Sunday, November 17, 2013
NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...
...about the Obamacare keep-your-plan fix and how, rightbloggers insist, it can't possibly work. All players in this game -- insurers, rightbloggers, and Obama -- are doing everything they can to get the most they can out of it; but while the insurers are trying to supplement their already massive payday, and rightbloggers are trying to win future elections, Obama seems to be trying to get a national health care system to work. How he became the villain in all this will be a fruitful study for future generations, if we have any.
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Pay or DIe!
ReplyDeleteIs there a flag for that? A coiled stethoscope broken into 13 pieces?
I'm not sure it can work, but not for any of the reasons rightbloggers are. I think in most cases, insurers aren't going to continue the plans, even though they can for current enrollees.
ReplyDeleteI learned (Kevin Drum?) that the recently cancelled policies are particularly cheap because the insurance companies knew they would end on Jan 1 2014, so no tail risk of paying out for YEARS. It would be amusing if they lost a lot of money (Yeah, right) on an extra year.
ReplyDeleteIf only someone would out the damn insurers. The president of the United States has given them great cover. Time for #askWellPoint.
ReplyDeleteYeah, "can" seems nought to do with "want." The profits, they are not cummy enough.
ReplyDeleteObama seems to be trying to get a national health care system to work.
ReplyDeleteWhere's Liz Fowler when we really need her?
http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/healthcare_expert_for_sale.php
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All players in this game -- insurers, rightbloggers, and Obama -- are
ReplyDeletedoing everything they can to get the most they can out of it
......
Obama seems to be trying to get a national health care system to work.
How he became the villain in all this will be a fruitful study for
future generations, if we have any.
It's pretty much, "The Good, the Bad, and the Crazy" out there.
More like a colonoscope...
ReplyDeleteGahhh... Max Baucus... *shudder*
ReplyDeleteMy local paper had two batsh*t op-eds today from syndicated (I think WaPo) columnists about how Obamacare was going to ruin Obama's presidency and the Democratic Party's chances of election forever. And one short piece from a local self-employed person who hasn't been able to afford even catastrophic coverage for the last seven years and now has (or is about to have) decent coverage for, if memory serves, $64/month net. I dropped my catastrophic coverage when it became a catastrophe every single month, a few years back, but fortunately am now on my partner's plan. Something tells me we need to get the good-news stories out there. Sheesh.
ReplyDeletePicture of a bankruptcy filing, on a red (ink) background, with the words "Come And Take It" below.
ReplyDeleteHere's looking up your old address!
ReplyDeleteShorter rightwing: There will be more suffering? Hooray!
ReplyDeleteI read that these policies typically are held for between 6 and 18 months, because the policy-holders either drop them when their situations change or the insurance companies cancel them whenever policy holders try to make claims on them, or annually, whichever occurs first.
ReplyDeleteSo, yeah, it's great that we tweaked the system to accommodate these folks, who represent, what, 2% of the population? While not talking about all the poor people in the states held by Republican governors who chose not to accept the Medicaid expansion, denying them coverage.
The next time I hear a conservative blaming the runaway vulgarity of our culture on liberalism, I'll have to remind them that it was their hopenchangecartoons.com that brought Sim fisting into our political discourse.
ReplyDeleteThat does seem to be the missing piece. I mean, that was the business plan for health insurers for years: squeeze money out of the healthy, cut loose the sick. The new law basically guarantees a profit for insurers who, you know, _insure_. There's not going to be money in selling non-insurance to the healthy anymore. Good!
ReplyDeleteAh, like term vs. whole life?
ReplyDeleteThe funny thing about the insurer shit fit is that it lays bare exactly what the mandate was all about: if healthy people are allowed to opt out and buy "catastrophic" non-coverage coverage, the risk pool shifts and the resources to care for the sick are in shorter supply.
ReplyDeleteInsurers should be smarter than wingnuts, but that doesn't see to be borne out by events.
We might be discovering that insurers *are* wingnuts. I won't faint from the surprise, if it is so.
ReplyDeleteJesus, rightie humor really is recoil-inducingly horrible.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure there's an overlap. How broad that overlap is, I don't know. What I do know is that they're taking the opportunity to serve the wingnut side of the equation.
ReplyDeleteDo the wingnuts realise how ridiculous their fear of Obamacare looks like from over either ocean - or even from over your northern border?
ReplyDeleteOh, it goes back a lot further than that. I was "blessed" to spend some quality time down south in many of the GOP strongholds back in the late '70s. Crude bumper stickers with crass sayings were par for the course even back then. One of my particular favorite household items was a series of dish towels with homey aphorisms such as "Never whittle toward yourself or piss against the wind." I know that's the kind of language I'd want any third-grader learning at home!
ReplyDeleteShorter Republicans:
ReplyDeleteCollective action problems: features, not bugs.
For right-wingers there are no over-the-ocean people to worry about, even less so their opinions. It's like a wingnut Saul Steinberg cover. To the east is Socialist Europe, or as old-schoolers call it, the USSR, then come terrorists, war zones and places to invade for oil 'n shit. Over the Pacific are land cars, cheap electronics, and computer stuff. Then it's brown people all the way. So, you know, Mexico.
