Health Care Horror Hooey
Paul Krugman, NYT
FEB. 23, 2014
Remember the “death tax”? The estate tax is quite literally a millionaire’s tax — a tax that affects only a tiny minority of the population, and is mostly paid by a handful of very wealthy heirs. Nonetheless, right-wingers have successfully convinced many voters that the tax is a cruel burden on ordinary Americans — that all across the nation small businesses and family farms are being broken up to pay crushing estate tax liabilities.
You might think that such heart-wrenching cases are actually quite rare, but you’d be wrong: they aren’t rare; they’re nonexistent. In particular, nobody has ever come up with a real modern example of a family farm sold to meet estate taxes. The whole “death tax” campaign has rested on eliciting human sympathy for purely imaginary victims.
And now they’re trying a similar campaign against health reform.
I’m not sure whether conservatives realize yet that their Plan A on health reform — wait for Obamacare’s inevitable collapse, and reap the political rewards — isn’t working. But it isn’t. Enrollments have recovered strongly from the law’s disastrous start-up; in California, which had a working website from the beginning, enrollment has already exceeded first-year projections. The mix of people signed up so far is older than planners had hoped, but not enough so to cause big premium hikes, let alone the often-predicted “death spiral.”
(More here.)
FEB. 23, 2014
Remember the “death tax”? The estate tax is quite literally a millionaire’s tax — a tax that affects only a tiny minority of the population, and is mostly paid by a handful of very wealthy heirs. Nonetheless, right-wingers have successfully convinced many voters that the tax is a cruel burden on ordinary Americans — that all across the nation small businesses and family farms are being broken up to pay crushing estate tax liabilities.
You might think that such heart-wrenching cases are actually quite rare, but you’d be wrong: they aren’t rare; they’re nonexistent. In particular, nobody has ever come up with a real modern example of a family farm sold to meet estate taxes. The whole “death tax” campaign has rested on eliciting human sympathy for purely imaginary victims.
And now they’re trying a similar campaign against health reform.
I’m not sure whether conservatives realize yet that their Plan A on health reform — wait for Obamacare’s inevitable collapse, and reap the political rewards — isn’t working. But it isn’t. Enrollments have recovered strongly from the law’s disastrous start-up; in California, which had a working website from the beginning, enrollment has already exceeded first-year projections. The mix of people signed up so far is older than planners had hoped, but not enough so to cause big premium hikes, let alone the often-predicted “death spiral.”
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
Americans For Progress do not have to run commercials featuring Julia Boonstra when they can just run the KEYC clip of Klobuchar/Peterson/Walz running away from the question "Where's the $2500 that Obama said would be saved ?"
They should have pointed to Julia Boonstra themselves ... with no lifetime cap and the inability to be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition.
The Detroit News interviewed Boonstra Jan. 28 when she was the guest of Republican Rep. Tim Walberg of Tipton at the State of the Union address in Washington. The one-minute ad makes no mention that Boonstra successfully enrolled in a new Blue Cross plan where she’s able to retain her University of Michigan oncologist and continues to receive the life-saving oral chemotherapy.
The ad also does not mention that Boonstra’s health care premiums were cut in half when she enrolled in a new Blue Cross plan, to $571 a month from $1,100. The new plan, however, increases out-of-pocket costs, such as doctor’s visits going from $20 to $50, she told The News.
Boonstra told The News she wasn’t clear how much her overall costs would compare with last year’s, but she was preparing to pay more under the new plan.
How much more ? Well, the savings alone from the premium is $6,348 and with Obamacare caps out-of-pocket costs for individual plans at $6,350, so feasibly Boonstra would be paying at most $2 more this year for her health plan.
The $750,000 AFP ad works because it has a real person telling her story .... the fact that the real person is uninformed it left for the viewer to research.
Minnesota voters better get used to the AFP tactics ... Randy Westby has been used against Rick Nolan and there will be more.
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