Health Exchanges: The More, The Better for Small Business

KT- way to keep up the MSM boycott of the exploding Acorn story. If this was a republican group,..it would be nonstop 24/7 coverage..very predictable KT.

Ah Karen, healthcare is now a non-issue. Or didn’t you get the memo?
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Republicans and Democrats are not going to go for Obama’s healthcare. What has taken its place is the ACORN scandal, and Obama’s connections.
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Perhaps you will FINALLY report on this developing and on-going debacle.
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Even Jimmy Carter coming out and saying it is “nothing but racism” is losing.
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Obama’s poll numbers have now reach an all time low. People ARE tired of the corruption in Washington, and Obama’s promise to bring “Change” to Washington is NOTHING but a big joke. A big joke on the Democrats and those stupid enough to have voted for him.

Way t’ keep up th’ boycott o’ th’ 70% o’ American doctors supportin’ a public option, too!
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Ne’er mind tha’ exchanges be smoke an’ mirrors.
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Stick wi’ th’ script ye been handed, lass, ye’ll be just fine.
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Yarr!

So I’m only f**ked by the Baucus plan until 2022? Sweet!

Republicans keep demanding that insurers be able to sell policies across state lines.
Is there any federal statute that currently stops this? For instance, could Arizona pass a state law that states that any policy that is good in Mississippi is good in Arizona (with the relevant coverage and exclusions, and the insurers blessing of course)? Could there be a federalist solution to their whining?

The thing that is hilarious about the Baucus “bipartisan” bill is the fact that no one supports it. He couldn’t even get Snowe to support it. Hopefully this will put an end to the fantasy that there is such a thing as bipartisanship, or a middle ground between the two sides. The Democrats ought to go it alone and tailor the bill to what the people who voted them into office want and forget about the obstructionists and poor losers on the other side.

even liberal John Stewart is cracking up at the lack of coverage..very funny. watch carefully KT

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/09/16/jon-stewart-mocks-media-acorn-story-where-hell-were-you

KT-…. if this story was about the christian coalition being a fraudulant group n say 1995 do you think TIME would be ignoring it….KT I know you dont like to respond to anybody but liberals…but how about a quick story about how the MSM is trying to cover for Barack…or does that make me a racist for saying that

You are a racist. Let Karen alone, she is busy fondling her copy of the Baccus plan in hopes that this will be “the” plan which will save the Democrats. She is carefully looking at each and every word to shed some light on the hope and dream that this can somehow be salvaged.
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Psssst Karen. It’s over. Please do not be the last one out of the room, and the one who has to turn out the light.

Is this the “poll” you are referring to PW?
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http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=506199
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45% Of Doctors Would Consider Quitting If Congress Passes Health Care Overhaul

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IBB/TIPP also says this:

The poll contradicts the claims of not only the White House, but also doctors’ own lobby — the powerful American Medical Association — both of which suggest the medical profession is behind the proposed overhaul.

It also calls into question whether an overhaul is even doable; 72% of the doctors polled disagree with the administration’s claim that the government can cover 47 million more people with better-quality care at lower cost.Nowhere in the Times story does it say doctors as a whole back the overhaul. It says only that the AMA — the “association representing the nation’s physicians” and what “many still regard as the country’s premier lobbying force” — is “lobbying and advertising to win public support for President Obama’s sweeping plan.”

The AMA, in fact, represents approximately 18% of physicians and has been hit with a number of defections by members opposed to the AMA’s support of Democrats’ proposed health care overhaul.

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Doctors want TORT reform. They want paid for their services. They do not want to see their taxes increased in order to pay for a group of people who currently do not have insurance. They will not support the Baccus Plan, as it is simply a Medicaid give away. This plan does not solve any problems, it simply creates more.

KT, hopefully your conference ended well, but do you have to take the redeye back? Or can you have a leisurely breakfast with celebrity starlets, and then spend the day flying back while napping and hitting the laptop? Did you get pics of you with Warren, Arianna, and Geena Davis? You may get asked LOTS of questions here about the recent poll of doctors supporting the public option. I slipped in a mention here (w/ link) ahead of time so you can have something to read besides the SkyMall magazine. Now if those doctors would also mention my idea of running / paying for HC services like police and fire depts….
docs / PO – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112818960

KT:
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Will the inclusion of 50-worker small businesses in the proposed exchange reduce the cost of health care in the US from $7000-plus per person per year (according to the OECD) more than a 20-worker requirement to participate?
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Will the greater participation in an exchange starting in 2013 lower our strangely exorbitant price tag down to where the French or Germans are, like around $3600? When will we start to pay what the rest of the developed world pays, if the Baucus plan goes into effect?
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Will the exchange as outlined in the Baucus plan stop Americans from paying more than twice as much for their health care (with worse results) than other wealthy nations?
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Will the exchange lower the per capita cost of health care in the United States to somewhere around $4000? …$5000? …$6000? …$6500? $6750?
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What will the projected cost per capita be under the Baucus plan, KT, and by when? Will it be less than the $7000-plus we Americans pay now? Will it be more?
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Isn’t that the most important feature of the bill, even more important than the exchange getting a bit more clout?

