Obamacare Insurance Costs Affordable, Kaiser Survey Finds - Bloomberg

Obamacare Insurance Costs Affordable, Kaiser Survey Finds - Bloomberg:

Obamacare Insurance Costs Affordable, Kaiser Survey Finds

By Alex Wayne - Sep 4, 2013 9:01 PM PT

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A 25-year-old New Yorker earning $25,000 a year will pay as little as $62 a month for health insurance next year, and a peer living in Vermont may pay nothing, according to a 17-state survey of premiums under the U.S. health-care overhaul.

The Kaiser Family Foundation report is the broadest look yet at what consumers will pay for health insurance when the Affordable Care Act takes full effect next year. The cost issue has been a top concern for President Barack Obama’s administration, which is trying to persuade at least 7 million Americans who now lack insurance to sign up for coverage starting Oct. 1.

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A health clinic on May 2, 2013 in Fort Collins, Colorado. Photographer: John Moore/Getty Images

12:31

Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Peter Orszag, vice chairman of corporate and investment banking at Citigroup Inc. and former director of the Office of Management and Budget, talks about the U.S. debt ceiling debate and the labor market. Orszag, speaking with Tom Keene, Sara Eisen, Betty Liu and Alix Steel on Bloomberg Television's "Surveillance," also discusses U.S. health-care legislation and Federal Reserve policy. (Peter Orszag is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. Source: Bloomberg)

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California and New York are among the states that have announced rates for the plans to be sold through marketplaces called exchanges. Republican officials in states including Ohio, Indiana and Georgia have released partial information on premiums, emphasizing big increases for some customers.

“There’s obviously intense interest in what the choices are going to look like for consumers and what they’re going to have to pay in 2014,” Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at Menlo Park, California-based Kaiser, said in a phone interview. “For the most part insurers seem to find this market attractive and they’re pricing accordingly.”

The health law sets up a system of state-based online and telephone exchanges that will sell insurance from companies including UnitedHealth Group Inc. (UNH) to people who don’t have coverage at their jobs. The law makes government subsidies in the form of a tax credit available to discount monthly premiums for people with low- to moderate-incomes.

Law’s Requirements

About 25 million people are expected to enroll in exchange plans by 2018, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Insurers are barred from denying coverage or raising premiums for people in poor health, or charging women more than men, common practices now. Under the law, they can charge their oldest customers a maximum of three times the price for their youngest ones, a narrower difference than in many states today.

Rand Corp. researchers, looking at 10 states, said in an Aug. 29 report that predictions of sharp increases in premiums were overstated. “Our analysis found no widespread trend toward sharply higher prices in the individual market,” Christine Eibner, a Rand senior economist, said in a statement with the report.

The lowest monthly premium for a 40-year-old in the 17 states surveyed by Kaiser would be $146 in Baltimore. If that 40-year-old had an annual income of $29,000, government subsidies would reduce the monthly cost to $111, according to the report from the nonprofit health-research group.

Bronze Plans

Those are the prices for the least-generous level of health coverage, called bronze. Bronze plans cover about 60 percent of medical costs and may cost a participant $6,350 out of pocket in deductibles and co-payments, in addition to premiums.

“What has surprised me is how inexpensive some of these bronze plans will be,” Levitt said. “They’ll come with high deductibles and significant out-of-pocket costs for consumers, but for those who are looking for catastrophic protection there will be some inexpensive options out there, particularly if you’re eligible for a tax credit.”

For $214 a month, the same Baltimore 40-year-old may upgrade to a “silver” plan that covers about 70 percent of medical costs and reduced out-of-pocket expenses. A $35 monthly subsidy would discount the premium to $179.

The highest premiums in the Kaiser survey are in Vermont and New York, where the states require insurers to charge the same amount to people of all ages. That helps older people, who get a break on their premiums, at the expense of younger people, who pay more.

