Smear campaign against ACA failed

by Tom Maertens
April 29, 2014

The Affordable Care Act hit the trifecta this month. A new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office forecast that it will have lower premiums, cost less than was earlier projected and insure more people.

Separately, President Obama announced that eight million people signed up for Obamacare through the federal exchange. As many as nine million people may have bought policies directly from insurance companies, bypassing federal exchanges, in order to avoid penalties. Another three million were enrolled under Medicaid.

In addition, three million young adults under 26 secured coverage on their parents’ health plans and approximately one million children with pre-existing conditions were covered as soon as the law passed in 2010.

Thanks to price competition, the CBO now projects that enrollees will spend $190 billion less on premiums over 10 years than earlier estimated.

The CBO and the bi-partisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the ACA’s coverage costs will be $5 billion less than previously forecast for 2014 and $104 billion less for the 2015–2024 time period.

Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index found that the share of adults without health insurance shrank from 17.1 percent at the end of last year to 15.6 percent for the first three months of 2014.

Because of the high sign-up numbers, Politico has reported many insurers are considering expanding their participation in the program next year, which could drive costs lower still.

The CBO and JCT estimate that the percentage of the non-elderly population with health insurance will rise from the current 80 percent to 84 percent this year and to roughly 89 percent by 2016.

In addition, the CBO and JCT reaffirmed their earlier estimate that the ACA’s overall effect would be to reduce federal deficits. Their current forecast is that the deficit will be 2.8 percent of GDP in 2014, the lowest number since 2007. For purposes of comparison, annual deficits under Reagan averaged 4.2 percent of GDP, the result of his unfunded tax cuts and military Keynesianism that tripled the national debt.

The effects of the ACA have also pushed down the increase in health care costs to the lowest in decades.

All this occurred despite the furious campaign by the right-wing noise machine. According to Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, opponents spent $500 million reinforcing people’s ignorance about the Affordable Care Act, and peddling scare stories about death panels pulling the plug on granny.

In reality, one of the most important accomplishments of the Affordable Care Act is that it abolishes death panels. No, not the fictional ones fabricated by Sarah Palin, but the real ones run by the insurance companies who used to cancel out costly patients under various pretexts, leaving them sick and without health insurance, and now uninsurable because of a pre-existing condition.

The same propagandists produced fantastic claims about the number of people who had their insurance cancelled. RAND found that fewer than a million people who previously had individual insurance became uninsured, and some of those were probably in transition from one company to another.

It’s becoming clear that the smear campaign has failed: recent polls by the Washington Post and NPR show that the ACA’s approval rating is now slightly higher than its disapproval rating.

Some healthcare opponents claim — erroneously — that Obamacare is socialism.

We have a socialist healthcare system in the United States:The veterans’ health-care system. It is owned and operated by the federal government, builds or contracts for the facilities, hires the health care personnel, and provides mostly free health care to veterans. Only the best for the troops.

Not surprisingly, the healthiest states in the country are those where nearly everyone is covered: Hawaii, Massachusetts and parts of the Upper Midwest. By contrast, the areas with some of the highest rates of death from preventable illnesses are parts of Texas, Florida and the Deep South, where fewer than 7 in 10 working-age adults have health insurance.

Despite those statistics, 24 governors — all of them Republican — decided to prevent Medicaid implementation in their states. That comes with a cost: one recent study projected the death toll from Medicaid rejection is likely to run between 7,000 and 17,000 Americans each year in those states.

Many of the same states also declined to establish insurance exchanges in their states, and some passed laws to prevent “facilitators” from advising new applicants.

Meanwhile, House Republicans “repealed” Obamacare for the 52nd time recently. Their principle platform for 2014 will be to oppose health coverage for the uninsured.

The Republican Party — proudly repealing Obamacare since 2010.

Tom Maertens served as National Security Council director for nonproliferation and homeland defense under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and as deputy coordinator for counterterrorism in the State Department during and after 9/11.

This article was published in The Free Press, Mankato, Minn., Tuesday, April 29, 2014.