This recent exchange illustrates the conundrum the GOP faces next year in the elections.
Albright doesn’t want the Affordable Care Act repealed, which Stutzman and the Republican-controlled House have voted to do numerous times. Albright told his congressman that his monthly payment for family health coverage will drop from $3,800 to $1,700 by enrolling in a plan offered through the much-maligned law.
Albright said most of his dozen employees also are enrolling in Affordable Care Act plans and will have coverage for the first time. “If the Republican Party thinks they’re going to kill Obamacare, you guys need to realize that those nine people that I add on, are they going to vote Republican ever again if you take their health care from them?”
Stutzman responded: “No, probably not.”
If I were in charge of strategy for the GOP in the 2014 elections, I would find out how many voters in those key swing districts and states are signing up for health care for the first time and compare that number to how many voters are being "screwed over by Obamacare."
9 comments:
Uhuh
This is why Republican were so adamant about stopping the ACA before it went into effect. They know people like it, and more importantly, people need it (or something like it).
The problem with our health care system before the ACA was that it was totally slanted toward large corporations and their employees. Starting in the 80s and 90s health care costs surged upwards 10 and 20% per year because employers subsidized premiums for insurance. Employees paid the same premium no matter what age they were; large companies formed their own pool of insurees, and everyone paid the same regardless of how much they cost.
There was no incentive for employees to watch their usage (they weren't paying anything), no incentive for providers to control their costs, and very little incentive for insurers to keep costs under control (they were getting a big piece of an ever-expanding pie).
However, over time the cost of premiums started to make a big dent in employer overhead, so they started passing those increases to their employees. That didn't really slow down premium increases much, because employees were completely locked into their jobs if they want to keep their health insurance: if you have a preexisting condition, switching to a job usually means you have to wait a year before your coverage kicks in. Quitting a job to start your own business meant losing your health insurance altogether.
In the private insurance market you were basically uninsurable if you had any preexisting conditions. This made people who lost their jobs or worked for small employers extremely prone to bankruptcy if they got sick. Additionally, insurers could terminate individual policies at will for any reason -- getting sick was reason enough for them to terminate your policy. There were also lifetime limits on these policies, and many of them were quite low, easily reached with common procedures like hip implants and coronary bypasses.
The ACA fixes almost all of this. Your insurance can't be canceled arbitrarily, and you can't be denied insurance for preexisting conditions, there is no lifetime limit. That means you can be entrepreneurial and quit your corporate job without having to worry that you won't be able to get health insurance because your kid has nut allergies, or because your wife is pregnant, or you have high blood pressure.
(Continued)
On the cost side of things, unlike employer-based insurance, not everyone pays the same premium: older people pay premiums up to three times more than younger people. Smokers also pay more. That's one of the reasons that lower participation by younger people in the exchanges doesn't automatically spell doom. But because the risk pool is now everyone that the insurance company covers, rather than treating each policy holder as their own risk pool, the cost of insurance is much more uniform than it used to be.
Even though the old pay three times as much as the young, some young people still complain that they have to subsidize old people. But the old subsidize the young as well: maternity costs and birth control costs are covered, and those are things the elderly subsidize for the young. The young are also more prone to accidents (serious car accidents, etc.). And the young can still get cancer -- I know a 24-year-old woman who came down with cancer, which was covered under her parents' insurance policy because of the ACA.
And don't forget that old people still have to pay income and property taxes, which subsidize public schools, colleges and universities where the young get their educations.
The ACA isn't perfect -- it's the same Romneycare that the Heritage Foundation was pushing, after all. The insurance companies are worthless blood-sucking middlemen who should simply not exist. The ACA guarantees their continued profitability, but it also places constraints on how much profit they can make. With great profit comes great responsibility...
But the ACA is a hell of lot better than the system that we used to have. Most importantly, it provides affordable health care to individual consumers on the open market that can't be arbitrarily terminated or denied by insurance company bean counters.
But the ACA is a hell of lot better than the system that we used to have.
Hah! The thing isn't in operation yet, the unexpected hasn't even had the opportunity to crop up, the unintended hasn't had the time to show - you are in no position to claim it even works, let alone works 'better' than something else.
If it does work, will you admit it?
Mark, if you wanted everyone to have health insurance you could have had a one page law that did that.
If you wanted to lower the cost of health care, the last thing you would have done to do that was increase the demand for health care without addressing the supply.
ACA has increased the eligibility rolls for Medicaid, raising the costs for my state - therefore increasing my taxes. Every enrollee who gets a subsidy is getting tax money - therefore raising my taxes. Then, if and when my employer plan is deemed to be non-compliant I will either get a plan that costs more, or covers less.
That's two levels of tax increase and either more direct cost or less coverage. It ain't affordable, it ain't care - the only thing it is - is an act.
If it does work, will you admit it?
Sure I will*. I will also admit it if pigs fly.
Somehow I think the odds of the latter happening are slightly higher.
*I define "working" as lowering costs (as promised), increasing the number of people covered (as promised), without damaging our access to, quality of, and innovation in health care. Oh, and also doing so without bankrupting the country.
Ah, now I see why you guys would rather just criticize and not offer solutions of your own. You say things like Guard Duck's comment.
What form would this one page law take? How would it work? Details, please. But here's the real reason why you guys lose elections...
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/insurance/2009-05-28-hiddentax_N.htm
You have been paying for those folks all along, GD. The fact that you bitch about taxes now shows how very little you understand about the problems facing health care in this country.
To put it in terms you like to use Mark,
Increasing the number of people with insurance (that they are paying for dammit, so they ARE going to use it) is JUST like when you say 'increasing demand for oil from China and India'.
And just like those oil threads - you ignore supply.
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