2013 American Values Survey (.pdf) by PRRI, Sept 21-Oct 3 (just released):
Americans’ views on the 2010 health care law, commonly known as Obamacare, are complex.
More than 4-in-10 (44%) have a favorable view of the law, while a majority (54%) have an unfavorable view of the law. However, only 42% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the law because they think the law goes too far while 11% are unhappy with the law because it does not go far enough.
The numbers about not going far enough reflect every poll that asks.
Michael Hiltzik:
Developments in the rollout of Obamacare are coming with dizzying speed, though not as fast as the pileup of fiction and misunderstanding created by politicians, pundits and the news media. So here's a list of the latest themes you're hearing on America's healthcare reform, and what they mean.
1. Obama "knew" that people would lose their health insurance. This story, chiefly promoted by NBC News, reflects the Washington media's eternal search for scandal, abetted by every politician's instinct to reduce even the most complicated ideas to a sound byte.
It was always clear that many insurance policies serving the individual market wouldn't conform to the coverage requirements set by the Affordable Care Act and would have to be changed. Some were "grandfathered" in, but the rules dictated that any that were changed by the insuring companies -- including changes in premiums or other terms -- would lose that status.
As a result, millions of policyholders are now being informed that their nonconforming policies are being canceled as of Dec. 31. The idea, of course, is for them to get new policies under Obamacare as of Jan. 1. NBC is breathing heavily over its investigative "discovery" that "because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, 40 to 67% of customers will not be able to keep their policy" mostly because they changed plans.
But is this news? No: The exact same figure was put out by the Obama Adminsitration -- in 2010. Here's a release from the Department of Health and Human Services from June that year, explaining that "40% to two-thirds of people" in the individual market normally change plans in a year, and thus would no longer be in grandfathered plans. Did Obama "know"? Yes, but so did anyone else who was paying attention, including reporters covering healthcare.
There's more, read the whole thing.
More politics and policy below the fold.
NY Times:
Ms. Tavenner, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said that “nearly 700,000 applications have been submitted to the federal and state marketplaces” in the last four weeks.
But she repeatedly refused to say how many of those people had actually enrolled in health insurance plans since the federal and state marketplaces, or exchanges, opened on Oct. 1.
“That number will not be available until mid-November,” Ms. Tavenner said. “We expect the initial number to be small.”
The testimony from Tavenner was actually very credible if you saw or heard it, reviewing that prior to ACA, insurance was far from adequate. The fact is it's going to be impossible to really judge how things are working for weeks to come, until we get a sense of enrollment numbers beyond success stories like KY and failures like the healthcare.gov rollout. But that won't stop media from chasing the shiny object and offering judgment anyway. And nothing will stop GOP criticism, which ought not to be taken at face value from people who have a stake in having the program fail even as Americans want it to succeed. Republicans can't run away from that no matter how many hearings they hold.
CHIRBlog:
There’s been a lot of breathless journalism lately – with each day’s events apparently a referendum on the success – or failure – of the Affordable Care Act. One of the latest story lines involves people with individual health insurance policies receiving policy cancellations from their insurance companies.
What’s Really Happening?
Having an insurance company discontinue an insurance policy is not anything new. And actually, the term “policy cancellation” is a misnomer. Generally, an individual health insurance policy is sold via a 12-month contract between the insurer and the consumer. At the end of that contract period, the insurer has the option to discontinue or change that policy – nothing in federal law changes that. Current policyholders are not having their current policy cancelled – rather, the insurance company is exercising its option to discontinue the policy at the end of the contract year.
WaPo editorial:
Though some people might pay more than they did before, they and many others will also get more. Among other things, they will be less financially vulnerable when they get sick — in some cases dramatically less. Their new plans will also put taxpayers at less risk of having to cover big medical bills when under-insured patients unexpectedly fall very ill. That goes, too, for people who currently decline to buy insurance but who will have to next year.
Reform still might not sound like a great deal to people who are young, feel healthy and don’t want to pay for coverage . Yet having lots of healthy people paying into the new system on its terms will not only limit their financial risk, but also their participation will allow others who have been priced out of the health-insurance market — those with serious preexisting conditions, for example — to obtain good coverage. They deserve compassion, too.
