NY Times peddles Obamacare fiction

Flopping Aces ^ | 10-27-14 | DrJohn

[Starman417]

The NY Times today runs an article that tries vainly to rescue Obama and Obamacare:

After a year fully in place, the Affordable Care Act has largely succeeded in delivering on President Obama’s main promises, an analysis by a team of reporters and data researchers shows. But it has also fallen short in some ways and given rise to a powerful conservative backlash.

Here at the arguments:

1. Has the percentage of uninsured people been reduced? Yes, the number of uninsured has fallen significantly.

2. Has insurance under the law been affordable? For many, yes, but not for all.

3. Did the Affordable Care Act improve health outcomes? Data remains sparse except for one group, the young.

4. Will the online exchanges work better this year than last? Most experts expect they will, but they will be tested by new challenges.

5. Has the health care industry been helped or hurt by the law? The law mostly helped, by providing new paying patients and insurance customers.

6. How has the expansion of Medicaid fared? Twenty-three states have opposed expansion, though several of them are reconsidering.

7. Has the law contributed to a slowdown in health care spending? Perhaps, but mainly around the edges.

Let's analyze some of this. The number of uninsured has fallen, but it is still higher than when Obama took office.

The CBO predicts that the number of uninsured will never fall below 30 million. The number of Obamacare enrollments is cooked:

Of the Obamacare sign-ups, only 27 percent had been previously uninsured in 2013. And of the 27 percent, nearly half had yet to pay a premium. (By contrast, among the 73 percent who had been previously insured, 86 percent had paid.) Put all those percentages together, and you get two key stats. Only 19 percent of those who have paid a premium were previously uninsured. Among those that the administration is touting as sign-ups, only 14 percent are previously uninsured enrollees: approximately 472,000 people as of February 1.

In other words, the claims for Obamacare enrollees includes those who lost their plans due to Obamacare.

Keep in mind another fact: According to the Associated Press, at least 4.7 million Americans who shop for coverage on their own have had their plans canceled because they don’t conform to Obamacare’s regulations. So Obamacare has disrupted the coverage of millions of Americans, requiring many to purchase costlier policies with higher deductibles and narrower doctor networks, for a fairly modest expansion of coverage. According to the administration, total sign-ups now exceed 4 million. But on a recent HHS conference call, Obamacare implementation point man Gary Cohen was asked the key question: how many of the people who have signed up for Obamacare were previously insured? His response: “That’s not a data point that we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way.” So. The whole point of Obamacare was to expand coverage to the uninsured. But for the tens of thousands of regulations that the law has imposed on the country, its authors never bothered to try to measure the one thing that they were actually trying to achieve. That about sums it all up.

Has Obamacare made health care affordable? Not really. Premiums might appear to be lower but 1. they're going up:

However, a new study from the well-respected and non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research (and published by Brookings Institution), overcomes the limitations of these prior studies by examining what happened to premiums in the entire non-group market. The bottom line? In 2014, premiums in the non-group market grew by 24.4% compared to what they would have been without Obamacare. Of equal importance, this careful state-by-state assessment showed that premiums rose in all but 6 states (including Washington DC).

and 2. the deductibles are onerous. A great number of people are simply unable to afford health care.

Patricia Wanderlich got insurance through the Affordable Care Act this year, and with good reason: She suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2011, spending weeks in a hospital intensive care unit, and has a second, smaller aneurysm that needs monitoring. But her new plan has a $6,000 annual deductible, meaning that Ms. Wanderlich, who works part time at a landscaping company outside Chicago, has to pay for most of her medical services up to that amount. She is skipping this year’s brain scan and hoping for the best. “To spend thousands of dollars just making sure it hasn’t grown?” said Ms. Wanderlich, 61. “I don’t have that money.”

Has Obamacare reduced the overall cost of health care? No.  But let's go back to the false premise of this article:

"After a year fully in place, the Affordable Care Act has largely succeeded in delivering on President Obama’s main promises, an analysis by a team of reporters and data researchers shows."

A team of reporters no doubt from the news outlets that roll over for Obama. The above were NOT the main promises about Obamacare. To assert that they are is a bald face lie.

[Texas Eagle]

[Texas Eagle]

1. Has the percentage of uninsured people been reduced? Yes, the number of uninsured has fallen significantly.

They must be using the same fuzzy Common Core math they use to determine that the unemployment rate has dropped since Borat Obola took office.

[KC_Conspirator]

Lie after lie, after lie, after lie from that rag.

[razorback-bert]

My ex now a femanazi liberal, complained on facebook that she can’t find insurance on the ACA site that she can afford, now that she is retired.

[high info voter]

[Grams A]

First two calls we fielded this morning were referrals from doctor client’s offices. Both were current patients of two different doctors who say they cannot afford to keep their insurance after January 1, 2015, and wanting to know the fee if they pay cash. One of the patients is currently covered under a sizable group and has a $2,000 deductible which is going to $6,000. The other is self-insured.

So it’s not just hitting those who are retired. Less than miniscule sample but we do expect the uninsured number to climb significantly.

[Soul of the South]

Lies, lies and more lies.

My wife and I have purchased private insurance for four years. Our insurance company canceled our policy last year. The closest Obamacare compliant “Bronze” policy alternative doubled our premium and increased our deductible from $5000 per person to $6250 per person. Plus we lost dental coverage. Trying to keep track of the physicians in the network at any point in time is a nightmare. For this I get birth control, maternity and pediatric dentistry benefits we will never use.

Obamacare is nothing but a major redistribution program. Too bad the stupid party was unable to capitalize on the issue in this year’s midterm campaign.

[Walkingfeather]

Articles like this really do not matter at this point. It is only there to try to bolster the morale drained left... The center totally does not buy it.