More ACORN moments. This is “healthcare reform, ACORN style”. Are these two ladies “at the table with Obama deciding for the rest of us what our healthcare reform will be like when Obama comes out with HIS plan?
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R.I.P. Mary Travers (72)
Peter, Paul and Mary

There are more important things to cover. If you want to read the latest gossip about ACORN, go read Fox News or the Drudge Report. I’m sure their coverage can satisfy your desire for trivial drivel.
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No one on the Left ever subscribed to the Right’s obsessions and incessant conspiracy theorizing. ACORN was never the great political machine that the Right has been trying to make it. The outrage emanating from conservatives is merely their latest political wedge, hence the nonstop attempts to associate the organization with the Democratic party and the White House. Sorry, but I’m not buying in to it.

Obama’s “all time low” poll numbers are at the same level as the percentage of people who voted for him and 3 times as high as Bush’s when he left office. Meanwhile, Conservatives and Republicans are sticking to all the policies that got us in to this messs and playing the fiddle while the country burns.

Baucus has struck out, but that is no reason to kill health care reform.Here is an alternative to the public option that would lower costs just as much while relying on existing insurance companies:
1. Anyone offering health insurance must offer a basic plan that is the same for all companies, so that potential buyers can directly compare costs.
2. The companies compete as to which one can offer it at the lowest cost.
3. the prize for offering it at the lowest cost is that anyone who does not actively make some other choice, (or is not assigned to one by an employer) is assigned to the basic plan with the winning company.
The competition would be held again every three years. A public option would only be invoked if he companies refused to bid or made identical bids.

Hey, KT, I don’t know if you heard about the whole “doctors come out in support of the public option” thing. Might be worth checking out.

No Rusty, that would be this one:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112818960

Among all the players in the health care debate, doctors may be the least understood about where they stand on some of the key issues around changing the health care system. Now, a new survey finds some surprising results: A large majority of doctors say there should be a public option.

When polled, “nearly three-quarters of physicians supported some form of a public option, either alone or in combination with private insurance options,” says Dr. Salomeh Keyhani. She and Dr. Alex Federman, both internists and researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, conducted a random survey, by mail and by phone, of 2,130 doctors. They surveyed them from June right up to early September.

Most doctors — 63 percent — say they favor giving patients a choice that would include both public and private insurance. That’s the position of President Obama and of many congressional Democrats. In addition, another 10 percent of doctors say they favor a public option only; they’d like to see a single-payer health care system. Together, the two groups add up to 73 percent.

wowser. i leave for a few days and you guys turn really cranky. am still in san diego, and not entirely sure i want to come back….:)

thanks for asking. i informed the high sheriffs that i am too old to take the redeye, except under extreme duress, so they gave me another night here. i’m on the early flight back to DC tomorrow. had a nice dinner all by myself reading the best novel i have read in a long time: “cutting for stone,” by abraham verghese. highly recommend.

also, am happy to report that geena davis is very nice. unlike anchor of a significant news show, whom i met for the first time here. not naming names.

Are these two ladies “at the table with Obama deciding for the rest of us what our healthcare reform will be like when Obama comes out with HIS plan?
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How did you figure it out Rusty? Actually, it is a round table with Obama, Billy Tauzin, Max Baucus, Chuck Grassley, A few lobbyists from WellPoint and Aetna and these two ladies.
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The “public option” is actually a liberal dog-whistle word for non-Western medicine. Not only will there be Death Panels for Granny, but Seniors will be euthanized by a team of Central-Asian shamen, Carribean witch doctors and Native American medicine men. During the process, a duet entitled “Today Is A Good Day To Die” is sung by Barbra Streisand and Pete Seger.
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Glenn Beck should be all over this later in the week. As usual, don’t expect much coverage by the liberal media.

Why cover it? I can tell you how it’s going to go:
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ACORN has fired or will fire the employees. They will conduct an investigation. They will make changes to minimize the chance of this happening again. Law enforcement officials may conduct their own investigation. Charges may be pursued against the individuals who broke the law. The government will divest itself or has divested itself of involvement with ACORN until further notice. We all move on to more important matters. The world keeps turning. End of story.
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I know conservatives would love to make this about Obama and the Democrats (anything to bring their poll numbers out of the ditch), but it’s just not happening. Sorry.