A 40-year-old in New York City would pay at least $308 a month for a bronze plan and $336 in Burlington, Vermont. Those who qualify for subsidies will see greatly reduced costs. For the same person earning $29,000 a year, the premium is cut to $111 in New York and $116 in Burlington.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Wayne in Washington at awayne3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net

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Did You Know the Deficit Is Shrinking? Most Americans Don't, Thanks to Shameless Deficit Hawk Propaganda | Alternet

Did You Know the Deficit Is Shrinking? Most Americans Don't, Thanks to Shameless Deficit Hawk Propaganda | Alternet:

Did You Know the Deficit Is Shrinking? Most Americans Don't, Thanks to Shameless Deficit Hawk Propaganda

The deficit is down 37.6 percent for the first 10 months of 2013. But half of Americans think it’s growing.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

August 14, 2013  |  

 

 

 

 

Remember all those deficit hawks who screamed that the federal deficit is spiraling out of control and must be stopped with spending cuts that have a funny way of hurting the pocketbooks of the most vulnerable Americans? Their excuse for ripping us off has been literally disappearing, but a new Google survey shows that not only do the vast majority Americans not know it — half of the public actually believes that the deficit is growing.

Here are the facts: The U.S. budget deficit has been shrinking at a rapid rate over the last few months. The deficit peaked at 10.2 percent of GDP in 2009, but over the past four quarters, it has shrunk to a mere 4.2 percent of GDP. What’s more, the Congressional Budget Office predictsthat the deficit will fall to 2.1 percent of GDP in 2015.

Why such a disconnect? Unfortunately, disgraceful propaganda has left the public misinformed and confused.

Over in Economic Wonderland, the deficit hawk duo of Alan Simpson and Erksine Bowles have made a second career over the last several years wildly exaggerating the deficit issue and scaring Americans into thinking that deep cuts in the federal budget were necessary for the economy. The reality was just the opposite. If these two had ever sat down to read John Maynard Keynes, whose work is vital to understanding how to respond to economic crises, they would have known that cutting the federal budget when the economy is weak actually slows it down even more.  Yet to this day, Simpson and Bowles continue waging battle for a “grand bargain” that would shred the social safety net and cost many Americans their jobs by requiring trillions of dollars to be cut from the federal budget over ten years. All in the name of a “problem” that doesn’t even exist.

Deficit hawks like Simpson and Bowles, and their grand funder, hedge fund billionaire Pete Peterson, go on promoting the nonsense that the deficit is the major economic problem of 2013 despite the obvious facts and a growing consensus from economists that such a claim is utterly absurd. Incredibly, they do it even after the faulty work they relied on to make their case – a paper produced by two Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff – was discredited by a mere grad student in one of the great academic revelations of our time. Even conservative economists are bowing to reality. The folks over at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, for example, have come to theconclusion that austerity is a terrible idea and that without proper stimulus, the U.S. economy would look a lot more like Europe’s, where individual countries without sovereign currency have been forced to go the austerity route. It’s getting increasingly hard to deny that things have gotten pretty ugly over there because of deficit hawks and their ilk.

But deficit hawks are paid well to misinform the public. They write reports. They get corporate honchos to help them run campaigns with innocent-sounding names like “Fix the Debt.” They build websites. They write articles. They hold conferences. They pay off think tanks – even progressive ones – to play ball with them.  And the corporate dominated major media frequently are happy to play along. On it goes, until the lies repeated to the public take on the ring of truth.

So it’s no surprise that the public is not aware of the important news that the deficit is shrinking. Or that it is shrinking precisely for the reason progressive economists have been saying all along. When you have a recession, you have to juice the economy through government investment. That, in turn, reaps you the benefit of more money in people’s pockets, which leads to more jobs, more tax revenue for the government, and less reliance on social safety net programs like unemployment insurance or food stamps. If the original stimulus package had been bigger, the deficit would have shrunk even faster.

The deficit hawks have been more than spectacularly wrong. They have impacted policy in a way that turned the attention of Washington away from what it should have been focused on all along – jobs. Instead of a deficit commission, Obama should have called for a jobs commission to address the fact that hard-working people have not been able to find jobs to feed their families because of a Wall Street-driven financial crisis.

