53% Expect Quality of Care To Suffer Under Health Care Law
Monday, April 07, 2014
Unfavorable opinions of the new national health care law are at their highest level in several months, while the number who think the quality of care in this country will get worse is at its highest level in over three years.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 58% of Likely U.S. Voters have at least a somewhat unfavorable opinion of the health care law, with 43% who view it Very Unfavorably. Just 39% have a favorable view of the law, including 16% with a Very Favorable one. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Despite the Obama administration’s claim that it has exceeded its March 31 goal of signing up seven million Americans through new health insurance exchanges, overall unfavorables for the health care law are up from 54% two weeks ago. Most voters have had an unfavorable opinion of the law in regular surveys since the beginning of last year. But the latest finding matches the all-time high first reached in mid-November. Favorables fell to a record low of 36% in that same survey.
GOP Backs Minor Change in Obamacare to help small business
Apr 6, 12:10 PM (ET)
By DAVID ESPO
WASHINGTON (AP) – At the prodding of business organizations, House Republicans quietly secured a recent change in President Barack Obama’s health law to expand coverage choices, a striking, one-of-a-kind departure from dozens of high-decibel attempts to repeal or dismember it.
Democrats describe the change involving small-business coverage options as a straightforward improvement of the type they are eager to make, and Obama signed it into law. Republicans are loath to agree, given the strong sentiment among the rank and file that the only fix the law deserves is a burial.
“Maybe you say it helps (Obamacare), but it really helps the small businessman,” said Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., one of several physician-lawmakers among Republicans and an advocate of repeal.
No member of the House GOP leadership has publicly hailed the fix, which was tucked, at Republicans’ request, into legislation preventing a cut in payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients.
It is unclear how many members of the House rank and file knew of it because the legislation was passed by a highly unusual voice vote without debate.
For Democrats, a problem with seniors
By Alexandra Jaffe
Democrats are facing a senior problem that could get even worse this year.
The party has traditionally had trouble with older voters, losing them by 16 points in 2010 — when Republicans picked up 63 seats — and 12 points in the 2012 presidential race.
Seniors are the GOP’s most reliable voting bloc in midterm years, turning out in higher numbers than Democratic base voters. And a recent Gallup poll showed seniors have become even more Republican over the last two decades, and in 2013 48 percent considered themselves Republican.
“Democrats have to perform better with seniors than they did in 2010. They got shellacked with seniors in 2010. I don’t think the goal here is to win, but I definitely think the goal is to narrow the gap,” he said.
After a rough few months with the rocky rollout of ObamaCare, Democrats are more optimistic because of better-than-expected health care enrollment numbers out this week, but Republicans are pledging to continue to hammer Democrats on the law.
The president tries to put a good face on ObamaCare.
By
PEGGY NOONAN
Updated April 4, 2014 7:44 p.m. ET
Put aside the numbers for a moment, and the daily argument.
“Seven point one million people have signed up!”
“But six million people lost their coverage and were forced onto the exchanges! That’s no triumph, it’s a manipulation. And how many of the 7.1 million have paid?”
“We can’t say, but 7.1 million is a big number and redeems the program.”
“Is it a real number?”
“Your lack of trust betrays a dark and conspiratorial right-wing mindset.”
As I say, put aside the argument, step back and view the thing at a distance. Support it or not, you cannot look at ObamaCare and call it anything but a huge, historic mess. It is also utterly unique in the annals of American lawmaking and government administration.
Its biggest proponent in Congress, the Democratic speaker of the House, literally said—blithely, mindlessly, but in a way forthcomingly—that we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. It is a cliché to note this. But really, Nancy Pelosi’s statement was a historic admission that she was fighting hard for something she herself didn’t understand, but she had every confidence regulators and bureaucratic interpreters would tell her in time what she’d done. This is how we make laws now.
Her comments alarmed congressional Republicans but inspired Democrats, who for the next three years would carry on like blithering idiots making believe they’d read the bill and understood its implications. They were later taken aback by complaints from their constituents. The White House, on the other hand, seems to have understood what the bill would do, and lied in a way so specific it showed they knew exactly what to spin and how. “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan, period.” “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period.” That of course was the president, misrepresenting the facts of his signature legislative effort. That was historic, too. If you liked your doctor, your plan, your network, your coverage, your deductible you could not keep it. Your existing policy had to pass muster with the administration, which would fight to the death to ensure that 60-year-old women have pediatric dental coverage.
The leaders of our government have not felt, throughout the process, that they had any responsibility to be honest and forthcoming about the major aspects of the program, from its exact nature to its exact cost. We are not being told the cost of anything—all those ads, all the consultants and computer work, even the cost of the essential program itself.