ReplyDeleteTo us furriners, Obamacare itself, as compared to other countries' health care plans, looks ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteBaby steps, we're hoping.
We were just having a discussion of this issue this morning, Mr. Aimai and I. We came to the conclusion that "in the short run we are all dead."
ReplyDeleteBut I don' tthink it is great cover. As soon as the President said "you can keep your policies" the insurance companies squealed like pigs and began begging and hectoring to be allowed to drop the coverage. That seems like it might be a bit less like "cover" and more like "exposure."
ReplyDeleteI know I'm always bringing up Albion's Seed here but the section on the long, long, history of crude expressions among the Appalachian descendants of the Scots/Irish borderers is pretty jaw dropping. You can still hear the shock as the earliest ethnographers and visitors to these regions, in the 17th century, discovered elderly grandmothers referring fondly to their infant grandchildren as "the little shits."
ReplyDeleteAs always, the Simpsons got there first:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SITblTidzT0
You pretty much *have* to be a wingnut to be an insurer when your business model is essentially "take someone's money and do literally *everything* to keep from paying out when they (inevitably) get sick at some point in their lives,".
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure, have you seen the bronze plans?
ReplyDeleteThe fact that these policies are total shit policies that don't pay when it hits the fan is really something that should be a HUGE part of this story, but no. It's just as taboo as mentioning all the people who could be insured by the Medicaid expansion if they didn't live in rethug-governed states.
ReplyDeleteI recall thinking it was strange how quiet all the current suspects were when ACA passed, like "hmm, they sure gave up all of a sudden". How silly of me; this crap was the plan B (and C, D, E....... really, there will be plenty more iterations).
ReplyDeleteAnd one short piece from a local self-employed person who hasn't been able to afford even catastrophic coverage for the last seven years and now has (or is about to have) decent coverage for, if memory serves, $64/month net.
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure. Have you seen the bronze plans? Without exception, they're apparently worse than no health insurance coverage at all. Sure, previously-uninsured people might be grateful now, especially if they have pre-existing conditions, but just wait until they have to deal with obscenely high dedeductibles and co-pays instead of having all costs be out-of-pocket.
So how come ALL the other fish-belly white Anglophone countries (including insignificant afterthoughts like Australia) have reasonable universal health care, despite being run by Rupert's incompetent lackeys for much of the last 50 years? American exceptionalism, you're soaking in it.
ReplyDeleteI think it depends on the plan; I had a bronze Fallon plan last year, and a bronze Neighborhood Health this(in Mass, I got the NHP via the exchange), and both were great.
ReplyDeleteSo what you're saying is, I need to edit my comment to add explicit sarcasm tags? And here I hoped I had managed to turn it up to eleven. Guess I'm just too much of an optimist.
ReplyDeleteDARN YOU! Darn you to heck!
ReplyDeleteA national healthcare system was torpedoed in the mid 20th century largely because it would have integrated Southern hospitals.
ReplyDeleteVance Randolph's Pissing in the Snow, a collection of bawdy Ozark tales, is required reading for anyone interested in this subject.
ReplyDeleteIn the NC mountains, babies are now referred to as "it." Very strange to hear someone complain that, "It's crying."
ReplyDeleteE pluribus unum?
ReplyDeleteHaystack's comment about regretting that we furriners may seem dickish or smug seconded, but I still do not understand how the hell the Republicans expect to get anything but destroyed by publicly opposing even the cited ridiculous baby steps, 50 years after the Kennedys and LBJ.
Insuring only the healthy was only one way for insurance companies to make money. Their chief weapons were...
ReplyDeleteWell: limiting access to the presumably healthy, recissioning the sick, refusing to cover things they should have covered, writing policies to exclude common complaints and illnesses, changing rules relating to coverage or network, and churning people through plans so that they collect premiums and move the client on or dump them before the client needs the care.
The treatment of all insurance policies as equivalent - "You got insurance, quit yer whinin'" - reminds me of the way the Redoublechins consider all jobs equivalent. If you have a job, even though you don't make enough to live on, you can just shut up and any kind of difficulty you have is due to your own Poor Life Choices.
ReplyDeleteI picked up on the snark, but it took me reading it twice - I think snip "apparently" from before "worse than no health insurance coverage at all." (er, pardon my snark doctoring.)
ReplyDelete"I know that's the kind of language I'd want any third-grader learning at home!"
ReplyDeleteReally, they should learn it in 2nd grade on the school ground like I did
Mainly because "socialized medicine" has been thoroughly and successfully demonized for all of those 50 years.
ReplyDeleteOf course their contempt level increases exponentially for people who DON'T have jobs.
ReplyDeleteI stopped reading and checked the writer (mds!). I thought "HE'S not a troll." Sometimes snark just passes over one's head.
ReplyDelete'cause in America capitalism=democracy. We're taught that democracy (which is holy, especially when protected with 'teh people's' guns) isn't possible in any other political scheme than CAPITALISM!!11!!11
ReplyDeleteYep. I not only knew the f-word before I turned 8, I also knew what it meant.
ReplyDeleteAnd look at me, I turned out fucking great! I only say "cocksucker" in mixed company occasionally.
Not government jobs. Those aren't real jobs. Cutting them hurts no one.
ReplyDelete