonstras. One big determinant of how Obamacare ends up playing in the elections this November will be how many resistors have become adapters.

Meanwhile, it's comical, but also kind of sick, that the law's opponents keep producing these lies and can't find any real victims. I'm sure some are out there, but far, far more people will benefit from the fine print of this law, which is why these stories fall apart.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/11/health-care-s-resistors-and-adapters.html

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UPDATE 1-Obamacare enrollment in private coverage rises to 4.2 mln people

Tue Mar 11, 2014 6:38pm EDT

(Recasts first paragraph, adds details, quotes and background))

By David Morgan

(Reuters) - The Obama administration said on Tuesday that 4.2 million people have signed up for private health insurance .. http://www.reuters.com/sectors/industries/overview?industryCode=139&lc=int_mb_1001 .. under Obamacare, and indicated that total enrollment could surpass a 6 million-enrollee forecast by the end of March.

New enrollment data for a five-month period from Oct. 1 though March 1 came out as the administration threw its public relations campaign into overdrive, with President Barack Obama .. http://www.reuters.com/people/barack-obama?lc=int_mb_1001 .. appearing for an interview on the comedy website, "Funny or Die," in a direct appeal to the site's audience of young adults.

Healthy enrollees aged 18 to 34 are vital to the success of new online health insurance .. http://www.reuters.com/sectors/industries/overview?industryCode=139&lc=int_mb_1001 .. marketplaces set up in all 50 states under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The administration is targeting younger Americans because they are cheaper to insure and can compensate for older, sicker policyholders who have been able to obtain affordable insurance due to the law.

Tuesday's data showed the level of young adult participation stuck at 25 percent of total enrollment for the second month in a row.

However, officials predicted that enrollment would skyrocket over the next 20 days, pushing totals significantly higher with a rush of younger enrollees.

"We do believe millions more Americans will come in and enroll in coverage before the March 31 deadline," said Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the government's lead Obamacare agency.

Bataille declined to issue a specific forecast. But her prediction suggests administration officials are confident that Obamacare enrollment will meet or exceed the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) revised estimate of 6 million private insurance enrollees.

CBO initially forecast 7 million marketplace enrollees but scaled back that estimate after last year's botched rollout, in which the federal website HealthCare.gov was paralyzed by technical problems. Those problems continue to hobble enrollment efforts for state-run marketplaces in Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland and Oregon.

Enrollment advanced by 940,000 people in February, amid independent signs of a sustained decline in the United States' huge uninsured population of nearly 50 million people. A recent Gallup survey showed the percentage of Americans without health coverage at 15.9 percent in early 2014, down from an all-time high of 18 percent last summer, with declines in every major demographic group below age 65.

Eighty-three percent of Obamacare enrollees qualify for federal subsidies that help low-income people pay for health coverage, the data showed.

"What we're finding is that as more Americans learn just how affordable marketplace insurance can be, more are signing up to get covered," U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told reporters in a teleconference.

But there were key gaps in the government data regarding who was signing up.

Officials did not have enough data to say how many enrollees were previously uninsured, versus those moving into Obamacare coverage from other plans, including policies canceled last year. A recent survey by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co found that 27 percent of February enrollees were previously uninsured.

The administration was also unable to say how many people who have signed up for coverage have actually enrolled by paying their first month's premium. The McKinsey study showed that more than three-quarters of February enrollees had made a premium payment.

Republicans zeroed in on the lack of detail to call on Obama to delay the law's tax penalty for those who fail to enroll in coverage by March 31.

"The administration won't tell us how many people have actually paid for a plan or how many were previously uninsured," said Brendan Buck, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. "But what we do know is that young adults - those who the White House repeatedly said are critical - are deciding the healthcare law is a bad deal."

Anticipating an enrollment surge, Officials said HealthCare.gov continues to operate smoothly with low error rates and fast page-loading speeds following last year's emergency effort to salvage the website.

But the problems faced by state-run exchanges that continue to be troubled were obvious in the latest enrollment data.

Connecticut, a leading Obamacare success story, has enrolled more than 57,000 people in private insurance since Oct. 1.

But two larger states, Massachusetts and Maryland, have signed up only about 13,000 and 38,000 respectively because of marketplace problems. Oregon has also enrolled only 38,000, while Hawaii, Obama's home state, has signed up just 4,661.

The watchdog Government Accountability Office is probing states with problem launches to determine how hundreds of millions of dollars on Obamacare grants were spent. (Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/11/usa-healthcare-enrollment-idUSL2N0M821L20140311

.. not a bad effort in light of the Dem oops 'technical difficulties',
and the darkness of the GOPire anti-Obamacare campaign, across so many states ..

bit from an old one ..

Obamacare Exchange Enrollment: What Recent Numbers Don't Tell You

4. Community Rating: Beginning in 2014, all insurers selling individual plans must use "adjusted community rating" which allows for insurers to modify what they charge based on:

· Your family size
· Where you live
· If you use tobacco
· Your age

Insurers are limited in how much more they charge for these factors; for example they can't charge the oldest patients more than 3 times [ ouch, 3x feels heavy ] what they charge the youngest.

These provisions did not get much attention in the past but given recent enrollment news as well as the President's announcement several months ago that insurers could continue to offer policies that would not have met 2014 standards, people are starting to really scrutinize what a risk corridor or a reinsurance program is and how that could help with unanticipated costs. There has also been direct criticism of these programs as handouts to the insurance industry or a bailout.

In sum, do not interpret enrollment trends as fateful sticker shock. Having said that, the fact that these temporary programs expire in 2016 tells us that there is a hypothesis that enrollment trends will be smoothed out by 2016, and given the rocky implementation start as well as the inevitable confounding noise of the 2014 and 2016 elections, there is a long way to go before success or failure can be declared.
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.. for young healthy people? .. is there any incentive, except to avoid the penalty if you don't sign up .. is there
any incentive such as a slightly lower premium for signing up before a certain date, or age? .. just wondered ..