What the bill declared it would do—insure tens of millions of uninsured Americans—it has not done. There are still tens of millions uninsured Americans. On the other hand, it has terrorized millions who did have insurance and lost it, or who still have insurance and may lose it.
Obamacare Changes require switch from small-group market to individual — and more costly – health insurance plans.
Healthcare reform is bringing an unpleasant surprise for thousands of mom-and-pop shops, small law firms, technology startups and other owner-operated firms in New Jersey.
For years, owners of companies with no other employees could buy insurance in the small-group market and benefit from a wide selection of plans, less-expensive drug coverage, and other advantages compared to the individual health insurance market.
But in December, the state changed its small-group insurance regulations to match the Affordable Care Act, which defines businesses as having at least one employee who is not an owner or the spouse of an owner. That excludes both husband-and-wife teams and partnerships with multiple members but no other staff.
As those firms’ health-insurance policies expire this year, instead of being allowed to renew their plans or buy another small-group plan, they are being directed to research their options on the individual marketplace at Healthcare.gov.
And they are barred from purchasing small-group insurance through their brokers or the new federal Small Business Health Options Program. “There are a lot of small employers who are in for a very rude awakening,” said Linda Schwimmer, vice president of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute. “As soon as their policies expire, they’re not going to be able to renew them on the marketplace or even the SHOP. They’ll experience rate shock, and many won’t qualify for a subsidy.”
“We view it as one of those unintended consequences that bubble up in a place like New Jersey that has so many self-employed and freelancers and small law firms and places like that — father-son plumbing firms, electrical engineers and so on. It’s going to have an impact,” she said. (Rinde/NJSpotlight)
OK Missed the Deadline Where You Can Buy Health Insurance After Today
Amy Payne
March 31, 2014 at 6:30 am
UPDATE (April 2): We wrote on March 31 (below) that Americans would still be able to buy health insurance in the individual market—outside Obamacare’s exchanges—after the Obamacare deadline. The Associated Press reported the same thing on April 1:
Buyers can always go directly to an insurance company, but it may be expensive. Plans bought outside the marketplaces don’t come with government subsidies that hold down the cost for people with low or mid-level incomes. But they do include the law’s consumer protections. For example, insurers can’t turn down customers because of pre-existing medical conditions.
Even after the deadline, buying a plan that meets the law’s essential coverage standard reduces the penalty owed, which is based on the number of months without coverage.
When the law was passed, Obamacare indicated that insurance companies offering coverage in the individual market would have the leeway to determine their own enrollment periods, if desired. But now that the open enrollment period has closed for the Obamacare exchanges, it appears that in most states, so has enrollment in the individual market.
Our staff visited eHealthInsurance.com, where individual policies are usually available, testing one ZIP code for every state. For all but two states, we received this message: “Now that the Open Enrollment Period (OEP) has ended, you’ll need to experience a qualifying life event to enroll in a qualified health insurance plan.” (Qualifying life events include marriage, loss of a job, and the birth of a child, for example.)
In these early days of April, Oregon and Nevada were the two states where policies were still available for purchase. We know that the Oregon Obamacare exchange extended its signup deadline to April 30 because of its own website woes.
It makes sense for insurers to follow the same enrollment period as Obamacare, because one of the law’s mandates is that insurers must issue a policy to anyone at any time, regardless of pre-existing conditions. Observing a set enrollment period makes it more difficult for people to wait until they are sick to buy coverage.
Note: People who are eligible for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) can apply for those programs year-round.
The original post follows.
Photo: AFP PHOTO/MANDEL NGAN/Newscom
Today is kinda-sorta the deadline to sign up for Obamacare, though if you want to say you’re “in line” for coverage, the administration is okay with that. (If your state is running its own Obamacare exchange, it may be keeping its deadline firm, so check with your state.)
When we wrote about the Obamacare deadline and penalty recently, a reader brought up a great question: Can you still buy health insurance after March 31?
She asked, “If I chose to go uninsured, but end up with a massive medical issue,” could she “just buy insurance and be covered, you know, since they must cover pre-existing conditions”?
The answer is yes. If you don’t have Obamacare-compliant health insurance by today, you could pay the penalty for this year—depending on the amount of flexibility the administration decides to offer in its latest delay—or you could still purchase a policy anytime in the individual market outside the Obamacare exchanges. The amount of time you go without coverage determines your penalty—or as the IRS calls it, your “shared responsibility payment.”
Under Obamacare, the new pre-existing conditions rule means that you can wait until you develop a health problem to get your policy. This isn’t great for the system, because healthy people’s premiums are needed to pay for the sick people. So if fewer healthy people buy health insurance, the system has a problem.
That’s why the Obamacare system has a mandate forcing everyone to buy insurance, a (somewhat) set enrollment period, and a financial penalty to back it up.
