In other words, be very careful to understand the context of the "rate increase" story before drawing any conclusions when reading reports of either "excessively high" or "quite reasonable-sounding" 2016 premium rate change requests.
A couple of days ago I noted that the primary damage (but by no means the only damage) of the Supreme Court ruling for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell would be for appx. 6.5 million people to have to shell out an average of over $1,600 in extra taxesthis year to keep their current healthcare policy through the end of 2015, plus a likely average 493% hike in premium rates if they want to keep the same policies in 2016.
However, seeing one big blobby spreadsheet isn't exactly conducive to capturing people's attention, so I've taken the liberty of whipping up social media-friendly individual state graphics. Feel free to share widely!
The California Assembly has approved a bill to designate pregnancy as a qualifying life event to allow women to purchase health plans through Covered California outside of the regular open enrollment period. The bill is now set for review by the state Senate.
In New York, three separate bills have been drafted with the same goal, in a bid to increase the odds that a version will be passed.
Moves like the one in California could influence federal policy on the issue, suggests Christina Postolowski, health policy manager at Young Invincibles.
Sec. Burwell responded in the only rational way possible: By pointing out that if [the Republican Party is] absolutely determined to destroy the lives of millions of likely voters across 34 states (including swing states like Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin) while simultaneously forcing insurance premiums up an additional 35% - 45% for everyone else in those states (on top of whatever they were set to go up already), when it would literally take about 5 minutes for them to "fix" the very issue that they ginned up as the "problem" in the first place, there's not a hell of a lot that she can do to stop them.
...None of the above options involve anything that Sec. Burwell has any control over.
In other words, her only "contingency plan" is "try to convince the Republicans controlling the Supreme Court, Congress or those states to stop being colossal jackasses and actually do something to help the people they're supposed to be serving."
Not a plan likely to succeed, of course...but it's a plan.
A couple quick developments in the ongoing saga of Luis Lang, the guy from South Carolina with serious medical and insurance issues whose story went viral a few weeks back.
I've been occasionally chastized for my occasional use of less-than-professional language. Terms like "pile of crap" or, rarely, more crass terminology.
Now and then I think, "hey, I should probably tone down the language here!"
And then, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the 3rd in line to the Presidency, is reduced to issuing grade-school insults taken from 3-month old New York Post op-eds written by FOX News correspondents...
Over at the Washington Post, Greg Sargent notes that Mitch McConnell, as expected, is following the standard Republican playbook when it comes to...well, everything, really: Blame President Obama.
BAIER: Doesn’t this hold some potential problems for the GOP? What do you think the solution is if you have to deal with this quickly?
McCONNELL: Depending on what the Supreme Court decides, we’ll have a proposal that protects the American people from a very bad law. Obamacare was the single worst piece of legislation that’s been passed in the last half century. The single biggest step in the direction of Europeanizing our country…What we will do is offer a proposal to protect the American people.
Setting aside the "Europeanizing" part for the moment (seriously, I always wonder about the impact on foreign policy/diplomatic relations with our allies whenever a Republican says something like this), Sargent lays out the GOP's options:
There's not any new info here, but this bit pretty much summarizes what you'll be seeing across 2/3 of the country in a worst-case scenario:
...HealthCare.gov, the federally run exchange, is where 27-year-old Kathryn Ryan, a restaurant server in Philadelphia, turned for health coverage, as soon as the law took effect.
"I was excited because if it weren't for Obamacare, I wouldn't be insured at all," she says. "I wouldn't have the ability to go to the doctor."
She can afford health insurance thanks to a $200 a month subsidy that brings her premium down to $60 a month.
Ryan, who's also studying social work, is one of nearly 400,000 Pennsylvanians who have qualified for income-based financial assistance. But like a lot of people, she had no idea that a case before the Supreme Court puts at risk the subsidies in states like Pennsylvania that rely on the federally run exchange.
