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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAnatomy of a Bogus Obamacare Argument
Well worth a read; Cohn calling out a conservative columnist. Props from me; more of this! !!
http://www.newrepublic.com/node/113362#
Anatomy of a Bogus Obamacare Argument
How an irresponsible Forbes writer distorted the debate
BY JONATHAN COHN
snip//
But the most amazing part of Roys entry was what it didnt say. Roy never acknowledged that, even as young and healthy people would have to face higher premiums, older and sicker people would face lower premiums. He said absolutely nothingnot a single word!about the federal subsidies available to people with incomes below 400 percent of the poverty line. (That's about $46,000 a year for a single adult, or $94,000 for a family of four.) This has been a pattern with his writing and, unfortunately, much of what I read on the right. Articles focus on the drawbacks of Obamacare but almost never acknolwedge the benefits.
Eventually, in response to criticism I made on Twitter, Roy added a postscript about the subsidies. And in a follow-up that Roy posted on Monday morning, he acknowledged them againalthough only late in the piece, and in a highly misleading way. He wrote that only a select few will get the discounted prices, a point he's made over and over again. Actually, the majority of people buying coverage on the exchanges will get subsidies. It's difficult to be certain about the overall effect on all Californians buying coverage, because it requires insurer information not available to the public. But it's entirely possible (I'd say likely) that, with the subsidies, the majority of people buying on the exchange next year will pay less than they pay for insurance today.
Roy is no dummy. Hes well aware of these facts. He could have acknowledged them, and went on to make the case that the benefits are not worth those coststhat its fundamentally unfair to ask young, healthy, affluent people to pay more, or that Obamacares whole scheme is just so inefficient as to make it worse than the alternative. As Aaron Carroll wrote the other day, Obamacare involves real trade-offs: Higher-income people have to pay higher taxes, the health care industry has to endure lower payments from Medicare, andyessome young, healthy, affluent people have to pay more for private insurance. Those of us who support the law believe that's a worthwhile price to pay to help achieve universal coverage, given the lack of politically viable alternatives. Roy disagrees, I know, and he could have made that argument in a nuanced way last week.
But Roy didnt do that. And while all of us are susceptible to hyperbole or selective intepretation from time to time, Roy's column was something else entirely. He plucked out two examples of people who would pay more in California, pretended they were emblematic of the system as a whole, then accused other writers of being irresponsible. His argument hasn't held up well to scrutiny, but it's part of the political conversation and, I'm sure, will remain so for a while.
In his follow-up post today, Roy says were finally having the intellectually honest argument about Obamacare that we should have been having all along. If only that were true.
Shrike47
(6,913 posts)babylonsister
(171,109 posts)The initial response on the right was silenceuntil late last week, when Avik Roy, a columnist from Forbes, decided to try an experiment. He went to eHealthInsurance, the clearinghouse website for people who try to buy individual coverage today, and used two fictional people to obtain insurance offers for a 25-year-old healthy man and a 40-year-old healthy man. He then compared the offers eHealthInsurance produced to the bids the California exchange had provided. The eHealthInsurance premiums were substantially lessand, from this, Roy concluded that California would experience precisely the kind of rate shock he and other Obamacare critics had predicted. "Obamacare itself more than doubles the cost of insurance on the individual market," Roy wrote. "I can understand why Democrats in California would want to mislead the public on this point. But journalists have a professional responsibility to check out the facts for themselves." Within a day or so, every right-wing outlet had picked up Roys calculationfor a while, it was the lead item on Drudge. The Daily Callers headline was typical: Obamacare drives up insurance premiums by up to 146 percent in California.
If youve ever tried to buy insurance on your own, you have a pretty good idea of how ridiculous Roys experiment was.
zipplewrath
(16,646 posts)But it doesn't achieve that. And, in fact, it is very clear about those people who will not be required to be covered. And it is very clear that it is those people who can't afford it, and the government doesn't want to afford it either.