[BUMPED UP once more.]
All is not lost! You can still order from Amazon for the holidays through the handy neo-neocon portal. Use the widgets on the right sidebar, or go here.
You’ll be glad you did. Your family and friends will be glad you did. I’ll be glad you did.
Win, win, win.
…you can’t buy it, if it was grandfathered in.
Not for any amount of money.
Or anything like it. At least, in California, and probably in many other states.
We already knew that Obamacare has led to many cancellations of individual policies, and that people were complaining about it because many liked those policies. We also knew that the Obamacare exchanges (especially in California, but in many other states as well) feature what’s known as “narrow networks.” That is, counter to Obama’s promise about keeping your doctor and your hospital, many (in fact, most in California) doctors and hospitals will not be covered on the plan. So it is insurance that’s offered on the exchanges, but you won’t be able to go to many of your favorite and customary doctors and hospitals, often the ones with the best reputations. If you purchase insurance on the exchanges, you will be shut out of them unless you want to pay completely out-of-pocket, which almost no one can afford.
What I didn’t know, though—and what I’ve just learned from some research I did for a relative who lives in California—is that even individual insurance policies sold off the exchanges in California feature very narrow networks. Insurance companies have had to revamp their policies to cover pre-existing conditions plus those mandatory things (maternity, etc.) that many people don’t want, and so they’ve had to cut corners somewhere, and that “somewhere” is in choice and doctor reimbursement levels, resulting in narrow networks.
That’s not unexpected. What is unexpected is that companies are not offering the choice of buying more expensive individual policies with wider networks. No such animal exists anymore, except that policies that were grandfathered in still have the wide networks of old.
So you have a curious two-tier system where people in the individual market who bought policies in 2013, right up to December 15 (retroactive to December 1), have a lot of choice of doctors and hospitals. But a person who buys a policy after that date—or even before it, if that person didn’t want the policy to start until January 1, 2014—will find that his/her choice will be sharply reduced. It that person wants to go to a non-participating doctor or hospital, he/she won’t just pay a little bit more or have a higher deductible, as often happened in days of yore, either. That person will pay entirely and completely out-of-pocket.
You can’t buy any other type of individual policy in California. You can’t even pay more for more choice, as you used to be able to do, although the networks were wider then to begin with.
Health insurance could have been reformed without restricting or even ending choice this way. But that’s not what they were after, was it? They were after what Churchill called “the equal sharing of misery,” and by gum they will get it.
[NOTE: The individual market is mostly for the self-employed. Those who have group insurance (small or large) through their employers still have access to the old wide networks for the most part, creating a system of health-insurance proles (the self-employed) and health-insurance aristocrats (the group folks).
For now, anyway. Watch out, groupies. Are you next? If that happens, the doctors who are boycotting the exchanges and the individual market right now might be forced into them—and lower reimbursement rates—just to survive. And that’s probably part of the plan, too.]
[ADDENDUM: I was just on the phone with an insurance company in California (been doing a lot of that lately), and the person I was talking to contradicted what other people had told me. I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong, but this person said that there are still deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums for out-of-network coverage, although the figures for them are at least double the in-network figures for deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums, and it’s hard to find the figures on websites. In addition, health care providers can do what’s called “balance-billing”—charging patients for the difference between what the insurance company considers the customary cost and what the provider considers the actual price, so that those out-of-pocket maximums for out-of-network providers are not really maximums at all, and the patient can be liable for much more.
My guess right now? Nobody really knows how it will go, even the insurance companies themselves. But most people don’t know enough to even ask the questions about networks. They just assume the new networks will resemble the old ones, and they assume wrong.
Plus, the agents themselves really have no idea who’s in the networks. They look it up online just like the rest of us, and the online lists are incorrect in both directions (too many or too few doctors).
What a farce, except not a very funny one.]
[ADDENDUM II: I’ve added lots more information here about my understanding of how out-of-network works, including what happens with out-of-state providers, and in emergencies.]
…from ever writing about George Bush again. But instead he brings us this piece with the undeniably correct title, “Barack Obama is not George Bush.”
Well, of course not. Was there ever anyone who had a particle of doubt on that score? When I first glanced briefly at the title, not paying attention to who had written the article, I thought for a fleeting moment that the author meant that Obama was worse than Bush. Then I noticed who’d written it, and I realized that Chait must be very threatened by how far the mighty Obama has fallen to feel called upon to differentiate the two and state how much better Obama is than his altogether-blameworthy predecessor.
This tells you how bad it must be for Obama right now, because Chait is the guy who wrote the most famous, no-holds barred, unashamed, and unapologetic ode to Bush Derangement Syndrome I’ve ever read.
