Senator Ted Cruz is often asked about doing away with President Obama’s health care law. He is less rarely pressed by voters on what will replace it.
But at a middle school cafeteria here, a man, Mike Valde, presented him with a tragic tale. His brother-in-law Mark was a barber — “a small-business man,” he said. He had never had a paid vacation day. He received health insurance at last because of the Affordable Care Act. He began to feel sick and went to a doctor.
“He had never been to a doctor for years,” Mr. Valde, 63, of Coralville, Iowa, said. “Multiple tumors behind his heart, his liver, his pancreas. And they said, ‘We’re sorry, sir, there’s nothing we can do for you.’ ”
The room was silent.
“Mark never had health care until Obamacare,” Mr. Valde continued. “What are you going to replace it with?”
Mr. Cruz expressed condolences and pivoted quickly to a well-worn answer assailing the health care law.
UPDATE: I've expanded the second half of this entry.
A week or so ago, I took a good look at Bernie Sanders's Single Payer healthcare proposal and was, as I put it, "beyond disappointed" due to it's lack of detail, and naiveté about not only the political realities of trying to get such a plan through (which is the biggest issue that Sanders supporters insist can be overcome through a "political revolution" etc etc), but also due to the sheer mountain of legal, economic, infrastructure and logistical headaches that would have to be navigated.
The irony is that, for me, the math behind such a plan (ie, how much it would end up saving people overall in terms of actual dollar savings as well as reduced administrative overhead, greater efficiency, etc) was something which I didn't even get into. I was operating on the assumption that, while the specifics would obviously jump up and down here and there, the numbers were generally in the right ballpark. HOWEVER, according to Emory University expert Kenneth Thorpe (who's actually a strong single-payer advocate who has authored several SP plans himself), that may not be the case whatsoever. Dylan Matthews of Vox writes:
UPDATE: I thought this was obvious, but apparently not: I'm not saying that a complete relocation of the entire population of Flint will be necessary, I'm just trying to get some sort of feel for how much it would theoretically cost if they had to be relocated.
"A September estimate, only recently released by Michigan governor Rick Snyder, puts the cost of replacing all the lead pipes in Flint at $60 million. And the project will take 15 years.
I'm surprised by this for several reasons. The snowstorm was nearly a week ago, and there's still 3 days left for people to enroll as it is; are there still a lot of areas of Maryland coping with power outages/other disruptions which are making it unreasonable to expect people to get in under the wire?
Second, because CMS just stated pretty unequivocally that HealthCare.Gov will not be offering any official deadline extension (although, like the MD exchange, they did say that they'll have an "in line by midnight" exception). I assumed that if HC.gov was taking a "hard line stance" that the state exchanges would as well.
As a single payer advocate, it may sound strange to hear me rooting for private, for-profit insurance carriers to do well, but the fact remains that for the time being, the ACA exchanges are a huge part of the individual heatlhcare market, and they're based on the capitalistic theory of a competitive market helping keep prices from spiraling out of control. For the next few years, at least, it therefore behooves me to be hopeful for their success.
Remember how the Risk Corridor program was put in place specifically to help guide insurance carriers through the rocky, turbulent, confusing waters of the early years of the ACA exchanges by mitigating massive premium rate miscalculations the first few by having carriers which did better than expected chip into a kitty to be passed out to those which missed the target for the first 3 years?
Remember how the carriers which lost money the first year were really, really counting on those Risk Corridor funds to be there to help cushion the blow?
Remember how as a result, when it came time to start doling out the RC funds to the carriers which had a crappy first year, there were only 12 cents on the dollar sitting in the cupboard?
LANSING -- In January of 2015, when state officials were telling worried Flint residents their water was safe to drink, they also were arranging for coolers of purified water in Flint's State Office Building so employees wouldn't have to drink from the taps, according to state government e-mails released Thursday by the liberal group Progress Michigan.
A Jan. 7, 2015, notice from the state Department of Technology, Management and Budget, which oversees state office buildings,references a notice about a violation of drinking water standards that had recently been sent out by the City of Flint.
...State officials could not immediately answer e-mailed questions about the water purchases, including how long the state continued to buy bottled water for state employees in Flint while telling Flint residents the water was safe to drink. An official said the administration was "looking into these issues."
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Covered California announced that a surge of consumers interested in affordable, quality health care coverage had signed up through the agency this week. Through Jan. 27, more than 329,000 new enrollees had picked a health coverage plan during the current open-enrollment period. In addition, more than 148,000 new and renewing consumers had enrolled in the new optional family dental coverage.
As always, CoveredCA is happy to tout their new enrollees but has a weird thing about keeping mum on the number who renewed policies from 2015. This would make sense if the renewal number sucked, but it doesn't: The ASPE report through 12/27 clearly states that they had 1,411,664 QHP selections, of which 84% were renewals (automatic or active) by 2015 enrollees.
84% of 1,411,664 = roughly 1,186,000. Add 329K to that and you get 1.515 million QHP selections to date.
Nearly 71 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP in November 2015. 7 This enrollment count is point-in-time (on the last day of the month) and includes all enrollees in the Medicaid and CHIP programs who are receiving a comprehensive benefit package.
This number is about 900K lower than October's report (71.8 million) due to a reporting correction in California:
