One week ago I posted en entry titled "Color me shocked: Michigan GOP State Senator spewing nonsense", which documented an appallingly erroneous Op-Ed by Republican State Senator Patrick Colbeck riddled with basic mathematical errors about the Affordable Care Act.
Among the many factual errors included in Colbeck's essay were such gems as:
He claimed that the ACA is costing $1.35 trillion per year. It's actually priced at less than 1/10th that price ($120 billion per year).
He claimed that the ACA has insured an additional 19 million people, which is oddly generous as compared with my own estimate of 14 million or even the Obama administration's estimate of 16.1 million.
He claimed that the ACA is "still leaving 36 million people" without insurance, while failing to acknowledge that 4 million of those are stuck in the Medicaid Gap created by Republican-run states, while another 6.3 million are undocumented immigrants who aren't legally eligible for coverage under the law.
He claimed that the ACA is costing over $71,000 per enrollee per year, when the actual number is closer to $5,000 per person.
He claimed that a "high quality policy" can be purchased on the non-ACA market for $6,000/year, which may or may not be true depending on the person.
He claimed that "159 organizations" which stand "between a patient and a doctor" were created by the ACA, which is utter nonsense.
He claimed that the state of Washington launched a program which magically cut both costs and hospitalization rates in half, without citing any source or providing any information about what this mystery program might be.
So, in my piece I carefully debunked all of these lies (or misstatements, assuming he was just ignorant). My response garnered quite a few retweets and a generally positive response...so positive that several people suggested that I write up a simplified version and submit it to the Detroit News Op-Ed page myself as a rebuttal.
Analysts at Standard & Poor's Ratings Services say the effects of funding restrictions on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) risk corridors program may cause the program to hurt small and midsize health insurers.
Drafters of PPACA created the risk corridors program in an effort to make selling health insurance under PPACA rules less risky, by using cash from health insurers with good underwriting results for 2014, 2015 and 2016 to help insurers that get poor results for those years.
When Talking Points Memo, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post needed data on how often police officers are charged with on-duty killings, they all turned to the same guy: Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson.
Stinson, 50, has become an indispensable source for researchers and reporters looking into alleged crimes and acts of violence by police officers because he has built a database tracking thousands of incidents in which officers were arrested since 2005. His data has shown that even the few police officers who are arrested for drunken driving are rarely convictedand that arrests spike for cops who have been on the force 18 years or longer, contrary to prior research showing it was mostly new officers who were acting out.
I haven't actually done Short Cuts in awhile, letting dozens of significant ACA-related stories disappear into the Memory Hole. Will try to be better about this going forward:
Normally this is exactly the sort of story which I'd post a full point-by-point debunking of (see McConnell, Mitch), but frankly I've had a lousy weekend and am just too damned tired to bother. It's like playing whack-a-mole, anyway; sometimes it's just not worth the effort.
Fortunately, Jason Easley of PoliticsUSA clears up at least a couple of the whoppers John Boehner spewed this morning:
So, the good news is that new Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, who has already scrapped his predecessor's unnecessarily confusing "alternative" Medicaid expansion plan in favor of regular expansion, has officially submitted a latter to the HHS Dept. stating that yes, if the Supreme Court does rule against the government in the King v. Burwell case, PA will indeed establish their own ACA healthcare exchange.
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - Gov. Tom Wolf's administration advanced plans Friday to maintain federal health insurance subsidies for nearly 400,000 Pennsylvanians ahead of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could wipe out the aid to insurance buyers in some states.
The Democrat wrote to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell to declare his administration's intent to take over operation of the insurance marketplace in 2016. The federal government currently operates the marketplace, which is a prominent feature of the 2010 federal health care law designed to extend insurance coverage to 35 million Americans.
However, there's still no enrollment data since late February for about 10 states, and only fractional data for the other 40. Based on my best estimates, the actual total QHP selections to date should beslightly over 12.3 million as of yesterday (click image below for the full-size version).
As for the tax filing season Special Enrollment Period specifically, there have been over 110,500 confirmed enrollments to date (68,000 via Healthcare.Gov, 33,000 in California, around 4,800 in Washington State and over 4,700 in Maryland). My best estimate is that #ACATaxTime QHPs will end up being roughly 140,000 in the end.
BALTIMORE (May 1, 2015) — More than 4,700 Marylanders took advantage of a special six week enrollment period that allowed them to enroll for health insurance to avoid an additional federal tax penalty for 2015 if they had already owed a tax penalty for lacking health coverage in 2014.
Marylanders who applied for the special enrollment period, which ran from March 15 through yesterday, attested that they owe the penalty for lacking health insurance in 2014 and that they became aware of this after the Feb. 15 close of open enrollment for 2015 coverage.
