Tag Archives: Affordable Care Act

Calling Their Bluff

We’ve been putting up with a lot of GOP whining about the health care reform bill. They keep informing us that they have all these great ideas that we wouldn’t listen to (try not to let your eyes roll out of your head if you were a close follower of the HCR debate). One specific issue that the GOP has honed in on is the most unpopular part of the bill, the individual mandate. As many of you know, the bill actually gives states flexibility to enact their own plans as long as it meets the goals of the Affordable Care Act. that means covering a comparable amount of people with affordable coverage, not the proposed race to the bottom. Obama has called their bluff:

President Obama has endorsed minor tweaks to the Affordable Care Act since its passage — most notably the “1099 problem” — but today’s announcement reflects an openness to a more significant kind of change.

Seeking to appease disgruntled governors, President Obama announced Monday that he supported amending the 2010 health care law to allow states to opt out of its most burdensome requirements three years earlier than currently permitted.

In remarks to the National Governors Association, Mr. Obama said he backed legislation that would enable states to request federal permission to withdraw from the law’s mandates in 2014 rather than in 2017 as long as they could prove that they could find other ways to cover as many people as the original law would and at the same cost. The earlier date is when many of the act’s central provisions take effect, including requirements that most individuals obtain health insurance and that employers of a certain size offer coverage to workers or pay a penalty.

Specifically referencing a proposal from Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.), the president endorsed the kind of flexibility Republicans say they want. “[I]f you can come up with a better system for your state to provide coverage of the same quality and affordability as the Affordable Care Act, you can take that route instead,” Obama said, adding, “If your state can create a plan that covers as many people as affordably and comprehensively as the Affordable Care Act does, without increasing the deficit, you can implement that plan and we’ll work with you to do it.”

I believe what Obama just said is Bring It On. I’d certainly like to get a peak of these great ideas that the Reoublicans have been hiding from us. Also, it would allow states to experiment with a single-payer system too. Steve Benen adds that this will really put a lot of pressure on state governors too:

So, how big a deal is this? It marks a fairly significant departure from the administration’s status quo, but at its root, what we’re seeing is the White House call Republicans’ bluff. The GOP is convinced it can offer comparable coverage at comparable prices using Republican-friendly policies. Today, in effect, the president said, “Be my guest.” Why? Because Obama knows it’ll take more than tort reform and HSAs to make the system work, and he sees a political upside to watching GOP officials scramble to actually craft their own plans, rather than bash his.

This approach has many upsides for Obama. For one, it probably takes a lot of air out of the challenges on the basis of states rights and the individual mandate. States are free to get rid of the mandate as long as they meet the goals of the ACA. Plus, it will show these newbie Republican governors that there’s a difference between opposition and actual governing. It will be interesting to see how many plans turn out to be pretty much the plan we’ve already got.

ACA Repeal Stunt Amendment Fails in Senate Tonight

Today is the day that freshmen Congresspeople get *their* government-run healthcare, right?

The GOP brought up their amendment to repeal the ACA on a bill meant to reauthorize the FAA. It failed pretty spectacularly — largely because the GOP amendment didn’t propose a way to *pay* the $1+ trillion cost of repeal. It failed, because the GOP were looking to play to the cameras and the horse-race reporters who would not pay attention to the fact that 1) the new rules agreement with Reid and McConnell meant that the GOP would bring up bill amendments that were related to the bill on the floor; 2) the GOP had no intention of paying for it (do they ever?); 3) they didn’t have a *replacement* plan; and 4) they knew they didn’t have the votes. So the news will be full of this drama without any context for this bit of legislative stunt wrangling. The amendment failed 47 – 51. Barbara Milkulski gets that this was a stunt:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne3HP2ahZwM[/youtube]

The GOP-led House repealed the ACA a couple of weeks back, and the news was full of the story of *this* stunt vote and the Democrats’ *strategy* for opposing (which, according to he media I consume, appears to be lots of personal stories).

But it took a comment I read over at Congress Matters to know about this:

A little after 5:00 p.m., House Democrats proposed that the bill be sent back to three House committees and be altered to say that the repeal of last year’s healthcare bill will not take effect until a majority of House and Senate members agree not to enroll in federal health insurance. Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) said repeal should not happen unless most members agree to abandon their own coverage.

