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Reasons ObamaCare is already good for you

Millions of Americans have already benefited from ObamaCare

In 2011, an estimated 86 million Americans used provisions in the Affordable Care Act to get preventative care through their insurance plans, care that insurance companies previously subjected to co-pays or deductibles but now must provide for free. Over 2.5 million seniors have saved an estimated $1.5 billion thanks to prescription drug discounts included in health care reform.

At least 2.5 million young people now can stay on their parents’ health insurance until age 26. And 4 million small businesses can now claim a tax deduction for providing health insurance to their employees, which so far over a quarter-million small businesses have claimed, providing insurance for 2 million workers.

The individual mandate was originally a Republican idea.

President Obama’s senior adviser David Plouffe called then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney “the godfather of the individual mandate.” At a GOP primary debate in 2011, Romney said, “We got the idea of an individual mandate…from [Newt Gingrich], and [Newt] got it from the Heritage Foundation.”

In fact, the idea of requiring businesses or individuals to provide and pay for health insurance traces at least as far back as Richard Nixon, who in 1974 proposed a mandate that “every employer would be required to offer all full-time employees the Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan,” the insurance plan Nixon was pushing.

In 1989, Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation shifted the conservative frame from an employer mandate to an individual mandate, writing:

"If a man is struck down by a heart attack in the street, Americans will care for him whether or not he has insurance. If we find that he has spent his money on other things rather than insurance, we may be angry but we will not deny him services—even if that means more prudent citizens end up paying the tab…. A mandate on households certainly would force those with adequate means to obtain insurance protection, which would end the problem of middle-class “free riders” on society’s sense of obligation."

Incidentally, Butler tried to renounce his invention of the individual mandate, but it appears to me that his reasoning reads something like, “I was for it when it was a Republican idea and am against it now that Democrats embraced it.”

The Congressional Budget Office recently cut health care reform’s cost estimates.

Conservatives have relied on apples-to-oranges accounting gimmicks to suggest the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently doubled the cost estimates for the Affordable Care Act.

In fact, the CBO adjusted its estimates to say the Affordable Care Act will cost less than originally projected. Moreover, the CBO has said that repealing the Affordable Care Act would increase the deficit by $210 billion.

Something had to be done about health care

The fact is, almost three-quarters of Americans saw health care reform as an urgent priority in the fall of 2009.

President Obama had a plan.

Republicans did not.

Still today, the president is trying to adapt and confirm the implementation of the Affordable Care Act to meet the needs of all Americans while keeping costs down. Republicans simply put forward more budgets that slash Medicare and middle class benefits while giving more tax breaks to the rich.

At the end of the day, while Americans are still on the fence about the Affordable Care Act as a blanket concept, when asked about particular remedies that the law includes, the public is overwhelmingly supportive.

This suggests that the President has a messaging problem, not a policy problem --- whereas the Republicans simply lack any substantive alternative, let alone a popular one.

All of the above suggests that the current fight over health care reform has nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act and everything to do with the President who signed it.

Never mind the fact that the law already shows promising and valuable impact even before it’s fully in effect. Never mind the fact that cost estimates are dropping and, starting in 2014, the law will contain overall health care costs that are crippling our household budgets.

Never mind the fact that the central component of the law was a Republican idea. Conservative ideologues are willing to sacrifice much-needed health care reform and the well-being of millions of Americans who don’t have health insurance or are being denied care because of pre-existing conditions, lifetime caps on spending or other injustices -- all for the sick goal of undermining President Obama. http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/03/28/5-reasons-obamacare-is-alrea
dy-good-for/

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New Data Suggests Obamacare Is Actually Bending The Healthcare Cost Curve

According to a new Congressional Budget Office report, hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending for Medicare and Medicaid are being removed from government projections as federal healthcare spending is now expected to be full 15 percent less than what had been initially budgeted for 2012. The surprisingly low spending projections come as the growth in healthcare spending has hit a new low for the fourth consecutive year.

Now, experts are beginning to recognize that the Affordable Care Act may, in fact, be contributing to the good news—a significant development as bending the cost curve was a primary goal of Obamacare.

While Douglas Elmendorf, Director of the CBO, previously noted that much of the savings were the result of a loss of wealth due to the recession, for the first time, he was willing to say that a ‘significant part’ of the savings are the result of structural change in how healthcare is now being delivered.

While the new data suggests that some of the changes in how providers are paid for delivering healthcare began—and were having a positive impact—prior to passage of Obamacare, the ACA codifies these changes in payment procedures for physicians and hospitals, taking what now appears to be programs that are slowing the growth in costs and applying them to all providers throughout the nation.

Importantly, the slowdown in the cost of care is happening in both the overall rate of spending and government spending. Writes Annie Lowrey in the New York Times—

“The slowdown has occurred in both government and overall health spending. From 2009 to 2011, total health spending grew at the lowest annual pace since the government started keeping records 52 years ago, a trend that seems to have continued last year. In the 2012 fiscal year, Medicare spending per beneficiary grew just 0.4 percent. The new Congressional Budget Office data said that overall Medicare outlays grew 3 percent in 2012, the slowest rate since 2000.”

While we can expect the Obamacare bashers to pour cold water on this good news, there is no denying that the law is paying some dividends in the critically important effort to bend the cost curve in healthcare delivery.

Could this be enough to open people up to contemplating that there may just be other good news to come thanks to health care reform? http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/02/12/new-data-suggests-oba
macare-is-actually-bending-the-healthcare-cost-curve/]

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Fact Check: Is Obamacare Slowing Growth of Health Costs?

