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I never argued (or even thought) you're a partisan, I simply would like to have a explanation, dispassionate if possible (with you that seems the case) as I'm one of those baffled foreigners mentioned by The Economist, having a hard time understanding why this generate so much passion.
After all, in essense, it's Romneycare and that seems to work in Massachusets. Now, I'm well aware that Heritage has long disowned it, and Romney argued it should be up to individual states (if my memory is correct, this is from the presidential debates), but why it generates such heated passion that we have active attemts at sabotage the law, a government shutdown, and possibly a US debt default (and I can assure you, all bets are off if the latter should happen).
Now, what you seem to say is that it's more the unilateral way the law was introduced (which, as far as I know, was mostly done in backroom deals), steamrolling any opposition, than the law as such that generates such heated passion I'm not sure whether you're talking about your personal feelings or describing the opposition as such.
In case of the latter, from what I'm reading, it seems more the law as such, but I'm merely an outside observer, albeit a concerned one as this could have a major impact in the markets anytime soon.
My own country certainly isn't without its own disfunctional political folklore (shutting down the government, let alone an engineered default is just that), luckily enough it's too small to have much impact beyond our borders for anyone to take much notice..
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Is it all in essence about the wish for a much smaller government?
To understand how we ended up in this strange political moment, with the federal government shuttered in pursuit of a political goal that most elected Republicans concede is well-nigh-impossible to achieve, it’s worth talking not only about polarization and redistricting and the conservative media landscape and anti-Obama sentiment and the weakening of institutional party power, but also about a more basic, often-underappreciated element in how many movement conservatives regard the history of the last forty years. To explain this point, I’ll start with a quote from David Frum’s great book “Dead Right,” which was written in the early 1990s, in what seemed like a period of exhaustion and defeat for limited-government conservatism, just before the 1994 congressional sweep gave that movement new political life. Here’s how the Frum of that era — who was much more of a small-government rigorist than he is today — depicted the Reagan years and their implications for the right:
However heady the 1980s may have looked to everyone else, they were for conservatives a testing and disillusioning time. Conservatives owned the executive branch for eight years and had great influence over it for four more; they dominated the Senate for six years; and by the end of the decade they exercised near complete control over the federal judiciary. And yet, every time they reached to undo the work of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — the work they had damned for nearly half a century — they felt the public’s wary eyes upon them. They didn’t dare, and they realized that they didn’t dare. Their moment came and flickered. And as the power of the conservative movement slowly ebbed after 1986, and then roared away in 1992, the conservatives who had lived through that attack of faintheartedness shamefacedly felt that they had better hurry up and find something else to talk about …
What this passage gets at is the deep, abiding gulf between the widespread conservative idea of what a true Conservative Moment would look like and the mainstream idea of the same. For the American mainstream — moderate and apolitical as well as liberal — the Reagan era really was a kind of conservative answer to the New Deal era: A period when the right’s ideas were ascendant, its constituencies empowered, its favored policies pursued. But to many on the right, for the reasons the Frum of “Dead Right” suggested, it was something much more limited and fragmented and incomplete: A period when their side held power, yes, but one in which the framework and assumptions of politics remained essentially left-of-center, because the administrative state was curbed but barely rolled back, and the institutions and programs of New Deal and Great Society liberalism endured more or less intact.
This divide, I think, explains a lot of the mutual incomprehension surrounding size-of-government debates. To liberals and many moderates, it often seems like the right gets what it wants in these arguments and then just gets more extreme, demanding cuts atop cuts, concessions atop concessions, deregulation upon deregulation, tax cuts upon tax cuts. But to many conservatives, the right has never come remotely close to getting what it actually wants, whether in the Reagan era or the Gingrich years or now the age of the Tea Party — because what it wants is an actually smaller government, as opposed to one that just grows somewhat more slowly than liberals and the left would like. And this goal only ends up getting labeled as “extreme” in our debates, conservatives lament, because the right has never succeeded in dislodging certain basic assumptions about government established by F.D.R. and L.B.J. — under which a slower rate of spending growth is a “draconian cut,” an era of “small government” is one which in which the state grows immensely in absolute terms but holds steady as a share of G.D.P., and a rich society can never get rich enough to need less welfare spending per capita than it did when it was considerably poorer.
