Category Archives: Health care

By Lambert Strether. Originally published at Corrente.

Kaiser Health News:

Some of the millions of poor people expected to lose out on Obamacare coverage next year because their states are not expanding Medicaid might have a way to get help, but the strategy carries risk.

Experts say the key is for them to project their 2014[*] income to at least the federal poverty level, about $11,500 per person or $23,500 for a family of four.

From his latest presser, Obama’s partisan perspective on ObamaCare:

[OBAMA:] Now, I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail, their number-one priority.

However, from the public purpose perspective, the really interesting question is why our “friends” in both parties refuse to put truly universal coverage — for example, single payer Medicare for All — on the table at all. Remember, ObamaCare is, pathetically, projected to enroll only 7 million people in its first year, and when fully implemented will leave about as many uninsured as newly insured — 25 or 30 million, but with “these people,” who’s counting?

By lambert strether of Corrente.

And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

In this series, we’ve been looking at how ObamaCare, through its inherent system architecture, relentlessly creates first- and second-class citizens; how it treats people who should be treated equally unequally, for whimsical or arbitrary reasons. It’s all in the luck of the draw! If you live in the right place or have the right demographic, you go to Happyville. If you don’t, you go to Pain City.

By lambert strether of Corrente.

And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.” –Henry Chao, HHS, of the ObamaCare Federal Exchange

“Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.” –Henry Chao, HHS, of the ObamaCare Federal Exchange

UPDATE “Credit Reporting Agency Hired to Verify Incomes for Insurance Subsidies” — and lambert scooped the world at Naked Capitalism. The Times, 2013-07-17…

Will the state Exchanges launch on time? Even if the Exchanges (now also called “marketplaces”) will only cover 7 million of the 56 million uninsured in 2014, this answer to this question is still important to some; and the political fortunes of the Democratic nomenklatura are not necessarily their first concern.

Katiebird writes:

[T]his implementation issue is not a trivial thing. Many, many, many people are counting on it. They expect to have access to health insurance and for that health insurance to give them access to actual health care. I repeat: This is not trivial. It is not a game.

In Part I, we looked at the first Google hangout organized by HHS, with Julie Bataille, Director of CMS’ Office of Communications, and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, Executive Director/CEO and Co-Founder of MomsRising, at #HCgovHangout. We concluded, after categorizing and color coding the twitter stream, that the event was a public relations debacle. Today, we’re going to color code the transcript, helpfully provided, on virtually no notice, by the transcriber: Bataille and Rowe-Finkbeiner in their own words. Let’s break out our color-coding Magic Markers…..

By lambert strether of Corrente

On Tuesday, Pravda informed us that the White House was “ramping up” its efforts to market ObamaCare, and that among those efforts would be “a Google hangout Wednesday to promote its enrollment Web site,” www.healthcare.gov [sic*]. Some of us also received a mail blast giving the event details, and inviting us to submit questions via twitter to #HCgovHangout. Needless to say, many of us noted the date and submitted questions, and when the time came, we were not disappointed…. I grabbed the live stream off Google[‘s proprietary site]; here it is:

By lambert strether of Corrente. And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow As ObamaCare inches painfully closer to its October 1 launch date, we’re getting more and more detail on how the exchanges (or “marketplaces”) will actually work. By design, ObamaCare doesn’t treat health care as a right, […]

By lambert strether of Corrente.

And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

When talking about ObamaCare, single payer advocates sometimes hear “But the ACA helped me,” or “the ACA helped my sister,” and so on. Of course, a program as large as ObamaCare is bound to help somebody; it’s just that single payer advocates want everybody to be helped in the same way that you or your sister were. And that’s the problem with ObamaCare: It doesn’t treat health care as a basic human right that should be guaranteed for all. Instead, ObamaCare uses a complex and intricate Rube Goldberg-esque system of eligibility rules to throw people into various buckets by past (and projected) income, age, existing insurance coverage, jurisdiction, family structure, and market segment. In a system so complex, people will inevitably be thrown into the wrong buckets, or land between buckets, because their personal circumstances don’t mesh well with the Rube Goldberg device.* Some citizens get lucky, and go to Happyville; others, unlucky, end up in Pain City. The lucky are first-class citizens; and the unlucky, second class. In an earlier post, I gave three examples of the whimsical and arbitrary distinctions that ObamaCare makes between citizens who should be treated equally; in this post, I’d like to give three more.

By lambert strether of Corrente. And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow One of the things I hate most about ObamaCare is the vicious and relentless way that it creates first- and second-class citizens. ObamaCare does this by construction, of course: ObamaCare’s central concept of eligibility — the […]