Up to 17 million Americans eligible for Obamacare tax credits: report

Source: Reuters

As many as 17 million low- to moderate-income Americans should be eligible for tax credits to buy private health insurance under President Barack Obama's healthcare law in 2014, according to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The subsidies are a provision of the law that aims to make U.S. health coverage more affordable. Enrollment in the health plans began on October 1, but has been hobbled by technical problems that have halted access to the federal HealthCare.gov website meant to help people in 36 states verify their eligibility for subsidies and sign up.

The three states with the highest number of individuals who will qualify for the subsidies are Texas, where as many as 2 million people qualify; California, where some 1.9 million people qualify; and Florida, where 1.6 million people qualify, the Kaiser report said. It is based on an analysis of 2012 and 2013 population and economic data from U.S. Census Bureau.

The states with the fewest number of residents to qualify are Vermont, with 27,000 individuals, and the District of Columbia, with 9,000.


Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/05/us-usa-healthcare-subsidies-idUSBRE9A405920131105?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&dlvrit=992637

Salon - "How the media is blowing the Obamacare rollout"

This is great story that talks about the now familiar Fox news pattern:

1) A story about an individual insurance policy holder discouraged by a cancellation notice and “rate shock” lands and blows up, all likely with the help of a dutiful GOP public relations professional.

2) A day or a week later, the story is debunked or a more conscientious reporter finds that the full set of facts paints a much more nuanced picture. But it gets much less attention than the first story.

It is sort of like the Death Panels, where the media lazily pushes outrageous GOP talking points, then quietly offers a fact check after the damage has been done.

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/05/how_the_medias_blowing_the_obamacare_rollout/

But it’s really striking how long it’s taking reporters to realize that these stories are incomplete, and probably inaccurate, unless and until they and their subjects have a handle on all of the relevant information. Read the kicker of this Jonathan Cohn story. It really should be the lede. Dianne Barrette, a Florida woman who became a poster child for the “rate shock” meme, has learned a bit more about her situation, and now says that the cancellation of her junk insurance plan may may be “a blessing in disguise.”

You can trace Barrette’s change of heart to the fact that her initial outrage was based upon misleading information from her insurance company, and CBS News’ decision to pass that information along to the public without explaining the deceit at the center of it.

“Last month, she received a letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield informing her as of January 2014, she would lose her current plan. Barrette pays $54 a month,” according to the Oct. 28 report. “The new plan she’s being offered would run $591 a month — 10 times more than what she currently pays.”

CBS did note that Barrette will be eligible for subsidies to defray some of her expenses, but let the $591 quote from Blue Cross stand. What’s more shocking than a 1000 percent price increase? Cohn’s article makes clear that once Healthcare.gov is fixed, Barrette will find much, much cheaper options, all of which offer far better insurance than she currently has.

Latino voters say health care, controversial remark spur them to turn out for McAuliffe

Source: Washington Post

Some Latinos who turned out to vote in the Northern Virginia suburbs on Tuesday said they were supporting Democrat Terry McAuliffe for governor because they believed his opponent is anti-immigrant.

Republican Ken Cuccinelli II, Virginia’s attorney general, was pilloried in a Democratic campaign commercial for a remark he made criticizing a D.C. law on pest control, which he claimed prevented the killing of rats.

“It is worse than our immigration policy,” Cuccinelli said in a 2012 radio interview. “You can’t break up rat families .?.?. and you can’t even kill ’em.”

In a Spanish-language television ad that aired last month, Virginia’s Democratic Party denounced the comment — which Cuccinelli’s campaign said was taken out of context.


Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/latino-voters-say-health-care-controversial-remark-spur-them-to-turn-out-for-mcauliffe/2013/11/05/a942c4bc-462b-11e3-a196-3544a03c2351_story.html?tid=pm_local_pop

California probe of campaign donations sheds light on 'dark money'

Source: LA Times

The Republican consultant and his team had raised piles of cash to use in California politics as last November's election approached. But a wrinkle in state law meant he couldn't spend it in the final two months of the campaign without jeopardizing the anonymity he had promised his rich donors.

So Russo turned to what he called "the Koch network." He asked a political consultant who has worked with billionaire Republican contributors Charles and David Koch to shuttle the money through an Arizona nonprofit. That group, which is not required to reveal its donors, could send cash to California causes without names attached.

