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Since President Obama took office the percentage of uninsured people in America has been steadily raising and has now reached a new high. From Gallup:
This rise in the number of uninsured is for the most part not the fault of the Obama administration. It is primarily the result of long term trends, rising health care costs, and the huge spike in unemployment during the economic crash, as workers lost their employer-provided insurance. Some smaller aspects of the Affordable Care Act, like young adults staying on their parents’ plans, have even helped keep the level of uninsured from going even higher.
Still this development is deeply problematic for Mr. Obama. One of his biggest accomplishments that supporters tend to point to is his passage of the Affordable Care Act and its health insurance reforms.
I simply don’t know how the Administration can successfully campaign on passing a law to expand coverage, when the level of uninsured has increased significantly during Obama’s tenure. It is tough for people to see such a law is any form of a real accomplishment when over a year after its passage it hasn’t even begun to accomplish its main promises and the exact opposite is taking place in people’s lives.
Instead of campaigning on delivering for the American people with his signature legislation, Obama will be forced to explain that even though the insurance situation has gotten worse, voters need to trust his claims that his signature law will eventually improve things in the future.
“Eventual change in the future I hope you believe me about” just doesn’t have that nice campaign ring to it.
The decision to delay the start date of the primary expansion in the Affordable Care Act until 2014 should be remembered as one of the most idiotic political and policy decisions ever made. I would argue that if Obama narrowly loses in 2012, it could be the single decision that is most responsible.
The Administration reportedly supported the delays to hold down near-term costs and achieve a more favorable 10-year cost estimate from the CBO. Almost no one will remember the bill’s official CBO score come November 2012, but plenty of people will remember they haven’t seen any tangle benefits from the law Obama spent a year working on in the middle of an economic and unemployment crisis.
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“…but plenty of people will remember they haven’t seen any tangle benefits from the law …”
And they are unlikely to. My sister just saw her private Health Insurance bill soar from $1000 per month to $1200 per month. I don’t think she’s thanking Obama for the ACA right now.
I know, we can just Mandate that they buy insurance. Problem fixed. s
Obama’s amde a lot of idiotic political decisions. Delaying the implementation of the ACA is one of many. I guess the delay was another effort to get GOP support, which didn’t happen.
“This rise in the number of uninsured is for the most part not the fault of the Obama administration. It is primarily the result of long term trends, rising health care costs, and the huge spike in unemployment during the economic crash, as workers lost their employer-provided insurance.”
So how is this not Obama’s fault. He claimed he’d be solving it. Obama advancing the status quo rather than changing it is an indictment of him, not an excuse for him. Obama should not be rewarded for cutting secret backroom deals by saying those very backroom deals to keep prices inflated mean he’s not responsible for his actions against the US public.
When your goal is “preserv[ing] the private delivery of healthcare…”
We didn’t ask for Health INSURANCE, we asked for health CARE.
We got orders to get crappy insurance, which will reduce our already thin incomes and does very little for health care.
Health insurance is pretty complicated. Health care is not. Frankly, Obama’s Health act reads to me like exactly what a GOPer under court order would produce. It meets the requirements of the order, doing as little as possible in the process.
My solution: Everybody gets the same health care package as congress does and it’s paid for by a brutal tax on insurance companies along with additional business taxes for the business that no longer have to pay for health care.
Boxturtle (If congress feels that is too generous, they can reduce their benefits)
I know the saying is to never blame on evil what can adequately be explained by stupidity…..
Boxturtle (I suppose it is possible that Obama’s shoes are marked “L” or “R” on the inside heel)
Fixed it for ya.
Accomplishment? I would hide my head in shame if I’d had anything to do with this pos.
Your letting him off much too easily. Postponing the start date was just a small wave in tidal sellout to the health care industry that was ACA. We could have had universal health care if he had stood up, said that is what he is for and all he will settle for. If he had fought for it we would have had it in place by now.
Politically the delay is a mistake, that was obvious to anyone with a sense of history but ACA was a total sellout.