Anyone interested in seeing this argument advanced with particular verve and force should take up William Voegeli’s recent book “Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State.” But no matter how it’s been advanced or by whom, it’s never carried the day in our politics. The right has had success restraining the federal government’s growth and frustrating liberal ambitions for new programs, but when it comes to the question of whether the state should meaningfully shrink its footprint in our society, American political reality really does seem to have a liberal bias. And so the process that Frum described well in the early 1990s has played out repeatedly in our politics: Conservative politicians take power imagining that this time, this time, they will finally tame the New Deal-Great Society Leviathan … and then they make proposals and advance ideas for doing so, the weight of public opinion tilts against them, and they end up either backpedalling, getting defeated at the polls, or both.
So what you’re seeing motivating the House Intransigents today, what’s driving their willingness to engage in probably-pointless brinksmanship, is not just anger at a specific Democratic administration, or opposition to a specific program, or disappointment over a single electoral defeat. Rather, it’s a revolt against the long term pattern I’ve just described: Against what these conservatives, and many on the right, see as forty years of failure, in which first Reagan and then Gingrich and now the Tea Party wave have all failed to deliver on the promise of an actual right-wing answer to the big left-wing victories of the 1930s and 1960s — and now, with Obamacare, of Obama’s first two years as well.
“They didn’t dare,” Frum wrote of the Intransigents’ Reagan-era predecessors, “and they realized that they didn’t dare.” Well, this time, no matter the risks and costs and polls, there are small-government conservatives who intend to dare — because only through a kind of wild daring, they believe, can the long-term, post-New Deal disadvantage that the cause of limited government labors under finally be overcome.
And if this attitude sounds more like a foolish romanticism than a prudent, responsible, grounded-in-reality conservatism — well, yes, unfortunately I think it pretty clearly is.
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In a further effort in trying to understand..
By Francis Wilkinson Oct 4, 2013 2:35 PM GMT+0200
If you want to understand why the government is shut down or why elected Republicans would even consider doing something as reckless as using a debt default to extract policy concessions from the White House -- without necessarily even knowing which policy concessions they want -- Stan Greenberg has a memo for you.
Greenberg has been a prominent Democratic pollster for decades, with a specialty in white working-class distrust of Democratic elites. In addition to his own polling firm, he operates Democracy Corps with former Democratic consultant James Carville. (Both men worked for former President Bill Clinton.)
Democracy Corps issued a report this week on six focus groups conducted with Republican subgroups -- two each with Tea Partiers, evangelicals and moderate Republicans. The results somehow manage to be unsurprising and shocking at the same time -- largely due to the bracing effects of reading the real words of (almost) average Americans.
First, a word on focus groups. Unlike a poll, which asks a series of standardized questions to hundreds of people and then tallies the results, a focus group is more like a conversation. Usually 10 or 12 people are chosen because they meet certain demographic and partisan profiles and invited to a conference room. A professional moderator is charged with keeping the conversation flowing in a productive (for the researchers) direction, and a sense of safety is established among participants.
Safety is largely a function of sameness. If you want to know what black working-class men think about Mitt Romney, for example, don't throw three white professionals with briefcases into the mix. Instead, surround like with like. Groups that are homogenous in terms of race and class tend to produce far more uninhibited responses.
That's what Greenberg did -- putting together separate homogenous groups of white Tea Partiers, white evangelicals and white Republican moderates.
The moderates are in some respects a breed apart. They share the antipathy Tea Partiers and evangelicals have toward President Barack Obama, but lack the other groups' default position amid demographic, political and cultural change.
That default is essentially abject terror. Before discussion began, participants were asked to write down private thoughts about Obama that they wouldn't have to share with the others. Here's a sample:
"Socialist, income redistribution"
(Tea Party man, Raleigh)
"What is he really thinking?"
(Tea Party man, Raleigh)
"Background"
(Tea Party man, Raleigh)
"Lack of relationship with the American people."
(Tea Party man, Raleigh)
"Muslim; birth agenda; Fake; not true"
(Tea Party man, Raleigh)
"Not a US citizen. Supports Terrorists."
(Evangelical man, Roanoke)
"I don’t believe he’s a Christian. He’s a tyrant."
(Evangelical man, Roanoke)
"He wants to fundamentally change the country."
(Evangelical man, Roanoke)
"He is going to try to turn this into a communist country."
(Evangelical woman, Colorado Springs)
"His motives behind his actions."
(Evangelical woman, Colorado Springs)
"He supports everything that is against Christianity."
