By lambert strether. Originally published at Corrente.
Rahm’s little brother Zeke has an Opinion piece in the Journal on ObamaCare. First, the state of play on the health insurance exchanges:
Setting up the exchanges will pose a host of technological challenges, such as digitally linking an individual’s IRS information (which determines a subsidy level) to the insurance offerings in the individual’s home area and to employment data [and DHS data for citizenship and credit reporting data] —while simultaneously factoring in Medicaid eligibility [which varies by state].
Bugs in the computer software are bound to pop up, and the quality of the user experience will undoubtedly need improvement. … But IT problems aren’t the ones that should keep you up at night. Such glitches will be ironed out within a few years, and certainly by 2016 browsing your health-insurance exchange will be very much like browsing Amazon and other online shopping sites.
That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.*
So now to “the young invincibles,” who are key to the success of ObamaCare:
Insurance companies worry that young people, especially young men, already think they are invincible, and they are bewildered about the health-care reform in general and exchanges in particular. They may tune out, forego purchasing health insurance and opt to pay a penalty instead when their taxes come due.
The consequence would be a disproportionate number of older and sicker people purchasing insurance, which will raise insurance premiums and, in turn, discourage more people from enrolling. This reluctance to enroll would damage a key aspect of reform.
Insurance companies are spooked by this possibility, so they are already raising premiums to protect themselves from potential losses. Yet this step can help create the very problem that they are trying to avoid. If premiums are high—or even just perceived to be high—young people will be more likely to avoid buying insurance, which could start the negative, downward spiral of exchanges full of the sick and elderly with not enough healthy people paying premiums.
Fortunately, there are solutions. First, young people believe in President Obama. They overwhelmingly voted for him. He won by a 23% margin among voters 18-29—just the people who need to enroll. The president connects with young people, too, so he needs to use that bond and get out there to convince them to sign up for health insurance to help this central part of his legacy.
Leave aside all that shinola about the “bond” young people have with Obama; 2008 is so over. And does anybody really care about Obama’s legacy except Obama? And leave aside the student debt crisis, and youth unemployment, even if it is horrific.
What’s one thing you know about young people today, maybe the most obvious thing? That’s right: They’re totally wired, totally digital, totally computer-savvy. (They are also said by some to multi-task and have very short attention spans.)
So if you had an Internet product, and you wanted to turn young people off, right at the point of purchase, what would you do? That’s right: You’d build a platform that was “buggy,” with a “user experience” that “needs improvement,” that has “glitches,” and that will take three years to straighten out.
Which is exactly what ObamaCare’s exchanges are going to be like, according to Rahm Emmanuel’s little brother. Yikes.
NOTE * Never mind that on Amazon you’re comparing a book to a book, or a laptop to a laptop, or on Expedia an airline flight to a flight. In those cases, both terms of the comparison are known; the goods are commodities. The information asymmetry between buyer and seller is quite small (and there are reviews. Will there be reviews on the exchanges? Why do I doubt that?). However, on the exchanges, plans are compared by actuarial value (even if expressed in dollars), and those values “differ substantially” from insurer to insurer (Kaiser). And so the information asymmetry between buyer and seller is much greater, and the exchanges cannot fix it (and worse, sucker citizens into believing they’re comparing lemons to lemons when in fact they are not).
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A software program is like a parachute. If it doesn’t work the first time, people are unlikely to use it again.
Note, heard it a long time ago, but don’t know who the author of the above comment is.
Yea but software is always somewhat buggy. I mean the commercial websites out there that are so wildly used are buggy, Amazon is often slow, not even to get into FB and google product releases etc.. It mostly has issues.
‘Setting up the exchanges will pose a host of technological challenges, such as digitally linking an individual’s IRS information (which determines a subsidy level) to the insurance offerings in the individual’s home area and to employment data [and DHS data for citizenship and credit reporting data] —while simultaneously factoring in Medicaid eligibility [which varies by state].
‘Bugs in the computer software are bound to pop up.’
Bugs are music to the ears of one major category of users — hackers.
This sounds like ‘one-stop shopping’ for identity theft, whether it’s stolen credit cards or fake ID for employment that you need. A Hacker’s Paradise, as it were, with great steaming mounds of government-collected data just waiting to be shoveled into offshore servers — yowza!
Let’s sponsor a contest to reward the precocious fifteen-year-olds who can extract and post the greatest quantity of personal income, spending and medical data for politicians, celebrities and LEOs. Digital Sweden, comrades!
