On Jonathan Gruber's comments 'bashing' Obamacare

Further to Jonathan Gruber's comments from 2013 on YouTube, 

which have talk radio, Fox and Republicans publicly all aflutter. So check this out:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/11/11/obamacare-consultant-under-fire-for-stupidity-of-the-american-voter-comment/

"Healthy people pay, sick people get money," is the way all health insurance works, I'm afraid. It's the way insurance works, period: "Unsunken ships pay; sunken ships get money;" "Undamaged homes pay; damaged homes get money;" "Safe drivers pay; unsafe drivers get money," and so on.

Nevertheless the insurance companies through rescission have tried, illegally, to mitigate the economics of health insurance, retroactively; but PHSA, HIPPA and Obamacare have restricted that underhanded business practice.

No, Obamacare isn't "something for nothing." It's not "free healthcare." More people have to pay in by buying private insurance, or having their employer pay part of their insurance cost, but the economics are sound, there is no other way. The other side of the ledger, (which any accountant should acknowledge), is that having more people insured will lower health spending overall. That's what the CBO has said consistently. 

In the U.S. we're spending nearly 20 percent of GDP on health care, and that's not sustainable. It's also not competitive. Check this out from the World Bank,health expenditure, total (% of GDP):

Australia -- 9.1 percent

Canada -- 10.9 percent

France -- 11.1 percent

Germany -- 11.3 percent

Great Britain -- 9.4 percent

Japan -- 10.1 percent

... and so on.

Next, take a deep breath and check this out: "Revisions to CBO's Projections of Federal Health Care Spending" from July 2014. Upshot: The U.S. economy, at least the federal government'share of it, is projected to spend less  on health care in the long term, which is exactly what we liberal-progressives wanted, to bend the cost curve:

CBO now projects that, if current laws remained generally unchanged, net federal spending for the government’s major health care programs in 2039 would equal 8.0 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—1.6 percentage points, or about 15 percent, less than the 9.6 percent the agency projected in 2010 (see the figure below). That revision stems in large part from the observed slowdown in health care spending in recent years, but it also includes the effects of other factors; some of those factors reduced projected spending, and others increased it.

The programs included in the calculations are Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and subsidies for insurance purchased through exchanges. 

But how can that be, my conservative interlocutor will ask? How can the government be spending more on [Obamacare] subsidies yet projected to spend less, overall?  

The answer, (not to get too wonky), if you read between the lines of the CBO's revised estimate, is that growth in healthcare spending, including on Medicare, has been slowing down faster than anybody projected. 

Indeed, noted conservative Forbes, "The current numbers represent the slowest rate of growth since the government began tracking the data in 1960."

And why is that? Apparently nobody knows yet. But for four years running, the rate of spending on health care in America has slowed... just coincidentally under President Obama, under an Obamacare regime. 

Harvard economist David Cutler argued in the Washington Post a few days ago that, in fact, we do indeed have Obamacare to thank for it.

Probably it's still premature to say for sure, but the signs are good. Yet one more reason not to "repeal and replace" Obamacare when it's doing what it was designed to do -- covering about 7 million more Americans in its first full year; and lowering -- or at least not increasing -- healthcare costs for four years running.

UPDATE (11.15.2014): Here's kind of a fair and balanced analysis of what Jonathan Gruber said (on multiple occasions, unfortunately), from none other than CNN: "Obamacare: Voters, are you stupid?"

Gov. Beshear to Mitch McConnell: Obamacare is working

Excellent!  This is from a Democratic governor in a Red State who isn't afraid to tell it like it is to his conservative constituents:

[O]ver 421,000 Kentuckians have signed up for health insurance through "kynect" -- about 75 percent of whom didn't previously have insurance and about 52 percent of whom were under age 35.

That's almost 1 in 10 Kentuckians.

...[I]f each of the over 421,000 people who signed up via "kynect" could grab 10 minutes of Sen. McConnell's time to explain what health care coverage means for their families, and if the Senator had the endurance to listen 24/7, it would take eight years to hear from each enrollee.