(Evangelical woman, Colorado Springs)
It's worth noting these were not the words of activists dressed in colonial garb on their way to a Capitol Hill protest. All these participants did was get paid to attend a focus group in or around their home towns.
For them, Greenberg notes, Washington looks nothing like the capital many others see. Gridlock? There is no gridlock. Only a socialist steamroller before which the Republican Party is feeble and afraid. "Evangelicals who feel most threatened by trends embrace the Tea Party because they are the ones who are fighting back," the report states. Republican base voters "think they face a victorious Democratic Party that is intent on expanding government to increase dependency and therefore electoral support."
This is the context of the fight against Obamacare. The basic idea -- similarly articulated by some Republican officeholders, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz -- is that Obama has extended a new entitlement to create a class of lazy, poor voters whose well-being is dependent upon the Democratic Party. Shorthand: more 47 percenters.
"Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities," the report states.
The Republican moderates were staunch fiscal conservatives, but most readily embraced new gender relations and minority empowerment, including gay rights. The Tea Partiers and evangelicals spoke as if they were in the midst of War of the Worlds. As the report characterizes the Tea-Party worldview: "Obama's America is an unmitigated evil based on big government, regulations and dependency."
It's a tough situation to rectify. A lot of Americans were not ready for a mixed-race president. They weren't ready for gay marriage. They weren't ready for the wave of legal and illegal immigration that redefined American demographics over the past two or three decades, bringing in lots of nonwhites. They weren't ready -- who was? -- for the brutal effects of globalization on working- and middle-class Americans or the devastating fallout from the financial crisis.
Their representatives didn't stop Obamacare. And their side didn't "take back America" in 2012 as Fox News and conservative radio personalities led them to believe they would. They feel the culture is running away from them (and they're mostly right). They lack the power to control their own government. But they still have just enough to shut it down.
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Is it all that bad?
Of the countless reasons that congressional Republicans hate the Affordable Care Act enough to shut down the government, the most politically potent is the claim that it will do untold damage to the economy and cripple small companies. Orrin Hatch has said that Obamacare will be “devastating to small business.” Ted Cruz argues that it is already “the No. 1 job killer.” And the vice-president of the National Federation of Independent Businesses called it simply “terrible.” So it comes as some surprise to learn that Obamacare may well be the best thing Washington has done for American small business in decades.
The G.O.P.’s case hinges on the employer mandate, which requires companies with fifty or more full-time employees to provide health insurance. It also regulates the kind of insurance that companies can offer: insurance has to cover at least sixty per cent of costs, and premiums can’t be more than 9.5 per cent of employees’ income. Companies that don’t offer insurance will pay a penalty. Republicans argue that this will hurt companies’ profits, forcing them to stop hiring and to cut workers’ hours, in order to stay below the fifty-employee threshold.
The story is guaranteed to feed the fears of small-business owners. But the overwhelming majority of American businesses—ninety-six per cent—have fewer than fifty employees. The employer mandate doesn’t touch them. And more than ninety per cent of the companies above that threshold already offer health insurance. Only three per cent are in the zone (between forty and seventy-five employees) where the threshold will be an issue. Even if these firms get more cautious about hiring—and there’s little evidence that they will—the impact on the economy would be small.
Meanwhile, the likely benefits of Obamacare for small businesses are enormous. To begin with, it’ll make it easier for people to start their own companies—which has always been a risky proposition in the U.S., because you couldn’t be sure of finding affordable health insurance. As John Arensmeyer, who heads the advocacy group Small Business Majority, and is himself a former small-business owner, told me, “In the U.S., we pride ourselves on our entrepreneurial spirit, but we’ve had this bizarre disincentive in the system that’s kept people from starting new businesses.” Purely for the sake of health insurance, people stay in jobs they aren’t suited to—a phenomenon that economists call “job lock.” “With the new law, job lock goes away,” Arensmeyer said. “Anyone who wants to start a business can do so independent of the health-care costs.” Studies show that people who are freed from job lock (for instance, when they start qualifying for Medicare) are more likely to undertake something entrepreneurial, and one recent study projects that Obamacare could enable 1.5 million people to become self-employed.
