...about the latest Obamacare outrage -- that some people had their old policies cancelled, an event that could not have been foreseen unless you had been paying attention to the news when the ACA was passed three and a half years ago or at any time since. I'm thinking they have these things on a rotation schedule -- next week, I'm told, Routine 12 will be that your new Obamacare plan will have fewer providers than the one you have now. The week after that, it'll be that the laminate will wear off your plan ID card more easily than your old one. Eventually, it'll be "Benghazi" and "skree."
Its funny you should say that about the card thing. For several years our employer sponsored health plan did not include an actual plastic card at all. It was a tear off paper card. And then for several more years the ID number was something really, really, wrong like mr. aimai's SS number. Its not like you ever have any choice in how screwed you are by the plan within a plan within a plan that your employer negotiates for you.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who pays attention to politics, I find the Obamacare controversy to be a real eye-glazer. Even Obamacare humor is a pretty flat brew. I have to assume that it's only the stupidest of the stupid who are being stirred up by all the right-whinge hysterics -- at least there's one minority the Republicans are able to reach out to. (Yes, stupid people are a minority!)
ReplyDeleteCripes, we've had four years of obamacare hysteria now, The Line Must Be Drawn Heah, ten appomattoxes and wounded knees put together, it's the worst thing that ever happened to any great nation, not since the Fall of Rome and the Ultra-Holocaust, etc. etc. etc. , four nonstop years of max-volume SKREEEE and they're still going. And at the end of the day it was a slight modification in how health insurance is purchased. it just amazes me sometimes to think of it. What the hell would these people do if there really WAS a dictatorial tyrant in the white house? Oh yeah, vote for him and call any dissenters traitors.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, it's not just stupid people. I have a college friend whom I haven't been in touch with for a long time, but who is definitely a smart guy and a lefty, and he's been filling up his Facebook with posts about all the problems he's had with the ACA website since he jumped into it at the very beginning of open enrollment... which could be interpreted in lots of ways, except he's headlining each post as "Day 1 of the Affordable Care Act", "Day 2 of the Affordable Care Act", etc., and he pretty clearly thinks that these website fuckups are the real untold story of how Obama sold us out. He recently tried using the phone and got someone to sort it out right away, so now the series is on hold. But his FB friends have been chiming in with stories of how they know someone who knows someone who is losing their policy, etc. And I've already been pronounced persona non grata for suggesting that perhaps Obama's economic advisor's super-vague remarks to a business group are not really evidence that Obama has been trying to destroy Social Security for the last 5 years.
ReplyDeleteBut... for fuck's sake, what good are centrist technocrats if they can't do something right just once, and on time without profit motive, when it's really goddamn important?
ReplyDeleteThe week after that, it'll be that the laminate will wear off your plan ID card more easily than your old one.
ReplyDeleteObviously a plot to make the sharp unlaminated edges cut people's fingers, which will make them go to the emergency room where Obama's GOON SQUAD OF DOCTORS will use the blood sample to create a NATIONAL ID DATABASE! You won't hear this in the MSM, people!
This should totally be a Wingnut Set.
ReplyDelete"See government be canceling your policy like this but the Free Market be canceling your policy like *Intersperses AA-OOGAH noises with Randian OOGA-BOOGA* ... Reagan."
It really appeals to all the core conservative messages: comfortable myths about how equivalent actions between the public sector and private sector are somehow different/Black Hitler Gambits, hyperventilating about stuff taking time (there's that temperamental conservatism for you) and racial minstrelsy to balm unreconstructed racial/sexual/heteronormative reactionary impulses.
I mean did anyone see that poll about Republicans and blackface? Seriously. You can't even make this shit up anymore.
Yes, the latter is a real possibility. Still and all, the right-wing noise machine has been enormously successful--especially in this hiatus leading up to the rollout of the ACA--in portraying Obama as a progressive/socialist/communist/whatevah, which he certainly is not.