But things went from bad to worse. Although Russo handed over $25 million, only about $15 million ended up back in California. And when the money surfaced, it sparked an investigation by state authorities, who last month[ levied $16 million in penalties against the Arizona group and three others.

The case offers a rare glimpse into the shadowy world of politically active nonprofits, which have played an increasing role in elections nationwide since the U.S. Supreme Court eased campaign rules in 2010. They provide donors a way to influence elections by piping major money around the country until it resurfaces — without their fingerprints — in a campaign.


Read more: http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-secret-money-20131104,0,2449947.story?track=lat-pick#axzz2jhGSatVC

New Republic - "Business Donors Were For Tea Party Challengers Before They Were Against Them"

The MSM has been bending over backwards to portray establishment Republicans and their corporate supporters as "moderates" fighting against the radical Tea Party. However, the truth is that there really is no difference between them, since the corporate donors who are now supporting the "establishment" once heavily supported the so-called radical Tea Party. In other words, the change is entirely cosmetic.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115465/tea-party-republican-business-establishments-alabama-showdown

The closest and most relevant election tomorrow may turn out not to be any of those on the Eastern Seaboard that have been soaking up the media’s attention—for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, and for mayor in New York and Boston—but rather the special Republican primary for an open House seat in the deepest Deep South, in and around Mobile, Alabama. The primary has emerged as the first post-government shutdown battleground between Tea Party Republicans (represented here by wealthy businessman Dean Young) and establishment business-oriented Republicans (represented by Bradley Byrne, a former Democrat turned Republican officer-holder). Despite heavy spending by business groups, Young holds a slight edge in recent polls, which is causing grave disquiet for establishment Republicans who realize that the way back to the mainstream for their party is probably not continuing to elect people like Young, who declares that homosexuality “always has been, and always will be” wrong.

* * *
Some of these supporters rushing to Byrne’s aid struck me as oddly familiar. Why? Maybe because I’d seen them very high on the list of the biggest backers to … Tea Party Republicans cut out of just the same cloth as Dean Young. Tom Graves of Georgia, who led the shutdown movement in the House, ranks among his top 20 donors Eric Cantor’s leadership PAC, the beer wholesalers, and AT&T, which hosted a fundraiser for him at Nationals Park the very night that he voted against the deal to end the first debt ceiling crisis, in 2011. Marlin Stutzman, the Indiana Republican who famously declared of the shutdown, "We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is”? His top source of funds is Cantor’s PAC; his fifth largest is Honeywell, the company led by David Cote, who has come to embody the sober “business community” elite that is seeking an end to brinkmanship. Randy Neugebauer, the Texan who berated a U.S. Park Service ranger over the closure of the World War II Memorial, counts among his top five donors both the homebuilders and beer wholesalers. John Culberson, the suburban Houston Republican who compared the shutdown caucus to the passengers seeking to overcome the terrorists on Flight 93, counts among his top 20 donors AT&T, the beer wholesalers, Honeywell and the homebuilders. As for Joe Ricketts, another one of the aforementioned Byrne saviors—you may recall him as the oh-so-moderate fellow who had a short-lived $10 million plan to run ads against Barack Obama last year portraying him as a follower of "black liberation theology" who had lied to the country in 2008 by casting himself as a "metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln."

None of this is to say that the “business community” can’t be undergoing a true change of heart as a result of last month’s government shutdown and credit default flirtation, though it’ll take more than one House special election to judge if that’s the case. But it is to say that it’s awful late in the day for these corporations and business groups to be coming to the realization that having people like Dean Young in Washington is perhaps not in their best interests. The likes of Tom Graves have not exactly been making a secret of their intentions these past few years, and yet they were showered with business establishment support nonetheless. If Dean Young holds on to win Tuesday, it will be a gross oversimplification to declare that he did so despite the opposition of the business establishment. No, his victory would very much be yet another legacy of the close alliance between Tea Party and Chamber of Commerce Republicanism that is only now starting to show cracks, long after the horse broke out of the barn and headed for the Hill. The Republicans may be stuck inside of Mobile with the Tea Party blues again, for quite a while to come and deep inside their heart, Mama, they know they can't escape and this really may be the end.