I’d leave the country if I were you; all signs are indicating imminent implosion.
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On a separate note: What of such importance occurred in San Diego that Time had to send the great Karen Tumulty?

Awww, come on, come back.

You have to understand how frustrating this is for some of us. We really don’t feel like single payer or even a really strong public option (ie on day one you can choose between your current healthcare and a government run plan) got a fair airing in this debate. Instead we get… co-ops that kind of maybe eventually let everyone choose to use them after 2020?

We’re cranky because we feel like we got screwed. And when you’re on the left it sometimes feels like your ideas never get a fair shake from the media. It’s like every time I read a post here about “the public option paying for abortion,” I have to get mad. Public money pays for so many things I don’t like. But Time doesn’t get up in arms saying “it’s not fair that destor23 has to pay to invade Iraq when he doesn’t want to!” But you all do basically write that for James Dobson. What gives?

Karen – Aren’t we always cranky?

I hear you about red eyes. I could do them when I was 20. No more.

It’s great that you met Geena. Have a relaxing trip back.

KT:

Like rusty and ilikechips, I have become incredibly frustrated over the failure of the media to cover the ACORN story.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that ACORN organizers are not going to turn a blind eye to — if not aid and abet! — prostitution on their own. The Democratic Party has obviously crawled into bed with the prostitution lobby and it is time for the media to pull back the sheets.

Today, the prostitution-industrial complex threatens the very fabric of our society. President Obama has already signed an executive order to create an army of illegal-alien prostitutes that will join forces with the Teachers’ Unions (ask Joe Klein about this part) to abduct and indoctrinate our children into state-run prostitution camps.

Make no mistake. This reaches the highest levels of government. With ACORN leaders having access to the White House itself, can we believe that the President doesn’t know the true characters of these people? Do they not run background/security checks?

Ask yourself these simple questions. What if the Bush administration was revealed to have had ties to a prostitute? Or if the administration had even let such persons into the White House? Would the media gulliblly believe that the Bush Adminsitration did not know who they were associating with? Would the media leave it up to The Daily Show and bloggers to cover the story?

2022?

Talk about a mirage. that is the weirdest damn thing. Who in the hell cares about what’s going to happen in 2022? And who in the world, besides the truly disconnected Ezra, thinks it will ever come to pass without being completely defanged? Gee, only 7 election cycles between now and then.

Why not 2050? My God, this makes Ross Perot and “I can’t be president because it would take three election cycles for me to fix things” look like a prophet.

Call it RipVanWinkleCare.

So Karen, we know these senators are totally gutless. But is this provision based on self-delusion or unimaginable cynicism?.

Another important piece from Trudy Lieberman’s groundbreaking series on health care reform. This time she analyzes the Massachusetts model, uncannily similar to what Obama is proposing:
Health Reform Lessons from Massachusetts, Part VI : CJR

The Massachusetts model includes an individual mandate that requires people to carry insurance. … If someone doesn’t qualify for a subsidy, they must purchase insurance on their own. If they want to, they can use the state’s shopping service, called the Connector. Those deemed able to afford a policy must pay a tax penalty if they don’t buy one.

Lieberman details the problems with the Connector, which is the insurance “exchange” in MA. The piece is really too good to excerpt, but here is a few interesting facts: (all quotes taken from the piece)

-”But recent Census Bureau statistics show that, in 2008, … about 5.5 percent of the state’s population; up from the 2.6 percent who were uninsured in the years after reform took effect.”

-”While the number of uninsured in Massachusetts is lower than other states, the latest rise suggests either that the state is exempting more people from the mandate or that more are taking the tax penalty. The maximum penalty is about $1000 per person, which may be less expensive than buying a policy.”

-”Last year, the average family premium in Massachusetts topped $13,788.”

-”Massachusetts may require insurers to cover the sick, but it doesn’t force them to sell affordable policies. Rates for an older person can be twice as much as that for a younger person, requiring them to pay several hundred dollars more. ”

-”It’s no secret that Massachusetts’ lack of cost controls, deliberately avoided when reform passed, threatens to undo the law. Ultimately, if the state has no way of paying for subsidies to cover insurance premiums, the law is doomed. Same goes for national reform. Most cost control measures under consideration by Congress and the president are weak or predicated on squeezing savings out of the existing health care order—savings that may or may not materialize.”

-”People I interviewed mentioned the lack of a dedicated funding source, similar to that which exists for Social Security and Medicare, that would pay for the subsidies. Without such a source, financing is always at the whims of politics and competes with other state priorities.”