ReplyDeleteIt's not surprising, though, that it's the mouthbreathers that are the only ones taken in by that propagandizing. They didn't care a whit about him from the get-go.
I sometimes apply the "How ridiculous will this look in the history textbooks" test to see just how loony our body politic is getting. 50 years from now, there will be a lot of sentences like "A health-insurance industry reform bill sparked almost a decade of political dysfunction in America, coming close to open sedition or the breakdown of the federalist system multiple times." Oh, how our grandchildren will laugh! Assuming they're not all dead by then.
ReplyDeleteOnce our Obamachips are implanted, we won't need cards, of course.
ReplyDeleteYou cant make it up but you really, really, wish you could.
ReplyDeleteOh, I think David Barton getting Tea Party support to run for the Senate will have them chortling long before that decade has run. Especially the part about Politico referring to him as an "historian."
ReplyDeleteCan we just say that what was going on in Benghazi was that the embassy staff was developing a plan to enhance Social Security benefits and establish a public option, but Obama found out through an NSA wiretap and ordered the whole thing terminated with extreme prejudice by gay terrorists who won't say Merry Christmas? That would validate like all the conspiracy theories at once.
ReplyDeleteOnly because libruls won't shell out for my vanity ebook project like the good conservative rubes would.
ReplyDeleteEventually, it'll be "Benghazi" and "skree."
ReplyDeleteIf by "eventually" you mean "right now" then yes.
Having read some right-wing fiction over the last few years, I'm consistently amazed at how small and petty their dystopias are. I guess when you're sheltered enough, any inconvenience can seem like tyranny.
ReplyDeleteThrow in something about guns and Big Gulps, and we're set.
ReplyDeleteAlas, martyrdom envy is not restricted to the right by any means. Your old friend wants to believe that the President is secretly in the league with the GOP because it makes him feel smarter than everyone else for "knowing" it. It would be funny if it weren't so common.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's shocking that signing up on the very first day something is available might not be a smooth experience.
ReplyDeleteSo in the cartoon on the second page Obama is telling the guy that he gets to keep his pallbearers, but he's lying like the Kenyan socialist he is, so the guy in the coffin doesn't get to die? That's as much sense as I can make out of it.
ReplyDeletean event that could not have been foreseen unless you had been paying attention to the news
ReplyDeleteIOW, the same people who despise the "liberal media" until they want something from it. (And they always get it.)
four nonstop years of max-volume SKREEEE and they're still going
ReplyDeleteIt's quite astonishing, their endurance, isn't it? I moved cross-country with a cat, and while she didn't stop meowing, she did get pretty hoarse by the second day.
Would that the skreeing achieve the same sort of pathetic, scratchy quality.
"Right-whinge hysterics" merits an upvote on its own.
ReplyDeleteWhat kills me is the hysteria in the media - not even the right-wing media but their dreaded MSM - about how only six people signed up through the website on its first day. Now this is true as far as it goes, keeping in mind that Obama and Sebelius have already admitted that the website was thoroughly fucked at the beginning. So does that mean that since then only six people have been signing up per day? Mouthbreathers might in fact think that, but no. It means that one particular way of signing up wasn't much used for a certain period of time. Several weeks after the fact that one day is trotted out as proof of the plan's failure, which is kind of like flunking a student who wasn't ready to take the midterm on the first day of class.
ReplyDeleteObama has decided what constitutes adequate insurance for Americans.
ReplyDeleteThey really don't understand how laws are made, do they?
"Ominated" is this week's word. Truly inspired.
ReplyDeleteThey also don't understand what constitutes adequate insurance.
ReplyDeleteFunny how they are against a national ID database, but are totally for state ID's as a prerequisite for voting.
ReplyDeleteYeah, with Texas calling the shots on textbook purchases nationally, this joke isn't very funny.