Even more important, Obamacare will help small businesses with health-care costs, which have long been a source of anxiety. The fact that most Americans get their insurance through work is a historical accident: during the Second World War, wages were frozen, so companies began offering health insurance instead. After the war, attempts to create universal heath care were stymied by conservatives and doctors, and Congress gave corporations tax incentives to keep providing insurance. The system has worked well enough for big employers, since large workforces make possible the pooling of risk that any healthy insurance market requires. But small businesses often face so-called “experience rating”: a business with a lot of women or older workers faces high premiums, and even a single employee who runs up medical costs can be a disaster. A business that Arensmeyer represents recently saw premiums skyrocket because one employee has a child with diabetes. Insurance costs small companies as much as eighteen per cent more than it does large companies; worse, it’s also a crapshoot. Arensmeyer said, “Companies live in fear that if one or two employees get sick their whole cost structure will radically change.” No wonder that fewer than half the companies with under fifty employees insure their employees, and that half of uninsured workers work for small businesses or are self-employed. In fact, a full quarter of small-business owners are uninsured, too.
Obamacare changes all this. It provides tax credits to smaller businesses that want to insure their employees. And it requires “community rating” for small businesses, just as it does for individuals, sharply restricting insurers’ ability to charge a company more because it has employees with higher health costs. And small-business exchanges will in effect allow companies to pool their risks to get better rates. “You’re really taking the benefits that big companies enjoy, and letting small businesses tap into that,” Arensmeyer said. This may lower costs, and it will insure that small businesses can hire the best person for a job rather than worry about health issues.
The U.S. likes to think of itself as friendly to small businesses. But, as a 2009 study by the economists John Schmitt and Nathan Lane documented, our small-business sector is among the smallest in the developed world, and has one of the lowest rates of self-employment. One reason is that we’ve never had anything like national health insurance. In a saner world, changing this would be a reform that the “party of small business” would celebrate. ♦
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While the stock market sinks further, I'm more and more baffled by its causes..
By Eugene Robinson - October 8, 2013
WASHINGTON -- While Republicans were throwing their silly tantrum, Obamacare became a fact. There is no turning back.
The point of no return was reached when millions of people crashed the websites of the new Affordable Care Act exchanges trying to buy health insurance. Republicans can fight rear-guard battles if they want, but last Tuesday they lost the war. All they can do at this point is harm the nation -- and their own political prospects.
Someday, if the GOP captures the presidency and both houses of Congress, President Obama's health care law could be altered or even repealed. But it would be replaced by some new program that does the same thing, because there is no politically viable way to snatch away the medical insurance that customers are buying through the exchanges.
Quite the opposite: As soon as the glitches are cleared up and everyone becomes a bit less hysterical, the question will be how to obtain coverage for as many as 30 million people who will still be uninsured -- including about 8 million ineligible for Obamacare because of a sabotage campaign by Republican governors.
Look at Texas, which the state medical association calls "the uninsured capital of the United States." An estimated 22.5 percent of the population lacks health insurance, a higher percentage than in any other state.
Many will remain uninsured because Gov. Rick Perry -- a once and perhaps future GOP candidate for president -- refused to set up a state insurance exchange and turned down billions in federal funds to expand Medicaid coverage.
Rejection of Obamacare may be popular in Texas now. But demographic trends are making the Lone Star State's electorate more diverse, as the Latino population grows, and less reliably Republican. Small businesses that cannot afford to offer health insurance may soon worry about losing employees to states offering better coverage for the working poor through local exchanges and expanded Medicaid. Time is on the side of those who want to expand coverage, not those who want to restrict it.
I trust that conservative leaders will continue riling up the base with the untrue charge that Obamacare is "government health care." It is nothing of the sort. Obama decided at the outset not to push for a government-run health system, such as those in Britain and Canada, or a single-payer system of any kind.
Instead, all of Obamacare's insurance plans are offered by private firms -- the same companies that also provide employer-sponsored insurance. Disappointing his liberal supporters, Obama declined to include even a single public, government-run health plan. All the apocalyptic right-wing rhetoric about socialism and the end of freedom is nothing but hot air. Soon, no one will take it seriously.
Those who are genuinely worried about the cost of a new entitlement should have their concerns taken seriously. But if money is the overriding issue, the obvious thing to do is go further and adopt a truly universal system like those in other industrialized countries.
The United States spends nearly 18 percent of GDP on health care, more than any other nation. France, Germany and Japan, to cite three examples with universal health care, spend between 9 percent and 12 percent of GDP on health -- and obtain health outcomes at least as good as ours.