Read the whole thing. I can’t do it justice. Lieberman’s series on health care reform is the best work out there on health care reform. This is what we are looking at, even under the best of circumstances. It ain’t pretty. In fact, I predict that health care “reform” will turn into one huge debacle. You think people are going to like this? It may well doom the Democrats for 50 years if anything like the Baucus Plan or the Massachusetts plan passes.
Health Reform Lessons from Massachusetts, Part VI : CJR

I want some of what KT and EK are smoking.
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Both are conflating the “co-op” idea with the “health insurance exchanges” idea. Here’s a clue.
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The health insurance exchanges are merely marketplaces that are set up to establish an ‘even playing field’ where consumers can compare health care plans. They are NOT co-ops that combine purchasing power and collectivize risk — and as we’ve already seen, co-ops are a failed model.
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And there is a reason for this — groups and individuals who have lower than average risk (and would thus be available for lower than average premiums) will avoid the co-ops. As a result, the co-ops will devolve into extremely expensive and economically unsustainable high risk pools as the advantages of “combined purchasing power” are outweighed by the costs of providing care to a less healthy pool of patients.
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But since Ezra Klein has the Washington Post seal of approval, his utter nonsense is quoted by KT without her ever engaging a single brain cell…..

i’m not conflating at all. the exchanges will be marketplaces, all governed by the same rules. and there will be different plans within those marketplaces that people can shop for, but (I suspect) probably not more than three of four big ones. i still think that giving small businesses a big pool that they can buy into is a much, much better thing than having them go out and buy on their own.

KT….
The existence of a marketplace does not create a larger pool that individuals and small businesses can participate in — and this is especially true when the baucus plan allows/encourages huge differences in insurance premiums (up to five times more expensive) based on age. In other words, small businesses with “older” workforces are going to wind up paying a whole lot more for health insurance than those that “phase out” their older employees and hire younger ones.
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this should bother you as much as it does me, since neither of us is a spring chicken!
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The Kaiser Family Foundation issued a report about the Consumer’s Experience in Massachusetts. All of this talk about health insurance clouds the issue in more ways than one: affordable insurance premiums do not equate to affordable care. The study found that 17% of insured individuals postponed care because of cost and 26% had debt.

In other words, paying for insurance didn’t mean that they could afford treatment. Since I consider being able to get treatment when one needs it without becoming financially unstable as a prime object of reform, I can’t see that this approach has much to offer.

DDay-has a good write up over at Digby’s that give a different prespective.
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Everybody’s talking about Max Baucus’ plan for health care!
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Mostly, people don’t like it!
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Republicans don’t like it because… it’s a health care bill. Democrats don’t like it because… it’s a bad health care bill designed to kowtow to Republicans who won’t even vote for it. Health care advocacy groups don’t like it because it “would give a government-subsidized monopoly to the private insurance industry to sell their most profitable plans – high-deductible insurance – without having to face competition from a public health insurer.” A good reason not to like it! And unions don’t like it because there’s no employer mandate and it would “tax health plans.”
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A bill of particulars:
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• The bill spends too little on coverage subsidies. While putting a price tag on something that is paid for inside the budget window is misleading, the fact is that Baucus artificially lowered that price tag to meet some conception of centrism, and the lowered subsidies have a direct impact on affordability.
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http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

Ye got t’ admit – it do be despicable tha’ a few not-too’well ed’cated, not-too-well trained, not-too-well paid, minority women be handin’ out legal advice on hidin’ yer ill-gotten gains fer free!
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How dare they!
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Ev’ryone be knowin’ th’ real, patriotic, American way be t’ be payin’ yer (corporate sponsored) financial advisor a minimum o’ hundreds o’ thousands o’ doubloons per year t’ set up secret off-shore accounts t’ stash yer millions in! Anythin’ else be just – well, just near treason, me hearties!
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Tin can – tha’ be fer amateurs!
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Acorn be deservin’ o’ th’ most draconian prosecution an’ punishment, an’ then be deservin’ t’ ne’er have gov’rnment fundin’ ag’in! Let those women c’llect welfare fer bein’ so uppity!
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I know – le’s put ‘em on th’ docket ri’ b’hind KBR when we prosecute ‘em fer skimmin’ millions o’ dollars fr’m their gov’rnment handouts an’ buildin’ extreme’ shoddy, flammable housin’ fer our service members, an’ cut THEIR fundin’ off, an’ send THOSE guys t’ jail!
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YARR!

Blast! Section 5, ri’ after ne’er receive fundin’ ag’in should read”
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Fire their bl*ck a$$es an’ let em c’llect welfare…jus’ li’ we do white corporate boys!
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Cause tha’ be wha’ this be ’bout, too!
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YARR!

I’m seen some of the material, and it looks suspiciously to me like illegal surveillance and entrapment. If this goes to court (and I doubt it will) the videos will probably be thrown out as evidence. Not that legal issues matter to the wingnuts: all they want to do is fling their mud and screech their hate slogans.