ReplyDeleteNeeds more black helicopters, emphasis on black, IYKWIMAITTYD,,,
ReplyDeleteTaranto quotes an emailer complaining about losing her great health insurance, and having to pay "extra" now for maternity coverage even though she is beyond childbearing age. (Similar to Renee Ellmers (R-Surprise!) grilling Sebelius "To your knowledge, has a man ever delivered a baby?" and claiming that "This is why premiums are going up, because we are forcing people to buy coverage they will never need.") Of course, this exhibits a profound ignorance about how universal health insurance works, or the concept of insurance, period. And I bet that, just like mine does, Taranto's health insurance covers maternity care. What wingers really need is a policy that covers chronic sociopathy, but alas, their case is usually too severe for treatment.
ReplyDeleteYou also have to love all their faux-hysteria about ACA's "socializing an industry," and the ensuing collapse of the entire country. I mean, they do know about the "Medicare" thing don't they?
...this exhibits a profound ignorance about how universal health insurance works, or the concept of insurance, period.
ReplyDeleteThe GEICO gekko is the new Stalin.
GOPers have finally found a calling: Hall Monitors for the ACA Website.
ReplyDelete"To your knowledge, has a man ever delivered a baby?" and claiming that "This is why premiums are going up, because we are forcing people to buy coverage they will never need.") Of course, this exhibits a profound ignorance about how universal health insurance works,
ReplyDeleteIt also exhibits a profound ignorance about how people wind up needing maternity coverage. To my knowledge no woman has ever delivered a baby without a man being involved at some stage of the proceedings.
And those chips? Chocolate.
ReplyDeleteObviously no good at all. The giggest change in national public policy since medicare, millions of people added to medicaid including single men, creation of a national right to health insurance and the whole thing is simply meaningless because of the computer interface. I saud the same thing about the birth if my first child. The whole process was ridiculously painful and messy so i handed her to the nurse and told them to throw her out with the trash.
ReplyDeleteHall monitor of the apocalypse.
ReplyDeleteMy mother calls this "the cult of the savvy." It goes along with priding oneself on being shrewd, iconoclastic, and never buying retail or showing something as low class as enthusiasm or team spirit.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure Sibelius had to bite back the response, "Do you know where babies come from?" Although given the quality of sex education in the red states, he likely doesn't.
ReplyDeleteMilk chocolate. "My half" is white, as the guy Asif Mandvi interviewed pointed out.
ReplyDeleteFind an undertaker and see if any of the bodies they've dealt with ever gave a shit who their pallbearers were, or whether their coffins were shiny enough, or sat up and critiqued the flower arrangements. It's trying to make a joke about how Obamacare is going to kill all of us (skree!) but the problem with that attempted joke is that we're all going to die. Many of us are going to die unpleasantly in hospitals with tubes rammed into several orifices, and it's going to be expensive no matter where the bills go, and there's going to be a ton of paperwork, and it's going to suck for everyone involved. I don't try to make jokes about death 'cause I'm not Mel Brooks. This cartoonist isn't even funny enough to be one of Mel's socks.
ReplyDeleteI am one of the people who is losing their present coverage because of ObamaCare. The plan that I and Mrs. Derelict are enrolled in disappears come January 1. So, we have no choice but to venture out into the new exchange for our state.
ReplyDeleteThus far, the policy we've found that most closely matches our present coverage reduces our monthly premium from $505 a month to $495 a month. However, in exchange for that $10 a month saving, our deductible goes from $500 each to $1,250 each, with an additional $750 each out-of-pocket for drug coverage.
So, yeah--we're among the Americans getting a worse deal from ACA. I'm not happy about it, but I still don't think the law is bad, or that it should be repealed. It is part of the price we have to pay to make America move one half-inch closer to being like every other industrialized nation on the planet.
They really don't understand...
ReplyDeleteWhat on earth makes you imagine they want to understand anything at all? They might have to give up some of the precious, precious butthurt they've worked all their lives for. They built that, and now some dark-skinned moocher wants to take it away.