WaPo - "The Squeaky-Wheel Problem in Obamacare Coverage" - Upper Class Rules!

I think it is funny that David Frum is the one that points this out as a weakness of Obamacare. That the primary beneficiaries are the middle class and those lower on the income spectrum. I thought that was a good thing.

The upper-middle-class self-employed people in the individual market can stir up a lot of dust, even if they represent a tiny fraction of the population.

Conservative writer David Frum points to something in a column today that I think explains a lot of the somewhat-overwrought coverage of the individual insurance market:

Talking Points Memo today offers a chart suggesting that the losers under Obamacare will number about 3 percent of the population. Why, that’s only … 9 million people. Nine million of the best educated, most affluent, and most vocal people in the country. How much trouble can they make? So really—it’s no story.

It's all well and good to argue that only a small fraction of Americans will see premium increases in the individual market, but most of those who are seeing them—and who also are subsidy-ineligible under Obamacare—are from the middle to upper-income part of the middle class. More than 40 percent of people in the individual market are there because they are self-employed or running a small business. They're entrepreneurial and independent-spirited by nature, and when they squeak, they make a lot of noise.

By contrast, I'll be shocked if we see nearly as much attention devoted to the personal stories of the tens of thousands of low-income people now getting insurance through Obamacare's Medicaid expansion. Instead, we get experts tut-tutting over whether the planned expansion that's intended to cover an additional 9 million near-poor people over the next year is going to be a burden on the states.

Fact Checker -"Obama’s claim that the Massachusetts enrollment experience IS relevant to Obamacare"

Mitt Romney, of all people, has been attacking the President for comparing the ACA to the Massachusetts Health Law. However, even WaPo is confirming that the comparison is appropriate. Indeed, I actually think that WaPo's fact checker is being charitable to Republicans by giving one Pinnochio for ignoring MA's Medicaid automatic enrollment, because on the federal level, most pundits ignore the expansion of Medicaid due to the ACA, as well.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/11/01/obamas-claim-that-the-massachusetts-enrollment-experience-is-relevant-to-obamacare/

So what is Obama referring to? He is talking about Phase 2, which began in January 2007. That was the phase for subsidized health care, covering people between 100 percent and 300 percent of FPL (between about $21,000 and $62,000 in income), who had to pay at least part of their premium.

The final phase, which began in May 2007, was for unsubsidized coverage. The deadline for enrollment for everyone was the end of the year, after which point the individual mandate would take effect. But because of the slow rollout, many health-insurance plans for the final phase were not even available in the early part of the year, according to news reports at the time.

Jason Lefferts, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Health Connector, the state agency that helps residents find health-care plans, said that at the end of the first month for enrollment in the subsidized plan, 123 people had signed up, though by Feb. 8 the number was 226, according to meeting minutes that day. After the end of the second month, 2,089 had signed up. By the third month, more than 5,000 people had enrolled, he said.

In other words, Obama is citing just Phase 2 enrollment. Jon Gruber, an MIT economist who advised on both plans, said that was the appropriate place to start, with the first phase “irrelevant to the debate” because these are people automatically transferring to a type of Medicaid program. Some might differ, but we were convinced on this point.

Pittsburgh Gazette - "Debunking those Obamacare horror stories"

A Deborah Cavallaro has been making the rounds of conservative media complaining about how she is an Obamacare victim. Of course, the cable media refuses to actually fact check her claims. Here is one writer who actually did.

http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/Op-Ed/2013/11/01/All-those-horror-stories/stories/201311010033

Insurers and the media need to better explain how the new health insurance system works

"Please explain to me," she told Maria Bartiromo on CNBC Wednesday, "how my plan is a 'substandard' plan when ... I'd be paying more for the exchange plans than I am currently paying by a wide margin."

* * *

Ms. Bartiromo didn't take her up on her request. So I will. . . Here's what I found.

I won't divulge her current income, but this year it qualifies her for a hefty federal premium subsidy. At her age, she's eligible for a good "silver" plan for $333 a month after the subsidy -- $40 a month more than she's paying now. But the plan is much better than her current plan -- the deductible is $2,000, not $5,000. The maximum out-of-pocket expense is $6,350, not $8,500. Her co-pays would be $45 for a primary care visit and $65 for a specialty visit -- but all visits would be covered, not just two.