One might hope that the reality emerging will help squelch the calls to recklessly cut government investment in the economy. But there’s a big problem: Deficit lies benefit the 1 percent in the short-run. Rather than shrinking the deficit, what the short-sighted, greedy rich in America really want to shrink is their tax liabilities, which is why they don’t want to pay for things like education, infrastructure, and social safety net programs that benefit the population and ultimately help keep the economy humming.  The financiers among them would also dearly like to privatize things like Social Security so that they can collect fees on American retirement accounts. The corporate honchos like the way austerity drives up unemployment and drives down wages because they hold the mistaken view that keeping workers stressed and vulnerable is good for their bottom line. They want people like Larry Summers to head the Federal Reserve, who, while in the White House as the president’s chief economic adviser , famously presided over a stimulus program many economists warned was way too small.

In the fall, will deficit hawks in Congress manage once again to hold the American economy hostage? Or will reality finally rear its head? Facts have a tough time competing with well-funded mythology.

Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of 'Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.' She received her Ph.d in English and Cultural Theory from NYU, where she has taught essay writing and semiotics. She is the Director of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.

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Daily Kos: Fox News doc says women should pay more for health insurance because they have breasts, ovaries

Daily Kos: Fox News doc says women should pay more for health insurance because they have breasts, ovaries:

TUE AUG 27, 2013 AT 02:51 PM PDT

Fox News doc says women should pay more for health insurance because they have breasts, ovaries

byHunterFollow

 
 
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Nope. (Crooks and Liars)

No. I refuse to engage you, crazy Fox News person.

A Fox News medical expert on Tuesday argued that President Barack Obama's administration was wrong to force gender equality for health insurance rates because men "only have the prostate," while women "have the breasts, they have the ovaries."

It's bad enough to have future serial killer Keith Ablow on the teevee dispensing creepy psychological advice with all the finesse of a monkey wielding a hatchet, I'm not going to listen to some other Foxian bozo argue that women should be charged more for health insurance because they's got more parts.

It's not that I don't have a strong stomach for these things, either, which is why it's no particular stretch to listen to Fox News blowhard not-Steve-Doocy opine that women should be charged more because they live longer, or to Gretchen Carlson observing that women should get a discount because men tend to wait longer to see the doctor and end up having more expensive problems, or we could even go with the old bit about how duh, women are the ones having the babies so they naturally use more healthcare—but what's that, the good doc here isn't going to go with even that one, he's so wedded to the womens has parts argument?

Carlson pointed out that women were blamed for maternity costs, "but men and women have babies together."

"I agree with you that it's a shared responsibility," [Fox News Medical A-Team contributor Dr. David Samadi] said. "But just the way the system are -- in my field, we only have the prostate. Women have the breasts, they have the ovaries, they have the uterus. They get checked in every part."

OH MY GOD NO. I am not doing this. I am not going to even list off the reasons why this statement made by an actual as-seen-on-teevee-medical-doctor-hi-doctor-nick-expert-guy is stupid, because it does not deserve even that much. I am instead going to simply observe that it is something that somebody actually said, and again use the occasion as proof that the showFox & Friends is a secret, long-running plot to make America paste-eatingly stupid via osmosis.

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Daily Kos: Georgia Republican Caught Bragging About Sabotaging Obamacare (VIDEO)

Daily Kos: Georgia Republican Caught Bragging About Sabotaging Obamacare (VIDEO):

Georgia Republican Caught Bragging About Sabotaging Obamacare (VIDEO)

byEgberto WilliesFollow

 
 
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When will the callous disregard for human life end? Have those steadfast on obstructing and delaying the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) not understand that they will be causing the suffering and likely deaths of many because of their failed ideology. What do they have to offer citizens if they were miraculously able to stymie Obamacare? The answer is the same it has been for decades; nothing.

What is true is that over the last several months Republican politicians have been in a competition with themselves. It has been a competition as to who can be the most aggressive in obstructing the President on every issue. At no time is the well-being of American citizens considered. It has been simply a visceral hate for the President and his policies no matter how many people it helps.

Georgia Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens (R) is the latest candidate attempting to out macho other Republicans in what he is doing to obstruct Obamacare. When one listens to the thrill in his voice on how he intends to attempt to stymie the health insurance exchanges, it is rather scary. It is hard to believe that politicians would attempt to use the law in Jim Crow fashion to cause actual harm to the citizens of their state. What is even scarier is the response, the applause, and cheers by the audience. Can they not see the evil in their actions?

