Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Eleven days later

Ace: "Obamacare Website Won't Reveal New, Higher Premiums -- Until After the Election, Of Course."

I think Republicans should take a page from the playbook of alleged pederast Harry Reid: just say loudly and repeatedly that Obamacare premiums are going to go up 30%.  It's not true?  Who cares: it's truthy enough and there's an election to win.

13 comments:

Don't tell Ace said...

The accounting firm PricewaterhouseCooper LLP:
"As of October 3, 2014... among the six states and DC with final rate announcements, the average premium (across metal tiers and ages) is about $328, and the average premium increase from 2014 is 2.6%. By contrast, the average premium increase across all reporting states is 5.9% and the average premium is $382."

24 states are showing single-digit percentage increases for 2015, 4 states are between 10-15%, and 3 states are above 15%. 3 states are showing further decreases. Full data is not yet available for the remaining 14 states.

These numbers are fluid: the average rate increase in Colorado will be 2%, although the range across all plans is from -22% to +35%.

People are not obligated to maintain their current plans or insurers.

Eric said...

"People are not obligated to maintain their current plans or insurers."

Yeah, that tends to happen when they lose their policies, the ones they were going to keep. Period.

Old and busted: "You'll save $2500!"
New and busted: Only single-digit percentage increases, peasants.

If you like your rhetoric, you can keep it said...

When it comes to this "train wreck," there's a lot of busting going on.

“Premiums will skyrocket! Death spiral!”
The average premium increase for 2015 is less than the pre-Obamacare norm.

“No one can sign up on a broken website! The goal will never be met!”
More than 8 million enroll.

“All right, maybe they enrolled. But almost nobody has paid!”
7.3 million pay.

“Young invincibles are abandoning Obamacare!”
The number of uninsured 19-to-25-year-olds has nearly been halved.

“These new regulations will destroy the health insurance industry!”
Insurance company participation in ACA coverage is going up 25% in 2015.

Single Digitalis said...

ObamaCare Bronze Plan Premiums To Jump 14% In 2015

Eric said...

Hey, that's awesome news, which is why Democrats all across the country are running on Obamacare.

Not.

Eric said...

Yeah, what's with this careful selection of data? Let's keep things nice and broad like "more than 8 million enroll."

Hey how many of those were previously insured but were forced to enroll in Obamacare when they were kicked off their insurance plans?

Ummm...in Yuma County, silver plans are only going up 4%!

Eric said...

Let's look at that biased article:

"An examination of next year's rates in the biggest city in 15 states and Washington, D.C., reveals that the cost of the cheapest bronze plan will jump an average of 13.9% for 40-year-old non-smokers earning 225% of the poverty level ($26,260)."

So the selective sliver we're looking at is for the cheapest plan in urban areas and a typical insurance user - the very people Obamacare was designed to help.

"In Seattle, the cost of the cheapest bronze plan, after subsidies, will soar 64%, from $60 to $98 per month, for individuals at this income level. Some other cities seeing notable gains include Providence (up 38%, from $72 to $99 per month); Los Angeles (up 27%, from $88 to $111); Las Vegas (up 22%, from $100 to $122); and New York (up 18%, from $97 to $114)."

A small price to pay for access to the three doctors in the city who will take Obamacare.

Insurance companies need to inform people of rate increases in the 2-3 weeks before the election. The Republicans are focusing on this White House's other screw-ups before going for the big Kahuna.

"Obama? Never heard of him" - every Democrat in America

Eric said...

Oh, man, look what I found while browsing the news today. You can dismiss it though - just another right-wing news source:

"Unable to Meet the Deductible or the Doctor."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/unable-to-meet-the-deductible-or-the-doctor.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

Double Digitalis said...

Okay, let’s look at the article:

“In general, double-digit ObamaCare premium increases have been the exception rather than the rule, leading news outlets and health policy experts to deride earlier predictions by the law's critics that rates would spiral this year.