I'll say it again, "Big Government" programs like ACA and Social Security aren't just debits, they aren't just financial obligations, they represent real assets -- because they sustain and improve millions of real Americans' lives. Somebody living longer and being more productive -- that's harder to quantify in dollars and cents the same way we can track federal spending, but heck if it isn't just as real.

(Every other corporation says, "Our people are our most important asset;" and this is even truer for the U.S. Government of its citizens!)  

It's high time Republicans stopped ignoring half our nation's balance sheet, i.e. ignoring the assets that government produces and sustains all around us.

P.S. -- Unless something changes soon, I'll become an Obamacare "customer" in June. I've already shopped for plans and consulted on the telephone with kynect representatives, who were very friendly, helpful and knew their stuff. I was impressed, especially compared to the experience of calling an insurance provider for answers!

The Affordable Care Act in Kentucky: It's Working

By Gov. Steve Beshear

May 29, 2014 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/1mw6ekw

Obamacare IS working...especially in McConnell's Kentucky!

California, the most populous state in America, is on track to hit its Obamacare enrollment targets for 2014!

"But," said MSNBC host Chris Hayes, "the most fascinating Obamacare success story comes from the state of Kentucky. It is the only state in the South both expanding Medicaid and operating a fully state-based exchange."

The irony of Kentucky being Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's home state was not lost on Hayes. McConnell "just happens to be up for re-election next year, a race he will now have to run from a state where health reform is working."

Obamacare: Working the way it’s supposed to

All In With Chris Hayes

November 19, 2013 | MSNBC

It's OK some health plans got cancelled

It's called health care reform for a reason, folks:  

Senator Mary Landrieu's "Keeping the Affordable Care Act Promise Act" would require insurance companies to keep offering people the plans they have right now as long as they keep paying their premiums. It's the kind of poll-tested idea that's good politics, and horrible, horrible policy. That's because it's a good thing if some people lose their plans. That's how reform should work, the White House's false promises and hopelessly bungled roll-out, notwithstanding.

The individual insurance market doesn't work. You can't get insurance if you are sick, and don't get much insurance if you become sick. In other words, insurers won't sell policies to people with preexisting conditions, and sell insufficient policies to healthy people. As Jonathan Cohn explains, these insufficient policies often don't cover things like prescription drugs and won't cover high out-of-pocket expenses. And if your plan wasn't insufficient, insurance companies would look for excuses to cancel it after-the-fact if you did become seriously ill—what's known as "rescission."

Obamacare tries to fix these problems with the individual market—and the inescapable logic of that is some people will end up paying more than before. Here's why in three steps. First, Obamacare makes insurers offer everyone the same policies at the same prices regardless of preexisting conditions (though not age). But bare bones coverage with high out-of-pockets, and even lifetime limits, isn't much use if you're sick. So, second, it sets minimum benefit levels. But what about healthy people who already have individual policies that don't meet these levels? Well, if they had those plans before Obamacare was passed in March 2010, and those plans haven't changed at all since, they can keep them. Otherwise, they can't. [That's an oversimplification of the ACA's grandfathering rules -- J.] They have to buy conforming plans that are almost certainly more expensive. Because, third, Obamacare needs healthy people paying for more than just catastrophic (and even junk) insurance to help pay for all the sick people now getting coverage. In other words, Obamacare needs health insurance to be...insurance.

Bill Clinton Is Wrong: It's Okay That Some People Can't Keep Their Insurance

By Matthew O'Brien

November 14, 2013 | Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/bill-clinton-is-wrong-its-okay-that-some-people-cant-keep-their-insurance/281455/

Media myths of Obamacare's 'failure'

I've been seeing different figures for the private insurance market, and those "losing" their private insurance because of Obamacare. Yesterday I quoted the figure of 19 million Americans who have individual, private health plans. Here Michael Hiltzik sets us straight [emphasis mine]:

[T]he market for individual policies is about 30 million people. Of those, more than 20 million are uninsured.For virtually all of them, Obamacare is an unalloyed blessing. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about 81% of all individual policy-holders will be eligible for income-based insurance subsidies. The uninsured population skews poorer than the total individual market, so an even higher proportion of them are likely to be subsidized. The Affordable Care Act also forbids insurers to base the cost and availability of insurance on pre-existing conditions, which has kept millions of people out of the individual market.