As Bismarck should have said, "People with weak brains. . . "
ReplyDeleteWhat state are you in?
ReplyDeleteVT
ReplyDeleteIs it possible to get a plan that's not as close to what you used to have, but cheaper, and still adequate for your needs?
ReplyDeleteThe trade-off is always between premiums and deductibles. So we can save some on the premiums by risking huge hits with deductibles. At my age, that's not a good gamble.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how many people are freaking because they're trying to get a plan from the same insurance company that they used to have; I'm also curious as to how many of these policies are being cancelled because they've got a clause buried in there somewhere to the effect of "If you ever really need serious medical care, we can drop you like a hot potato, even if you're in the middle (literally with the needle in your arm) of chemotherapy." Or, you know, just generally why policies are being cancelled.
ReplyDeleteAlso, have to love this line from Roy's Veev article: "The upshot for rightbloggers was that Obama is a liar and would not be elected for a third term."
Eh, my hope is that Texas calling the shots on what goes into textbooks will simply further speed the demise of the textbook publishers. I was an independent publisher's rep for a number of years and to be blunt, it's a racket. The whole reason the entire educational system has to switch to a new teaching method or curriculum every 5 - 6 years is so the publishers can sell their overpriced books. (Typical cost per student is now somewhere in the $100 range for texts; back in the mid-90's, it was about $40.) Now the publishers are so consolidated that there's a virtual monopoly and they are so burdened with debt that their primary focus is on keeping shareholders happy while servicing that debt, which tells you where "quality instructional materials" ranks on their priority list. Just to give you an idea of what their drive to consolidate has done to prices, a book I was selling in 2000 for $16 is now priced at $37. And it's the same book with no revisions - in other words, they haven't spent a penny on changing it, they're just selling it for two and a half times as much. Not surprisingly, at the same time they started gobbling each other up to form behemoth publishing houses, they also axed the independents in favor of company reps, with salaries less than a third of what the independents were making in commissions. Of course they pick up the expenses for employees which they didn't do for independents, but they also work them like they're salt miners. I tried the company rep gig for a very brief stretch - worked twice as much for a third of the pay. I hope they do succeed in putting themselves out of business, the greedy fucks.
ReplyDeleteWHY MUST I PAY FOR THAT ROAD ACROSS TOWN I SHALL NEVER USE THIS CONCEPT IS WELL BEYOND ME
ReplyDeletethe skree is strong in this one...
ReplyDeleteThis already, infamously, came up and I believe a Democratic congresswoman shot back to the Republican at the hearing "your mother was grateful for the coverage."
ReplyDeleteUprated for all caps, uprated for lack of punctuation, but downgraded for proper spelling.
ReplyDeleteBenghazi and Skree. Two cops--joined at the "hip"! On FX this winter.
ReplyDeleteHoly shit. Challenging a new "poll tax" requirement on the grounds that you consider the mandatory photo ID to be the Mark of the Beast. It wouldn't win, but the head-exploding casualties would be worth it.
ReplyDeleteI'm really sorry about that, Derelict. Can I ask whether the busting of the lifetime caps and the cap on out of pocket expenses is something that hasn't changed or that you don't value? Also, do you know that your insurance company wasn't going to raise your deductible and your rates simultaneously if the ACA hadn't gone into effect? I guess I think there is such incredible imprecision in our knowledge of what our insurance companies were doing, and why, that we can't really ascribe to Obamacare what we ought to understand was a side effect of the insurance scam in the first place. Over at Balloon Juice they've been running a very interesting series of blog posts by an insurance guy about exactly how the plans we were on were priced, and what kinds of jiggery pokery the ACA has to go through, on a state by state basis, to try to bring everyone under the umbrella in a financially feasible way.