Someday, fiscal conservatives will acknowledge those numbers. For now, we are stuck with a fee-for-service health care system that is perhaps the most wasteful in the world. Critics of Obamacare seem not to understand that the vast numbers of uninsured Americans -- about 15 percent of the population -- contribute heavily to the system's inefficiencies.
We provide care for these people, but we do it in the dumbest way imaginable. Since they can't afford to see a doctor regularly, treatable health problems and chronic conditions worsen. When ailments become acute, the uninsured go to hospital emergency rooms -- the most expensive way to receive care.
The uninsured cannot pay their bills -- medical costs are the biggest single cause of personal bankruptcy -- so they are passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher health insurance premiums. Families USA, a nonpartisan health care advocacy group, estimated that in 2010 an average family in Texas paid an extra $2,786 in premiums to cover care for the uninsured. Are you listening, Gov. Perry?
Medicare guaranteed health care for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor. Obamacare begins to fill the remaining gaps. It will get better over time, but already -- crashing websites and all -- it's a beautiful thing.
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My amazement continues to grow..
AFP/Getty Images A Tea-Party supporter protests outside the U.S. Supreme Court last year over the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care.
It seems unthinkable that any group would decline $833,000 in federal funding. Yet Cardon Outreach, a Woodlands, Texas-based organization, did just that—returning its chunk of $67 million the federal government set aside to guide uninsured Americans through getting coverage under the Affordable Care Act. They refused the cash after Republican congressional representatives and the Oklahoma insurance commissioner put a gag on what these “navigators” could discuss with consumers during enrollment. Cardon’s lawyer Chuck Kable worried that their ability to help would be so limited, navigators might actually discourage frustrated consumers from enrolling at all: “Are you providing a disservice to the individual by taking them halfway and then saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t go any further?’”
The ongoing political hostility to Obamacare—most recently taking the form of the government shutdown—is having the greatest impact on consumers living in states where elected officials are opposed to the law. Twenty-seven states—many of them led by Republicans—refused to set up their own health exchanges entirely, leaving them to the federal government to take care of.
But some states have taken their protests a step further and launched legislative battles and lawsuits. Oklahoma, for instance, is currently suing the federal government, claiming that awarding premium subsidies is unconstitutional in states with federally run exchanges (if it’s successful, the suit would effectively prevent an exchange from operating there at all, experts say). “The federal exchanges are really swimming upstream in these states,” says Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University who is studying health exchanges.
Henry Aaron, a renowned health care economist and senior fellow at think tank the Brookings Institution compares the red state movement against Obamacare to the 1950s policy of “massive resistance,” the name given to efforts by some politicians in the South to prevent black children from attending school with white students after the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation ruling. Indeed, a September survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that 23% of adults want elected officials to try to make it fail. “The idea that you have a duly passed law, confirmed by the courts, that is affecting tens of millions of people, and you have state officials doing everything in their power to block the enforcement of the law of the land,” says Aaron, “is in the same corner of the box, so to speak, as a massive resistance.”
See also: 10 things Obamacare won’t tell you
Congressional budget bills to defund and delay Obamacare are perhaps the most high-profile acts of defiance yet—aside from the 41 times House Republicans have voted to repeal the law—but states have also rebelled at the local level. South Carolina proposed to refund residents who pay a penalty for not having insurance next year, effectively canceling out the law’s coverage requirement. Florida banned navigators from county health departments, “keeping that piece of health reform away from the population that’s going to need help,” says Bill Melville, market analyst for Decision Resources Group, a health care data firm. In Georgia, the insurance commissioner publicly declared himself an Obamacare “obstructionist,” while Missouri prohibited state agencies from promoting the law, and created licensing hurdles for navigators that other states have copied. “Missouri emerged as a sort of anti-pioneer,” says Melville, who published a report card grading each state’s exchange—flunking Missouri and assigning D grades to South Carolina, Florida and Georgia. (Alabama, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Oklahoma also received D’s, for placing similar restrictions on navigators as well as for lacking insurer competition.)
The real losers in this fight may be the consumers who actually want health insurance in those states. They may have to pay higher prices for coverage, which some critics have blamed on lawmakers’ relinquishing control of the marketplace. And if constituents approach their state representatives with questions about the law, some Republican congressional representatives decline to answer. “We direct all questions about the program to HealthCare.gov,” says Tennessee Rep. Diane Black’s press secretary, Tom Flanagin. “We have serious privacy concerns about the exchanges, and concerns about the program in general.” (Tennessee got a C on Melville’s report card, earning points for relatively low insurance rates in spite of state officials’ objection to the exchanges.)
