Any way you look at it, it’s not a pretty sight.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428925/obamacare-report-card
You know that Obamacare is having a really bad year when Paul Krugman starts to concede that it “has hit a few rough patches lately.” To be sure, Krugman still believes that Obamacare is working, but even he must acknowledge that it is “an imperfect system” and that “the run of unexpectedly good news for Obamacare has come to an end.”
That’s one way to spin it.
For example, one of the few positive claims that Obamacare could make was that it had expanded coverage. And it is true that the number of Americans without insurance has fallen by about 12.6 million since 2010. However, a new study cited by Health Affairs suggests that the number of uninsured in 2010 was artificially inflated by the financial meltdown. Many people who lost their jobs (unemployment, you will recall, reached 9.6 percent) also lost their health insurance. While it is impossible to judge a counterfactual for certain, it is likely that many of those temporarily uninsured workers would have regained coverage as the unemployment rate dropped — even without Obamacare. The Health Affairs article shows that insurance coverage today is just 2.6 percentage points better than the pre-recession baseline. That means it is reasonable to presume that we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars and disrupted the entire health-care system to expand insurance coverage to surprisingly few people.
Essentially, the people signing up for an Obamacare plan are the people getting it for free. A recent report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute looking at enrollment so far found that almost all Americans with incomes of between 100 and 150 percent of the poverty line (who receive the biggest subsidy) sign up for exchange plans, but less than a third of those with incomes between 200 and 300 percent of the poverty line do, and just 13 percent of those with incomes above 300 percent of the poverty line (who receive little or no subsidy).
I guess even lousy health insurance is okay if it’s free. If you have to pay for it, however, you might think twice.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428925/obamacare-report-card
You know that Obamacare is having a really bad year when Paul Krugman starts to concede that it “has hit a few rough patches lately.” To be sure, Krugman still believes that Obamacare is working, but even he must acknowledge that it is “an imperfect system” and that “the run of unexpectedly good news for Obamacare has come to an end.”
That’s one way to spin it.
For example, one of the few positive claims that Obamacare could make was that it had expanded coverage. And it is true that the number of Americans without insurance has fallen by about 12.6 million since 2010. However, a new study cited by Health Affairs suggests that the number of uninsured in 2010 was artificially inflated by the financial meltdown. Many people who lost their jobs (unemployment, you will recall, reached 9.6 percent) also lost their health insurance. While it is impossible to judge a counterfactual for certain, it is likely that many of those temporarily uninsured workers would have regained coverage as the unemployment rate dropped — even without Obamacare. The Health Affairs article shows that insurance coverage today is just 2.6 percentage points better than the pre-recession baseline. That means it is reasonable to presume that we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars and disrupted the entire health-care system to expand insurance coverage to surprisingly few people.
Essentially, the people signing up for an Obamacare plan are the people getting it for free. A recent report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute looking at enrollment so far found that almost all Americans with incomes of between 100 and 150 percent of the poverty line (who receive the biggest subsidy) sign up for exchange plans, but less than a third of those with incomes between 200 and 300 percent of the poverty line do, and just 13 percent of those with incomes above 300 percent of the poverty line (who receive little or no subsidy).
I guess even lousy health insurance is okay if it’s free. If you have to pay for it, however, you might think twice.
