The Obama administration, officials in around half of the states and a network of the program’s supporters are desperate to get the new health insurance scheme up and running. It’s shaping up as a particularly ugly fight in an era that’s come to be defined by “crisis governance.” What does no-hold-barred warfare against a law that’s been settled for three years look like? Some tea party activists are urging Republican lawmakers to shut down the government — or even default on the debt Congress itself ran up — in a quixotic effort to “defund” Obamacare. In refusing to expand Medicaid, legislators in 21 states, most of them “red,” are not only denying their poorest citizens coverage, but also turning away billions of dollars from the federal government. Some members of Congress are refusing to help their own constituents navigate the new exchanges to get the benefits available to them. According to the Washington Post, some state legislators are getting quite creative, “refusing to enforce consumer protections, for example, and restricting federally funded workers hired to help people enroll in coverage.” In Missouri, “officials have been barred from doing anything to help put the law into place.” The latest strategy to undermine the law’s success is especially pernicious — a major campaign to persuade young people without insurance to pay a penalty, skip the cheap plans they could purchase in heavily subsidized Obamacare exchanges (a young, low-income worker in California will actually be able to get very basic coverage for nothing, according to Sarah Kliff at the Washington Post) and face the risk of a debilitating injury or illness on their own. The idea is that if young, healthy people can be convinced to stay away from the exchanges, premiums will skyrocket for everyone else and the whole scheme will come crashing to the ground. FreedomWorks is urging people to burn fake “Obamacare draft cards” and post videos of the stunt to YouTube. Dean Clancy, vice president of the group, told the Washington Post, “We’re trying to make it socially acceptable to skip the exchange.” Twila Brase, a conservative health care activist with a group called the Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom, launched a campaign called “refuse to enroll” which likens participating in the exchanges to receiving welfare. The right-wing National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) released a report highlighting how much cash young people might save by paying the penalty instead of buying insurance (and predicting that they’ll stay away in droves). Conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnuru argues that it’s no big deal to go without coverage. Those who are mangled in an accident or come down with some awful ailment “will be able to buy insurance once they’re sick at the same rate they could have gotten it for when they were well,” he writes. “That’s the part of the Obamacare law that its defenders are usually most keen to emphasize.” That’s a common but inaccurate belief about the law’s requirement that insurers cover pre-existing conditions: you can just wait until you need insurance to purchase it. FreedomWorks said as much to an inquiring reporter from Bloomberg News. But the reality is that, after this year, you’ll only be able to enroll in the exchanges for a brief period in October and December. There are a few exceptions, like if you lose a job in the middle of the year, but as Adrianna McIntyre remarked, “I accidentally burned my Obamacare card” isn’t one of them.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Sep 2013 20:16:05 +0000
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