What about individual policy-holders? They number somewhere between 8.5 million and 9.5 million. The vast majority of these customers - two-thirds - spend less than a year in the individual market, according to a 2004 study published in Health Affairs. The study found that most people use individual insurance to bridge between periods of coverage from employers or public programs like Medicaid. If three-quarters of the individual customers will be eligible for insurance subsidies, that leaves 2.1 million to 2.4 million Americans paying the full freight.

The last piece of the puzzle, and the murkiest, is how many of this last group will be paying higher prices for lesser coverage - the emblematic Obamacare "victims." Even if it's all of them, at most they account for less than 1% of the country.

But plainly they're not all paying more for less. We know this because the individual market is where people have been getting ripped off by overpaying for inadequate coverage - "junk" insurance in many cases. It's where premiums are driven up and coverage constrained by pre-existing conditions. Those practices are eradicated by the Affordable Care Act.

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones posits that one-third of these customers may be charged more for less, which sounds reasonable, if perhaps a little high. I've heard from dozens of readers who claim to be in that group. But my experience, which I'd guess is matched by most of my journalistic colleagues, is that most of them aren't examining their options very well. They're not calculating their costs beyond their premiums - the free services mandated by Obamacare they're not getting today, for instance. They're not factoring in the rate increases on their existing plans they've been hit with in the past, and would face again, but will be limited under Obamacare.

As I said before, what's fueling a lot of this public disappointment with Obamacare is the 149 million Americans who aren't affected by it all, who don't need the exchanges right now, yet who pass judgment on it based on ignorant or biased media reports. Also, as Hiltzik notes above, a majority of the folks in the individual market only use private insurance as a "bridge;" so they rarely keep their plans very long. And most private health plans are offered with terms of only one year anyway, then prices and conditions always change.

Hiltzik describes the group who is indeed being affected, sometimes for the worst: those whose private insurers chose not to renew their old plans with the same prices and conditions to comply with the ACA grandfathering rules, i.e. those infamous "cancelled" plans:

The bottom line is that we're down to about one-quarter of one-percent of the country being paraded around to set the agenda for everyone else - fewer than 2 million people. Compare that with the number of people who are being denied health insurance in 21 states that have refused to expand Medicaid, as the Affordable Care Act allows them to do largely at federal expense. (Four other states are still thinking it over.)

This group numbers about 5 million, and in every case they're being deprived of health coverage by Republican governors or legislatures, or both. That should tell you that the Republicans who are carrying on about Obamacare's "failure" really don't have your welfare in mind, any more than the characters hawking diet plans on late-night TV really want you to get thin.

Regardless of the political fallout, 2014 midterm elections, or Obama's popularity, Hiltzik's conclusion is spot-on:

The fact is that Obamacare is here to stay. Its customer protections are worth real money to tens of millions of consumers, and it's vastly expanding the insurance market. The politicians claiming that they're only out to "fix" a broken program are playing you for suckers, and not for the first time.

The myths of Obamacare's 'failure'

By Michael Hiltzik

November 19, 2013 | Los Angeles Times

URL: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/nov/18/business/la-fi-mh-obamacares-failure-20131118

Six Things the Media Doesn't Understand About Obamacare

By Jonathan Cohn

November 18, 2013 | New Republic

URL: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115625/obamacare-policy-cancellations-media-mythology-republican-spin

Obamacare Hyperventilation to Continue Forever!

By Jonathan Chait

November 18, 2013 | New York Magazine

URL: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/11/obamacare-hyperventilation-to-continue-forever.html

Obama lied, my health plan died?

(Actual headline from an hysterical Michelle Malkin op-ed).

I exposed this lie recently, but here's a much better explanation. All of you accusing President Obama of "lying" should read this.

It is much more the other way around: insurers are lying about Obama "forcing" them to "cancel" private health insurance plans for individuals.