If you don’t already have employer-sponsored insurance or coverage through a government health program, your options are the Obamacare exchange or the individual marketplace. Policies in both have to comply with all of Obamacare’s rules and benefit mandates, so the big difference is the taxpayer-funded subsidies.
The subsidies are supposed to be the big draw of the Obamacare exchanges—but it turns out they aren’t as simple as they seem. And holding onto a subsidy can encourage people to stay stagnant in a job—or worse, not seek employment. As Heritage experts have explained and the Congressional Budget Office has confirmed, “The law gives millions of Americans new incentives not to work—or not to raise their income levels—because they may lose federal insurance subsidies.”
Today’s deadline marks the end of the open enrollment period to buy subsidized coverage in the exchange. Enrollment for subsidized coverage doesn’t officially start again until November 15 of this year.
As we’ve noted, however, there are now quite a few ways you can qualify for an exemption from the individual mandate, in addition to the new box you can supposedly check on HealthCare.gov to indicate that you need more time to sign up.
Whether it’s your state or the federal government running your nearest Obamacare exchange,the goal remains the same. Heritage experts Robert Moffit and Ed Haislmaier described the transition from the old individual market to “private coverage in name only”:
The primary goal of the Obamacare exchanges is to establish federal control over state health insurance markets by enforcing new federal insurance rules and requiring federal standardization of health benefits.
And policies in the remaining individual market must, by law, look exactly the same. You can buy them anytime, but the benefit design isn’t likely to be much different. (Just watch how long you go without coverage, or the penalty for being uninsured will kick in.) Obamacare doesn’t improve on the old health insurance market—which is why we need patient-centered reformsthat give people more choice.
Employers Say Obamacare Will Cost Them $5,000 More Per Employee
Businesses reveal in confidential survey that Obamacare will add up to $200 million in costs
BY: Elizabeth Harrington
April 2, 2014 2:01 pm
Obamacare will cost large companies between $4,800 and $5,900 more per employee and add hundreds of millions to their overhead, according to a newsurvey.
The American Health Policy Institute conducted a confidential survey of 100 large employers—those with 10,000 or more employees—asking what costs they expect to incur from Obamacare over the next decade.
Factoring in the health care law’s added mandates, fees, and regulatory burdens, employers anticipate cost hikes between $163 million and $200 million in 2016, a 4.3 percent increase. By 2023, employers will be paying 8.4 percent more than “what they would otherwise be spending” for their employees’ health care.
In the next 10 years, the total cost of Obamacare to all large American employers is estimated to be from $151 billion to $186 billion, according to the study.
Obama May Want to Put the Cork Back In The Champagne Bottle After He Sees These ObamaCare Numbers
Now that Obama has taken a victory lap and popped the champagne cork over hitting the ObamaCare enrollment goal, it looks as if it might be time to put the cork back in the bottle.
Results of a RAND Corporation study suggest that barely 858,000previously uninsured Americans – nowhere near 7.1 million, as claimed by Obama – had paid for new policies and joined the ranks of the insured by the Monday night deadline. The study also indicates that only one-third of exchange sign-ups were previously uninsured.
Yes, millions of enrollees were previously insured, including those who lost coverage when their existing policies were cancelled because they didn’t meet ObamaCare’s minimum requirements.
Still, Obama claimed that “millions of people who have health insurance would not have it”‘ without ObamaCare. The numbers simply do not support that claim.
Moreover, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take a shot at Republicans “who have based their entire political agenda on repealing it.” Obama also thanked Democrats, who passed the “Affordable” Care Act without a single Republican vote.
Some Bay Area Residents Refuse To Sign Up For Insurance, Will Pay Penalty
April 1, 2014 12:02 AM
SAN JOSE (KPIX 5) – Despite an extended deadline tosign up for health care under Covered California, some in the Bay Area are choosing to pay a penalty instead of insurance because of the cost.
Brian Roi has worked as a bartender without insurance for the last two years. He chose not to sign up for health coverage because at the end of the night, he said the math does not add up.
“It doesn’t work for me.” Roi told KPIX 5. “I went to college. I have to pay all these student loans still I’m paying those. I’m paying credit card bills that incurred when I went to college.”
Obamacare website stalls a bit before enrollment deadline
By David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The federal website for U.S. consumers to enroll in private health insurance under Obamacare ran into problems twice on Monday because of a surge of people trying to access the site hours before a midnight deadline to sign up for coverage.
Technical issues that barred access to HealthCare.gov for several hours throughout the day underscored the frantic last-minute pace of an enrollment process that could determine the ultimate success or failure of the healthcare law that represents President Barack Obama’s domestic policy achievement.
More than 6 million people had signed up for private health coverage through the new Obamacare insurance markets by last week, surpassing a target set after a disastrous October rollout called the enrollment process into question. With daily volumes continuing to surge, analysts believe the final tally could approach or even exceed an original goal of 7 million.