ACA implementation is going to be a big ol’ clusterf#@k. My guess is that at least half of us who don’t currently have insurance will still be un-insured in 2015. Many that get insured won’t be able to afford to use their coverage. But hey, at least we’ve got a black guy in the White House…that’s gotta be worth something…
Don’t forget the quality of coverage.
I suspect the only difference between the uninsured today and the uninsured a year from now will be a hefty tax penalty. So does this violate Obama’s no new tax on the middle class if you just call it a penalty instead of a tax?
They project IIRC 7 million new enrollees in the first year. Of course, that’s so unambitious they could be low-balling it.
Well the Congressional Budget Office predicts roughly 30 million Americans won’t have health insurance under Obamacare, so you could be right.
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/03-13-Coverage%2520Estimates.pdf
One big problem is going to be that some states where we’re seeing the most pop growth, like Texas, are weighted down with deep Red governments, the primary objective of which regarding “Obamacare” is to implement it in as pro-corporation and anti-customer a way as they possibly can. For that reason, and because the admin has been willing to concede to such spoilers to see this program put in place, we’re going to see pretty poor participation in those states.
Then again, given that most young people in Texas work crappy jobs under-the-table, it’s an open question of whether they’ll even be able to afford to participate in these “exchanges” in the first place.
The student loan debt slavery crisis has led to a massive increase in under-the-table work, nationwide.
This is really stupid on the part of our elites, as it leads to disintegration of governmental authority, but here we are.
The primary objective regarding “Obamacare” is to not implement it at all.
I predict that the next six months will be critical for the success or failure of Obamacare.
Ha ha. Extra points for the 1st to assert things will get better in a Friedman Unit.
We are in the midst of the 7th Friedman Unit since ACA was signed, so yeah…
brilliant
I’m still waiting for the salaries of hospital administrators to decrease from all the flatness of the world.
Check out the British Health Service web page. The beauty in simplicity… the “Just do it” approach.
http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/
No application, no credit check, no IRS, no shopping. The first option begins with actual health care – helping you with symptoms.
Which would be why Cameron is trying to destroy it.
Which, in turn, is why the Brits hate him, the Tories are looking to oust him, and Andrew Sullivan was throwing fits about Tory “disloyalty” yesterday.
Hmmm, looks like how the VA works. No one has ever hassled me for money or asked about paperwork at the VA. Just, “what is your issue and how can we fix it?”. And then they do.
Wow, which episode of the Twilight Zone was that?
Saying the VA “just does it” isn’t consistent with casual observation. The number of people who “just kill themselves” under what passes for veteran’s care is an example.
Once the VA admits that you had a “service-related” problem, they really do “just do it”.
First, they will move heaven and earth trying to deny that your problems are service-related, which may take years of paperwork and lawyers to fight, however.
FUBAR
ECONOMIST MILTON FRIEDMAN SAYS :
“The Free Market System distributes the fruits of economic progress among all the people.”
Where are you Milton? Under current system top 1% own 73% of Net Wealth, 83% of Financial Wealth, get 43% of Individual Income and pay an 18% Tax Rate. Top 25% get two thirds of Individual Income and pay a 15% Tax Rate.
We are deep in debt due to one Major cause. We spent to support two wars and failed to tax wealth to support them.
The Middle Class observed their good paying jobs flush overseas. 3.7M under Bush and 800,000 to Mexico since Nafta began.
We are in need of jobs that have health care and pensions plus a decent per hour pay.
The Free Market System is not creating them. Who shall? How? When?
You’re asking questions from inside an extremely convoluted and unsustainable paradigm. I know it’s tough for people in America to get now, but pretty soon everyone (who survives) is going to realize that at a fundamental level the questions and problems we’ve been worrying over until now have very little to do with our actual problems.
If I was working on such a project, I would push them to focus on creating solid, secure REST based APIs. The user interface should be secondary.
If you have good APIs then others can mash the site to add better or more specific user experiences. (IE.. create a site that allows reviews.)
Heck, if you want an Amazon experience… let Amazon access the APIs. I’d be surprised they wouldn’t.
If the unemployment rate for those 18 – 25 year olds keeps increasing, where will the money come from for them to pay for the stuff, let alone have the I.R.S. in the picture too? Also, just who will be supplying the software to run such a program? Oh, just how many times has the F.B.I. tried updating theirs only to fail? Kind of reminds me of what happened in California when they tried to computerize the D.M.V., the software company[s] sold old crap that didn’t work, but they sure got the bucks. Single payer is the only way, without the insurance companies calling the shots.