The Affordable Care Act made provisions for ‘navigators’. These are people hired by organizations to help people purchase health insurance policies. The federal government is offering training programs and grants to help create these ‘navigators’. In order to obstruct this process, Hudgens says in the video below,

The problem is Obamacare. We’ve got to now determine what we can do to solve that problem. Let me tell you what we are doing; everything in our power to be an obstructionist.

You have probably have heard about the exchanges. Well exchanges are coming to Georgia, not the state is not setting them up. The federal government is going to set them up.

But we have passed a law and with the help of senator McCoon and others,  we havepassed a law that says that a navigator, which is a position in that exchange, has to be licensed by our Department of Insurance.The ObamaCare law says that we cannot require them to be an insurance agent, so we said fine, we’ll just require them to be a licensed navigator. So we’re going to make up the test, and basically you take the insurance agent test, you erase the name, you write ‘navigator test’ on it

He has also stated that Georgia has passed a law that forces insurance companies to state specifically that any rate increases are not the fault of the Governor, general assembly, or department of insurance but because of Obamacare. In other words irrespective of reasons, he forces insurance companies to lie.

Americans are waking up. Several town halls have proven that the expectations many Republicans had that opponents of Obamacare would storm town halls did not materialize. In fact the opposite has occurred (see here and here).

One can only hope that Democrats fight with this same intensity promoting Obamacare. Moreover one hopes the Democrats will campaign on Obamacare during the 2014 campaign. There is ample video of many Republicans who in order to placate the Tea Party overtly take positions on Obamacare that hurt the well-being of their constituencies. As Obamacare is rolled out successfully in states that put the well-being of their citizens ahead of ideology, state run by obstructionist will kick them out of office as citizens realize they were lied to.

Source: Jay Bookman - Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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The Latest Stupidity of the Right-Wing: "Medicare is Un-American" | Alternet

The Latest Stupidity of the Right-Wing: "Medicare is Un-American" | Alternet:

  TEA PARTY AND THE RIGHT  

Think Progress / By Igor Volsky

 40 COMMENTS

The Latest Stupidity of the Right-Wing: "Medicare is Un-American"

Heritage Foundation president and former senator Jim DeMint humiliates himself, and the Republican party, at a town hall in Delaware.

August 30, 2013  |  

 

Heritage Foundation president and former Senator Jim DeMint suggested to a town hall audience in Wilmington, Delaware, Thursday that health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid are “un-American” and built on the principles of “socialism and collectivism.”

“I cannot think of anything that’s more un-American than national government-run health care,” DeMint said. “Those who believe in those principles of socialism and collectivism we’ve seen over the centuries, they see as their holy grail taking control of the health care system.”

Though DeMint was referring specifically to the Affordable Care Act, a law the Heritage Foundation is urging Congress to defund in next month’s continuing resolution, his comments could also apply to existing programs that have more direct government involvement than the ACA.

While the federal government does establish the rules and guidelines private insurers must follow in offering coverage for the uninsured though reform and directly finances insurance expansion for lower-income Americans who are eligible for Medicaid — often by contracting with private insurers — numerous other popular government programs like Medicare, the Veterans Health Administration and even the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan (FEHBP) (which DeMint himself relied on for health care coverage as a member of the Senate) are operated by the government.

Public health comprises more than 40 percent of the nation’s health care spending and that percentage will remain stable as the Affordable Care Act is implemented. By 2014,“private health insurance is anticipated to account forroughly 31 percent of national health spending, or about the same share as was expected without enactment of the Affordable Care Act,” actuaries at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid estimate.

DeMint warned his town hall audience that the system threatens Americans’ freedoms. “[Health care is] such a personal service, it’s such a big part of the economy,” he said. “If [Democrats] can control that, they can control most areas of our lives.”

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The Moment the US Ended Iran’s Brief Experiment in Democracy | The Nation

The Moment the US Ended Iran’s Brief Experiment in Democracy | The Nation:

The Moment the US Ended Iran’s Brief Experiment in Democracy

Sixty years ago this week, the CIA successfully staged a coup to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

Robert Scheer 

August 20, 2013  

• 
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President Truman and Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/National Archives)

This story originally appeared at Truthdig. Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).

