The political left may be ready to produce its version of the old National Rifle Association bumper sticker:
“I’ll give you my Obamacare when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”
No matter the health care program’s continued shortcomings, the left continues to deceive itself that all is well and continues to use verbal somersaults to convince supporters it was built so expertly that even the bad is good.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration, which Democrats claim wants to destroy Obamacare, is falling all over itself giving consumers options if they want to join up, options that if Democrats had considered might have made the 2010 health care bill more popular.
Paul Krugman, a New York Times pundit whose opinions sometimes are carried by the Chattanooga Times opinion page, is one of those true believers (or explainers, anyway). He wrote earlier this week that Republicans hated the health care bill not because they expected it would fail but because they feared it would succeed.
Only in the columnist’s mind is the latter statement true.
Republicans not only said from the beginning the health care scheme could not work as it was planned, they spelled out why it couldn’t work as planned and what would happen when it didn’t work as planned. And then things happened pretty much as they predicted.
You couldn’t necessarily keep your doctor, you couldn’t necessarily keep your plan and Americans certainly didn’t see their health care costs decrease. Not enough younger, healthier people signed up for the plans to pay for all the older, sicker people. And insurance companies, after a while, got tired of losing money on the Obamacare plans they agreed to offer and stopped offering them.
Krugman said “political reality forced [program designers] to build a Rube Goldberg device,” which in modern parlance has come to mean a confusing and/or complicated system.
Of course, his statement is typical liberal thinking: You Americans are not smart enough to make your own sound, health care decisions, so the government will create something so bewildering and make it sound so inviting that you’ll be happy to turn your health care decisions over to us.
According to Krugman, 27 million Americans did just that at one point, but less than half that many are registered now.
While the Trump administration would surely like to rid the country of the flawed program, it is doing what the Obama administration was loathe to do – allowing states to have more flexibility to offer cheaper plans.
On Monday, the administration released new regulations on the benefits the health care exchange plans can offer and how much money insurers have to devote to improving services. Those options will lower costs to consumers and allow them to choose a more affordable plan, even one from another state.
Not surprisingly, flexibility and affordability are anathema to Democrats.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said the new regulations are an end-run on Obamacare’s patient protections and would “open the door” to less comprehensive coverage.
No, they’re actually a way for more Americans who want it – but can’t afford the current plans – to buy health care coverage. If the Obama administration had seriously considered such ideas and other marketplace reforms, the program might not be on such wobbly legs.
As it is, and despite Krugman’s protestations that increases are mostly Trump’s fault, health care costs in general – driven up by the cost of Obamacare – are now so expensive that many Americans are no longer going to the doctor. The cost of plans through the Affordable Care Act increased markedly under Obama and naturally increased originally under Trump because of the uncertainty of whether Obamacare even would survive.
In a recent survey by the West Health Institute and NORC (National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago, 47 percent of respondents said they chose within the past year not to see a doctor or dentist for a routine exam or dental cleaning because of the high costs of care, 44 percent said they at least once in the past year had avoided the doctor if they were sick or hurt because of cost concerns, and 40 percent admitted they skipped a “recommended medical test or treatment.”
An Obamacare Silver Plan, for the record, has an average $4,033 deductible for individuals and $8,292 for families, and the cheaper Bronze Plan has an average $5,777 deductible for individuals and more than $11,550 for family coverage.
With those costs, most Americans, if they’re relatively healthy, will get relatively little actual “coverage” from what they’ve paid in.
So Krugman can claim that Obamacare is “remarkably stable,” and to him that may seem like a safe statement since it’s still around at all and because the left is so politically invested in keeping it, but for many who have to rely on it stability is not a reality they associate with it.