Obamacare / Affordable Care Act : classic or dud?

xxxp - On the national exchange, I think bronze plans (for me) were ~$250 before subsidy.

Milo you're in Texas, right? You can still get a nonACA plan. Though come 2015 you'd have to switch to ACA anyway, as I understand it.

so if you wanted high deduct plan and you're relatively young and no significant med history, your premium would be way lower than $250

last paragraph of that is key

actually, that's how i came to the story, because digby was praising the article as a whole but taking issue with the final paragraph.

here's the final paragraph:

ACA supporters need to argue not that these people don't exist or that their circumstances only changed because of greedy insurance companies; they need to argue that their losses are more than offset by the gains of the sick and uninsured who will get better and more affordable coverage under the law.

here's digby:

I'm sure that many people are moved by altruism and fully understand that some must pay more so that others can have insurance. But many of the people I know who are being hit with higher premiums live in or near expensive cities where many salaries above the cut-off for subsidies (around 45k for a single person) don't go very far. After factoring in housing and transportation they don't actually have a lot of disposable income. So this is going to hurt.

I have been talking about this for a long time. Lecturing middle class workers and small business people who are already feeling squeezed about how they should be happy to be the only people who will have to sacrifice for the greater good in this scheme just doesn't strike me as a big winner. Unfortunately, it seems to be the only rationale on offer.

Lecturing adults is always a sign of shaky leadership.

xp yeah that seems to be one of the biggest flaws with the act -- it seems to shift a lot of the burden for paying for the poor onto the barely-not-poor. I wouldn't say it's a fatal flaw, but it's something that should be worked out with further reforms imo.

wonder how the romneycare website would be operating right now if the republicans hadn't shut the federal government down the day the website went live

exactly the same????

i mean i get that you're 14 or whatever but good lord

Lecturing middle class workers and small business people who are already feeling squeezed about how they should be happy to be the only people who will have to sacrifice for the greater good in this scheme just doesn't strike me as a big winner. Unfortunately, it seems to be the only rationale on offer.

yes yes yes exactly -- I want to OTM this a hundred times; wrote something similar today.

That's not 100% accurate though. Those groups aren't the "only people who will have to sacrifice." Anyone who has or would have had an individual plan, is relatively young, and in good health is going to have to sacrifice no matter their income. Granted, a $30k worker will feel it more than a $300k worker.

exactly the same? are you 13?

Denial-of-service tool targeting Healthcare.gov site discovered

Big Dog snags a headline

"I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got,"

Interesting.

hmm did the "federal government" make that commitment? i guess so, in a way...

two uh opposition takes, one to take sort of seriously:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenhayward/2013/11/11/obamacare-will-be-repealed-well-in-advance-of-the-2014-elections/

and one to just take in for the laffs

http://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/2013/11/11/unaffordable-care-act/3/

Ugh, these people are the worst: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/feinstein-cosponsors-landrieu-s-bill-to-unwind-obamacare-market-reforms

Charles Pierce mourns the beginning of what might be the end:

If the Democratic party, through its elected leaders, bails on the health-care law even so far as go out of its way to let people keep their lousy insurance plans that do not come up to the Affordable Care Act's specifications, that's pretty much the ballgame. There will be barbering and compromising until hell won't have it and, eventually, the only thing left will be the Medicaid expansion, and we all know the vast influence that poor and lower middle class people have over the political process. (And, as Steve M shrewdly notes, the Democrats will get blamed for the deleterious effects of any changes now anyway.)

i hope pierce is overreacting. after five years of kenya, bill ayers, pastors, you lie!, filibusters, solyndra, college transcripts, staged bin laden killings, secret muslimismism, and benghazi!!!!!!, the right finally has something on BOB. it's almost cute how gleeful they are (after shutting down the government!) but (big) if the dems hold strong nobody's gonna remember this next november

a growing meme? seen in comment boxes, twitter responses: that the Ocare rollout was botched on purpose, that maximum chaos and wrecking indiv market is all to pave the way for single payer

seeing this from (apparent) conservatives, i should say. ha.

Tensions escalate between Democrats, White House

oh lord Politico. Seriously, don?

Politico runs "Tensions escalate between ________ and _________" twice an hour.

obama could veto any of these proposals that have been popping up over the last few days. hopefully he'll keep his spine.

the oregon exchange still doesn't have an online application system at all. however a few weeks ago they put up a PDF of the application that can be filled out and submitted electronically, so I did that yesterday. when they talking about "fixing the website," do they mean just healthcare.gov, leaving the individual markets to work out their issues themselves? or are all the different exchanges using the same system behind the scenes?

everyone in Washington reads Politico and you know it, Alfred. You could always make an argument that tension wasn't rising.

well, everyone in Cokie's beauty parlor thinks Obama is a cold man and that Michelle should stop attacking Georgetown's fat kids.

lolz. I hear ya.

But 27,000 people signed up for Obamacare isn't quieting anyone down.

no one is ever going to quiet down, because no one knows the exact number that would constitute 100%. the number of people who could benefit from using Healthcare.gov to purchase new insurance is a relatively small percentage of the U.S. population, because so many others are already covered by their employer or by medicare/medicaid, or they live in a state where the healthcare.gov platform isn't being used because the state decided to exert the option to build its own exchange.

anyway, no one knows what the exact figure is that would constitute "success", although there are the administration's own stated goals, i suppose.

so yeah, when 489,000 people have signed up using healthcare.gov will people shut up? no, they won't, because no one knows what the fuck they're talking about in the first place

Isn't the number of uncovered citizens projected to be at 9million or more even with Obamacare at full implementation?

also, won't the real test come in 2014 when employer plans are held to the fire?