“We admittedly had just a terrible start because the website wasn’t working, and despite losing effectively two months, we are going to be reasonably close to that original projection,” Obama said in a CBS Evening News interview that was taped last week and broadcast on Monday.
Obamacare ‘Glitch’ on Deadline Day
Amy Payne
March 31, 2014 at 9:26 am
If you rushed to HealthCare.gov this morning, you might have found the site unavailable or been placed in a queue, reports said.
“An administration spokesman told the AP the website is usually offline for maintenance overnight, and was brought down for four extra hours by a technical glitch,” NBC reported.
This probably didn’t take many people by surprise. Obamacare’s technical glitches are well known. But the big problem with Obamacare is that the law’s flaws are more than a glitch. Share our parody video below as the administration frantically urges people to “Get Covered” today.
On eve of Obamacare deadline, law remains a work in progress
BySTEPHANIE CONDONCBS NEWSMarch 30, 2014, 6:00 AM
After six tumultuous months, open enrollment on the new Obamacare marketplaces comes to a close. Once enrollment is over, a look at the marketplaces will give the nation a better picture of how well the Affordable Care Act is functioning. It’s already perfectly clear, though — to voters and lawmakers alike — that the law is a work in progress.
The first few months of open enrollment were disastrous, after HealthCare.gov — the site that serves as the Obamacare portal for 36 states — was launched with major technical problems. Still, the administration says it has largely recovered, with more than 6 million Americans enrolling in private insurance as of Thursday.
The public has noticed the improved enrollment process, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll released Friday. While just 12 percent of Americans said in December that the launch of the new marketplaces has gone well, 26 percent say so now.
A new poll shows that just 26 percent of Americans support Obamacare, but at the same time only 13 percent think the law will be completely repealed.
obama-health-law-fails-gain-support” target=”_blank”>The Associated Press-Gfk survey was completed before the White House announced this week that it had signed up 6 million people for private health plans through the state and federal exchanges under the Affordable Care Act.
The poll showed that 7 in 10 American believe the law will stay on the books with some changes.
The AP noted that support for the law has dropped 13 points since 2010, when 39 percent favored the law. Opposition also has dipped 7 percentage points from 2010, when it stood at 43 percent. The number of people on the fence, the AP reported, has tripled from 10 percent to 30 percent.
The day before the Iowa caucuses in 2008, I wrote about the massive crowds of young people at Barack Obama rallies, noting that his candidacy would collapse “if they don’t show up.”
The next night, after Obama’s victory celebration in Des Moines, Obama strategist Steve Hildebrand spotted me in a crowd. “The kids showed up!” he said fiercely.
They did. But where are they now?
An army of 15 million voters under 30 swept Obama past Hillary Clinton and John McCain and to the presidency in 2008. More than 12 million helped him return in 2012. But now his presidency is on the line — and the Obama youth are abandoning him in his hour of need.
The administration announced last week that only 1.08 million people ages 18 to 34 had signed up for Obamacare by the end of February, or about 25 percent of total enrollees. If the proportion doesn’t improve significantly, the result likely will be fatal for the Affordable Care Act.
The administration had said it needed 40 percent of registrants in the health insurance exchanges to be young adults, or about 2.7 million of the expected 7 million total. Overall enrollment is also below target. But the alarming shortcoming is the number of young participants, which would make the insured population older and sicker and the program too expensive.
This week saw the release of Obama’s sit-down with comedian Zach Galifianakis, of “The Hangover” fame, to encourage the young to join the Obamacare exchanges. It was good comedy (the host, in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, rolled up his sleeve to show Obama his “spider bites”), and according to the White House it had the desired result: a boost in traffic to HealthCare.gov. Yet the fact that Obama sought Galifianakis’s help was an indication of how much the president’s standing has slipped among young Americans. Six years earlier, he had been a demigod among that demographic.
What went wrong? The president and his aides failed to keep his youth movement engaged. But part of the problem also is the inability of the millennial generation to remain attached to a cause. The generation that brought Obama to power is connected online but has no loyalty to institutions — including, it turns out, the Obama White House.
In 2008, “the level of innovation and engagement in the election, especially the primaries, was amazing, but then the level of engaging them during the administration was extremely disappointing,” says Peter Levine, a Tufts University professor who specializes in youth civic involvement. “He had a potential army for legislative success and implementation, but the Obama administration did not do that. At a critical moment in the first term, they did not turn to them. . . . They got rapid youth demobilization.”
Young voters, after playing a big role in the campaign, became little more than an e-mail list for the White House and Obama’s Organizing for Action group. Then came health-care reform. The millennials, very liberal overall, saw Obama’s plan as too timid; they were disillusioned by his failure to fight for the “public option” of government-run health plans.
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