Tag: Healthcare

Those Liberals at the AP

The far-left journalists over at the AP make the hard calls and reports that there is trouble at the mill, everyone:

LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday waded into waters in which past British governments have foundered, promising fundamental changes to the country’s expensive and over-stressed public health care system.

I see. Crazy expensive socialist medical care. Only Lord Jesus can Know how much that stuff costs. Or, you can throw your lot in with pointy-headed statisticians and find out that it costs about $2317 per capita for the UK to provide universal, essentially free care to everyone (free as in beer, it is obviously paid for through various taxes and etc…). The US? We pay $5711 per capita. More than twice as much.
Now, of course, that would all change if we look at percent GDP, right? The US is such a giant economy and all. Actually, no. The US spends ~15% of GDP on healthcare, UK: ~8%. So it’s roughly half as expensive, whether considered as a function of the overall economy or strictly in terms of what’s spent per individual. And but so they all get access to healthcare. In the US, well, the GOP assures us that the market will take care of that any minute now.

Now we come to “over-stressed,” which must mean that outcomes are terrible in Britain when compared to the US, which (as we’re told repeatedly) has the finest care anywhere. They must be choking the streets with bodies over there if they spend half as much and then funnel that through some socialistic nightmare of a healthcare bureaucracy. Not so much: turns out they live longer, have lower infant mortality, and, of course, have universal access to free-as-in-beer healthcare 24/7, all without having to use the ER as their primary care physician or being told to just go die in the streets already. In fact, we typically rank in the low end of developed nations, not even within spitting distance of dread France, and always well behind the UK.

So, AP wrong on “expensive,” wrong on “over-stressed.” But they did get the current PM’s name right (though notably not his party affiliation; can’t go around limning the word “conservative” with “fundamental changes” and “foundered,” now can we?). So there’s that.

Another several of the big lies laid out by a single table. Last I checked, 590+-610=-20. This is something I learned in Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun starring Troy McClure, which did have a decidedly liberal math bias now that I think back…

Full document available if you click. Note to Democrats: print out, laminate, and refer to often.

Is Rahm Still Available?

Bill Daly, potential Obama Chief of Staff: [The Obama administration] miscalculated on health care. The election of ’08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left — not left.
Ezra Klein: The health-care law the president signed was modeled off of the health-care law the Republican governor of Massachusetts had signed, which was in turn modeled off of the health-care law the Republicans in Congress had proposed in 1993. That’s “left”? And meanwhile, Daley thinks the country had moved substantially leftward over that period — “after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left” — but that even a compromise bill based on Republican ideas was too far left for the country, which would imply that the administration he served in the early-’90s, which pushed a more ambitious health-care bill when the country was further to the right, bordered on communist.
Lemkin: Yep, and do we really want anyone who has ever been quoted peddling that particular brand of horseshit running the President’s days in the inevitable “Eliminate ACA or we destroy the economy of the United States of America now and forever through default!” battle that will be coming on in, oh, five or six weeks? I say no, but then I’m less than skilled in multi-dimensional chess…

Death-spiral Escape Hatch

Paul Starr of the American Prospect provides a way to lose the mandate and but also not destroy the private insurance system:

The law could give people a right to opt out of the mandate if they signed a form agreeing that they could not opt in for the following five years. In other words, instead of paying a fine, they would forgo a potential benefit. For five years they would become ineligible for federal subsidies for health insurance and, if they did buy coverage, no insurer would have to cover a pre-existing condition of theirs.

Fine by me. However, I can state categorically that the GOP will be against this, against the mandate (originally their idea anyway), and thus are implicitly for the destruction of the current insurance-based system and its inevitable replacement with single payer. But let’s not talk about that. Shrill.

Death-spiral Escape Hatch

Poison Pill Revisited

Jonathan Gruber sums up the wages of partial repeal (be it legislative or judicial) of the Affordable Care Act:

Removing the Affordable Care Act’s mandate would eviscerate the law’s coverage gains and greatly raise premiums. And going further by only keeping the market reforms and the small business tax credit would virtually wipe out those coverage gains and cause an enormous premium spike.

Oh, and it would totally destroy the existing insurance company-based system of coverage within a very few years. They’d be the first ones screaming for some replacement for the mandate; they’d have to be, because without it, and in the continued presence of the rest of the reforms, they’d be out of business.

But, by all means, GOP: herald in the era of single payer, finally a true government takeover of healthcare funding in this country by launching relentless attack on the less popular but absolutely critical parts of the package. Said it before, will likely say it again: bad policy is absolute catnip to the GOP and their Tea Klan enablers. They cannot resist it. Forget testing proposed legislation; just see if the GOP/Tea Klan is for it. If so: it is at best a singularly bad and more likely an utterly catastrophic policy.
With that useful razor in hand, it’s easy to see that with a policy outcome as catastrophic (to the insurers) as removing the mandate and but also leaving the popular stuff like the community rating, no lifetime limits, and etc… in there, the GOP and Tea Klan are and will forever be like moths to the flame until such time as they see their particular foolishness accomplished. And before we know it, President Palin will be signing the new American Homeland Patriotic Healthfulness Imbuement and Embiggening Flag Act of 2013, handed to her by a slothful yet resolutely responsive GOP rubber-stamp of a Congress.

Cannot wait.

Poison Pill Revisited

The end result [of Elizabeth Edwards pushing her husband to make a comprehensive and universal health-care reform plan the centerpiece of his second presidential campaign] was that the three candidates ended up fighting over who would do more to pass a universal health-care bill the fastest, which meant they made repeated promises that, in Obama’s case, he eventually found himself having to keep. Without Elizabeth Edwards’s involvement, the Edwards campaign would likely have come out with a more modest effort, and the Obama and Clinton campaigns would have taken a similarly incremental approach, and none of the campaigns would have made as many promises on the subject as they did, and health-care reform might never have passed.

Ezra Klein remembers.
The Edwards campaign really had an outsize impact on the de facto Democratic platform as a whole, “progressivizing” it much more than Kucinich ever did; presumably because Edderds was seen as a very serious candidate, at least in the early going, and had to be responded to, in detail, in a way that Kucinich just never did.
The old “remarkable woman behind a deeply flawed candidate”…in another era, John would have been the Billy Carter dragging on her campaign.

Kevin Drum supplies us with a graph that does more to explain the McDonalds thing than anything else I’ve seen. Red bar is current Mini-Med plan. As you can see, under ACA, the vast majority of McDonalds workers get a better deal; those earning minimum wage get a vastly better deal, in that far more comprehensive healthcare is now free for them.
In fact, only those making more than $12/hr, a tiny minority of McDonalds workers, will pay about what they pay now…and but also get a hell of a lot more useful health insurance.

Indeed: what a failure for the ACA. Yet this failure narrative, unintended consequences, and so forth is precisely what we hear from Our Liberal Media. Again and again.

This is just the sort of graph that needs to be trotted out every time this comes up. Simple and easy to understand. But isn’t. And now even self-identified Democrats are turning against a plan they most likely have no idea about other than what they’ve heard on FOXnews. Because those anchors are at least trying to tell the truth of the story, right?
If you don’t think this is a serious problem you haven’t been paying attention. This is why they fail.