I think people who expect completely bugless software don’t understand software period, full stop. However the CA DMV software is the perfect example of an absolute unbelievable cluster@#$# in software. I mean it’s the kind of software you just stand there mouth agape that anything could be that bad. The way it works you can derive that it can’t even correctly pull customer data from a database. Thus the DMV loses things like records that you’ve paid. It’s totally non-functional. Of course that’s the CA DMV in general, but the software is just out of this world bad.
You know, for all the general failures of government in Texas, the Texas DMV-equivalent is actually pretty well run and its website is simple, easy, and informative. Actual DMV sites outside of Austin tend to be too few and understaffed, but they do a really good job for how thin thier resources are.
By contrast, everything at the NY DMV “just works”. Even really tricky stuff.
“Insurance companies are spooked . . . so they are already raising premiums to protect themselves from potential losses.” (Ezekiel Emanuel)
Yeah, that’s it. In a world fraught with danger, the insurance rackets must wage preventive war on their captive market. State-extortion alone is insufficient to maximize profit.
We should be getting a good example of Insurance company villainy pretty soon given what happened to Moore, Oklahoma yesterday.
Breathtaking that the solution to our health care woes is getting people who don’t want the product and won’t (in the aggregate) benefit from the product to buy the product.
Not just “getting them to buy” the product, but taxing and penalizing them if they don’t.
Another great one. Thanks for highlighting young people in particular. It feels like there may finally be growing recognition of just how differently younger Americans experience this country than those old enough to have had decent/gainful employment for a significant portion of their lives. Younger people can be ignored for some time, but eventually, public policy has to deal with the consequences of significant numbers of people simply unable to afford what the punditry expects people to pay (health insurance, housing, education, transportation, etc.).
It cracks me up looking at apartments, for example. Liberals are all mad at Teabaggers for being so racist, but yet all the properties for rent utilize these corporate fronts to screen people out. Y’all move along, this neighborhood ain’t for you…no, it has nothing to do with the way you look, it’s just that your credit score isn’t right. I mean, just get a job that pays you a lot of money, what’s your problem? That’s what we did when I was young!
***”2008 is so over”*** [re the MIllenials and their love for Obama].
Yeah, just ask my two recent college grad kids, and any of their friends.
Perhaps Obama and his ilk have snookered a NEW generation of college folk, but those who were crazy about him in 2008 have awakened to the real world of crushing student debt and no jobs — and no action by Obama on either issue. [But plenty of time and action for his corporate pals.]
Empire cartography reveals more about them than us… Or is it the other way aRound?
Perhaps the system knows. If you and I are honest Kevin, the the only reason we stick around and wait for the scores is for final closure, even though we both know we’ll get home from the stadium quicker if we leave before the final whistle sounds and the temporary hero/villains meander out their prescribed roles and cash in, the end result never having been the subject of the bystanders informed discourse.
Our children understand. I hope to god they will.
Military Law
Military Law, self-discipline in a common goal, is just common sense manners required to ensure reciprocal investment between generations, among participants. As with labor, capital defines military in civil law to its own end, to protect and grow non-performing assets with easily exploitable resources in a robot demographic social insurance policy, until it can’t.
Why would you subject the source of wealth to the insanity of civil law, backed by force, and not expect tyranny of the majority?
Under civil law, the majority replicates behavior from birth, accepting the false assumptions belying it and ensures continuation of the empire status quo, replication of its history. Assuming government assurance, social compliance in return for social insurance, its participants believe they are ‘freed’ from direct responsibility. They then test themselves and find that empire behavior is inescapable.
They pool their deficit behaviors and expect a surplus, prosperity, because there is always another credit on the bank card. The magic of scale economic gravity increasingly constrains the independent family budget to unleash the corporate family budget, and life is all about joining a body politic to direct the distribution of credit, which “suddenly” becomes the majority’s debt when the ponzi time delay mechanism collapses.
When you go to sea, one of the first things you learn is that distance is relative to how you measure it. If you measure in miles you lose every time, because of natural current. You work against the current, and, relative to others, fall behind, increasing your distance into irrelevancy. The space and nuclear programs failed by design, creating all kinds of make-work.
If you want to provide your children and grandchildren with an option on the future, and maximize your own NPV in the process, neither civil family law nor capping its participants in the head is the solution. Either way, your DNA goes to the garbage disposal, to be switched on at the convenience of nature, which has outlasted every irrational market in History.
Empires delay bad outcomes with penalties and interest shifted off-sheet, until their currency, the ability to delay, is all that remains, which works out just fine for you, if you do not put off to tomorrow what may be done today. The empire wants you to wait for Jesus. Prepare to be successful instead.
