According to Byron York, if you are getting Medicaid benefits or you are 26 years or younger and getting coverage on your parents’ health insurance plan, you simply do not exist. There are an estimated seven and a half million people in this country that fall into one of those two categories and now have access to health care that they would not have enjoyed if John McCain had won the 2008 election, but they don’t count.
The [Los Angeles] Times says the numbers break down like this: 4.5 million previously uninsured people are now on Medicaid; 3 million previously uninsured young people are now covered because of a provision that allows them to stay on their parents’ policies until age 26; and 2 million previously uninsured people have purchased coverage on the Obamacare exchanges. In all, it is “the largest expansion in health coverage in America in half a century,” according to the Times…
…The part where Democrats essentially blew up the health care markets, imposed the individual mandate, and caused premiums to rise and deductibles to skyrocket? That hasn’t been such a success. If the Times number are correct, all of that — placing new burdens of higher costs and narrower choices on millions of Americans, in addition to setting the stage for coming changes in employer-based coverage — has resulted in two million of the previously uninsured gaining coverage.
Let me explain the logical error here, in case it isn’t immediately obvious. Byron York says in the first paragraph that 9.5 million people now have health insurance that they would not otherwise have. In his the second paragraph he says that two million people now have health insurance that they would otherwise not have.
How did he subtract 7.5 million people? He refused to acknowledge that they actually exist.
He also conveniently ignores that millions more people would have health insurance today if Medicaid had been allowed to expand in all 50 states as was intended by the drafters of the law.
His argument, insofar as he makes one, is that more people have been insured by the “modest” reforms of allowing people to stay on their parents’ plans and the expansion of Medicaid (that’s “modest” now) than have been insured on the new health care exchanges.
Not only is that consistent with the design of the law, but it’s what should be expected. Most people are either too poor to afford insurance or they get coverage from their employer.
But at least Mr. York isn’t as dishonest as Marc Thiessen, who trots out a litany of lies in rapid succession in a piece so dishonest that the Washington Post should be forced to spend some time in the time-out chair for publishing it.
Jonathan Cohn already eviscerated the totality of Thiessen’s argument, so I don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. Let me focus on this part only:
And let’s not forget: Many of those new Obamacare sign-ups are self-sufficient people who were previously paying their own way and now receive government subsidies for insurance. Creating government dependency is not progress — it’s a step backward.
The stated goal of Obamacare was not to move millions of privately insured Americans into taxpayer-subsidized health coverage. The goal was to cover the uninsured.
So, let’s say that you are a self-employed person who was previously shouldering the entire burden of your health care costs. You were “self-sufficient.” Now you are receiving a subsidy to help you pay your heath insurance bill. You have become “government-dependent.” The bill helps you, obviously, but you are now on the dole.
If I am following this correctly, this means that you no longer exist.
The spinning is only going to get more and more desperate. These assholes know that their disgusting I’ve-got-mine-screw-you ideology has suffered a huge, irreversible real-world defeat.
By July or August, we will know how well Obamacare policies are paying out benefits. After then, the GOP line on Obamacare is sunk. I think they know it and that is why they have been unrelenting in their attacks since it passed.
It’s the cowardly Democrats who are in trouble at the moment; fortunately most of them either were defeated in 2010 or have retired this round.
Excellent post, thank-you.
Maybe it’s time we all started using the invaluable Charles Gaba’s numbers: 14.6 – 22.1 million Americans have insurance now because of the ACA.
(So, I guess that’s 12 – 20 million people who don’t exist, according to York.)
Imagine York’s surprise when those 12-20M people vote in the next election…
I thought the second paragraph of that first quote was snark. York makes a poor argument.
So, does that mean the Koch brothers, with their billions in tax payer subsidies, don’t exist? How about Jamie Dimon and the rest of the Wall Street moochers?
if only…
Hopefully, the seven million will count come November.
It’s a group that notorious for not voting. Endangered Senators and Congresspeople must reach out and forcibly remind them of what they got them and that their opponent wants to take it away. Tammy Duckworth, neglect to mention that you voted with Republicans to delay another year.
More! More! More!
Premiums haven’t skyrocketed and deductibles haven’t risen, certainly not from the law. Deductibles on the individual market are limited and certainly lower than before. So yes, paying $20 a month for coverage with a $25,000 deductible certainly saw its premiums “skyrocket” lol.
Just the other say a young person I know can get a silver plan with $6000 deductible for $2 a month. Or no deductible for $100 a month. I encouraged her to get the no deductible. 5 years worth of premiums in case of ONE trip to the emergency room in any one of those 5 years is better. I’m sick and tired of these conservative fucks talking about catostrophic coverage, as if it covers anything.
The next policy Dems need to run on is no deductibles and lower out of pocket maxes.
Insurance is not like HST — and it employs actuaries and not “flash boys.” Therefore, it’s silly to point out that premiums haven’t increased when the program only began three months ago.
Correct, which is why York’s argument that premiums have skyrocketed is silly.
