About those millions "LOSING" their Obamacare insurance coverage - Granite Grok

About those millions “LOSING” their Obamacare insurance coverage

I’ve been listening to a lot of nonsense about the impact of the different GOP “replacement” plans for Obamacare and the numbers just didn’t make any sense. After all, none of them drastically did much on the core structure of Obamacare.  They deleted most (but not all of the taxes).  They started to tinker with Medicaid Expansion implementations (showing their backbones made of Silly String while yammering about it). The only part that made a whole lot of sense in pulling that initial string out of the tangled ball of yarn that is Obamacare (since none of them dared to add in the Freedom for us to be able to buy across State lines) was the elimination of the individual and employer mandates.  Yet, the CBO numbers made the GOP look bad.

And now we know why – Avik Roy clues us in.  Take a look at this chart and then peruse the snippets I copied over:

1-Impact of Individual Mandate Repeal

Look at the number of uninsured – pretty much level across the years.  Did you know that this number has been rather constant since Obamacare started?  Why?  Irish Democracy. People just decided that they’d pay the Democrat’s tax for not buying a plan.  I would, too, if I had to pay $1200-$1500 / month for premiums and then another $8000-$12000 (family plan) for a total of $22K – $30K per year.  Remember, the median income in the US is $32K/year.  Do the math. Emphasis mine, reformtted:

CBO’s Secret: 73% Of Coverage Difference Between Obamacare & GOP Bills Driven By Individual Mandate

If you’ve read a newspaper or watched cable news in the last month, you’ve probably seen someone say that the Senate GOP health care bill would “kick 22 million Americans off of their health insurance.” But it’s not true. New information from the Congressional Budget Office—leaked to me by a congressional staffer—shows why.

For years, the CBO has been convinced—despite real-world experience to the contrary—that Obamacare’s individual mandate is the biggest reason why that law has increased the number of Americans with health insurance.

When Senator Barack Obama ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, he mocked Hillary’s insistence on an individual mandate. “If a mandate was the solution,” he said at the time, “you could try that to solve homelessness by mandating that everybody buy a house. But the reason they don’t have a house is they don’t have the money.”

He definitely had a point there – but then signed the bill that instituted one anyways.

After Obama became president, the CBO told him not having an individual mandate would mean his health reform plan would cover 16 million fewer people. So Obama relented, and included an individual mandate in what we now call Obamacare.

At the time, the truth was obvious and I certainly railed against it at the time – it was unAmerican for Government to force citizens to purchase products they otherwise wouldn’t.  It would have been as if Trump and the GOP passed a law that said you WILL purchase a firearm to exercise your Second Amendment Right.  No Freedom in that and no freedom in Obamacare.

Proposals to repeal and replace Obamacare from congressional Republicans and right-of-center think tanks disagreed on a number of things, but they were unanimous in repealing Obamacare’s individual mandate. The idea that Americans should be forced by the government to buy a private product, merely for the offense of being alive, is seen by all conservatives as a constitutional injury. And there’s a more fundamental question: if Obamacare’s insurance is so wonderful, why do millions of Americans need to be forced to buy it? By definition, you haven’t been “kicked off” your insurance if the only reason you’re no longer buying it is that the government has stopped fining you.

CBO has refused to disclose the impact of mandate repeal on coverage estimates. Arguably the most significant data point in the entire debate about the Senate health care bill has been the CBO’s claim that in 2026, 22 million fewer people would have health insurance under the Senate bill than under Obamacare. Democrats have seized on this number to stoke fears about the bill’s impact; moderate Republicans, intimidated by the negative headlines, have been reluctant to support the bill.

But buried within the CBO’s reports is a key fact: the vast majority of those coverage “losses” occur because the GOP bills repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate.

That’s right – the number of people WOULD be underinsured because they want to be (or more truthful, it doesn’t make economic sense for them to play the Obamacare or philosophically refuse to do something Government would otherwise fine them for doing.

In other words, they picked Freedom over Government’s “security”.  And read this next graph carefully:

Ok. But here’s the curiosity. The CBO has refused to disclose the specific, year-by-year impact of that thing that it says is the primary reason that people will go uninsured in 2018 and beyond. This is a critical omission. You’d think that CBO would want to include in its tables its actual estimates of how much impact the individual mandate is having on coverage under the GOP bill, and how much impact other factors are having, like the bill’s replacement of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion with refundable tax credits.

You’d think that, but CBO has refused to disclose that breakdown. The end result is a lot of misleading commentary about how Republican plans “take coverage away” from 22 million people. Previously undisclosed estimate: Three-fourths of CBO coverage difference is the individual mandate

Plain and simple, they tilted the playing field. Deliberately.  And the GOP proved, once again, why they wear the mantle of “The Stupid Party” for both not figuring it out – or not WANTING to figure it out and bring the fight to the Democrats.  It’s like they LIKE Obamacare….

This week, I obtained from a congressional staffer the CBO’s estimates of the coverage impact of repealing the individual mandate, separate from the Senate bill’s other provisions. The estimate was built out of earlier work CBO did to model how repealing the mandate would affect the federal deficit. CBO projected then that repealing the mandate alone would lead to 15 million fewer insured U.S. residents in 2018, and 16 million fewer by 2026, though they did not publish those estimates.

And why?  For being non-partisan, one would have thought they would have, yes?

16 million represents nearly three-fourths of the CBO’s estimate of the coverage difference between the GOP bills and Obamacare in 2026.

 

 

It comes down to this: the CBO only published the total of uninsured in their analysis of the GOP bills vs Obamacare.  They deliberately chose not to acknowledge what should be common knowledge – given Freedom to chose, a lot would choose not take it

As it should be.  After all, I could use that childrens oft used phrase and have it perfectly fit the situation: Government, you aren’t the boss of me.  Even if Obama and the Democrats think they are.  Woe to the GOP as they seem to forget it as well.

(H/T: Forbes)

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