Is that better than her current plan? Yes, by a mile.

If she wanted to pay less, Ms. Cavallaro could opt for lesser coverage in a "bronze" plan. She could buy one from the California exchange for as little as $194 a month. From Anthem, it's $256, or $444 a year less than she's paying now. That buys her a $5,000 deductible (the same as she's paying today) but the out-of-pocket limit is lower, $6,350. Office visits would be $60 for primary care and $70 for specialties, but again with no limit on the number of visits. Factor in the premium savings, and it's hard to deny that she'd still be ahead.

New Yorker - "Obamacare’s Three Per Cent" Or, Catastrophic Health Plans...

...are not really health coverage. The MSM has been pushing a false equivalency between individual catastrophic health plans and coverage that individuals are required to obtain under the ACA. The media simply says, "Hey, look someone must replace their coverage." Yet, the real story is that they really weren't receiving health care coverage.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/10/obamacares-three-per-cent.html?mobify=0

Gruber broke down the A.C.A. “winners” and “losers” for me. About eighty per cent of Americans are more or less left alone by the health-care act—largely people who have health insurance through their employers. About fourteen per cent of Americans are clear winners: they are currently uninsured and will have access to an affordable insurance policy under the A.C.A.

But much of the current controversy involves the six per cent of Americans who buy their own health care on the individual market, which the A.C.A. has dramatically reformed. Gruber argued that half of these people (three per cent of all Americans) will have little change to their polices. “They have to buy new plans, but they will be pretty similar to what they had before,” he said. “It will essentially be relabeling.”

The other half, however, also three per cent of the population, will have to buy a new product that complies with the A.C.A.’s more stringent requirements for individual plans. A significant portion of these roughly nine million Americans will be forced to buy a new insurance policy with higher premiums than they currently pay. The primary reason for the increased cost is that the A.C.A. bans any plan that would require a people who get sick to pay medical fees greater than six thousand dollars per year. In other words, this was a deliberate policy decision that the White House and Congress made to raise the quality—and thus the premiums—of insurance policies at the bottom end of the individual market.

“We’ve decided as a society that we don’t want people to have insurance plans that expose them to more than six thousand dollars in out-of-pocket expenses,” Gruber said. Obama obviously should have known that his blanket statement about “keeping what you have” could not apply to this class of policyholders.

Slate - "The Chart That Could Save Obamacare" - Or, Death Panels II

Here is a nice story that illustrates how the MSM continues to enable the right by pushing a false equivalency between the relatively few people who are worse off under the ACA versus those who are tremendously benefitted. Rather than provide proportional coverage to those who would be better off, the MSM actually focuses on those who claim they are worse off. Yet, as this story illustrates, those who claim they are worse off often aren't.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/10/31/the_chart_that_could_save_obamacare.html

Seems right to me; it so happens that the 6 percent of humans likely to lose their plans and pay more constitute millions of Americans, and that even a small number of them can talk to the media about how horrid the experience is. What they need is a long trench warfare campaign of fact-checking and, occasionally, apologizing. Michael Hiltzik, for example, has reported out the tale of Deborah Cavallaro, a Los Angeles woman spiriting around conservative-leaning shows to explain how Obamacare killed her plan.

Her current plan, from Anthem Blue Cross, is a catastrophic coverage plan for which she pays $293 a month as an individual policyholder. It requires her to pay a deductible of $5,000 a year and limits her out-of-pocket costs to $8,500 a year. Her plan also limits her to two doctor visits a year, for which she shoulders a copay of $40 each. After that, she pays the whole cost of subsequent visits... at her age, she's eligible for a good "silver" plan for $333 a month after the subsidy -- $40 a month more than she's paying now. But the plan is much better than her current plan -- the deductible is $2,000, not $5,000. The maximum out-of-pocket expense is $6,350, not $8,500. Her co-pays would be $45 for a primary care visit and $65 for a specialty visit -- but all visits would be covered, not just two.

Is that better than her current plan? Yes, by a mile.

But cutting through the fog of the Cavallaro story took several days, and she's going to have a lot of company.