Obama’s gift to the uninsured is a subsidy in 2014, if you can survive until then with some money to buy insurance, and an expansion in Medicaid (over half of the cut in uninsured comes from Medicaid) where the states have budget control on their Medicaid and can refuse the expansion.
So why should we expect a decrease in uninsured – or not blame Obama when their is no decrease?
We got the same results with Obama as we would have gotten with a GOP president and Democrats in Congress that either endorse or refuse to go the frugal “Medical Savings Accounts” tax deduction will solve all problems route – we got nothing.
Which is why my activities are limited this year to real progressive Democrats – and I don’t care if a non-progressive Democrat wins or loses their race – including Obama.
Guess he should have left single payer on the table.
And sadly that is how obama and his obamabots view how we all should be covered, through mandates.
Plenty of people won’t remember ( or care to, depending upon their ultimate destination ), because they’re needlessly dead.
This is the one single issue that has been working on me since the debates and law-making over health care. ISTM the prime consideration had always been the insurance industry, not health care for us.
“real progressive Democrats” ?
What does that mean ? The progressive caucus is bigger than it’s ever been,
and what did that get ya ? mandated insurance that we don’t want.
The core of the Democratic Party is a corporate Party papau.just look how the all band together for the sake of the PARTY not to confront corruption.
This whole law was an absolute catastrophe. It should have focused on changing the incentives and size of the health care industry (providers and insurers/financiers). As has been pointed out a couple times, the way to start would be with medicare. Episodic or condition based payment structures would subvert a couple perverse incentives that are serious problems in the current health care industry. Medicare is the biggest player in the industry. Providers will adapt to it. Until the cost structures change, things will continue getting worse.
As for expanding coverage, this is why we have medicaid. Just revise the means test. This should have been the route instead of the single-payer pipe dream.
Members of Congress are covered by private insurance under the same system that covers all federal workers (about 8 million people).
Health costs are going up because the cost part is taking effect before the mandate. Having kids on their parents plan costs insurers something. The same with no preexisting condition exculusion. These may be great ideas but they are not free. Since we dont have single payer the current insurance system has to recover their cost. There may be some relief with the mandate for insurance companies to have to pay out 80% of premiums in claims but really that would not be two hard to do. Just approve a couple of extra liver transplants or other high dollar operations per 1000 covered would put most of the insurance companies, on paper at least, of paying out more than 80%.
The vast majority of govt employees can’t afford the platinum plans congress scumbags have. The plans we were offered were no better, or worse, than those offered to private sector workers. Yeah, we had a bunch of plans to choose from but shit is shit, no matter who’s peddling it.
I’ve been without insurance for at least ten years now and I don’t see anything on the horizon that is likely to change that. I’m self-employed so no employer based coverage and I don’t make nearly enough to buy my own. I guess I’ll just keep going until I drop dead. I don’t see what other choice I have.
I don’t disagree.
I was just responding to BT’s comment #6 “Everybody gets the same health care package as congress does”
As you point out, you can offer everyone the same platinum package, but if they can’t afford it, what good does it do.
If the vaunted “Private Sector” wanted to serve the whole market, it could have done so at any time throughout its history. It didn’t.
If a U.S. President were a king who wanted everyone to have health insurance, health care, or a house, it would be so. A U.S. President trying to work with 535 legislators (500 of whom did NOT support single payer or universal care)would not be able to mandate nor negotiate such a change. Not yet.
Two changes I think will be effective are the requirement that 80 cents of every dollar spent by insurers be spent on actual health care services, and the reimbursement is tied to results. If your state gov’t is smart enough, it will construct a better plan for its residents. If it can’t, or won’t, you’ll still have health care through insurance coverage; which many of us do not have now, or have not ever had unless our job included it.
The sheer number of people qualifying for subsidy guarantee that change will be effected. We’ll still have to work to get improvements, but we’ll have coverage.
When health insurance is provided through the workplace, 26% unemployment/underemployment results in loss of insurance. Employment has been essentially flat or falling since 2000.
I’m voting for Obama 2012. Not voting throws away the only opportunity to be even slightly effective in the only system which exists.
