Opinion: Health Reform's Promises Keep Faltering
That AOL News is suddenly hosting opinion pieces like this is one more sign of a shift in the political winds as the mainstream media struggle to cover their asses in both directions at once.
http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/opinion-health-reforms-promises-keep-faltering/19726678
By John Merline, Opinion Editor
(Nov. 20) -- Everyone knows the old cliche - Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But what do you say when you get fooled the third, fourth, fifth or sixth time?
That's what supporters of health care reform might want to ask themselves 'round about now. After all, early promises made about the health care reform law enacted in March keep falling by the wayside.
Here are a few of the big ones:
It will be good for Democrats in November.
In mid-March, White House adviser David Axelrod told CNN that reform would help Democrats in the midterms. And Robert Creamer promised around the same time in The Huffington Post that voters "will be thrilled that Obama and the Democrats have vanquished [the insurance industry] on the field of battle." Many others echoed this sentiment.
Not exactly. Turns out, supporting health care hurt Democrats in the midterm elections. According to a post-election analysis by polling expert Nate Silver: "Democrats were punished by voters for their ... health care votes."
It will get more popular once it's enacted.
Here's how Joel Benenson, President Barack Obama's lead pollster, put it just before the vote in March: "In politics, new information is always the most potent, [and] once reform passes, the tangible benefits Americans will realize will trump the fear-mongering rhetoric opponents are stoking today."
Not quite. A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds that just 25 percent think health reform will make them better off, down from 35 percent just before it passed. And 56 percent of midterm election voters said they want either all or some of it tossed.
It will cut insurance premiums.
In a speech just before the reform law passed, President Obama promised: "My proposal would bring down the cost of health care form families, for businesses, and for the federal government."
Maybe that'll happen years down the road when the plan is fully implemented, but so far, reform is having the opposite effect. Hewitt Associates, for example, says premiums for employer-provided insurance will climb 8.8 percent next year, the highest level in five years, and that health reform is partly to blame. A November report from Mercer said that reform "will generally increase" costs. And in early November, the AARP - the senior group that strongly backed the reform bill - announced that its own employees would see insurance costs rise, in part because of health reform.
You'll be able to keep your health plan.
In selling health reform, Obama said repeatedly that under the new law, "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."
One problem: The law is already threatening to disrupt people's health benefits. First, several health plans announced in September that they were dropping children's coverage as a result of new coverage mandates in the law, according to The Hill newspaper.
Then, the administration was forced to issue a series of waivers to companies that said that, without them, they'd be forced under the new law to drop their employee health plans. As The New York Times reported earlier this month, the administration is "issuing more waivers to try to prevent some insurers and employers from dropping coverage and also promising to modify other rules."
It's on rock-solid constitutional grounds.
When a few Republican attorneys general announced plans to file suit against the reform plan on constitutional grounds, reform backers scoffed - the suits were frivolous, meritless, political theater, with "little or no chance of success."
But judges in Virginia and Florida have said the suits can go forward, and now the chance of success isn't looking so impossible. As George Mason University School of Law professor Ilya Somin put it, the legal challenges "still face an uphill struggle" but "it is increasingly clear that lawsuits are far from 'frivolous' and have a real chance to prevail."
There's no question that the nation's health reform system is in a mess. But the simple fact is that nobody really knows how the new health reform law will work out. You just can't impose an incredibly complex new set of rules on an already incredibly complex health care system and claim to know precisely what will happen to workers, the federal budget, the uninsured -- which is one reason big, comprehensive reform bills are always risky.
As James Klein, president of the American Benefits Council, aptly put it, "It's a huge roll of the dice."
But you can, at least, hold the reform promise-makers accountable. And so, as a reader service, here's a Health Reform Promisekeepers chart. Keep it handy and see how the rest of the big health care reform promises hold up.
http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/opinion-health-reforms-promises-keep-faltering/19726678
By John Merline, Opinion Editor
(Nov. 20) -- Everyone knows the old cliche - Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But what do you say when you get fooled the third, fourth, fifth or sixth time?
That's what supporters of health care reform might want to ask themselves 'round about now. After all, early promises made about the health care reform law enacted in March keep falling by the wayside.
Here are a few of the big ones:
It will be good for Democrats in November.
In mid-March, White House adviser David Axelrod told CNN that reform would help Democrats in the midterms. And Robert Creamer promised around the same time in The Huffington Post that voters "will be thrilled that Obama and the Democrats have vanquished [the insurance industry] on the field of battle." Many others echoed this sentiment.
Not exactly. Turns out, supporting health care hurt Democrats in the midterm elections. According to a post-election analysis by polling expert Nate Silver: "Democrats were punished by voters for their ... health care votes."
It will get more popular once it's enacted.
Here's how Joel Benenson, President Barack Obama's lead pollster, put it just before the vote in March: "In politics, new information is always the most potent, [and] once reform passes, the tangible benefits Americans will realize will trump the fear-mongering rhetoric opponents are stoking today."
Not quite. A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds that just 25 percent think health reform will make them better off, down from 35 percent just before it passed. And 56 percent of midterm election voters said they want either all or some of it tossed.
It will cut insurance premiums.
In a speech just before the reform law passed, President Obama promised: "My proposal would bring down the cost of health care form families, for businesses, and for the federal government."
Maybe that'll happen years down the road when the plan is fully implemented, but so far, reform is having the opposite effect. Hewitt Associates, for example, says premiums for employer-provided insurance will climb 8.8 percent next year, the highest level in five years, and that health reform is partly to blame. A November report from Mercer said that reform "will generally increase" costs. And in early November, the AARP - the senior group that strongly backed the reform bill - announced that its own employees would see insurance costs rise, in part because of health reform.
You'll be able to keep your health plan.
In selling health reform, Obama said repeatedly that under the new law, "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."
One problem: The law is already threatening to disrupt people's health benefits. First, several health plans announced in September that they were dropping children's coverage as a result of new coverage mandates in the law, according to The Hill newspaper.
Then, the administration was forced to issue a series of waivers to companies that said that, without them, they'd be forced under the new law to drop their employee health plans. As The New York Times reported earlier this month, the administration is "issuing more waivers to try to prevent some insurers and employers from dropping coverage and also promising to modify other rules."
It's on rock-solid constitutional grounds.
When a few Republican attorneys general announced plans to file suit against the reform plan on constitutional grounds, reform backers scoffed - the suits were frivolous, meritless, political theater, with "little or no chance of success."
But judges in Virginia and Florida have said the suits can go forward, and now the chance of success isn't looking so impossible. As George Mason University School of Law professor Ilya Somin put it, the legal challenges "still face an uphill struggle" but "it is increasingly clear that lawsuits are far from 'frivolous' and have a real chance to prevail."
There's no question that the nation's health reform system is in a mess. But the simple fact is that nobody really knows how the new health reform law will work out. You just can't impose an incredibly complex new set of rules on an already incredibly complex health care system and claim to know precisely what will happen to workers, the federal budget, the uninsured -- which is one reason big, comprehensive reform bills are always risky.
As James Klein, president of the American Benefits Council, aptly put it, "It's a huge roll of the dice."
But you can, at least, hold the reform promise-makers accountable. And so, as a reader service, here's a Health Reform Promisekeepers chart. Keep it handy and see how the rest of the big health care reform promises hold up.