Beware of Romneycare

by James Surowiecki

 

Mitt Romney can be a hard man to pin down. But there is one thing that he’s been clear about: if he becomes President, he will repeal Obamacare. That simple promise, more than any other that Romney has made, illuminates what is most at stake in this year’s election. The campaigns may spend most of their time talking about taxes and jobs. But health care is where the election’s outcome will have the most immediate and powerful impact on how Americans live.

Abolishing Obamacare would eliminate subsidies for people buying insurance and rescind regulations requiring insurance companies to guarantee coverage and benefits (for instance, to people with preëxisting conditions). Romney’s proposed alternative is to give individuals a tax break when they buy insurance and to push them toward high-deductible insurance plans, which he believes will make them more rigorous and price-conscious in choosing doctors and treatments. Romney also wants to reform Medicare by encouraging more competition among private insurers. The details are skimpy, but the core principle is that unleashing the power of the free market will bring down costs and raise quality.

Medicareless

HYPOCRITIC OATH: Anti-Obamacare Lawmakers Still Use It For Their Kids

  Erin Mershon, Greg Rosalsky, Cole Stangler, Nate Willis and Jeffrey Young contributed reporting.

WASHINGTON -- Congressional Republicans may not have been happy about the Supreme Court's ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act, but many of their children probably are.
According to an analysis by The Huffington Post, dozens of Republicans who want to repeal Obamacare have adult children who are allowed to stay on their parents' health plans thanks to the law, which extended this benefit nationwide. Many of the lawmakers' children are employed and on their own health care plans, but others continue to take advantage of their parents' coverage.
"He [My 24-year-old son] is on his health plan right now -- on his mother's plan -- but again, that wouldn’t weigh in on where I stand on the issue," said Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) last week, before the Supreme Court handed down its ruling. "Again, I just think the whole thing needs to be scrapped. And I don’t even want to think about certain provisions yet."
But Walsh and his GOP colleagues are soon going to have to start thinking about which provisions they want to keep if they are going to try to repeal Obamacare. Republicans are almost completely unified in wanting to get rid of the health care law, but they are significantly more divided on what a plan would look like going forward -- and whether they should keep some of the law's most popular provisions.
On Sunday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Republicans would not require parents' health insurance plans to extend eligibility to adult children if Obamacare is repealed.
Walsh demurred when asked if he supported maintaining the provision.
“No, I don’t know that I do. I don’t know that I do," he said. "I don't know where I am on that, and that's a lousy thing to say. My oldest is 24. That doesn’t matter to me, though, irregardless of that."
Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), however, wants to keep it.
"There are good things in the health care bill, and that's one of them," said Amodei, who has a 25-year-old daughter with her own health insurance. "I haven't talked with anybody who thinks that's something we ought to get rid of."
"I support it. Oh, sure. ... It would be [incorporated] in any Republican proposal," added Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), whose 22-year-old son is a full-time student.
So far, Republicans have not put forward a comprehensive alternative plan to Obamacare, focusing mostly on talk of "patient-centered reforms" that allow the "market to work." While three large health insurance companies promised to keep covering adult children on their parents' plans regardless of the Supreme Court ruling, many children would have lost coverage if the court had struck the law down.
Since the Affordable Care Act became law in March 2010, the share of Americans aged 18 to 25 without health insurance dropped to 23 percent from 28 percent.
Before the law was passed, 34 states had enacted laws that extended eligibility for adult children to stay on their parents' health plans, according to a study published in the journal Pediatrics and conducted by researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. But as the National Conference of State Legislatures noted, many of these states had tighter restrictions on the age and other eligibility requirements for dependents than are in the Affordable Care Act.
After Colorado, New Jersey and South Dakota enacted mandates for young people in 2005 and 2006, young adults reported increases in health insurance coverage, more physical exams, a greater likelihood of having a primary care physician and fewer occasions when they went without medical care because of costs than their counterparts in 17 states that do not mandate insurance coverage for that age group.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) has at least one of his daughters on his health care plan (he isn't sure about the second). He said he liked the provision. He believes, however, that the market would have provided the extra coverage for adult children, even if the Supreme Court had struck down the Affordable Care Act.
"They're going to continue that [provision] anyway," he said. "I think the insurance companies have all kind of decided that that's an okay thing. They were in our office, they've been in our office in the last few weeks."
The reason that health insurers began widely offering such benefits, however, is because Obamacare mandated it. The provision proved to be extremely popular with the American public. Without the law in place, it's unclear how long insurers would continue to offer such coverage, since they would no longer be required to do so.
Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.) has a 21-year-old daughter on his health care plan, which his spokeswoman noted was not the federal plan that members of Congress receive. He has declined federal benefits -- including health insurance and retirement -- and instead has coverage through a private insurance plan that he pays for through his business, Freedom Automotive.
Rigell was not elected until 2010, after Congress had already voted for health care reform, but he would like to see it repealed going forward. Still, he also said he supports the provision covering young adults.
"I think that is a good provision," he said. "There are parts of the Affordable Care Act that I support."
Rep. Bob Turner (R-N.Y.), however, was less sure.
"I haven’t really thought too much about this," he said. "I do know, whether your kid is 22 or 26, who’s gonna pay for that? Is it everybody pays for that or is it the person who has the kids pays for it? So I'm gonna let this sort itself out when we get through the bill."
"I don't think this is going to be one of the biggest drivers of things -- that particularly," Turner said. "High-risk pools, portability -- such important issues. This one has some merit, but I don't consider this one important."
Lawmakers who want to both keep their children on their health plans and repeal the Affordable Care Act could face political problems, as has Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.).
Brown has said his 23-year-old daughter is still on his health care plan, despite his opposition to Obamacare.
"Of course I do," he replied when the Boston Globe asked him whether he keeps his daughter on his plan.
Elizabeth Warren, Brown's Democratic challenger, immediately hit him with charges of hypocrisy, with a spokeswoman saying, "He says he likes being able to keep his daughter on the family health insurance plan; what he doesn't say is that he voted to stop other parents from doing the same."