None of this is an outrage. It’s the predictable result of a defensible policy choice embedded in the reform.
Erik Wemple:
The story, however, wasn’t as straightforward as the CBS News account suggested. As pointed out here and here, Barrette’s $50 insurance plan was shot through with holes, particularly with respect to hospitalization. The Obamacare-compliant plan that she was offered in its place must comply with a set of basic standards, including hospitalization.
Following all the ruckus, Fox News host Greta Van Susteren interviewed Barrette on last night’s edition of her program “On the Record.” The deficiencies of Barrette’s longtime plan got plenty of attention from Van Susteren:
VAN SUSTEREN: I must say though that your policy is like, you know, if you are walking across the street and someone runs a red light, you are in deep trouble under your existing policy.
BARRETTE: That is true.
Now there’s something: Fox News, clearing up the distorted and negative impressions left by the mainstream media on Obamacare.
Following her chat with Van Susteren, Barrette got word from a network producer that her appointment to appear this morning on Fox News was cancelled, she tells the Erik Wemple Blog.
Coverage from the networks has been just awful. It's easier to run a sloppy interview with an individual like CBS did than do the hard work of understanding complex policy and actually explaining it fairly (such as exploring what subsidy would be available), so don't expect much from them. Stick to the people who have been covering this, like
Jonathan Cohn (and read this through):
It would have been perfectly fine for Obama to say most Americans get to keep their coverage or to qualify his statement in some other way. And administration officials offered such nuance when asked. But Obama offered more absolute and ironclad promises when he spoke publicly—and, distressingly, some of his advisors are making similarly sweeping statements now. Such declarations lie "somewhere between an oversimplification and a falsehood," as Jonathan Chait puts it. In short, the president's critics have a point.
But ultimately the more important question is about what’s actually happening to these people losing their current policies—and why. This transformation is not just a consequence of Obamacare. It's very much the intent. And for very good reason.
By nearly everybody's reckoning, the "non-group" market is the most dysfunctional part of the American health insurance system. The dysfunction takes two primary forms. First, insurers have been selective about whom they would cover and how—charging higher premiums, covering fewer services, or simply denying benefits outright to people with pre-existing medical conditions. About half of all Americans have at least one such condition, according to official estimates, so roughly speaking about half the population couldn't reliably find comprehensive, affordable coverage if they had to buy it on their own.
Meanwhile, away from Congress and back in the real world, even
Kathleen Parker can't deny the obvious:
It isn’t over yet, but a bookie today would predict a Terry McAuliffe victory in the Virginia governor’s election next week.
Washington Post polling shows the Democratic businessman and fundraiser with a double-digit lead (51 percent to 39 percent) over Republican Ken Cuccinelli II following a campaign ad blitz that shredded the sitting attorney general over his conservative views. It’s not that voters love McAuliffe. They just don’t like Cuccinelli — and they really don’t like the Republican Party. ...
So it isn’t over yet, in Virginia or elsewhere, but Republicans have little time to regain the trust and confidence of the non-ideological centrist majority. It’s time to dump the tea party in the Potomac.
Ta-Nehisi Coates:
Howard, which nurtured civil rights warriors like Andrew Young, Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston, has played a special role in the work of integration. But an unspeakable conclusion has followed from that work — that the job of Howard University is to pave the way for its own obsolescence.
That terrible tension was on vivid display last weekend at Howard. A group of us — black parents with ties to The Mecca, as we call it — returned for Homecoming weekend. The football game (versus Morgan State University) was sloppy. A great many of the best college football players are black, but since the fall of Jim Crow, schools like Howard have not been able to compete for them.
But at a black school, football is barely the point. The point is the bands that battle at halftime. The point is the affection in the stands, the warm banter between us, which we invented out on the margins of America.
Howard won. We cheered and walked out on the Yard where thousands of black college students and black college graduates assembled in reunion. Love was free-flowing. Cameras were passed. Memory cards were filled. I walked past Douglass Hall, and thought of my professors who put The Struggle in my heart and Consciousness in my head. There was tailgating just off campus. The entire community was there, from hustlers running card games to Kappas running steps.
Always hard to abbreviate Ta-Nehisi. Read the whole thing.