Perhaps the clearest evidence of the benign rate environment for 2015 came from an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation . The authors found that the cost of the benchmark silver plan would fall an average 0.8% in the same 16 cities that IBD looked at.

Further, the report found that the after-subsidy cost of the second-lowest-cost silver plan would also fall an average 0.8%.”


Wow, that's a lot of quoting from a "website" that is "anti-Obamacare". I guess it's not so anti-Obamacare if it bolsters your view, right?

But wait... there's more that you somehow left out. I'm talking about the very next sentences in the article. You wouldn't want people to be uninformed because of lack of context, would you? -

"IBD relied upon the same bronze and silver premium data that Kaiser foundation researchers collected. So what accounts for the dramatic difference in findings about the path of bronze and silver premiums?
There are two big reasons for the difference. First, Kaiser researchers calculated after-subsidy premiums for someone whose expected income in 2015 is the same as in 2014, while IBD's illustration assumes income rises with inflation.

The difference is important because ObamaCare enrollees owe a greater percentage of income as earnings rise relative to the poverty level. Thus, an assumption that wages remain flat — i.e. fall relative to the poverty level — results in a lower unsubsidized cost.

While there will be people in both circumstances, IBD's assumption is more consistent with rising wages for nonsupervisors as reported by the Labor Department.

The other big difference in outcomes between the Kaiser and IBD analyses has to do with how ObamaCare determines subsidies.Consider the rather unusual example of Seattle: The second-lowest-cost silver premium that Kaiser tracked is actually set to fall nearly 10%, from $281 per month in '14 to $254 in '15. Yet the decline in that benchmark premium results in a much lower subsidy — from $126 to $96. That's because the subsidy is simply the cost of the premium in excess of an individual's premium contribution amount, which is determined by income level."


Hey, if you want something really constructive to do, could you try to convince some Democrat candidate somewhere to admit that they voted for Obama? Even I'm starting to squirm with pain at the sad spectacle we're seeing out there.

Open up and say "meh" said...

As sad a spectacle as Bush in 2006? As sad as Clinton in 1998? As sad as 1986 or 1974 or 1958 or 1946? Do you know how sixth-year midterms work?

Forget what the government, media, or insurance companies think. Never mind what the Senate Budget Committee Republicans wrote two weeks ago: “Millions of Americans find themselves locked out of the American Dream. Their wages are either flat or falling, even as the price of energy and goods surges.” Investors.com was RIGHT to unskew Kaiser’s assumption!

It’s a shame that even after making the appropriate adjustments, the site was apparently only able to unearth one specific customer profile, within a type of plan covering 7% of all ACA enrollees, that will jump in price two-thirds of the time. Then again, listing all of the people and criteria that fall outside of that calculation would have made their headline unwieldy.

Eric said...

It's not just health care recipients who hate Obamacare, it's the providers too:

"The Physicians Foundation made shockwaves last month when it released its 2014 Survey of America’s Physicians. The survey’s top-line finding: Of the 20,000 doctors surveyed, almost 50 percent stated that Obamacare deserves either a “D” or an “F.” Only a quarter of physicians graded it as either an “A” or a “B.”"

Don't worry folks: as the NY Times story indicates, when your deductible is $6000, you won't have to worry about seeing a doctor, anyways.

Open up and say "meh" said...

That’s certainly how a person from the Cato Institute writing about “Obamacare’s assault on the doctor-patient relationship” looks at it. A more radical way of presenting those survey numbers is simply to present them: 3% A, 22% B, 29% C, 21% D, 25% F. Quite the consensus.

Incidentally, those results come from a self-selecting email questionnaire in which respondents had to proactively send their answers in. 97% of the emailed doctors never responded at all. About 20% of U.S. doctors wre not contacted because because they don’t have an email address in the AMA database. Leaving fewer than 1% of the working doctors in the country to come forward and give Obamacare a D or an F.

Probably the other 97% didn’t reply because they’re too swamped by new regulations and death panel meetings.

Anonymous said...

If they had, they might have brought that A grade up to 4%.