Corporations do not spend a disproportionate amount of time advertizing false values, branding, by accident. Who cares what P&G does with the money, Tide is a great product. If you calculate NPV in dollar terms you can only lose, but you have the consolation of losing last. A well-paying job with mortgages growing faster than your income, dependent upon negative real interest rates for a wealth effect to draw in more fools, does not necessarily make you smarter than a homeless person with no empire assets.
A house is a commodity, but a homemaker is precious, so the empire must inflate the price of the house and de-value the homemaker to plunder the independent family. Labor doesn’t go to war over the price of a house, or the oil to maintain it, neither of which is integral.
Move the source of propulsion and the empire is left entertaining itself. Capital is paying the majority with debt guaranteed by the unborn to enforce trade routes through its gates, in a collapsing scale economy, distilling out navigators. That is what you are looking at.
Military law does not appear to subject itself to civil law by accident. Civil law proffers freedom with explicit rights, and delivers slave labor implicitly. Military law employs discipline accordingly. The US Navy appears to be a military organization, but the slightest scratch on its surface reveals a civil administration. HR compliance is the cohesive.
Microsoft, Boeing and Gates Foundation would not be growing in the bottom of the garbage disposal if US Navy were a military organization. Timing, timing. timing; capital and majority are always timed into the past, and, left to their own devices, will navigate into the dead zone every time. If you want to go to the future, build the bridge yourself, and you will see others implicitly doing the same. Respect is the cohesive.
From an actuarial perspective, it’s clear why the insurance companies WANT young people in the program. But from the young person’s perspective (and I was one once) — consider the following:
1) Uninsured young adults are (or can be) covered by parents’ plan until 26 (I know, it doesn’t help if you parents don’t have coverage). So some of the uninsured will be covered that way.
2) The reason you need to convince young people to buy insurance is that they probably don’t need insurance (barring a major illness or accident). Based on my understanding of the “plans” being offered, what a 23 year old really needs is a catastrophic care plan. That’s exactly what’s NOT being offered.
3) See #2 above — the “bronze” plan only pays 70% — so if you’re young it’s the worst of all worlds (well, it’s the bronze is awful for anyone) — you pay for insurance that you’re only going to need for a very expensive and (in your opinion) highly unlikely medical problem. And if the 30% equals $5,000 or $50,000 it really doesn’t matter if you’ve got $200 in the bank and $1,000/month in non-dischargeable student loan payments, you’re going bankrupt (unless, of course, you can “borrow” the money to pay the bill at, say, a non-dischargeable 22% per year).
4) W/R/T the UI issue — hell just publish the API’s and let independent producers build mobile apps. Oh, but you can’t award a $200mm contract to build it.
5) Old Fogey comment: the more you read about Obamacare, the worse it gets. 50 years ago the United States could vow (and succeed) to land on the moon in 10 years — hell now we can’t even get a relatively simple piece of software written in three years to provide a conduit to an existing service?
Not a youngster here – 30s – and even I can’t conceive of medical care for much other than major illnesses or accidents, that’s why you have it, you get a cancer diagnosis or something, that’s why you have medical insurance. Those bronze plans that only pay 70%, do they have an out of pocket yearly maximum? They must right, every plan I’ve ever been on has had one, and it should cap well below 50k! Of course that doesn’t help if you can’t afford it whatever it is.
Bronze Plans are actually 60% AV. Also having used the AV calculator(It really does suck I will admit) that CCIIO developed to evaluate plans there are limits to the Out of Max you can enter (6500) This is the same spreadsheet they use for the Minimum Value requirements on employer based coverage.
Also the comment above yours from Ed S makes the mistake of assuming you will always be paying some coinsurance(30 or 40 % in this case) of the cost. AV’s are based on expected values. There’s obviously going to be some variation. The idea is some people will get a lot of value of their policy(those with huge hospital bills) and some people will get little to none(those who don’t even hit their deductible).
A colleague of mine has told that the Connector Site is actually fairly intuitive and you get access to full benefit grids. One wonders if the HHS will steal that from Mass like they have other pieces of the law.
Young people are going to opt out of Obama care because it is a bad deal for them, and the premiums for everyone else will skyrocket. The policy is stupid because it’s attempting to compel the young to subsidize the old. What is actually needed is risk-based pricing, and price competition instead of government subsidies.
Because magic marketplace!
Yeah, but the point is that healthcare isn’t a marketplace right now. It’s a cartel, a cabal, an oligopoly, whatever, that is not just heavily subsidized by the government but owes its very existence to the private theft of the public commons.