See also: Obamacare’s bumpy beginning
Indeed, much of the obstructionist regulation has focused on blocking assistance for consumers—either literally banning navigators from certain locations, as in Florida; creating other barriers, such requiring navigators to pay fees or obtain surety bonds; threatening to penalize navigators who go beyond their job capacity; or requiring the navigators to undergo additional tests and training. To be sure, Georgia’s requirements that navigators take a state course on top of federal training and pass a state licensing exam “are intended to protect the consumers in Georgia from fraud, not restrict them from obtaining coverage,” says Glenn Allen, a spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Insurance. But several days after the exchanges opened, Georgia had only nine licensed in the entire state. “People are going to need help, and the assisters and navigators are important—and without them, it’s going to be a rougher road,” Aaron says.
See also: Meet Obamacare’s insurance salesmen
Still, in some parts of anti-Obamacare territory, health insurance officials and most navigators are pressing on. In Florida, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is “doubling down” to “provide Floridians with the information and assistance the state is committed to denying them,” enlisting mayors, local pharmacists and religious leaders to educate people about the ACA despite the “shameful attempt by the state to block the law,” says HHS spokesperson Joanne Peters.
And at Oklahoma’s Little Dixie Community Action Agency, the task is “black and white,” says Chad Austin, who is coordinating the navigator program. The recipient of a $580,733 navigator grant, the agency is based in a rural area where “there’s a very good likelihood that some people don’t even know that the Affordable Care Act exists,” Austin says. “There’s a lot of political controversy over it right now, but that’s what makes my job even more clear.” He says he plans to adhere to Oklahoma’s navigator limits by supervising and checking in with his staff, and handing people a list of brokers’ phone numbers when they ask questions navigators aren’t allowed to answer. “I don’t want my family or my friends or my community members to not have health insurance and have to pay a fee because they didn’t know they were supposed to get it.”
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Stunning. Those states are treating their people like they treated "coloreds" in the 1950s.
Road a bus in Chicago yesterday with a guy from Edmonton. He was amazed at the size and beauty of the city and wondered at its wealth. We spoke about Cicago's history. As the bus pulled up to our destination he said out of the blue, "By the way, if anyone asks you can tell them you road a bus with a Canadian that really likes his health care system. "
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Well, I'm not sure that's a helpful analogy but it's certainly remarkable that they face such hurdles insuring themselves as a result.
Did condense it into an article:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1739732-...-obamacare
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From bad til worse..
UPDATE I re-reported a Fox News segment on Obamacare -- it was appallingly easy to see how it misleads the audience
By Eric Stern
Topics: Sean Hannity, Hannity, Obamacare, Health, Health Care, Media, Fox News, Conservatism, Media Criticism, Editor's Picks, News, Politics News
I happened to turn on the Hannity show on Fox News last Friday evening. “Average Americans are feeling the pain of Obamacare and the healthcare overhaul train wreck,” Hannity announced, “and six of them are here tonight to tell us their stories.” Three married couples were neatly arranged in his studio, the wives seated and the men standing behind them, like game show contestants.
As Hannity called on each of them, the guests recounted their “Obamacare” horror stories: canceled policies, premium hikes, restrictions on the freedom to see a doctor of their choice, financial burdens upon their small businesses and so on.
“These are the stories that the media refuses to cover,” Hannity interjected.
But none of it smelled right to me. Nothing these folks were saying jibed with the basic facts of the Affordable Care Act as I understand them. I understand them fairly well; I have worked as a senior adviser to a governor and helped him deal with the new federal rules.
I decided to hit the pavement. I tracked down Hannity’s guests, one by one, and did my own telephone interviews with them.
First I spoke with Paul Cox of Leicester, N.C. He and his wife Michelle had lamented to Hannity that because of Obamacare, they can’t grow their construction business and they have kept their employees below a certain number of hours, so that they are part-timers.
Obamacare has no effect on businesses with 49 employees or less. But in our brief conversation on the phone, Paul revealed that he has only four employees. Why the cutback on his workforce? “Well,” he said, “I haven’t been forced to do so, it’s just that I’ve chosen to do so. I have to deal with increased costs.” What costs? And how, I asked him, is any of it due to Obamacare? There was a long pause, after which he said he’d call me back. He never did.