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying that the costs you are facing aren't high--they are--but they don't seem at all out of line for regular insurance at all. Our employer based healthcare has a 6000 a year deductible and as far as I can see, with a four person family, nothing was ever covered until the ACA. We paid the entire bill for my husband's two ambulance trips to the hospital when he had to be taken there a couple of years ago, and most years, since we don't meet the deductible, we basically pay everything out of pocket.
Talking Points memo, for once, does some journalism and discovers what should have been pretty obvious: insurance companies are not obliged to tell you that they will be offering you a better plan on the exchanges, and that you can get a subsidy for your coverage there. So a lot of these "roll over" letters that people are getting (and that is what a lot of them are: roll over not cancellation) are or were an attempt to get people to panic and sign on to a new, expensive policy before the exchanges openened and you got a look at what would be available to you. In fact Kentucky, I think, has sued one of the big insurance providers for false advertising and scare tactics and forced them to rescind the expensive policies and let people go on the exchanges.
ReplyDeleteFascinating. Thanks for posting that.
ReplyDeleteI'm aware of the advantages you point out re: lifetime caps and such. My point in the original post was that the ACA eliminated the plan I'm on, forcing me into the exchange where I can't get equivalent coverage. Even the most expensive plan available has higher deductibles. I'm not happy, but I'll live with the incremental cost increase.
ReplyDeleteAnd I've had the kind of coverage you had [have]: HUGE deductibles that made the policy essentially catastrophic coverage only.
Years ago when I did political consulting, I had the "pleasure" of attending many Republican fundraisers. Back then, the topic of healthcare came up with surprising frequency. The standard GOP line at the time wasn't anything about socialism--instead, the thing I heard most often was some variant of "Do you know how much your taxes would have to go up to pay for universal healthcare?"
To which my response was: My taxes could go up $18,000 a year and I'd break even with my current $12,000 a year in premiums and $6,000 deductible."
That would be , right? Urge to smash... rising.
ReplyDeleteBill and Hillary made the ad that was a couple reading the news that, under certain insurance policies - you may die.
ReplyDeleteOk, I hear you and I get where you are coming from but I do find the expression "forcing you onto the exchange" to be somewhat strange. The exchange is a gigantic favor to everyone since it puts all the available plans at your finger tips without your having to rely on an insurance salesman to help you pick through it. It also forced the insurance companies to look at other people's offerings and bring their own offerings in line. The exchange isn't some kind of insurance Siberia--its a highly controlled marketplace where individuals are finally able to gain access to larger pools of shared risk despite the best efforts of insurance companies to keep you tied to proprietary plans and threaten you with permanent loss of the plan if you tried to switch.
ReplyDeleteOther intangible benefits to you and to all of us are the ability to switch providers and even move states without losing insurance coverage.
"To my knowledge no woman has ever delivered a baby without a man being involved at some stage of the proceedings."
ReplyDeleteI've only heard tell of one, and he turned out just about as you would expect of a boy with no father.
All true. My larger point is that I'm one of the actual people who had their insurance "canceled" as a direct result of ACA--I'm not some hypothetical case--and I'm NOT demanding that the law be rescinded, defunded, delayed, or destroyed.
ReplyDeleteUnlike the screeching rightwing morons who are not affected, but dare to think they speak for me.
They're also not paying the authors commensurate with the rise in price - so that's not where the money is going. I have a friend who wrote a textbook - best-selling in the field, undergrad survey course. He gets paid royalties twice annually, and each check that comes in has a very hefty deduction for photo rights - the rights for photos that the publisher, not he, chose to illustrate the text comes out of his royalties.
ReplyDelete...the rights for photos that the publisher, not he, chose...
ReplyDeleteMy goodness, I wonder who owns the rights to those photos and is on the receiving end of your friend's involuntary largesse? Hmmmm...
Having written many chapters for a series of history textbooks coming out this year, I can tell you that they paid us freelancers fairly well for the work, but it was flat fees with no royalties.
ReplyDeleteThat's getting awfully close to Megan McArglebarble territory!
