Stephanie
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- Jul 11, 2004
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pure dnc propaganda but remember, they then turn around and tell us Fox NEWS is the station for stupid people and right wing propaganda
SNIP:
posted at 4:01 pm on September 25, 2014 by Guy Benson
Sometimes useful, frequently ideological, and more than occasionally embarrassing, the work of Vox’s self-stylized wonks is required reading among those news consumers whose unshakable faith in their own intellectual superiority is a boundless source of smug satisfaction.
Klein’s latest dispatch serves up a delicious premise to these eager members of the so-called “reality-based community:” President Obama’s health care law has been a big success in the real world (Vox has offered countless variations on this same argument), yet it remains unpopular in many quarters because too many Americans have been fed misinformation by unscrupulous conservative media sources.
These sources, it goes without saying, are run by vulgar partisans — Hot Air gets a shout-out in the piece — whose fealty to the facts is far less fervent than the selfless servants of truth who populate Vox’s editorial team. Klein’s conclusion:
On the whole, though, costs are lower than expected, enrollment is higher than expected, the number of insurers participating in the exchanges is increasing, and more states are joining the Medicaid expansion. Millions of people have insurance who didn’t have it before. The law is working. But a lot of the people who are convinced Obamacare is a disaster will never know that, because the voices they trust will never tell them.
“The law is working,” and the American people might understand that better if they weren’t subjected to the right-wing media’s ruthless conspiracy to deny them the truth. (Strangely, this powerful, narrative-dominating cabal was incapable of defeating a weak incumbent president two years ago). As one of the alleged merchants of deceit, I’m more than willing to stipulate that (a) certain critics’ doomsday predictions haven’t panned out (see, for instance, Klein’s example of insurer participation in some exchanges), and (b) that the law has, in fact, helped some people.
A recent Kaiser Foundation poll found that 14 percent of Americans say the ‘Affordable’ Care Act has impacted their family for the better. The trouble is that twice that number said they’ve been directly harmed by the law, which was marketed as a win-win for all consumers. Numerous national surveys have consistently tracked the same two-to-one, hurt-to-helped ratio.
People’s actual experiences are not a product of propaganda-driven confusion. Setting aside Klein’s faulty presupposition that the expansion of Medicaid is an unalloyed good, his first two points fail rudimentary scrutiny. Beyond the cloistered world of the goalpost-shifting wonkosphere, costs are most assuredly not “lower than expected,” nor is enrollment “higher than expected.” Allow me to try my hand at explanatory journalism:
(1) Democrats promised Americans that Obamacare would reduce “everybody’s” rates by $2,500 per family. Instead, back in the real world, premiums have continued to climb ever higher. Many consumers have experienced double-digit increases, with average 2015 individual market hikes projected in the high single digits — to say nothing of pared-back provider networks or heavy out-of-pocket costs. Employers are also seeing a continued uptick in their healthcare tab, with those costs being passed down to employees in the form of higher contributions and scaled down coverage.
Healthcare industry expert Bob Laszewski notes that the full extent of Obamacare’s premium increases won’t be realized until 2017, when the law’s bailout-style, taxpayer-funded reimbursement provisions for insurers sunset. At that point, insurers will have a much firmer grasp on the composition of their risk pools (which have thus far skewed older and sicker than anticipated); they will no longer be able to sustain losses to grab market share, then fall back on public dollars to make them whole. As for the national spending “cost curve,” the president said his law would bend it down.
The latest CMS numbers project healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP will climb from 17.2 percent today to 19.3 percent by 2023. It’s true that costs and spending have increased at a slower rate since Obamacare passed, but the government’s own bookkeepers have primarily attributed that phenomenon to the anemic economic ‘recovery,’ not the ACA. Overall, assertions that premiums and costs are “lower than expected” will come as an insulting surprise to many average people — and not because they’ve been watching too much Fox News.