Sixty years ago this week, on August 19, 1953, the United States, in collaboration with Britain, successfully staged a coup in Iran to overthrow democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh that a newly declassified CIA document reveals was designed to preserve the control of Western companies over Iran’s rich oil fields.

About the Author

Robert Scheer

Robert Scheer, a contributing editor to The Nation, is editor of Truthdig.com and author of The Great American Stickup...

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The US government at the time of the coup easily had manipulated Western media into denigrating Mossadegh as intemperate, unstable and an otherwise unreliable ally in the Cold War, but the real motivation for hijacking Iran’s history was Mossadegh’s move to nationalize Western-controlled oil assets in Iran. According to the document, part of an internal CIA report:

The target of this policy of desperation, Mohammad Mosadeq, [sic] was neither a madman nor an emotional bundle of senility as he was so often pictured in the foreign press; however, he had become so committed to the ideals of nationalism that he did things that could not have conceivably helped his people even in the best and most altruistic of worlds. In refusing to bargain—except on his own uncompromising terms—with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, he was in fact defying the professional politicians of the British government. These leaders believed, with good reason, that cheap oil for Britain and high profits for the company were vital to their national interests.

There you have it, the smoking-gun declaration of the true intent to preserve high profits and cheap oil that cuts through all of the official propaganda justifying not only this sorry attempt to prevent Iranian nationalists from gaining control over their prized resources but subsequent blood-for-oil adventures in Iraq and Kuwait. The assumption is that “the best and most altruistic of worlds” is one that accommodates the demands of rapacious capitalism as represented by Western oil companies.

Tragically, the coup that overthrew Mossadegh also crushed Iran’s brief experiment in democracy and ushered in six decades of brutal dictatorship followed by religious oppression and regional instability. If Iran is a problem, as the United States persistently and loudly insists, it is a problem of our making. Mossadegh, who earned a doctorate in law from Neuchatel University in Switzerland, was not an enemy of the American people; he was an Iranian nationalist who as the CIA’s own internal report concedes was preoccupied with the well-being of his people as opposed to the profitability of Western oil interests.

The CIA report derides the Western media’s acceptance at the time of the coup of the demonization of all actors on the world stage that fail to follow the approved script provided by the US government. As the report notes, the “complete secrecy about the operation,” breached only by leaked information, made it “relatively easy for journalists to reconstruct the coup in varied but generally inaccurate accounts.”

Without conceding responsibility for misleading the media, the report says, “The point that the majority of these accounts miss is a key one: the military coup that overthrew Mosadeq [sic] and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government. It was not an aggressively simplistic solution, clandestinely arrived at, but was instead an official admission that normal, rational methods of international communication and commerce had failed. TPAJAX (the operation’s codename) was entered into as a last resort.”

Parts of the formerly top secret report, an internal CIA study from the 1970s titled “The Battle for Iran,” which detailed the CIA-directed plot, have been revealed previously. But the section disclosed Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the National Security Archive is, as the archive’s research director Malcolm Byrne writes in Foreign Policymagazine, the first time the CIA admits to “using propaganda to undermine Mossadegh politically, inducing the shah to cooperate, bribing members of parliament, organizing the security forces, and ginning up public demonstrations.”

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All of these actions were described in great detail by veteran CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt in a lengthy interview with me for the Los Angeles Times in 1979. Roosevelt is confirmed in the newly released documents as having the leading role in planning and executing the coup. In the interview, Roosevelt revealed his part for the first time, but instead of celebrating the success of the venture, he cautioned that it had set a terrible example.

As I summarized the conversation in the story that appeared on March 29, 1979: “Roosevelt said that the success of the operation in Iran—called Project AJAX by the CIA—so inspired then–Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that Dulles wanted to duplicate it in the Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia and Egypt, where he wanted to overthrow President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Roosevelt said that he resisted these efforts and finally resigned from the CIA because of them.”

Roosevelt, as he recounted in his memoir published five months after our interview, came away from the coup he engineered with serious concerns about the efficacy of such ventures. But unfortunately it became the model in Vietnam, Guatemala, Cuba, Afghanistan, Nicaragua and other countries, where the full official record is apparently judged still too embarrassing for our government to declassify.

Washington’s Iran policy is still a disaster.

Robert Scheer 

August 20, 2013  

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