The growth in health care spending has slowed down and President Obama wants America to know his health care law gets the credit. Or maybe the blame, because one reason for that slowdown is that people are spending more out of their own pockets. Health care actuaries say that when people have to spend more out of pocket for health care, they tend to spend less elsewhere. And when a third party—employers, health insurers or the government—insulates consumers from the cost of care they tend to spend more. – See more at: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=25652#sthash.KaaCV94L.3b1iR1LZ.dpuf
One of the key questions surrounding Obamacare is just how many people have been newly insured under the law. The answer is clouded by the fact that the White House and others have changed some rules of math for making these assessments.
For example, several years ago, the Obama administration fiddled with the Census Bureau’s definition of what it means to be “uninsured.” The new parameters, which were looser than the old factors, make it hard to construct comparisons between today’s figures for the total number of uninsured and the historical trends.
The Obama team also abruptly started to exclude uninsured illegal immigrants from the national tally on total number of uninsured Americans. Before Obamacare, these individuals were counted in that reporting, inflating the numbers. After Obamacare, these individuals didn’t get insurance, but suddenly didn’t get counted any more.
Now, a new analysis from the highly regarded managed care analyst at Goldman Sachs, Matthew Borsch, and his team, cast uncertainty on some of the recent data releases from the White House, and its network of academicians. In particular, the Goldman breakdown conflicts in some key ways with a recent analysis from RAND that was published in the journal Health Affairs and widely cited by the media.
One of the key questions surrounding Obamacare is just how many people have been newly insured under the law. The answer is clouded by the fact that the White House and others have changed some rules of math for making these assessments.
For example, several years ago, the Obama Administration fiddled with Census Bureau’s definition of what it means to be “uninsured.” The new parameters, which were looser than the old factors, make it hard to construct comparisons between today’s figures for the total number of uninsured and the historical trends.
The Obama team also abruptly started to exclude uninsured illegal immigrants from the national tally on total number of uninsured Americans. Before Obamacare, these individuals were counted in that reporting, inflating the numbers. After Obamacare, these individuals didn’t get insurance, but suddenly didn’t get counted any more.
Now, a new analysis from the highly regarded managed care analyst at Goldman Sachs, Matthew Borsch, and his team, cast uncertainty on some of the recent data releases from the White House, and its network of academicians. In particular, the Goldman breakdown conflicts in some key ways with a recent analysis from RAND that was published in the journal Health Affairs and widely cited by the media.
ObamaCare Facts– Go to this link to find the latest numbers and unbiased facts about how people are being effected by Obamacare and what their opinions are on the various aspects of the law.
The Supreme Court’s pending decision in King v. Burwell could upend the way premium subsidies are distributed through the Federal health insurance exchanges in as many as 37 states. The impacted states are those that declined or failed to establish their own exchanges under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Examining the insurance market effects we find that:
If nothing else, the collapse of multi-million dollar state-based exchanges has created a PR problem for health reform, but that’s only part of the issue.
In Massachusetts, there is a stew of simmering revelations about apparent mismanagement of the Health Connector, a once working exchange created in 2006 that upon an update for the Affordable Care Act ceased functioning while consuming $1 billion.
Massachusetts health officials knew the Connector was in trouble for a year before its Oct. 1, 2013, launch date, according to an investigation by the Pioneer Institute, a public policy research organization.
“Instead of raising concerns about the project,” a team of University of Massachusetts Medical School contractors and MassHealth “misled the public by minimizing the shortcomings of the contractor hired to build the website, asked state workers to approve shoddy work and appear to have covered up the project’s abysmal progress in a presentation to federal officials,” said Josh Archambault, a senior fellow at Pioneer Institute and author of the report.