Is Health Care Ruling Part of a Conservative Master-Plan?

July 2, 2012

By sanghoee

The Supreme Court’s upholding of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a victory for President Obama, but one with a big problem attached to it. After all, there is a deadly tripwire concealed inside the court’s seemingly benign ruling, and that is the court’s declaration that the individual mandate provision, the heart of Obamacare, is legally valid because it is a de facto “tax.”

By labeling the mandate a tax, the Supreme Court has given the Republicans powerful ammunition for the Presidential campaign. From now till November, it is a safe bet that Mitt Romney will take every opportunity to demonize the healthcare law as a vehicle for more taxation, and in the tough economic climate of today, his argument might hold some power. Scaring voters with the specter of new taxes may not be novel, but it is tried and tested.

So now we have to ask, what exactly did the Supreme Court do here? On the surface, they acted in a non-partisan manner to deliver real justice, but reading between the lines, it seems more as if Justice John Roberts deliberately sandbagged President Obama. Had the Supreme Court ruled against the healthcare law, or even just the mandate, the public’s respect for the court would have declined dramatically, and Justice Roberts knew that. As an alternative, it appears as if he hatched a strikingly clever plan: uphold the law but interpret it in such a way as to give the Republicans a real chance to rally support against Obamacare and hopefully repeal it in the future. Not only that, but the ruling also limits Congress’ authority to regulate commerce and weakens its power over the states.
One of Justice Roberts’ statements in the opinion, which he wrote himself, drives his personal prejudice home very clearly: “It Is Not Our Job to Protect the People From the Consequences of Their Political Choices.” It does not take a political analyst to decipher the ominous implication in that statement — Justice Roberts thinks that the American people made the wrong choice by electing Obama and then letting him pass the healthcare law, but that it’s just not the Supreme Court’s role to do anything about it. Talk about passive aggressive.
The current Supreme Court may not be malicious but neither is it entirely impartial in its rulings, or apolitical. From Citizens United to immigration (by upholding the “show your papers” provision of the Arizona law) and now healthcare, the conservative wing of the court has repeatedly shown its preference for ideology over law.
Since the healthcare ruling, the news has been full of commentary about how Justice Roberts preserved the integrity of the court by upholding the president’s signature law, but the truth is he did nothing of the sort. What he actually did was play a masterful stroke of chess that protects him and the other conservative Justices from public ridicule (save from a few right-wing extremists) while still playing ball with the Republicans. Justice Roberts may be conservative in his judicial thinking but he is also smart enough to know that striking down a populist law that will provide relief for millions of middle class and poor Americans is really bad politics.
Given all this, we should stop idolizing Justice Roberts’ seemingly noble gesture and recognize it for what it really is — a political gambit to help Romney win the elections in November and to push the United States towards the conservative agenda incognito. Only time will tell what this all leads to, but there is a very real chance that the vote that Justice Roberts cast in favor of the healthcare law was his most conservative one yet.

It's Not a Tax!

CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION

Today America wins, and the fear mongers, liars, and hypocrites don't. The Democratic health care initiative passed Congress this weekend. Whether you like it or not, it's one of the major pieces of legislation to come out of Congress in the last hundred years. It will change the way health care is delivered in America forever. Not a single Republican voted for it.
Life would be so much smoother in if the Republican Party didn’t come across as an angry mob. At the beginning of this process they made a strategic decision, republicans would make no deal with the administration. There would be no negotiations, no compromise, nothing. If they couldn’t have it their way, then they would try to make sure no one had anything.
This is a huge political victory, and it calls for some celebration. Roughly 30 million people will now have some form of health care who didn’t have it before. Premiums should by logic, go down for those already covered. Insurance companies can't deny people based on pre-existing conditions or abandon patients in need. Those are huge victories.

Why Are People So Afraid Of Everyone Having Health Care?

The way the health care bill is now headed appears to be a major boon for the insurance companies. By mandating everyone have health care coverage or be subject to a fine is a big mistake. If you can't afford insurance how can you pay a fine? If everyone needs to buy health care from an insurance company the insurance company wins. I thought part of the reason for reform was to eliminate waste. What we need is Medicare for all citizens starting at birth. The insurance companies currently have a 30% administrative overhead, where medicare is only 2%. By converting to a single payer system, we immediately save 300 billion dollars in administrative overhead. We are now paying twice what other countries pay for health care, yet we have 45 million uninsured. Nearly half the bankruptcies currently filed in the United States are because of medical bills.The only reason we don't have a single payer system is due to lack of representative government. Our government does not serve the people who elected them, but serves the special interests of the health insurance industry.