It's very easy for insurers and their enablers in the media to get away with this lie, because as Semro notes, 149 million Americans have health insurance through their employer. They have never had to purchase individual insurance like 19 million other Americans. Most Americans don't know that these plans typically last one year, then they must be renewed -- or "cancelled" in current parlance -- with higher premiums, deductibles, lower coverage -- whatever the insurer offers instead. There has NEVER been a guarantee in the market of keeping ANY kind of health plan, because we have an economic system of free enterprise. 

Meanwhile, many people in the private insurance market don't know they can get cheaper plans through an ACA exchange, and/or qualify for subsidies. 

"But Obama still lied, he said we could keep our plans no matter what!" you still complain. Yes, it was a stupid thing of him to say, but he obviously meant that if the insurer wanted to comply with the grandfathering rules, then people could keep their plans. Many insurers chose not to comply with the grandfathering rules, which were well-known years ago:

A grandfathered plan is any policy in existence before March 23, 2010, when the ACA became law. Grandfathered plans must eliminate lifetime benefit caps, offer coverage to dependent children over age 26 and eliminate pre-existing condition exclusions in 2014, but they are exempt from most other ACA reforms.

The idea was to limit the impact of the ACA on those plans so that insurance companies would continue to offer them and employers and individual consumers could continue to enroll in them.

Under the ACA, a grandfathered plan can lose its status if out-of-pocket costs increase above the rate of medical inflation plus 15 percent, co-insurance rates increase, annual benefit limits decrease, employer contributions decrease by more than 5 percent, or the plan eliminates coverage for a previously covered condition.

So why are some people with ACA-compliant plans going to pay more? First, because Obamacare was a great excuse for insurers to raise their prices, let's be real. Secondly [emphasis mine]:

Should a grandfathered plan end, any new plan is subject to all of the ACA's reforms, including a minimum level of covered benefits. The 10 "essential benefits" required by the ACA include coverage for prescription drugs, preventative care, maternity care and mental health treatment. These new policies will offer consumers better coverage, but the expanded benefits may lead to higher premium prices for some. For others, this coverage may be comparable to or even more affordable than in the past. According to MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, approximately one-half of Americans in the individual market will likely have to purchase a new policy that may cost more.

Grandfathered Plans, the ACA and the 'If You Like Your Plan ...' Pledge

By Bob Semro

November 16, 2013 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/1eaf8Bh

GOP's alternative: Un-Affordable Care Act?

I hesitate to post this because of the author's conclusion: give single-payer (aka "Medicare for all") a second look.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer single-payer. But as I said recently, many Obamacare critics illogically believe the conspiracy theory that Obama has intended all along for the Affordable Care Act to fail, ushering in "socialized medicine" to save the day.    

Even single-payer is not socialized medicine; it's socialized payment for medicine. There are plenty of private doctors and hospitals today that make a fine living off Medicare patients, and nobody accuses them of communist sympathies.

Affordable Care Act ... as compared to what?

By Caroline Poplin

November 14, 2013 | McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Republicans can hardly believe their good luck. The Obama administration has once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. After successfully holding off Republican efforts to destroy Obamacare by shutting down the government and threatening default, the administration badly bungled the rollout of the crown jewel of health reform: the insurance exchanges. (No surprise to those of us who wrestle with computers daily.) Somehow administration leaders also failed to anticipate the predictable response of insurance companies to a perfect opportunity to raise premiums wholesale, while blaming someone else.

Nevertheless, we need to keep in mind that even as they gleefully tear into the ACA, Republicans have not offered an alternative.

On reflection, however, this is no surprise. Republicans don't see a problem with health care in America. Insurers can sell what they chose to whom they chose; people can select policies they like and can afford, or save their money for other things. This is how markets work. The only change Republicans would make is deregulation, so insurers and good prospects can find one another more easily across state lines.

As Ronald Reagan said: "Government is not the solution to the problem, government (in this case, the ACA) is the problem."

For conservatives, health insurance and health care are ordinary commodities to be traded in the marketplace, just like automobile insurance and automobiles.

But health care is not just another item in the shopping cart. As the African-American spiritual observed, "If living were something that money could buy, the rich would live and the poor would die."