(TPM also covered this and it may be the extent of coverage it got.)

Here is the motion that Representative Andrews made. It was defeated, 185-245 (largely on a party line vote), but how come the only place I can find anything reported on this is from a blog at The Hill or at TPM? Apparently, the only stunts that matter are the Republican ones. Even though you’d expect to see some mentions of a motion that asks the House to repeal the health coverage for themselves that they repealed for the rest of Americans. (And remember that once the ACA goes into full effect, Congress gets the same coverage offered under it.) As expected, the House Republicans (and 5 Democrats) made sure that they had all of the Government health insurance coverage they could eat, while other Americans’ needs go utterly unaddressed by the GOP’s grandstanding.

You’d think that the media would *want* and dualling stunts narrative. You’d think that the media would be eager to know what the GOP alternative is so they’d have another dualling plans narrative. You’d think that Democrats would be just everywhere talking up the sheer hypocrisy. (Except for Barbara Milkulski — more like this, please!) But what is certain is that Americans are apparently not to be told that the GOP is willing to make sure that Americans can’t have the coverage that they take as a matter of entitlement.

Forbes Magazine Says the Health Care Act is Actually Working

As Ezra Klein notes this morning, the health care bill is being redebated this morning, not being repealed. Whatever the House does to try to repeal the Act today or tomorrow will definitely die in the Senate, so remember that as you listen to the sound and fury. Sound and fury that is already useless and a waste of tax dollars. And one that doesn’t do anything to create a job, heal the economy or even to reduce the deficit.

A piece in Forbes recently works from an LA Times article that reports that early provisions of the ACA are definitely working:

The first statistics are coming in and, to the surprise of a great many, Obamacare might just be working to bring health care to working Americans precisely as promised.

The major health insurance companies around the country are reporting a significant increase in small businesses offering health care benefits to their employees.

Why?

Because the tax cut created in the new health care reform law providing small businesses with an incentive to give health benefits to employees is working.

To be sure, the full data are not in (and won’t be until well after Tax Day), but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the small employers targeted by the tax credit for new purchases of insurance are taking advantage of it (from the LA Times article):

Coventry Health Care Inc., an insurer in Maryland that focuses on small businesses, signed contracts to cover 115,000 new workers in the first nine months of this year, an 8% jump.

In California, Warner Pacific Insurance Services in Westlake Village, a major servicer of insurance brokers, has seen business grow more than 10% this year, a company executive said.

And Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, the largest insurer in the Kansas City, Mo., area, is reporting a 58% jump in the number of small businesses buying insurance since April, the first full month after the legislation was signed into law.

The independent nonprofit insurer has been particularly aggressive in marketing the new tax credit, which can mean a discount of as much as 35% for very small companies with low payrolls.

“One of the biggest problems in the small-group market is affordability,” said Ron Rowe, who oversees small-group sales for the insurer. “We looked at the tax credit and said, ‘This is perfect.'”

Small firms are signing up for employee coverage in the midst of the recession, but have found enough incentive in the tax credit portion of this bill to be able to make this investment in their employees. Remember this when you hear over and over again that there is something *job killing* about the ACA. Rather than harming businesses, small business owners are finding these provisions of the ACA helpful in expanding benefits for their employees AND certainly the new business isn’t hurting a single insurance company. In addition — large employers with large numbers of low-income employees (crazy, but another subject) got waivers from the Obama Administration that allow them to continue to offer the health care they currently offer (quite inadequate) until the subsidies like the small businesses have now and the exchanges come into effect in 2014. For those employers, the expectation was that they would either drop the coverage that they currently offer to these employees. And there isn’t much about tax credits actually working that counts as *socialism*.

And while I’m at it, you may want to have this piece from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities debunking the misinformation the GOP is spreading to try to redebate the ACA this week.