We don’t know if premiums will skyrocket. I suspect they’ll either level off, or increase at the rates they always have (the latter of which I would argue is not skyrocketing but certainly not sustainable); neither of which are necessarily due to the law.
If there’s surplus health care assets in the US health care system, adding a couple hundred billion dollars from the public treasury to the system to include an additional 2.5% of the population to those covered by private health insurance (most Medicaid is administered by private insurance companies), premiums may not increase faster than the general inflation rate. However, what health insurance has done over the past fifty years is move people from the low-cost public health care sector to the high-cost private health care sector. Therefore, as a percentage of GDP, health care costs will increase — and that is a function of this law. Those increased costs will be paid for — by whom or what remains to be determined. However, the known big loser at this point are the public health care facilities that lose DSH funding.
Let me get this straight: you are arguing that public hospitals are better off when people wander in uninsured? Now I’ve heard everything.
You also completely gloss over the major cost controls in obamacare, something that wasn’t present in Romneycare, for example.
Some of those cost controls just got undone by a politically popular (in Congress) annual “doc-fix”.
That’s not what she said or implied. She’s saying the public dollars should be used for public health care, not at private practices. The result has been a collapse of public hospitals to the detriment of a surge in “health care” GDP. Hint: increases in GDP are not always good.
DSH? I’m not familiar with the acronym. Department of small hospitals?
Anyway if your arguing that institutions like Stroger Hospital (nee Cook County Hospital, renamed after himself by the political slug that controlled it) in Chicago, then I have to tell you that most people, rich and poor, black and white, in Chicago would rather die in bed than go there.
And then there is the elephant in the room that is Massachusetts and of course the Heritage Plan.
The closest the GOP came to promoting their own health care plan was to choose the Heritage poster boy who brought RomneyCare to Massachusetts. But then they forced Romney to denounce what was a signature piece of a short governorship and left him literally without his own platform.
So it’s not just that York erases 7.5 million people, he also erases Massachusetts, Heritage and Romney. With math like that we would have missed the moonshot and ended up on Pluto.
For “conservative” propagandist Thiessen, it’s not that the newly subsidized don’t exist, it’s that they have been converted into gub’mint dependent subhumans who have obtained “free stuff!” and (apparently) will never vote Repub ever again. For Team Conservative, this is much worse than not existing.
Of course, no one reads conservative hacks like these two turds for actual information or understanding about some issue like Obamacare. These conserva-hacks are well aware that their arguments are unfair, highly selective, purely partisan and unobjective cherry picking–but they are paid to create lies and false impressions, so they do. It helps that they likely believe the shit they shovel, but that’s not a great personality trait for “journalism”.
They exist to be read by poisoned-brain True Believers who already know Obamacare is a complete failure that will destroy the country (if it already hasn’t done so). Thus inconvenient facts are what “don’t exist”, ha-ha. The endless lines of unsubstantiated, unexplained nonsense (“blew up health care markets” [where? how?] “caused premiums to skyrocket” [where?] “placing new burdens of higher costs and narrower choices on millions” [cite?]) should give the game away to anyone seeking real info.
And that professional journalist editors at WaPo allow such baseless conserva-drivel to be published under their mantle also gives THEIR game away…and it sure as hell isn’t “informing” the public!
Dontcha know, Mr. SMALL Businessowner, that only Jamie Dimon and the Koch brothers can be on the dole or whatever you call it when the government forks over millions of dollars to your corporation.
Also not that if that self-employed person is getting any subsidy at all, he/she is not a very successful businessperson.
I think when corporations turned into people they somehow became more people than people are, with more human rights, e.g. no imprisonment or capital punishment, and all the Roosevelt Four Freedoms that are denied to mortals. We’ll know things got really bad when they’re allowed to marry.
They can merge and spin-off (separate) at will. With corporations, its always temporary relationships.
Hahaha, uncontrollable corporate lechery. Indecent!
Don’t know who to attribute this to:
“I’ll believe that corporations are people when one gets drafted or goes to jail.”
Not to mention: Those people who were previously shouldering the entire burden of their health care and are now on the “government dole”: They were also previously living with the constant risk of being wiped out by something catastrophic, and are no longer. They’re now protected against that risk — the very purpose of insurance. That’s big.
But you just don’t understand. If you get a HI subsidy from the government indirectly via your employer, that’s goooooood. If you get a HI subsidy from the government directly via the ACA, that’s baaaaaaad. Jeepers.
Good God, the whole point of buying insurance is that you are NOT self-sufficient. It’s inherently a relationship of dependency–if not on the government then on the private insurance company.
Meanwhile 20 – 50 % of non-elderly Americans quietly benefit because they never, ever have to worry about that inhumane phrase “pre-existing conditions” or life time caps in benefits. They never have to watch how it hurts their families by making it impossible for them to gain good insurance even when they can afford it, or switch to a better job if they have the opportunity, or go broke when their insurance company dumps them.
That’s like 50 to 120 million people.
“more people have been insured by the “modest” reforms of allowing people to stay on their parents’ plans and the expansion of Medicaid (that’s “modest” now)”
That’s just a little seasoning to make this heaping helping of crow more palatable.
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