“Thanks in part to the Affordable Care Act, also known as ‘Obamacare,’ the cost of health care is now growing at the slowest rate in 50 years,” Obama said in remarks to his Export Council.

“Just yesterday CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] estimated that health care spending grew at it second-slowest rate ever in 2012, will grow at its third-slowest rate ever in 2013, grew at its slowest rate in 2011,” he said. “So the three years since ‘Obamacare’ passed, we’ve seen the slowest growth in health care costs on record.”

Obama’s claim on the historically low growth rates for health costs is true, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation and CMS data. National health spending grew by 3.9 percent from 2009 through 2011, and near 4 percent in 2012; it’s projected to grow at a similar rate through 2013. Those are the lowest rates since the government started keeping track in 1960.

“I think the ACA is responsible for a good bit of what the economy doesn’t explain,” said Larry Levitt, a leading analyst with the Kaiser Family Foundation. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/09/fact-check-is-obamacare-s
lowing-growth-of-health-costs/]

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Over the past year, the cost of all goods and services rose 1.5 percent. But costs for medical services rose 3.1 percent during the same time period, more than twice the CPI’s average rate of inflation.
In addition, the Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently issued its “National Health Expenditure Projections 2012-2022,” which noted that “health spending growth through 2013 is expected to remain just under 4.0 percent." The cost increase is lower than expected, "due to the sluggish economic recovery, continued increases in cost-sharing requirements for the privately insured, and low growth for Medicare and Medicaid,” CMS noted.
Next year, however, overall health care costs are forecast to increase 6.1 percent as “improving economic conditions, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage expansions, and the aging of the population, drive faster projected growth in health spending in 2014 and beyond.”
The same report also predicts that “health spending is projected to grow at an average rate of 5.8 percent from 2012-2022, 1.0 percentage point faster than expected average annual growth in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).”

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The last time the government expanded health care, it was also kind of a disaster

If you think the launch of HealthCare.Gov isn't going so well, consider this: When online shopping for prescription drug programs launched back in 2005, things went so badly that the federal government didn't even get off the ground until three weeks after its scheduled launch.

The first obstacle was one of scheduling: Officials had initially scheduled the launch shopping component of the Web site on the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur.



The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services decided to delay the launch, per then spokesman Gary Karr, as to "respect all partners out there and their religious beliefs,"

But even after that, the site where seniors were supposed to compare drug prescription insurance plans didn't launch until November.



"The Medicare folks have had some trouble getting the tool up and running," then-Washington Post reporter Chris Lee wrote on Nov. 8, 2005. "The original debut date was Oct. 13, but officials delayed it, citing the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. Next it was promised on Oct. 17, but that day, too, came and went without personalized plan comparisons being available."

A news briefing promised the site would be up and in the afternoon. It didn't happen. "Visitors to the site could not access it for most of the first two hours,: Lee reported. "When it finally did come up around 5 p.m., it operated awfully slowly."

"Certainly I remember, thinking back to 2005, that the launch of the Web site was challenging," says Jack Hoadley, a researcher at Georgetown University who has studied the Part D program since before its launch. "It was pretty regularly a source of frustration just like what we're experiencing now."

What Hoadley says surprised him though, reading back through old news clips over the past few days, is just how challenged the program's digital launch was. "I look back and remember it was rocky," he says, "But I don't think I remember the degree of the rockiness that was the case."

There were other challenges too. As Hoadley and his colleagues wrote in a recent paper on Part D's launch, when seniors called the 1-800 Medicare phone number for help, a review found the agency "only responded to calls accurately and completely only about two-thirds of the time."

Lee reported that an annual booklet sent out to seniors called "Medicare & You" contained "inaccurate details about some of the prescription plan choices." CMS later had to post a chart on the Web site with the accurate information.

The delays of the Medicare.Gov Web site weren't as big news as the glitches with HealthCare.Gov. Both of the stories above ran on page A17 of the news section, unlike the HealthCare.Gov stories that have regularly been landing on the front page.

Gary Karr, who served as a spokesman for Medicare during the rollout, doesn't remember the initial enrollment period being especially difficult. It was right after people signed up that was the real crunch time.

"The enrollment felt pretty good," he says. "The first three weeks of the actual benefit did not feel so good, especially the first week and a half. Every glitch was a problem that got reported in the local papers. That's how it felt to us."

What does seem similar, between the Part D launch and the health law's, is the quick rush to jump to conclusions about success or failure.

"There was also a rush to conclude something is good or bad really fast," Karr says. "That's not different than it was in 2005. Generally, the political system is not patient."

The data suggests that perhaps it should be: Medicare Part D, which is now wildly popular with seniors, had horrible approval ratings when it launched.

These days, about 90 percent of seniors say they are satisfied with their Part D coverage.

"The coverage that people ultimately get is the kind of coverage that they're looking for," Hoadley said of the Part D program. "They don't remember the glitches in the first weeks of getting coverage. It's the coverage that sticks with people." http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/11/the-last-ti
me-the-government-expanded-health-care-it-was-also-kind-of-a-disaster/

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Also, the number of part-time workers spiked in 2008, well before Obamacare was enacted, and has been slowly falling as a share of total employment since 2010. In September people working part time because they could not find full-time work made up 5.5 percent of the employed, unchanged from August. The spike in 2008 and the steady drift downward since then suggests the elevated level of part-time workers is more likely due to the economy's weakness.

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