Obamacare: The winners and the losers

Jennifer Harris is one of Obamacare’s many losers, said Chad Terhune in the Los Angeles Times. The self-employed lawyer recently received a letter from her insurer saying her $98-a-month individual health plan was being canceled, since it didn’t meet the requirements of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The California resident and her husband earn too much to qualify for subsidized health insurance under the new federal law—their joint income is $80,000—and the cheapest policy she’s found so far runs to $238 a month. “It doesn’t seem right to make the middle class pay so much more in order to give health insurance to everybody else,” Harris said. Obama knew his law would result in a “cancellation epidemic,” said Deroy Murdock in NationalReview.com. Back in 2010, his administration estimated that two thirds of those in the individual insurance market—up to 15 million people—could lose their policies thanks to Obamacare. Yet Obama “straight-out lied to the nation,” repeatedly promising, “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.”

Obama deserves some heat for that misstatement, said Froma Harrop in the Providence, R.I., Journal, but most of the plans now being canceled are pure junk. The “losers” are furious only because they “haven’t had a medical crisis yet,” so they don’t realize they were paying for imaginary coverage. Take the $65-a-month policy that Judith Goss, 48, signed up for. When the Michigan saleswoman developed breast cancer, she was faced with a $30,000 medical bill, but her plan would pay out only $1,000 a year for outpatient treatment and $2,000 for hospitalization. Unable to come up with $27,000, she put “off treatment until her tumor had tripled in size.” Under Obamacare, policies cannot require consumers to spend more than $6,000 a year on health costs. The law produces way more “winners” than “losers,” said Ryan Lizza in NewYorker.com. The 14 percent of Americans currently without insurance will “win” by getting access to affordable health policies. The 80 percent of people who get their insurance through their employer, Medicare, or Medicaid will see no change. That leaves 6 percent who buy their own plans on the individual market. Just half of that group—9 million people—will face higher premiums because their incomes make them ineligible for subsidies, said Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who helped develop the law. “That’s a shame,” said Gruber. “But no law in the history of America makes everyone better off.”

We’ve just begun to realize how many losers Obamacare creates, said Megan McArdle in Bloomberg.com. In 2018, “a lot of folks with employer-sponsored insurance are also going to see their insurance changed.” That’s when a 40 percent “Cadillac tax” will be levied on high-cost plans that provide workers—mostly union members and those in high-paying jobs—with extremely generous benefits. Millions of workers who will be switched to plans with higher deductibles and copays “are going to be screaming mad.”

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Such complaints are “breathtakingly cynical,” said Jonathan Cohn in NewRepublic.com.Any plan to reform our broken health-care system involves trade-offs, and Republican proposals would involve far larger disruptions. The 2012 budget approved by the GOP-controlled House, for instance, would have kicked up to 20 million people off Medicaid. Do they count as losers? Every conservative health-care proposal also calls for drastically curtailing the tax deduction for employer-based insurance, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. The Right’s ideal is to get rid of company-provided insurance altogether, and have us all go shopping on the individual market. Right now, these hypocrites are silent about their alternatives, while trying to whip up “fear of change.”

Going back to the status quo isn’t a viable option, said Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. Want to talk about “losers”? Consider the case of Richard Streeter, a 47-year-old truck driver from Oregon. He tried to buy health insurance after his employer dropped coverage in 2008, but as a lifelong smoker in his late 40s, couldn’t find an affordable plan. “So he took a terrible chance and did without.” In September Streeter was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer, and it may be too late to save him. The “biggest health-care crisis” is not that a few million Americans will pay more for better health care under Obamacare. It’s that 50 million people like Richard Streeter have had virtually no health care at all.