A great report to counter the naysayers and the purveyors of doom who are hoping for the A.C.A. to fail.
We're happy to report it won't.
The website has been fixed and it is doing just fine, signing up hundreds of thousands of Americans a day.
It was a terribly bumpy start that should never have happened, but now it's humming along and enrolling Americans who were not able to afford health care insurance in the past.
This will, of course, enrage the TeaPublicans who have hoped for the A.C.A.'s failure and, therefore, the continued misery of under insured and uninsured Americans, the continued misery of children and adults with pre-existing conditions who could not get coverage, and the misery of being thrown off the insurance companies' rolls once an American with a catastrophic condition hit his or her cap.
From Real Clear Politics:
The Obama administration said Sunday that it achieved its goal of making HealthCare.gov work for the “vast majority” of users after the disastrous start of enrollment in the president’s signature health law.
The Obamacare website will be able to support more than 800,000 consumers per day, the administration said. And the site is now online more than 90 percent of the time, not including scheduled downtime for maintenance.
These are huge improvements for a site that was up an average of 43 percent of the time in October, crashing frequently, spewing error messages, thwarting millions of people who tried to visit it.
“The bottom line: HealthCare.gov on Dec. 1st is night and day from where it was on Oct. 1st,” Jeff Zients, the management expert steering the repair mission, told reporters Sunday morning.
Since Obamacare was passed in 2010, the growth in health care spending has slowed to the lowest rate on record for any three-year period since 1965.
"If half the recent slowdown in spending can be sustained," the report says, "health care spending a decade from now will be about $1,400 per person lower than if growth returned to its 2000-2007 trend."
The authors further note that the benefit will go to workers in the form of fatter paychecks and to taxpayers as federal and state governments cut projected spending on health care.
Another plus would be more jobs as employers feel less burdened by the cost of covering their workers.
[snip]
Here's how the health care reforms did it: --
They reduced the overpayments to private insurers' Medicare Advantage plans and the price increases for providers. --
They're promoting new payment models, whereby medical providers are being financially rewarded for giving good care in an efficient manner. Under the old setup, providers could enhance their incomes by pumping up the volume of visits, tests and other services.
The reforms encourage the growth of "accountable care organizations." The more efficiently these groups of medical providers operate the more money they get to keep.
--Hospitals with high readmission rates are penalized. This is also a quality issue for Medicare beneficiaries, who are often discharged with inadequate planning for post-hospital care. Under a perverse set of incentives, hospitals were making more money when elderly patients returned. The taxpayers, of course, picked up the bills.
--Changes in Medicare should spill over into the private sector, generating even more savings. Medicare's payment structure is often the starting point in negotiations between private insurers and medical providers.
What about the rich? All this conservative talk about Obamacare's "redistributing" wealth to the less well-off ignores this reality: Every time medical spending rises, so do the taxes (of those who pay income tax) and the premiums for those who buy their own coverage. I mean, who do you think has been paying for all those uninsured people showing up at expensive hospital emergency rooms for free care?
those worried about federal deficits, here are some encouraging numbers, courtesy of the Affordable Care Act:
The Congressional Budget Office recently cut its projected Medicare and Medicaid spending in 2020 by $147 billion.
It expects the reforms overall to reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion from 2013 to 2022.
All this great stuff has been obscured by the bungled launch of the federal government's HealthCare.gov website. Once it is up and running, the conversation should turn in a more positive direction.
Those who read the advisers' report won't have to wait that long. Google "Council of Economic Advisers" for a copy. --Real Clear Politics
Finally some good news to drown out all those who cheered on the failures of the roll-out of the A.C.A. and, in doing so, wished for America to fail.
Go HERE to read about how the big insurance companies deceived their policy holders.
11 comments:
This will, of course, enrage the TeaPublicans who have hoped for the A.C.A.'s failure
The right wing will stay in denial about the success as long as they can, but when they finally have to recognize it, the freak-out will be a wonder to behold. They're pinning all their hopes for 2014 and 2016 on an ACA failure to drive voters back to them. If they don't get that failure, they'll have nothing.
Paul Krugman: "So what aspects of Obamacare might be causing health costs to slow? One clear answer is the act’s reduction in Medicare “overpayments” — mainly a reduction in the subsidies to private insurers offering Medicare Advantage Plans, but also cuts in some provider payments.
A less certain but likely source of savings involves changes in the way Medicare pays for services. The program now penalizes hospitals if many of their patients end up being readmitted soon after being released — an indicator of poor care — and readmission rates have, in fact, fallen substantially.
Medicare is also encouraging a shift from fee-for-service, in which doctors and hospitals get paid by the procedure, to “accountable care,” in which health organizations get rewarded for overall success in improving care while controlling costs.
Furthermore, there’s evidence that Medicare savings “spill over” to the rest of the health care system — that when Medicare manages to slow cost growth, private insurance gets cheaper, too.
And the biggest savings may be yet to come. The Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel with the power to impose cost-saving measures (subject to Congressional overrides) if Medicare spending grows above target, hasn’t yet been established, in part because of the near-certainty that any appointments to the board would be filibustered by Republicans yelling about “death panels.” Now that the filibuster has been reformed, the board can come into being.
The news on health costs is, in short, remarkably good. You won’t hear much about this good news until and unless the Obamacare website gets fixed. But under the surface, health reform is starting to look like a bigger success than even its most ardent advocates expected."
A political party that roots for America to fail deserves the oblivion it will earn.
Obamacare is already helping hundreds of thousands Americans and that will be what will drive the TPers over the edge. All they contribute to our national discussion is discord and disorder.
friends in Calif. have signed up with no prob...and they're very happy...the conservative media have been pushing this failure meme...makes their followers feel all gooey inside...hoping for Americans to fail? that's conservatism today...
"In the months ahead the GOP will squeeze every drop of political juice they can out of every Obamacare failure and hardship they can unearth or spin into existence. But the goal won’t be repeal. It will be to channel the right’s Obamacare obsession into voter turnout in 2014 — at which point millions of people will be insured and the law will be unrepealable.
I think the hopelessness of the repeal campaign — the absence of a viable legislative vehicle, the turning tide of Healthcare.gov, the initiation of insurance benefits — is becoming clear to elected Republicans, and its dying embers will be fully extinguished by early next year."
"One clear answer is the act’s reduction in Medicare “overpayments” — mainly a reduction in the subsidies to private insurers offering Medicare Advantage Plans, but also cuts in some provider payments."
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Unfortunately, for profit vigorish was not completely eliminated.
For profit insurers still have an effective cadre of leg breakers to extract their cut but I believe Krugman is essentially correct.
The Republican alternative would be to return the lost vigorish. That's their legislative plan.
There was never a doubt that the website would be fixed. Throw enough money at something and you can fix it.
The question is how many will see their health insurance rates increase so a small number of people can get free healthcare. For the hundred thousand that were signed up millions have lost their coverage.
Both sides lie about obamacare. Obama has admitted he lied with his keep you policy and doctor. The republicans lie when they say obamacare will never be implemented. The biggest lie is that obamacare was devised to lower healthcare costs. Obamacare was devised to provide insurance to the ten percent who didn't have it and the majority of those won't pay a dime.
Don't talk to me about OBMAFART please. Reasons are evident when one sets aside a full day to actually experience the smell.
Sorry to hear that, Les. But you're the only one of the 5 people I know who signed up who had any trouble.
Good for them. Stayed tuned.
Is Consumer Reports angling for Government Subsidies?
I wonder.
Who-Ah, happy days are here again.
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