Paul Krugman — fresh off his I’m smarter than you post (I have a few tasty comments in that thread that riled the libs something fierce), says this today in response to the Oregon study:
Fire Insurance Is Worthless!
After all, there’s no evidence that it prevents fires.
But strange to say (as Mark Thoma points out in correspondence), people seem to think it’s a good idea anyway.
I leave the relevance of this thought
Apropos to Alex’s post below, the huge news in the last day is a study from Oregon that looked at the effects of expanding Medicaid. As McCardle points out, the study was done under near ideal circumstances. Oregon could not expand Medicaid to everyone who wanted it, so they created a lottery. Sociologists swooped in and recruited. The result was a study of 6000 people with Medicaid and almost 6000 without. One of the authors … Read more
So one of the keystones of the Obamacare plan is the health insurance exchanges. These are the inventions, borrowed from Romneycare, that will supposedly heal the diseased health insurance market, right? They are the cure to what ails us, right?
Well guess what? In one of the most predictable developments in history, it looks like they’re not going to be ready in time:
Where was the contingency plan?
That’s what Joe Klein asks upon
One of the problems that I encounter in the debate over healthcare reform is that a lot of people simply do not understand what insurance is. Insurance is not a magical money tree that gives you free stuff. It is a way of spreading out risk. It has a secondary function in aggregating purchasing power so that insurance can negotiate prices. But, in the end, insurance will always cost the average person more than paying … Read more
Obama has apparently staked out a compromise on the birth control mandate:
The Obama administration proposed broader latitude Friday for religious nonprofits that object to the mandated coverage of contraceptives, one that will allow large faith-based hospitals and universities to issue plans that do not directly provide birth control coverage.
Their employees would instead receive a stand-alone, private insurance policy that would provide contraceptive coverage at no cost.
The plan will also offset self-insuring companies … Read more
Doh!
College students will soon wake up to the fact that they have been had. While they were overwhelmingly supportive of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or “ObamaCare”) when their charismatic President was championing it, they will not be pleased when they find out that there is a huge price they will have to pay. ObamaCare will be anything but affordable.
Apparently, New Jersey is the only state in the nation
Let’s not pretend that we’re surprised:
When the legislation that became known as “Obamacare” was first drafted, the key legislator was the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, whose committee took the lead in drafting the legislation. As Baucus himself repeatedly boasted, the architect of that legislation was Elizabeth Folwer, his chief health policy counsel; indeed, as Marcy Wheeler discovered, it was Fowler who actually drafted it. As Politico put it
I am Hal’s complete lack of surprise:
By the end of this week, states must decide whether they will build a health-insurance exchange or leave the task to the federal government. The question is, with as many as 17 states expected to leave it to the feds, can the Obama administration handle the workload.
“These are systems that typically take two or three years to build,” says Kevin Walsh, managing director of insurance exchange
You know, even for politics, this is pretty fucking low:
The pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action lobbed a heavy-duty attack at Mitt Romney this morning, airing an ad that links the closure of a GST Steel plant in Kansas City to the loss of a family’s health insurance — and the death of a woman some time later.
The man speaking in the ad, Joe Soptic, says, “Mitt Romney and Bain closed the plant,
How many times have I said it? When you outlaw cheap insurance, you create more uninsured:
Some colleges are dropping student health-insurance plans for the coming academic year and others are telling students to expect sharp premium increases because of a provision in the federal health law requiring plans to beef up coverage.
The demise of low-cost, low-benefit health plans for students is a consequence of the 2010 health-care overhaul. The law is intended
