COVID-19 & Healthcare

David Cay Johnston on seriously flawed reporting on ‘ObamaCare’

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

[T]he headline atop the front page of The New York Times Monday morning: “Talk of Penalty is Missing in Ads for Health Care.” I damn near spit out my coffee when I saw that mosleading headline — from a Times reporter no less.

Tax expert David Cay Johnston at the National Memo had the same reaction. Obamacare Penalized By Flawed Reporting In The New York Times:

News flash – there is no penalty for failing to get health insurance under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

Reporter Anemona Hartocollis built an entire piece around a faulty premise, stated clearly in her third sentence.  Times editors embraced her flawed reporting with the gusto of prominent placement, giving unwarranted credibility to what is, to be polite, a pile of misinformation.

Had Hartocollis read the law – or had any of the dozen or so Times editors who review every Page One story done so – they would not have published such nonsense anywhere in the paper.

* * *

Had anyone at the Times read the law, they would know that is bunk. Here is what the law says, with statutory numbering removed:

WAIVER OF CRIMINAL PENALTIES. – In the case of any failure by a taxpayer to timely pay any penalty imposed by the section, such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalties with respect to such failure.

LIMITATIONS ON LIENS AND LEVIES. – The Secretary [read IRS] shall not – file notice of lien with respect to any property of a taxpayer by reason of any failure to pay the penalty imposed by this section, or levy on any such property with respect to such failure.

There is a simple way for the world’s most authoritative newspaper to stop embarrassing itself this way – require reporters to actually read the laws they write about, a policy I suggested when I was a reporter there, obviously to no avail.

PDA Meeting: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Affordable Care Act (and Healthcare Reform)

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by Pamela Powers Hannley The Affordable Care Act (ACA) and healthcare reform, in general, will be the focus of PDA Tucson’s general membership meeting on Thursday, Nov. 14. Andrea Witte (the Connect the Dots Lady) will present the updated version of “The American Healthcare CrazyQuilt”, which looks at how the US healthcare system evolved into the … Read more

Dean Baker on the media hysteria over ‘If you like your insurance, you can keep it’

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Dean Baker has a must-read post at the Huffington Post for all those panicky Democrats in Congress — and also Bill Clinton — who care more about the politics of elections than getting public policy right on health care. The media focus should be on the regulation of predatory insurers engaged in consumer fraud, not on a campaign pledge President Obama made. The media is giving these predatory insurers a pass. The Obama Pledge on Keeping Your Insurance:

President Obama has been getting a lot of grief in the last few weeks over his pledge that with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in place, people would be able to keep their insurance if they like it. The media have been filled with stories about people across the country who are having their insurance policies terminated, ostensibly because they did not meet the requirements of the ACA. While this has led many to say that Obama was lying, there is much less here than meets the eye.

First, it is important to note that the ACA grand-fathered all the individual policies that were in place at the time the law was enacted. This means that the plans in effect at the time that President Obama was pushing the bill could still be offered even if they did not meet all the standards laid out in the ACA.

The plans being terminated because they don't meet the minimal standards were all plans that insurers introduced after the passage of the ACA. Insurers introduced these plans knowing that they would not meet the standards that would come into effect in 2014. Insurers may not have informed their clients at the time they sold these plans that they would not be available after 2014 because they had designed a plan that did not comply with the ACA. [i.e., consumer fraud]

However if the insurers didn't tell their clients that the new plans would only be available for a short period of time, the blame would seem to rest with the insurance companies, not the ACA. After all, President Obama did not promise people that he would keep insurers from developing new plans that will not comply with the provisions of the ACA.

Ezra Klein: President Obama should not apologize

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

All this faux outrage from the conservative media entertainment complex and Tea-Publican politicians over insurance cancellation notices is a disgusting spectacle to behold.

Essentially what the right-wing is arguing for is continuation of the status quo of a health insurance market that was completely broken. One where people were at the mercy of unscrupulous insurance companies who would sell you a crappy health insurance policy with a low premium, but with high out-of-pocket costs and no coverage for serious illness or medical procedures, preexisting condition exclusions, annual limits — and frequently cancelled after its term of one year expired. Consumers with a pre-exisitng condition were uninsurable at any price.

In essence, the right-wing is defending health insurance consumer fraud and victimizing consumers. The fact that some people are happy with being victimized by insurers with a crappy health insurance policy and no coverage speaks more to their shortcomings — "please take my money for nothing in return, i love throwing my money away!" These are not the kind of people who should determine sound public policy.

Ezra Klein argues Obama shouldn’t apologize for blowing up the terrible individual market:

NBC's Chuck Todd asked President Obama about the people losing their
health insurance despite his promise that "anyone who likes their plan
can keep it." (See the video and read the transcript here.)

"I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me," Obama replied.

The answer is a bit of a dodge. People aren't finding themselves in
this situation based on the president's promises. They're finding
themselves in this situation based on his policy. And Obama isn't
apologizing for the policy.

"Before the law was passed, a lot of these plans, people thought they
had insurance coverage," he said. "And then they'd find out that they
had huge out of pocket expenses. Or women were being charged more than
men. If you had preexisting conditions, you just couldn't get it at
all."

Obama was wrong to promise that everyone who liked their insurance
could keep it. For a small minority of Americans, that flatly isn't
true. But the real sin would've been leaving the individual insurance
market alone.