When the amazing Diana Nyad completed her improbable, record-setting swim from Cuba to Florida last week, people everywhere cheered at the triumph. It was her fifth try, and at the age of 64, she finally succeeded. Who could be anything but inspired by and ecstatic about her accomplishment? Of course, it was a good thing President Obama never attempted the same feat. Republicans would have followed him in a chartered fishing boat, chumming the waters with shrimp-crusted seal cutlets and taking turns riding his back like a SeaWorld porpoise.
You could say that Obama faced harrowing obstacles, too, when he first set out to reform our health care system. But instead of jellyfish, he’s had to deal with a thousand stings from congressional and state-level Republicans who can’t afford to see Obamacare succeed even a little — even though many Republicans supported key provisions of the health care law far before Obama adopted them.
But in the absence of a viable alternative approach, Republicans appear to be only too happy to preserve the status quo. That’s a status quo in which people who get sick through no fault of their own are bankrupted and their families ruined because they have pre-existing conditions and can’t get insurance. It’s a status quo in which Americans pay more per capita on health care — by leaps and bounds — than every other industrialized country, all of which have some form of universal health care. And what do we get for all the money we spend? Not healthier citizens, that’s for sure.
Yeah, by all means, let’s stick with this system. Hey, it works for Rebecca Kleefisch and Mitt Romney. What exactly is the problem?
So when I saw the estimates for insurance premium increases coming from the state Office of the Commissioner of Insurance last week, I couldn’t help but be a little skeptical. And I wasn’t the only one. Somehow, miraculously, Obamacare appears to be doomed in states that currently have Republican governors. What a coincidence!
Speaking to the Wisconsin State Journal, Citizen Action Executive Director Robert Kraig said of OCI’s report, “The data is surprisingly thin and unpersuasive as it’s presented, and it’s incomplete. They’re not even real numbers — they’re percentages.”
(Kraig also criticized the agency for not making available the raw data used to make the estimates. Go figure.)
Meanwhile, Jon Peacock of the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families told the Associated Press, “Given how sketchy this information is, I can’t help but wonder if they were even striving to make even-handed comparisons.”
Gee, ya think? Scott Walker’s government playing politics with people’s lives and livelihoods? Never!
I’ve written before about Walker’s attempt — in concert with national Republicans — to derail Obamacare, and I can’t help but think this is all part of that strategy.
Surely, the OCI wasn’t attempting to inform Wisconsinites about what’s coming; it was hoping to generate lurid headlines.
Here’s a link to the OCI’s press release, which details sharp estimated rate increases for people buying insurance in the individual market — including a gaudy 124% increase for 21-year-olds in the Madison area.
Well down the page, you’ll see the OCI’s sheepish acknowledgment that consumers will be eligible for subsidies to help them pay for insurance. So why only mention the subsidies in passing? Why not incorporate them into your estimates? Well, because 124% sounds so much scarier than a drastically lower number.
Of course, publicizing such a number only supports the Republicans’ obstructionist strategy. As they know, the success of health care reform depends on young, healthy people buying into the health insurance market. That’s why Republicans Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, George H.W. Bush, Rick Santorum, Dan Quayle, Bob Dole, Pete Domenici, Chuck Grassley, Ted Stevens, Orrin Hatch, Arlen Specter, Alan Simpson, Dick Lugar, and John Danforth, et al., all supported an individual insurance mandate at one point or another.
It’s puzzling, then, why Republicans would deliberately scuttle attempts to educate young people about the law, or why they’d like to make insurance appear so cost prohibitive that there’s no point in even bothering with it.
Meanwhile, two new studies are calling B.S. on some states’ predictions of an Obamacare rate shock in the individual market.
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A Kaiser Family Foundation study concluded that premiums will actually be lower than expected when the exchanges open on Oct. 1. And a new Rand Corp. study concluded that widespread predictions of sharply higher premiums under Obamacare have been overstated, with many states actually seeing little or no change.
“Rates for policies in the individual market are likely to vary from state to state, with some experiencing increases and some experiencing decreases in cost,” said Rand senior economist Christine Eibner in a statement. “But our analysis found no widespread trend toward sharply higher prices in the individual market.”
Of course, no one will know what’s really going to happen until the exchanges come online in October. But Republicans are cynically trying to stack the deck, apparently hoping that young people are so freaked out about the cost of insurance that they opt to go without coverage, thus smothering Obamacare in its crib.
Then again, that makes a lot of sense for the country with the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world — thanks, you know, to our world-class health care system.
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