It’s almost difficult to get back into the swing of doing these, after giving them a break for the long weekend. But the fails continue to stack up, so let’s collect three of them to make up for the lost time.
First we go back to the prolific Avik Roy:
At the end of the day, for all of the rhetoric and promises about what Obamacare would achieve, the health law’s most ardent supporters have stuck to their guns because of one thing: coverage expansion. But new data suggests that Obamacare may fail even to achieve this goal. Instead of expanding coverage to those without it, Obamacare is replacing the pre-existing market for private insurance. Surveys from insurers and other industry players indicate that as few as 11 percent of those on Obamacare’s exchanges were previously uninsured. If these trends continue, the probability increases that Obamacare will eventually get repealed.
65-89% of Obamacare exchanges enrollees were previously insured.
Remember the fierce moral urgency of getting 47 million uninsured Americans the coverage they needed right now? Instead, we have a billion-dollar website and some kind-of functional state marketplaces which serve primarily to re-insure people who had their plans taken away from them — with new plans which are in many (most?) cases worse than the old plans.
Forward with James C. Capretta and Jeffrey H. Anderson:
ObamaCare is already an extremely unpopular program, before anyone has been taxed for not signing up. When Americans realize that they’ll owe even a modest tax for opting out, pressure will grow to exempt everyone from paying it.
ObamaCare’s authors wanted to use both a carrot and a stick to make the law work, but neither one looks effective. The subsidies for coverage are concentrated on the lowest-income households, not the middle class, and the mandate was watered down. So if ObamaCare is to succeed, it will have to do so based on its attractiveness to consumers.
Maybe after we bail out the insurance companies for complying with ♡bamaCare!!!, we can make the program more attractive by mandating lower premiums and deductibles. And then bail out the insurance companies again for complying with ♡bamaCare!!!.
Finally, Tracy Seipel in the San Jose Mercury News:
This weekend, Ding Yuan got a flu shot — for free.
The 25-year-old San Jose software engineer is among 156 million Americans whose employers pay for their health insurance. But like many of them, Yuan was surprised to find out that as of Jan. 1, the annual flu shot at his CVS pharmacy wouldn’t cost him anything because of the new federal health care law.
So was Terry Woo, a 53-year-old San Jose father of five who was getting his inoculation at a Walgreens a few miles away.
“That’s great,” said Woo, who also receives his health insurance through work. “I fully supported Obamacare, but I didn’t know that.”
We gone through years of total craptaculence so that software engineers could get their flu shots paid for by other people.
You’ll excuse me if I’m not quite feeling the win.
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