And that is where we are in the 21st century. Health care is a matter of life and death. Our medicine is highly effective. Today, we can cure, or treat, diseases that were once fatal - heart attacks, many cancers, even HIV. That is, if you have the money. Today rich Americans live, on average, five years longer than poor citizens.

Nor is health insurance an ordinary insurance product.

Illness today is not evenly distributed across the population. Some 10 percent of people are responsible for 60 percent of health-care costs in the United States. Because most illness continues for many years after diagnosis, these people are easy to identify: patients with multiple sclerosis, congestive heart failure, lymphoma.

No one wants to pay for the sick people - not the insurance companies (particularly if they cannot recover their costs by charging the sick higher premiums), and not healthy customers. We hear this now, as single men and older people complain that to comply with the ACA, they have to pay for maternity benefits that they will never use.

A free market with lots of choices among multiple insurers, risk pools, policies with all sorts of benefits and price structures, allows insurers and healthy individuals to avoid the sick. The less affluent healthy can gamble on inexpensive policies with spotty coverage (useless to the chronically ill): since most people are healthy most of the time, few of them will ever need to test their insurance. (Or they can join large groups of other healthy people working for large employers who provide insurance.) Insurers can charge sick people thousands of dollars a month to cover the cost of their claims, and then some.

The result? The people who need health care the most have the most difficulty getting insurance that covers it. Doesn't this defeat the whole purpose of the exercise?

That, however, is the Republican alternative to the ACA. And remember, even before the ACA, things were not stable, but deteriorating: as health costs rose, premiums, co-pays and deductibles were going up, employers were cutting back. Without the ACA, those trends will continue.

The ACA was an effort to preserve a private health insurance market, using regulation to achieve a better result. As we see, this is very complicated.

There is a third option. If everyone is in the same, large, pool, everything medically necessary is covered, insurers are paid merely to process claims, and premiums are scaled to income, there is enough money to cover everyone at reasonable cost without elaborate, expensive, error-prone computer programs and geniuses to run them. People will be able to choose their doctors and hospitals. (And the rich can always buy more if they want.)

A crazy, wild-eyed socialist nightmare? No, this is Medicare, a familiar, popular, competently-run public insurance system that everyone's parents or grandparents rely on. Person-for-person, disease-for-disease, Medicare is the cheapest, most efficient health insurance program in the country. (There is virtue in simplicity.) Medicare already controls health care costs better than private insurers, and with a few tweaks, could do much more, forcing prices down to the level citizens of every other advanced democracy pay, with no sacrifice in quality.

Given the alternatives, maybe Medicare-for-all deserves a second look.

Dueling anecdotes for/against Obamacare

I've been saying for years that one of the main distinctions between liberals and conservatives is that liberals argue with statistics and facts, and conservatives argue with anecdotes, as in, something that happened to them or somebody they believe. Finally Milbank has noticed it, too [emphasis mine]:

Republicans are right to hammer President Obama for his dishonest — and now debunked — claim that those who like their insurance plans can keep their coverage. Millions who buy their own health insurance will not have that option. The White House knew this during the health-care debate and didn’t tell the truth.

But what Republicans are doing now is dishonest, too, because their constituents’ tales of woe, even if true, aren’t representative. Suppose the worst forecast proves to be true, and 12 million people cannot renew their coverage and must find new policies on the exchanges. In a country of 317 million people, that group would still be dwarfed by the number of people now able to get health insurance for the first time — and by the overwhelming majority of Americans who are largely unaffected by Obamacare.

Using props to make policy may be unreliable, but it’s apparently irresistible.

For political reasons, at this Senate hearing Democrats unfortunately followed suit with their own touching personal anecdotes, because frankly, it's too early for any of us to cite facts & statistics. It wouldn't be sensible or fair to draw any hard & fast conclusions about Obamacare yet, especially with the Healthcare.gov website not working.

Nevertheless, call me a partisan hack, but I predict that the Affordable Care Act will be with us for decades. It's time we started thinking of it as we do Social Security and Medicare: indelible and ineluctable. And instead of plotting futilely how to trash it, critics should be suggesting how to improve it. Because Obamacare's not going anywhere, sorry.

