03-19-2017, 07:21 PM
The simple truth is, Obamacare isn't imploding, Conservatives are lying. Says who? The nonpartisan CBO
Quote:Obamacare is not imploding. Nor is it collapsing. Nor is it a “ticking time bomb” that Obama ordered B613 to set to go off the moment he left office and he and Michelle arrived in New York City looking younger than you.Time to Call Out the Big GOP Lie on Obamacare - The Daily Beast
Don’t believe me? Ask the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which concluded in its report on the Trump-Ryan replacement plan that the “non-group” market, the individual insurance market in which people sign up on state or federal exchanges, “would probably be stable in most areas under either current law or the legislation.” In other words, it can survive whether or not Republicans “repeal and replace” Obamacare, because even when premiums spike, as they did in 2016, in large part because of Republicans in Congress and 19 states actively sabotaging the law, those increases are offset by the federal subsidies people get under Obamacare, which rise as premiums rise, according to people’s incomes. In fact, of the new signups this year, 84 percent were eligible for subsidies which covered 73 percent of the price of their premiums.
So while Republicans really want Obamacare to collapse, and indeed they’ve tried very hard to make it collapse so they could have an excuse to repeal it; the law is not, in fact, collapsing.
Nor is it in a “death spiral” – which actually has a specific meaning, which Politifact defines as “… a cycle where shrinking enrollment leads to a deteriorating risk pool (that is, healthy people leave the plan due to the cost). That leads to higher premiums, which causes enrollment to shrink even further, continuing the cycle." Well, that’s not happening, either.
According to The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal government agency that keeps track of these things, 12.2 million people enrolled in health plans during this year’s open enrollment period. That’s less than the 13.8 million people the Department of Health and Human Services projected, but by definition, if millions of people are still signing up for insurance under the ACA, rather than dropping it, Obamacare cannot be in a death spiral.
On the contrary, thanks to Obamacare, roughly 22 million people have gained insurance, between the exchanges and subsidies, the Medicaid expansion, and those remaining on their parents’ plans. As a result, the uninsured rate is at a record low of below 11 percent. It would be even lower, and the CBO would not have been so wrong in its estimate of how many people would be covered by now, had 28 Republican-led states refused to set up their own exchanges, and had 19 Republican-led states not refused to accept the Medicaid expansion. You’ll recall, they went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2012 to establish the fact that they could keep millions of their own people from accessing Medicaid through Obamacare. Roughly half of those who are uninsured by Republican fiat live in just two states: Texas and Florida.
Ryan himself bragged about the Republican-led congress withholding money from Obamacare’s risk pools in order to help elect a Republican president and cripple the law. When the Trump administration took over, they went so far as to cancel the TV commercials urging people to sign up.
It’s no secret that lots of insurance companies hate Obamacare, even though some of them have made quite a bit of money on it. Obamacare prevents them from excluding sick people from coverage; or cutting off the checks when their customer is in mid-treatment because she’s reached her lifetime cap; or charging older people much more than younger ones. Insurers did like the idea of potentially getting a flood of new, young, healthy customers who were required to buy insurance due to the mandate, and many are unhappy that they haven’t gotten more. Meanwhile, the law also made the junk policies they used to sell those younger, healthier customers illegal.
Republicans’ “repeal and replace” plan is a giant gift to those insurers, letting them bring back some of those awful – but profitable – practices; specifically, allowing them to charge older people five times more than younger customers, and restarting the junk policy machine, while also scrapping Obamacare’s limit on how much of their extravagant CEO pay packages insurers can write off on their taxes. As a bonus, Trumpcare would swap out the individual mandate that makes people pay a fine to the IRS if they go uninsured for a fine they pay directly to the insurance company when they do choose to sign up. Ka-ching!