A LOT more of this article here:
Ezra Klein Despite what the conservative media says Obamacare is working great in the 8220 real world 8221 Hot Air
SNIP:
posted at 4:01 pm on September 25, 2014 by Guy Benson
- 229 SHARES
Sometimes useful, frequently ideological, and more than occasionally embarrassing, the work of Vox’s self-stylized wonks is required reading among those news consumers whose unshakable faith in their own intellectual superiority is a boundless source of smug satisfaction.
Klein’s latest dispatch serves up a delicious premise to these eager members of the so-called “reality-based community:” President Obama’s health care law has been a big success in the real world (Vox has offered countless variations on this same argument), yet it remains unpopular in many quarters because too many Americans have been fed misinformation by unscrupulous conservative media sources.
These sources, it goes without saying, are run by vulgar partisans — Hot Air gets a shout-out in the piece — whose fealty to the facts is far less fervent than the selfless servants of truth who populate Vox’s editorial team. Klein’s conclusion:
On the whole, though, costs are lower than expected, enrollment is higher than expected, the number of insurers participating in the exchanges is increasing, and more states are joining the Medicaid expansion. Millions of people have insurance who didn’t have it before. The law is working. But a lot of the people who are convinced Obamacare is a disaster will never know that, because the voices they trust will never tell them.
“The law is working,” and the American people might understand that better if they weren’t subjected to the right-wing media’s ruthless conspiracy to deny them the truth. (Strangely, this powerful, narrative-dominating cabal was incapable of defeating a weak incumbent president two years ago). As one of the alleged merchants of deceit, I’m more than willing to stipulate that (a) certain critics’ doomsday predictions haven’t panned out (see, for instance, Klein’s example of insurer participation in some exchanges), and (b) that the law has, in fact, helped some people.
A recent Kaiser Foundation poll found that 14 percent of Americans say the ‘Affordable’ Care Act has impacted their family for the better. The trouble is that twice that number said they’ve been directly harmed by the law, which was marketed as a win-win for all consumers. Numerous national surveys have consistently tracked the same two-to-one, hurt-to-helped ratio.
People’s actual experiences are not a product of propaganda-driven confusion. Setting aside Klein’s faulty presupposition that the expansion of Medicaid is an unalloyed good, his first two points fail rudimentary scrutiny. Beyond the cloistered world of the goalpost-shifting wonkosphere, costs are most assuredly not “lower than expected,” nor is enrollment “higher than expected.” Allow me to try my hand at explanatory journalism:
(1) Democrats promised Americans that Obamacare would reduce “everybody’s” rates by $2,500 per family. Instead, back in the real world, premiums have continued to climb ever higher. Many consumers have experienced double-digit increases, with average 2015 individual market hikes projected in the high single digits — to say nothing of pared-back provider networks or heavy out-of-pocket costs. Employers are also seeing a continued uptick in their healthcare tab, with those costs being passed down to employees in the form of higher contributions and scaled down coverage.
Healthcare industry expert Bob Laszewski notes that the full extent of Obamacare’s premium increases won’t be realized until 2017, when the law’s bailout-style, taxpayer-funded reimbursement provisions for insurers sunset. At that point, insurers will have a much firmer grasp on the composition of their risk pools (which have thus far skewed older and sicker than anticipated); they will no longer be able to sustain losses to grab market share, then fall back on public dollars to make them whole. As for the national spending “cost curve,” the president said his law would bend it down.
The latest CMS numbers project healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP will climb from 17.2 percent today to 19.3 percent by 2023. It’s true that costs and spending have increased at a slower rate since Obamacare passed, but the government’s own bookkeepers have primarily attributed that phenomenon to the anemic economic ‘recovery,’ not the ACA. Overall, assertions that premiums and costs are “lower than expected” will come as an insulting surprise to many average people — and not because they’ve been watching too much Fox News.
A LOT more of this article here:
Ezra Klein Despite what the conservative media says Obamacare is working great in the 8220 real world 8221 Hot Air