At Obamacare hearings, governing by anecdote

By Dana Milbank

November 7, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/1bb2UWP

Don't blame ACA for 'cancelled' health plans

Some medical insurance companies have already been fined for sending out misleading cancellation notices to their customers that don't even mention cheaper options available through new ACA exchanges. 

This was always the weakest aspect of Obamacare: depending on private health insurers to play nice.  They don't. They won't. Especially under ACA, consumers must remain savvy, well-informed and stick up for their rights.  

Meanwhile, health insurance companies keep adjusting their earnings numbers for 2013 upward -- largely thanks to Obamacare. So don't cry for them -- or cry "socialism!"  Please.

Anyhow, some customers have complained -- or more often, others have repeated complaints they heard from FOX or talk radio -- that they were satisfied with their individual insurance plan that was cancelled because their insurer declined to upgrade their plan to comply with Obamacare, or else insurers raised the price to comply. 

Two responses here. First, individual health insurance policies typically last one year anyway, and then insurers raise prices and change conditions when offering renewal -- this was the way long before Obamacare. The HHH's grandfathering rule for Obamacare stipulated that, to be grandfathered, plans couldn't be changed after March 23, 2010, and prices could only rise with the medical rate of inflation. Pretty strict, admittedly.

So Obama should not have promised you could keep your current plan if you liked it -- because insurers have never let you keep your plan the way it was if you liked it. Insurers always raise prices and/or decrease coverage. 

Over the past few decades, insurance costs have gone up while coverage has gone down. That was the trend before Obamacare.  That was what Republicans such as John Boehner and Mitch McConnell preferred.

Now in 2013, and projected again in 2014, the rate of medical inflation is going down, a heartening reverse of a long-term trend. 

Second, it's impossible to say for certain in every case, but I would bet that most of those people have not had a catastrophic event or even an ambulance ride under their current plan. Obamacare requires insurers to cover them in almost every instance to avoid medical bankruptcy, the #1 cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S.  

And let's face it: currently, if you're an individual consumer, the primary reason for having health insurance is to avoid unpayable, unexpected medical bills that could ruin you. It really is insurance in the same sense as earthquake or life insurance: it only saves you in the worst-case scenario; the rest of the time it seems like a nuisance.

I predict that when all the dust settles and the website starts working, most consumers will realize they're getting a better deal.

Insurance cancelled? Don't blame Obama or the ACA, blame America's insurance companies

By Juan Williams

November 5, 2013 | FoxNews

Liar! Pinocchio! Deceiver!

With all the charges flying against President Obama in the on-going effort to stop ObamaCare it’s time for a reality check.

Having failed to kill the Affordable Care Act in Congress by shutting down the government the opposition is currently taking delight in charging the president will lying to the public when he said anyone who likes their current healthcare plan will be able to keep it under the new law.

It turns out that some people in the individual care market – about 5 percent of the overall insurance market -- are having their insurance policies cancelled. 

It is estimated that half of those folks will get better coverage for a lower price. Some people will even get subsidies to help them pay the lower price.

But some people losing their current policies [and being offered better coverage] are going to have to pay a higher price. Taking crocodile tears to a new level, ObamaCare opponents are now rushing to their defense and calling the president a liar.

These critics include Republican politicians who did not vote for ObamaCare; these are Republican governors who refuse to set up exchanges to reach their own citizens; these are people oppose expanding Medicaid to help poor people getting better health care; these are people who have never put any proposal on the table as an alternative fix for the nation’s costly health care system that leaves tens of millions with inadequate medical coverage and tens of millions more totally uninsured. 

The fact is if you are one of the estimated 2 million Americans whose health insurance plans may have been cancelled this month, you should not be blaming President Obama or the Affordable Care Act. 

You should be blaming your insurance company because they have not been providing you with coverage that meets the minimum basic standards for health care.

Let me put it more bluntly: your insurance companies have been taking advantage of you and the Affordable Care Act puts in place consumer protection and tells them to stop abusing people.

The government did not “force” insurance companies to cancel their own substandard policies. The insurance companies chose to do that rather than do what is right and bring the policies up to code. 