Looks like Politico got it right, Alfred.

NYTimes: Democrats Threaten to Abandon Obama on Health Provision

In a closed-door meeting Wednesday of House Democrats and White House officials, tensions flared as several lawmakers upbraided the administration, saying that the president had put Democrats in a tough political position by wrongly promising consumers that they could keep their existing health care plans. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Americans have received cancellation notices from their insurers because their health care coverage does not meet the minimum standards dictated by the new law.

The overall message of the meeting, said several attendees, was that the White House and the House Democratic leadership have until Friday to come up with a satisfactory alternative, or House Democrats may be forced to support Mr. Upton’s bill, which already has two Democratic co-sponsors: Representatives John Barrow of Georgia and Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, who represent more conservative districts.

It's not a matter of getting it right -- Tiger Beat on the Potomac, as Charles Pierce on the Potomac is the Beltway hack's bible -- it's a matter of who gives a shit, especially with unnamed sources.

whoa: I meant "as Charles Pierce calls it, is the Beltway hack's bible

yes it's a hack gossip rag but shooting the messenger kind of sidesteps the issue.

Are you questioning the gray lady's unnamed sources right now?

And really, if you think no one gives a shit about Democrats throwing out threats to the President about his signature achievement--or that a closed door meeting that is being completely misreported, then I guess we disagree.

if the Dems yield and allow people to keep existing insurance plans, the ACA fails. There's no shading it. And Dems will be destroyed in 2014.

Dems do best when they stop mewling and stop acting like "me too!" crypto-Republicans.

Basically, they fucked this roll-out up so badly that all bets are off in terms of support. Those numbers yesterday were disheartening, not just because they were even worse than expected, but because they show how far this still has to go, how much work they have to do on the fucking website weeks after it debuted, which is a travesty. The unintended consequence of all that Tea Party tomfoolery is that the timing was such that the gov was basically forced to go live rather than delay the ACA even a day. Which was the right thing to do, but still, surely dozens of people knew what kind of mess to expect when it launched and just basically watched as it went kablooey.

And I still think the average American has no idea about the very basic ins and outs of the ACA, which is strictly a communication problem, no tech necessary.

I think the average American has no idea about the ins and outs of most government services unless they actually need them. Easy to point to the waste in the safety net unless you rely on it. Easy to get off on the political shit for a function you've never even had to deal with on any level--that goes for the people who think it's just and those who think it's not.

I fully expected a clusterfuck of this magnitude but not because I think the Obamas are incompetent. Obamacare is a very complicated solution to a very complicated problem and thus, very difficult to implement on every level. It's important to hold these guys' feet to the raging fire and demand transparency, but I think that ACA is gonna survive and even expand over the years.

the Obamas

What does this even mean?

the Obama admin

I think the average American has no idea about the ins and outs of most government services unless they actually need them.

Probably true enough. But the fact that the whole point of the ACA is that it is something every American needs to get, or at least be aware of, makes the shoddy communication that much more glaring. Maybe I've missed these press conferences (probably), but massive tech screw up and Obama's "keep what you have" gaffe aside, the administration might have done a better job explaining the lack of cooperation among certain states, the confusion fostered by anti-ACA folks, basically, better explain the aforementioned ins and outs of the ACA in simple, easy to understand terms. Which maybe the website does! But, well, you know ... the website.

Like, the ACA is something I don't have to deal with right now. So I was surprised to hear that enrollment entailed making the first payment months in advance, before service even began. If I were on a budget, like I imagine many of the folks most in need of the ACA, I'd be wary of shelling out cash in advance of a scheme whose entire reputation is prematurely in shambles. Granted, a lot of this will work itself out when slacker healthy young folks start buying in, or those signing up actually make their first payment, but that's a lot of time left to pass while people stir and shit in various pots.

This whole situation is shameful and the way Democrats are eagerly lining up to gut ACA is some of the worst cowardice I've seen from these people. I'm extremely pessimistic that ACA is going to remain in any kind of functional state for very long.

LOL "functional." It's off to a great start!

Eh, it'll all work out in the end. Just depressing to see such a major achievement fucked up so easily. I hate that lizard Issa, but he was sort of OTM comparing the roll-out to a rocket that blows up on the launch pad. But eventually, we'll get our Tang.

true, it is barely functioning now. My fear is that the Dems are ready to completely neuter it, causing a situation where it will never be any better even if the website improves.

Medicaid has signed up 444,000 people in 10 states in the six weeks since open enrollment began.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/medicaid-health-overhauls-early-success-story-20859281

Kentucky, which built its own marketplace, signed up more people (5,586) than Texas (2,991), which relied on HealthCare.gov, even though it has a fraction of the latter's population. California has enrolled more people (35,364) on its own than the 36 HealthCare.gov states combined.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/here-s-where-people-have-signed-up-for-obamacare

anyone know what massachusetts enrollment looked like two and a half months into romneycare?