ReplyDeleteYes, she's in the dictionary right next to the definition. But I'd also put a lot of the permanently disaffected anti Obama left in that category. They really, really, really value thinking of themselves as sturdy iconoclasts so if they supported Obama it was before he was even cool, and they stopped supporting him when he became old and boring and obviously nothing more than another sell out band.
ReplyDeletes the cost and availability of ipad-type devices to students grows, the dead-tree text books will dwindle. And states, counties and even cities can demand modifications (or make them themselves) to suit their particular needs.
ReplyDeleteConsider the amazing, wonderful usefulness of ipads at the Pompeii excavations.
http://classics.uc.edu/pompeii/index.php/news/1-latest/142-ipads2010.html
Somewhere there is a picture of a young, sexy, 16 year old me in a hard hat hand drawing sections in a Neolithic dig in England. Ipads? We'd have been laughing, I can tell you! We had to melt our own lead for our pencils in those days.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't Vermont try to implement single-payer on his own but this was delayed because of the ACA?
ReplyDeleteTwo Heads! Two Right Arms! No Brains!
ReplyDeleteThat's the long-term goal here. It won't come soon enough. Even my primary-care doc wants single-payer ASAP.
ReplyDelete"Oh well, reverend Morrison... in your policy.... It states quite clearly that no claim you make will be paid."
ReplyDelete"You see, you unfortunately plumped for our 'Neverpay' policy, which, you know, if you never claim is very worthwhile... but you had to claim, and, well, there it is."
http://youtu.be/kO2R_DDZPCM
there's a lot they don't understand. like how paying for wars will increase the debt and the fact that Congress controls the purse strings and that the President can't spend our money.
ReplyDeleteYes, but we were happy then.
ReplyDeleteBut even that misses the main point, which is that none of us have made it into this world without a pregnant woman being involved in the process. So no, the bepenised may not use maternity coverage for themselves for their own personal bodies, but they came out of a woman who did either use or need it.
ReplyDeleteSomething that gets left out of a lot of the anaylses and critiques is what premiums under these old plans would be going forward, especially if you are staying on them for the long term. I switched from my old grandfathered PPO in early 2012 to escape the 25% increase about to occur from turning 55, and obtained a slightly lower premium than the previous year in exchange for increasing my deductible form $4k to $5.2k. There were no economic reasons to stay on the grandfathered plan, assuming my bet that I wouldn't need to spend up to the higher deductible paid off (which it did).
ReplyDeleteI am in the highest-risk premium tier, so am seeing quite a bit of benefit from PPACA, due to the new "community rating" and flattening of the age-based risk pricing: the Platinum plan I will be rolled into (if I don't choose one of the other plans) will lower my premiums by 22% and reduce my deductible from $5.2k to $0. Even better, it will provide doctor, Rx, and lab services at low fixed-dollar co-pays rather than the "patient pays for everything up to the deductible" structure of my current plan. (This is all without any tax credit or benefits).
My old 2006-2010 grandfathered plan still exists, and looking up the 2014 rates on a regulatory filing shows it would cost north of $1,500/mo. next year, while the "most expensive" PPACA Platinum plan comes in at $800.
So the Brits are trying to export their socialistic ways to us.
ReplyDeleteWell, to be (overly) fair, it *is* somewhat surprising that it had so many problems right off, which apparently nobody anticipated; couldn't they have gotten a better development team, say Google? (then a year later they cancel the site for the new Healthcare+)
ReplyDeleteAnd of course the media and the right-wing immediately begin hyperventilating, which is their default mode of dealing with the real world.
A big part of the problem was the GOP's game-playing with funding for the rollout, which led to a lot of the issues. There were also a lot of deadlines which were near-impossible to meet, and designed that way.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that makes a lot of sense; and deadlines are always impossible to meet, anyway, speaking from experience.
ReplyDeleteAnd don't forget the atheist Muslims too!
ReplyDelete