This would be like saying the government “forces” chemical companies to dispose of toxic waste safely rather than dumping it in the river. 

Or the government “forces” people to drive with intact windshields and working brake lights.

How dare they “force” drivers to pay money to get those things fixed if they are broken?

One of the most popular and important provisions of the Affordable Care Act is setting basic minimum standards of medical insurance coverage. Here are some of those standards:

- Your insurance company is no longer allowed to cancel your policy if you get sick

- Your insurance company cannot deny you coverage or charge you more if you have a pre-existing health condition

- Your insurance company must allow you to keep your children on your plan until they turn 26 years old or get a job that provides health insurance.

- Your insurance company cannot impose lifetime caps on your health coverage.

- And perhaps most relevant to current discussion about insurance companies canceling substandard policies, your insurance company must cover what are called “essential health benefits.”

What are “essential health benefits?”

They are clearly defined on HealthCare.gov:

“Essential health benefits must include items and services within at least the following 10 categories: ambulatory patient services; emergency services; hospitalization; maternity and newborn care; mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment; prescription drugs; rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices; laboratory services; preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management; and pediatric services, including oral and vision care.”

That’s right.

If you are rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, the ACA says your insurance company has to pay for the ambulance ride. 

If your son or daughter has a bout with depression or suffers from panic attacks, the ACA says your insurance company needs to pay for their medicine and treatment from a mental health professional.

People should be angry that their insurance companies were not paying for these humane, common sense benefits all along. 

It baffles me that people are directing their anger at the ACA which rights these terrible wrongs.

The Hartford Courant newspaper reports that the CEO of Aetna insurance made $36 million last year plus several millions more in stock options. 

They also report that the CEO of Cigna cleared a cool $12.5 Million plus stock options. 

The American health insurance industry is one of the most profitable in the history of the world. Before the ACA, they made money by finding any excuse, any loophole to deny coverage to the sickest and most vulnerable people in our society.

Rather than being vindictive and canceling policies under the pretext of ObamaCare, the insurance companies should be thanking their lucky stars that they do not have to contend with a public option or a single payer system. That is what the law allows in every other modern industrialized democracy.

Paul Ryan's guru: Our Medicare plan won't work

The mastermind of Paul Ryan's Medicare reform plan, Henry Aaron, has changed his mind, based on -- gasp! -- evidence that his theories didn't pan out: "The evidence to date is not encouraging," Aaron testified, noting a recent study that isolated the effects of competition on Medicare Advantage costs from government-related influences. "After controlling for all those factors, Medicare Advantage plans are more expensive than is traditional Medicare."

Premium support is key to Ryan's plan.  Ryan has assumed that if free markets are left to work by themselves (health insurance exchanges) then prices will eventually come down; and the gov't. should provide a small subsidy to pay for premiums in the meantime.

But Aaron went on to say, with Rep. Ryan in the audience, that premium support as envisioned in Obamacare should be left to work, to see if his ideas have any merit:

The passage of the Affordable Care Act means we have put in place a key element of the premium support idea for the rest of the population, namely health insurance exchanges.  The Medicare population is vastly more difficult to deal with than the population under the Affordable Care Act. We should prove that the health insurance exchanges work, get them up and running before we take seriously, in my view, calls to put the Medicare population through a similar system.

Aaron also noted that the current "pro-business" Republican Congress won't enact the strict regulation needed to prevent insurance companies gaming the system:  "The regulatory climate has changed.  It is far more hostile to the kinds of regulatory intervention that...I thought were essential."

Henry Aaron, Inventor Of Paul Ryan's Medicare Reform Concept, Explains Why It's Wrong

By Michael McAuliff

May 3, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/henry-aaron-paul-ryan-medicare_n_1466826.html

Obamacare won't increase the deficit

Big surprise, a Koch-funded think tank was behind the bogus report that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) would increase the deficit.

That claim was false.  In fact, the CBO recently revised its estimates to say Obamacare would cost $50 billion less over 10 years.

The Bogus Obamacare-Deficit Study

By Jonathan Chait

April 10, 2012 | New York Magazine

URL:  http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/04/bogus-obamacare-deficit-study.html