It was titled “Why I Hate George Bush”—you certainly can’t accuse Chait of coyness—and was published in the New Republic in September of 2003, over ten years ago. Chait began like this:
I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I’m tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism–“I inherited half my father’s friends and all his enemies”–conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage. He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school–the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks–shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks–blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudopopulist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing– a way to establish one’s social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.
Tell us how you really feel, Jonathan.
[NOTE: Notice also the personal, juvenile quality of Chait’s Bush-hatred. It’s meant to sound tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time it appears deeply felt and rooted (as Chait himself seems to suggest) in some sort of adolescent humiliation and envy.]
Those of you who read this blog regularly probably know that gay marriage, pro or con, is not my issue. My basic stance is that states should be allowed to decide for themselves, but that states which follow the traditional view of marriage as between a man and woman are being neither unconscionably discriminatory nor arbitrary.
Therefore yesterday when a federal judge struck down the clearly-expressed will of the people of Utah to defend a view of marriage that until a few short years ago was considered neither unconstitutional nor bigoted nor even controversial, I was troubled by the judiciary’s need to impose its own view on the people of the state (and for those who would compare this to courts striking down anti-miscegenation laws, I’ve already pointed out the large differences between the two in this lengthy article).
Part of yesterday’s ruling:
The state’s current laws deny its gay and lesbian citizens their fundamental right to marry and, in so doing, demean the dignity of these same-sex couples for no rational reason,” wrote U.S. District Judge Robert J. Shelby in the 53-page decision. “Accordingly, the court finds that these laws are unconstitutional.”
There are many rational reasons to deny this right, although Judge Shelby may not think they’re rational, nor share them. What’s more (as the Utah Attorney General pointed out), no 10th Circuit court has ever established marriage as a “fundamental right.” The people of Utah certainly don’t think so, nor do the last couple of thousand years of fundamental Judeo-Christian ethics, law, and belief.
But isn’t that what this is all about? The trend—whether it be an act as extra-judicial as A&E’s firing Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson for remarks that reflected centuries of Biblical beliefs about homosexuality, or the very-judicial action of Judge Shelby to overrule a popularly-passed law in Utah that affirmed the traditional view of marriage—is to relabel these ideas as unconscionable and unacceptable bigotry. This trend disturbs me far more than either Robertson’s remarks, Utah’s gay marriage ban, other states’ legalization of gay marriage, or gay marriage itself.
[ADDENDUM: I have to mention this excellent Mark Steyn column on the Robertson flap, which includes the following joke Bob Hope made in 1975: “I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”
Hmmmm. Do you think that, if the folks in California get wind of that one, they’ll petition to rename Bob Hope Airport in Burbank after someone else?]
I remember writing about this half-brother of Obama’s a while back. He seemed to be a really decent, straight-up kind of guy—not narcissistic, very different from his brother. Also very smart; a degree in physics from Brown and a Master’s in physics from Stanford.
He didn’t know Obama before the president became famous. His mother was Obama Senior’s third wife, and Ndesandjo grew up in Kenya. Now he’s written a book, and he’s got some interesting things to say while pitching it:
“Barack thought I was too white and I thought he was too black,” Ndesandjo said. “He was an American searching for his African roots, I was a Kenyan, I’m an American but I was living in Kenya, searching for my white roots.”…The 500-page book includes an appendix listing a number of alleged factual errors in Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams from my Father,” such as quotes incorrectly attributed to Ndesandjo’s mother.
“It’s a correction. A lot of the stuff that Barack wrote is wrong in that book and I can understand that because to me for him the book was a tool for fashioning an identity and he was using composites,” Ndesandjo said.
“A tool”—yes. And this especially caught my eye:
When asked how he would describe his relationship with his brother, he said, “Right now it’s cold and I think part of the reason is because of my writing. My writing has alienated some people in my family.”
I can tell you one thing: in any discrepancy between what Obama wrote and what Ndesandjo wrote, my money would be on Ndesandjo.
The title of Paul Mirengoff’s post on Obama’s announcement of the mandate waiver for those whose policies were cancelled due to Obamacare is “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.”
Mirengoff is talking about the mandate, and probably about Obamacare too. I couldn’t be more in agreement about that last.
But the title of his post put me in mind of more pleasant things. One of my favorite movie scenes:
Both were Republicans, by the way.
…recognizes your face, not just your smell.
…for people whose policies were cancelled due to Obamacare:
Some insightful commentary (and no, that “insightful” part is not sarcastic) by Ezra Klein, who seems bewildered:
Today, the Obama administration announced that people whose insurance plans were canceled this year will “temporarily” be exempted from the law’s individual mandate…
…[T]his puts the administration on some very difficult-to-defend ground. Normally, the individual mandate applies to anyone who can purchase qualifying insurance for less than 8 percent of their income. Either that threshold is right or it’s wrong. But it’s hard to argue that it’s right for the currently uninsured but wrong for people whose plans were canceled.
