Please, just stop the ridiculous point/counterpoint opinions in the Star

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

In recent weeks the Arizona Daily Star has taken to publishing a point/counterpoint series of opinions on Monday from McClatchy News. These opinions are invariably written by think tanks or politicians with an agenda and a partisan axe to grind. There is very little factual content and even less credible analysis. This is supposed to inform readers how exactly?

Today is a good example of this useless exercise. We have Is the Affordable Care Act hurting economic recovery? Yes: Stats show it put the brakes on hiring, by Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, which is funded in part by the pharmaceutical and medical industries (no industry-biased agenda there!), and Is the Affordable Care Act hurting economic recovery? No: Blaming the health law is a Republican sport, by Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., the only psychiatrist among the 16 medical doctors in Congress (and among the most liberal members of Congress).

The premise of the debate question is false: the main provisions of the Affordable Care Act are not even scheduled to take effect until 2014, and that depends on what the Felonious Five of the U.S. Supreme Court do with the law in its next term beginning in October. Unless time travel is possible, how is some future event that may or may not occur affecting economic recovery here and now in the present? The simple answer is that it is not.

Please, just stop the ridiculous point/counterpoint opinions. They are as useless and uninformative as the old 60 Minutes point/counterpoint segment back in the 1970s with James Kilpatrick and Shana Alexander spewing partisan invectives at one another. The media villagers find this entertaining, but it is not informative.

The correct question to have asked is how are the provisions of the Affordable Care Act that have gone into effect as a precursor to the full program in 2014 been working? Rick Ungar at Forbes Magazine — yes, Forbes Magazine — has the answer: More Solid Proof That Obamacare Is Working:

Recent data provided by the nation’s largest health insurance companies reveals that a provision of the Affordable Care Act – or Obamacare – is bringing big numbers of the uninsured into the health care insurance system.

And they are precisely the uninsured that we want– the young people who tend not to get sick.

The provision of the law that permits young adults under 26, long the largest uninsured demographic in the country, to remain on their parents’ health insurance program resulted in at least 600,000 newly insured Americans during the first quarter of 2011.

Wellpoint, the nation’s largest publicly traded health insurer with some 34 million customers, reports adding 280,000 new members in the first three months of 2011.

Add in the results of some of the other large health insurers including Aetna, who added just short of 100,000 newly insured to their customer base, Kaiser Permanente’s additional 90,000, and Highmark’s 72,000 new customers, and we begin to sense our health insurance pools are filling up with some badly needed young blood.

The Health & Human Services Department had estimated that the changes in the law would result in about 1.2 million new enrollees in 2011. However, according to Aaron Smith, the executive director of a Washington based non-profit that advocates for the young, it now looks as if that number will be exceeded.

This is very good news – particularly for those in the individual and small group markets that tend not to ‘self-insure’ as the larger corporations tend to do.

It is also very good news for those of us who write a large check every  month for our health coverage.

For starters, every one of the young immortals we add to the rolls of the insured is one less young adult who will turn to the emergency room to fix a broken leg and then find themselves unable to pay the bill – leaving it to the rest of us to pay the tab.

And it gets better.

Because the under 26 crowd tends not to get sick, adding them to the insurance pools helps bring the very balance that was intended by the new law.  The more healthy people available to pay for those in the pool who are ill (translation- the older people), the better the system works and the lower our premium charges should go.

One cannot help but notice that the health insurance companies turned in record profits for the first quarter of 2011 due, according the insurance companies, to fewer people seeking medical treatment.

* * *

Meanwhile, things continue to improve on the small business front where business owners are being heavily incentivized to offer health care benefits to employees.

As I wrote in January, there has been a significant uptick in small businesses taking advantage of the tax benefits offered by the ACA to provide health insurance to employees where they previously did not do so.

According to a Kaiser survey, there has been a 46% uptick in businesses with less than 10 employees offering health benefits as compared to last year.

That is a big number.

* * *

Health care reform is working, folks – and we have yet to get to the really big benefits which kick in come 2014.

* * *

Once we get past the August 2009 era of the townhall meetings where the Republicans were pitching the false “death panel” narrative  to great effect, we see that there are two primary challenges lodged against the law- the cuts to Medicare and the health insurance mandates.

Today, the GOP is pursuing the Ryan budget plan that would destroy Medicare as we know it, turning it into a voucher program that has no chance of keeping up with the rising costs of medical care and leaving seniors to face a future of inadequate and unavailable health care.

It is no secret that polling reveals that Americans are very much not in favor of Ryan’s plan.

* * *

As for the health insurance mandates, reviewing the field of the major GOP presidential contenders, some interesting data begins to emerge.

Newt Gingrich – for mandated health insurance before he was against it (although he may have already switched positions again this morning.)

Jon Huntsman – for mandated health insurance before he was against it. Indeed, mandates were a vital part of the health care reform Huntsman pushed as Governor of Utah before the GOP majority in the state legislature put the brakes on the idea.

Mitt Romney- as the true father of Obamacare, clearly he was for mandates before he was against them.

The time has arrived for even the most critical to take another look at health care reform. Facts and figures don’t lie – if accurately presented.

And while the full jury won’t be in for a few more years, maybe the time has come for average Americans more interested in what is best for their country rather than grinding a political axe, to reconsider their views.

Ungar's last point is aimed directly at the heart of the ridiculous point/counterpoint opinions in today's Arizona Daily Star.

UPDATE: On a related topic, here is a McClatchy News report that somehow did not manage to make it into the pages of the Arizona Daily Star. Regulations, taxes aren't killing small business, owners say | McClatchy:

Politicians and business groups often blame excessive regulation and fear of higher taxes for tepid hiring in the economy. However, little evidence of that emerged when McClatchy canvassed a random sample of small business owners across the nation.

"Government regulations are not 'choking' our business, the hospitality business," Bernard Wolfson, the president of Hospitality Operations in Miami, told The Miami Herald. "In order to do business in today's environment, government regulations are necessary and we must deal with them. The health and safety of our guests depend on regulations. It is the government regulations that help keep things in order."

* * *

McClatchy reached out to owners of small businesses, many of them mom-and-pop operations, to find out whether they indeed were being choked by regulation, whether uncertainty over taxes affected their hiring plans and whether the health care overhaul was helping or hurting their business.

Their response was surprising.

None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it. Some pointed to the lack of regulation in mortgage lending as a principal cause of the financial crisis that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-09 and its grim aftermath.

Continue reading Regulations, taxes aren't killing small business, owners say | McClatchy.