Get Your GOP Talking Points Now and Beat the Rush

Via Dave Neiwert at Crooks and Liars, we get a sneak preview of what at least one influential conservative wants to be a main Republican talking point this fall. While blabbering incoherently talking to Sean Hannity Tuesday night on Hannity’s FOX News show, Newt Gingrich regurgitated the factually untrue and already debunked right-wing myth about the IRS having to hire 16,000 additional agents to enforce the Affordable Care Act. Quoth the Gingrich:

One of the things in the health bill is 16,000 additional IRS agents. Now I think the average American doesn’t think we need 16,000 health police — they don’t think we need a single health police. And it’s interesting that that health bill has more IRS agents than it has doctors or nurses or people who actually do health in the bill.I think, Republicans this fall, if they were to run as one of their planks, that they will never fund the 16,000 IRS agents, and they will block implementation of the $430 billion in new taxes.

And then put it straight to the country — Do you want 16,000 new IRS agents? Vote Democrat. Do you not want 16,000? Vote Republican.

My guess is that, in fact, could be one of the five or six issues that could set the stage for a Republican majority.

Like almost every Republican campaign “issue” of the past couple years, this one could be pretty powerful — if it weren’t for those pesky “facts”. Of course, it’s also open for debate as to whether or not the lack of veracity actually does diminish the power of the assertion. Regardless, this one, like its death panel and birther brethren before it, has no basis in reality. For the best debunking of this blatantly fear-mongering, anti-government falsehood, I direct you to non-partisan FactCheck.org.

In the same mold as many lies before it, this one started as a vague assertion, did a couple rounds through the right-wing echo chamber, then came out as an unassailable “fact”. If you want the whole sordid affair, I strongly recommend the FactCheck article. But to make a long story short, it started with a soft range of how much the IRS’s budget might increase. Conservatives then acted on the assumption that the entire (and high-end) figure would not only be solely devoted to new personnel, but only to “agents”, who make up a small part of the IRS’s force, and not to various other types of employees. Ron Paul even gave them all guns by refering to “16,500 armed bureaucrats”!

Needless to say, almost no part of the “16,000 New IRS Agent” story has any truth to it. In fact, the ACA specifically states that, “In the case of any failure by a taxpayer to timely pay any penalty imposed by this section, such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty with respect to such failure” No need for gun-toting IRS cops. The real lesson to take from this, I think, is just the sad realization that the GOP still has no real platform to run on. It seems as if we’re in for another election cycle of Republicans making wild, false accusations, the press repeating them, and Democrats fighting in vain to educate voters on the facts. Sigh.

Edit: I see that Ezra Klein has a post on this subject, as well.

Affordable Care Act Survives Its First Challenge

In case you missed it yesterday, the ACA survived the first of what will undoubtedly be many attempts to nip at the edges of its authority.  The issue at hand this time was the provision that insurers would be prohibited from denying to coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. The goal and spirit of the law was ensure that these children would be guaranteed access to coverage as well as the full range of benefits of that coverage. This is to take effect six months after the signing of the law, well in advance of the 2014 date for guaranteed access for everyone else.

Not surprisingly, though, the insurance companies and their high-priced lawyers had a different take on the wording of the law. According to their interpretation, they would have to grant full coverage to children already in plans, but would not yet be forced to accept new customers, even children, with pre-existing conditions. Republicans took this as proof that the bill was shoddily written. Other conspiracy-minded individuals took this as proof that the administration had a hidden agenda to aid the insurance industry. Sane-minded people were just outraged that lawyers would take what they commonly do — look for loopholes in laws — and apply it to this situation.

In response, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sent a letter on Monday to Karen Ignagni, the head of AHIP, the insurer’s trade association, that basically said, “You don’t want to do this.” She also stated that she would issue regulations clarifying the letter of the law. Ignagni responded Monday night with a letter of her own that essentially said, “You’re right. We’ll do what you say.”

The fight was obviously not very long, nor was it over an issue that would effect a great deal of people. However, it did highlight one of the big problems facing anyone bent on repealing almost any part of the Affordable Care Act — it ain’t gonna look good. The insurance companies were fighting for their right to deny coverage to sick kids. That’s not exactly a great PR move. Trying to undo just about any other part of the law would likely put the repealers in an equally unappealing position. I say, “Bring it on.”