As a single, uninsured male aged 62 with a preexisting condition, the ACA will cost me $676/month with up to a $3000 deductible and co-pays. Hopefully, I’ll be able to become an ex-pat living in a democratic country before the mandate requires me to live in the gutter.
I submit that mandated coverage is worse than nothing. Really looking forward to the reimplementation of debtor’s prisons.
So much for health care reform
Remember that 2008 campaign promise that health care negotiations were going to be done live on C-SPAN, not behind closed doors with industry and Congressional insiders? Ah, good lies, good lies.
After having gone through 3 insurers in the past year, after loss of a job, getting private insurance for a month, and then getting another job with different insurer/plan, I have decided that tying health insurance/care to employment is a serious problem with our entire system and with Obama’s approach. Having insurance linked to states is also an obstacle to decent health care.
A decent system would not only be universal, but would be nationwide, and non-employment based. Every change in insurer/plan means disrupted care, often delayed care, and changes in what is covered and what is not. If you have a serious or chronic condition a loss of a job can wreak havoc on continuity of care.
My kid, age 25, lives in another state. She has had 2 different plans this past year, one was partly subsidized that she bought as an individual, the other came with a fulltime job. She has just been laid off and now has no insurance. I cannot put her on our plan because she is out of state.
Is this any way to run a health system in one of the most developed industrial countries in the world, and, as the politicians keep reminding us, the ONLY superpower?
It’s pure insanity.
The fragmentation, I had hoped, would be somewhat addressed with a nationwide public option, and then I hoped that at least the exchanges would be nationwide. Now, if I have followed developments correctly, each state will have a different system with different rules. Medicaid will vary state by state.
Personally, I am not as opposed to the mandate as I am to the continued fragmentation of the system (and the lack of a public option).
There are a few that can and do ignore the corporations -
Sadly Barney Frank is retiring so we won’t again see him doing battle with his own party just to get mild regulation passed. Wellstone is dead in what looked like an artificial EMF blast from someone – but then I’ve hung with too many folks in DC that couldn’t exactly say what they did, so I’m a conspiracy nut I guess.
You are correct – few to chose from. My choice this year is Warren to be my Senator from Mass – she is as close as I am going to get to a progressive that is a Democrat that is running for office.
Nixon’s employer mandate only was a better offer than Obama’s mandate.
The only good is that there is a pot of money for insurance company welfare via subsidized payments via the Exchanges.
If Obama approves the Vermont waiver, Vermont will take that money away from the ins. companies in 2014 and apply it to finance a state only single payer health care plan (along with using a state only payroll tax for their plan).
And that would be a good.
“Health costs are going up because the cost part is taking effect before the mandate.”
Well – no.
The mandate does nothing to control cost. It is only their to give the ins. co’s more customers because they said they needed to cover the extra cost of “no pre-existing conditions”.
Indeed there is nothing in ACA to control costs unless you believe Prof. Gruber and Obama that Exchanges will allow rational decisions where you will decide you will not spend money on over priced care that will save your life – thus saving the system money because you died.
HCR involves cuts to Medicare that are taking place this year. For example, the government will not reimburse healthcare providers (hospitals, doctors) for readmissions within 30 days for 3 common diagnoses: pneumonia, congestive heart failre, and acute MI. They want to push it to more admissions and the window to 90 days. If the hospital does not get paid by the government for a hospital admission, who do you think they will bill? Grandma and Grandpa. Collection agencies will be a calling and homes will be put up on a shitty sluggish real estate market. Good luck chuck.
There will be an outcry like you won’t believe.
Now you know why HCR was postponed until after 2012 elections.
Hospitals will either have to close or turn people away. Doctors will be telling patients to either embrace palliative care or find another doctor because they are also facing deep cuts. How can Drs. and hospitals be responsible for someone’s adherence to a medical regimen or, the fact that advanced disease does not get better? They are trying to do to healthcare what they are doing to education.
Obama had a chance to do something and he chose to give bjs to Wall Street instead. We know, we were there.