Life insurance and auto insurance work pretty well as private markets precisely because they are risk-based. An ACTUAL market for health insurance would work reasonably well (much better than the current system) – but it would require things like regulation and trust-busting and undoing absurd intellectual property laws that allow crime families, err, drug dealers, err, pharmaceutical companies to break knee caps, err, charge high prices to people who need medication that costs pennies per pill to manufacture. We have hospital franchise paper pushers that make more money than professional athletes(!) – and these salaries are sanctioned by direct government payments.
Of course, life and auto insurance work because choosing to not have insurance is a valid option. Anyone claiming that is not acceptable in health insurance, and then proposing anything other than government health insurance, should be seen clearly for the corrupt and/or idiotic shill they are.
But of course, as long as liberals support the Blue Team, they leave open the hypocrisy door so wide that the Red Team can (rightfully) point out that an actual, competitive marketplace for healthcare would be far superior to ObamaCare…
I’m not sure how well you can have government health insurance without breaking the corrupt intellectual property oligopoly either (remember under Obamacare we can’t even import meds from Canada).
Right, clearly what’s needed, no matter what the question/issue, is more capitalism. That capitalist/free market utopia is just around the corner.
And by capitlism, we really mean the opposit.
The current system sucks.
Both market solutions and government solutions would be superior.
That government solutions would provide better universal access than market solutions in no way disputes the fact that even those inferior market solutions are nonetheless vastly superior to our current system which is the antithesis of a market-based economy. The main features that violate market principles – like pricing power, asymmetric information, expensive bargaining, and patents – are precisely the features that make the current system so awful.
There is absolutely nothing ‘free market’ about hospital administrators making huge salaries or pharmaceutical companies selling medications at prices higher than the marginal cost of production.
Young peole will be attracted to plans that provide long-term value. Simply looking at the next year’s premium, and deciding whether or not to buy the coverage is an unrealistic way to plan for the future, when most health care is actually bought.
The patented plan we hope to put on the Exchanges next year, we will be asking this question to determine which plan will be most effecive:
Do you want you coverage for the next 10 years, the next 20 years, or the next 30 years?
Don Levit
Is this a snarky comment or are you serious? Because if you’re serious, I don’t have any idea what you’re trying to say:
Simply looking at the next year’s premium, and deciding whether or not to buy the coverage is an unrealistic way to plan for the future, when most health care is actually bought.
What is this supposed to mean?
And what does this mean:
The patented plan we hope to put on the Exchanges next year, we will be asking this question to determine which plan will be most effective:
Do you want you coverage for the next 10 years, the next 20 years, or the next 30 years
Huh?
I meant exactly what I said.
Part of the premiums will be designed to stay level for 10, 20, and 30 years.
Those that are older would typically choose the 10 year route.
Those that are younger would tend to choose the 30 year route.
The premiums work similarly to that of 10, 20, and 30 year term life insurance.
The older by choosing the 10 year premium would actually pay less than the younger, who would tend to choose the 30-year premium.
The design is patented, and its unique coverage is designed for those who can look forward at least 3-5 years in the future.
One of its unique features is a paid-up option, which for $300 a month, builds paid-up coverage every month, if claims are not made.
Building up to $25,000 over 36 months discounts traditional premiums by 60%. Building up to $50,000 over 60 months, discounts traditional premiums by 80%.
Don Levit
A few years ago my wife had to spend a week in the hospital and the cost before insurance was $20K.
Those coverages look hopelessly inadequate.
Obamacare will be so buggy as to be unuseable; it has already reached a level of almost complete confusion, with even experts differing about the details of coverage.
Add to that the machinations of insurance companies trying to protect their profits, the active and malevolent sabotage of many of the “cow states” (as H L Menken called them), and the total reluctance of Republicans to even consider a solution to our medical insurance coverage problems, and you get a system which cannot ever work, and will be rejected by the public, after horrendous financial losses, which could easily bankupt the Republic.
Compared to Medicare which has worked efficiently and well for five decades, there really is no alternative: Medicare for All, paid for with taxes, phased in over a short to medium time period.
LBJ took a year to phase in Medicare in 1965, back in the days of button shoes and bicycles with really big wheels, so I’d say “medium” would be one year, and “short” would be six months.
If it was done under the urgency of WAR!!!!, I would expect that a National Health Service could be fully implemented in three months. “Doctors! Your country needs you! Volunteer or you will be drafted!”
We who live in Canada, just sadly shake our heads as we watch Americans go through all these painful contortions in order to maintain a “free” market solution to health care. All this just so a handfull of large health insurance corporations can skim billions off of the system. Some day Americans will realize that the only solution is a universal single payer system such as the rest of the world has. Until then, Canadians will watch with bemusment and sadness.