There is only one Obamacare requirement that applies to a company of this size: workers must be notified of the existence of the “healthcare.gov” website, the insurance exchange. That’s all.
Next I called Allison Denijs. She’d told Hannity that she pays over $13,000 a year in premiums. Like the other guests, she said she had recently gotten a letter from Blue Cross saying that her policy was being terminated and a new, ACA-compliant policy would take its place. She says this shows that Obama lied when he promised Americans that we could keep our existing policies.
Allison’s husband left his job a few years ago, one with benefits at a big company, to start his own business. Since then they’ve been buying insurance on the open market, and are now paying around $1,100 a month for a policy with a $2,500 deductible per family member, with hefty annual premium hikes. One of their two children is not covered under the policy. She has a preexisting condition that would require purchasing additional coverage for $600 a month, which would bring the family’s grand total to around $20,000 a year.
I asked Allison if she’d shopped on the exchange, to see what a plan might cost under the new law. She said she hadn’t done so because she’d heard the website was not working. Would she try it out when it’s up and running? Perhaps, she said. She told me she has long opposed Obamacare, and that the president should have focused on tort reform as a solution to bringing down the price of healthcare.
I tried an experiment and shopped on the exchange for Allison and Kurt. Assuming they don’t smoke and have a household income too high to be eligible for subsidies, I found that they would be able to get a plan for around $7,600, which would include coverage for their uninsured daughter. This would be about a 60 percent reduction from what they would have to pay on the pre-Obamacare market.
Allison also told me that the letter she received from Blue Cross said that in addition to the policy change for ACA compliance, in the new policy her physician network size might be reduced. That’s something insurance companies do to save money, with or without Obamacare on the horizon, just as they raise premiums with or without Obamacare coming.
If Allison’s choice of doctor was denied her through Obamacare then, yes, she could have a claim that Obamacare has hurt her. But she’d also have thousands of dollars in her pocket that she didn’t have before.
Finally, I called Robbie and Tina Robison from Franklin, Tenn. Robbie is self-employed as a Christian youth motivational speaker. (You can see his work here.) On Hannity, the couple said that they, too, were recently notified that their Blue Cross policy would be expiring for lack of ACA compliance. They told Hannity that the replacement plans Blue Cross was offering would come with a rate increase of 50 percent or even 75 percent, and that the new offerings would contain all sorts of benefits they don’t need, like maternity care, pediatric care, prenatal care and so forth. Their kids are grown and moved out, so why should they be forced to pay extra for a health plan with superfluous features?
When I spoke to Robbie, he said he and Tina have been paying a little over $800 a month for their plan, about $10,000 a year. And the ACA-compliant policy that will cost 50-75 percent more? They said this information was related to them by their insurance agent.
Had they shopped on the exchange yet, I asked? No, Tina said, nor would they. They oppose Obamacare and want nothing to do with it. Fair enough, but they should know that I found a plan for them for, at most, $3,700 a year, 63 percent less than their current bill. It might cover things that they don’t need, but so does every insurance policy.
It’s true that we don’t know for sure whether certain ills conservatives have warned about will occur once Obamacare is fully enacted. For example, will we truly have the same freedom to choose a physician that we have now? Will a surplus of insured patients require a scaling back (or “rationing,” as some call it) of provided healthcare services? Will doctors be able to spend as much time with patients? These are all valid, unanswered questions. The problem is that people like Sean Hannity have decided to answer them now, without evidence. Or worse, with fake evidence.
I don’t doubt that these six individuals believe that Obamacare is a disaster; but none of them had even visited the insurance exchange. And some of them appear to have taken actions (Paul Cox, for example) based on a general pessimistic belief about Obamacare. He’s certainly entitled to do so, but Hannity is not entitled to point to Paul’s behavior as an “Obamacare train wreck story” and maintain any credibility that he might have as a journalist.
Strangely, the recent shutdown was based almost entirely on a small percentage of Congress’s belief that Obamacare, as Ted Cruz puts it, “is destroying America.” Cruz has rarely given us an example of what he’s talking about. That’s because the best he can do is what Hannity did—exploit people’s ignorance and falsely point to imaginary boogeymen.
Update: To check the plans I used this useful calculator from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
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