…Put more simply, Republicans will immediately begin calling for the uninsured to get this same exemption. What will the Obama administration say in response? Why are people who plans were canceled more deserving of help than people who couldn’t afford a plan in the first place?
…The same goes for the cheap catastrophic plans sold to customers under age 30 in the exchanges. A 45-year-old whose plan just got canceled can now purchase catastrophic coverage. A 45-year-old who didn’t have insurance at all can’t. Why don’t people who couldn’t afford a plan in the first place deserve the same kind of help as people whose plans were canceled?
Those are questions along the line of what I asked yesterday. Why, indeed? Because, that’s why. Because some animals are more equal than others.
The old inequities of the health insurance system were logical consequences of how insurance works as a business in terms of managing risk. They were not arbitrary discrimination, they reflected logical and unavoidable differences that are inherent in insurance and risk pools. The inequalities and waivers of Obamacare are government-sanctioned and politically-motivated creations of favored and unfavored classes of citizens. Probably unconstitutional as well.
[NOTE: It also would mean, as someone in the comments section of the Klein article observed, that in order to decide whether you should be penalized for noncompliance with Obamacare, the IRS would need to determine whether your insurance policy had been cancelled because of Obamacare. Good luck with that.
One more thing—ever since the cancellations began, I’ve been wondering how Obama would respond if the political reaction to them was negative enough. My leading theory (and it was something of a joke, but also sort of not a joke) was that he’d declare Obamacare to be a disaster and that the people who’d been affected would be eligible for FEMA relief. This announcement of his today and the one last night aren’t far behind.]
Obama had a bright suggestion for his insurance companies (they do kind of belong to him, don’t they?):
The Obama administration said Thursday it would allow millions of Americans whose insurance policies had been canceled to purchase bare-bones plans next year, in another 11th-hour tweak to the law likely to cause consternation among health insurers.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a group of six senators in a letter that people whose policies had been canceled because of new requirements under the Affordable Care Act would be allowed to purchase “catastrophic” plans. Those plans previously had been restricted under the new law to people under the age of 30 or those who qualified for a set of specific hardship exemptions.
Basically, this means they’ve expanded the definition of “hardship” to include “screwed by the Obamacare regulations.” Come to think of it, that makes sense.
In fact, though, it’s even later than the eleventh hour. Many insurers are saying this move would amplify the chaos in an already chaotic situation.
I have a question for Obama, Sebelius, and the rest: if the individual policies cancelled were such terrible “junk,” why are you allowing those who originally had them to purchase one of the very types of policy you defined as “junk” in the first place? Might it be because catastrophic insurance can be a valid choice for some people depending on their circumstances, and not “junk” at all?
Another question for Obama and company: why not just let anyone purchase a catastrophic plan who wants to do so? Wouldn’t that be a novel idea?
I think I know what their answer would be.
But it seems they didn’t listen to me.
Lately there’s been so much news that I don’t have the time to write in depth about all the things I’d like to. So I’m going to put on my “linker” hat and turn into Mini-Instapundit for the day:
This judge made a potentially important ruling, especially considering the fact that she’s a Clinton appointee (see also this).
Is this the tip of a larger iceberg?
Hispanics are turning on Obamacare.
I haven’t had a chance to really follow the PC flap about the Duck Dynasty guy, but here’s William Jacobson on the subject. Ace has a good take, too.
And here’s the Obamanation of the day.
…bring tears to my eyes.
Say what you will about Mitt Romney, he was one of the best men—on the personal level—ever to run for president in my lifetime. Maybe the best. And I believe he would have been a very good president, for all the reasons I’ve stated in the million or so (give or take a few) words I’ve written about him on this blog.
Looks interesting, but oh so painful (for me, anyway; perhaps not so much for you):
NOW they make it.
And here’s some snarky yet interesting commentary from the left:
…[I]n the end, Romney wasn’t as easy to hate as some other politicians might be.
So a year after he joined that small, melancholy club of presidential losers, it’s time that even those of us who thought it would be a terrible thing if he became president can see Romney as a human being. In January, Netflix will be releasing a behind-the-scenes documentary called “Mitt,” and the preview is surprisingly endearing…
Not so easy to hate? They certainly gave a good imitation of it, didn’t they?
NOW they can afford to admit that the man they slandered (and continue to slander*) was a good man, because it doesn’t cost them anything. They got their Obama second term, by hook or by crook. Hope it turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory.
[NOTE: *I’m using the word “slander” in its colloquial rather than legal sense. Legally, however, slander is spoken and libel is written, and the entire kit and caboodle is legally known as defamation.]