FOUSESQUAWK: Exit Sebelius

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Exit Sebelius

It's kind of sad that Kathleen Sebelius will not finish out her reign as 2013's Fousesquawk Jerk of the Year, but you knew once she was crowned that her time in Washington was coming to an end. You talk about a timed exit. Not only did she announce her firing resignation right after the March 31st 7 million enrollee deadline, Obama already had her successor named.

As for the 7 million enrollees that magically appeared right in the nick of time, kinda like Al Franken's ballots in the trunk of a car found in the Minnesota woods, it would be nice to know how many of these people are firmly enrolled, paid their first months dues, had previous insurance, had lost their old insurance due to Obamacare, what their ages are, and how many had hanging chads. But that is all a secret.

And how fitting was it that as Sebelius was reading her speech in the Rose Garden she came to a missing page-just like those who tried to sign up but found they had come to a dead end and had to give up and walk away?

A fitting end to a sorry tenure at HHS.

9 comments:

Squid said...: About those 7,000,000 sign-ups for the ACA. Remember that 6 million U.S. Citizens were kicked off their health plans because Obama lied to the American people that they could keep their plan. Those unfortunate individuals had to sign-up for a health plan, which was most likely ACA. So, subtract 6 mil form 7 mil and one gets 1 mil. Now, it is estimated that 20 percent of the signers had not paid for the ACA plan. Thus, the real number actually sign-up and paying is 800,000 individuals. This maybe a shock to you, but it is not a shock to Obama who planned it all. Watch for the next step when the insurance companies find that only 800,000 are actually signed and paying. They will go belly-up and we will end up with a single payer plan which is the strategy of the Marxist Progressives. Last, it was Saul Alinsky that said control the healthcare of the citizens to gain power over the citizens, by using intimidation.
Indeed, Sebelius could have well finished her work by botching the ACA, on purpose.

Squid; April 15, 2014 at 12:32 PM
Siarlys Jenkins said...: I am firmly enrolled, I have now paid four successive premiums, I was not previously insured, and I might add that I am not burning up resources in a profligate manner that will make the program financially unsustainable. I've gotten my first check-up in five years, established a relation to a primary care physician, I'm getting one fairly expensive preventive procedure that medically speaking I should have gotten three years ago, and I might need one modest prescription, but not yet.

As for the large numbers, Squid is "factually challenged." Most of those six million who lost existing health plans either found other private insurance outside the exchanges, or were covered by the one-year reprieve to allow time for an orderly transition. Most of the seven million who signed up through the exchanges are people like me, who simply couldn't get coverage.

As for the indirect quote from Alinsky, that sounds like a bold faced lie to me, not merely a selective manipulation of facts. Care to provide a credible source and a full quote, with citation, in context? I don't mean some web site where a self-appointed political guru says its so, how about the date, time and place where Alinsky said it, a credible source for the fact that he said it, and at least a full paragraph of context?; April 15, 2014 at 7:47 PM
Gary Fouse said...: This is a form of income redistribution and others are paying for you are getting -even if it is for a lower price.

Why did the 6-7 million have to lose their insurance plans in the first place?

I have not read Alinsky, but he did write a book, didn't he? (Rules for radicals or something like that); April 15, 2014 at 8:46 PM
Siarlys Jenkins said...: He did write a book Gary. If that's all you know about him, what do you have against him, anyway?

I'm aware that I'm being subsidized. As my sister (a family practice physician in New York) observed, the government is going to pay anyway -- when people without insurance end up as charity or Medicaid cases with advanced cancers and such like.

If medicine were primarily about solo practitioners who know their patients, who work out informal payment plans or never get around to billing certain people, and people pay what they can, and pay it all back when they are doing well, then we wouldn't need a government program. Since medicine is a technologically complex business run by centralized bureaucracies, either we say, if you can't afford it, get sick and die, or, we find the best, most rational, way to distribute the costs and benefits, and provide reasonably equal access.

I will be the first to agree that if the wage floor were sufficient to enable everyone to afford it on their own, we wouldn't need an Affordable Care Act. For me, if my income were about $7200 higher, or if my employer(s) kicked in proportionally to the hours I work each year, I could handle it.

What I appreciate most about this discussion, Gary, is that after I challenged your rag-tag hands-behind-the-ears, tongue stuck out, jeering of the ACA, with some simple facts, you calmed down and started offering sober causes for caution and reflection. Your last comment is all of that, but doesn't add up to good cause to repeal the law.

There are lots of ways to improve it. Ideally, I'd like to have a low-premium, high-deductible plan, where I would pay a percentage of the low premium, and then a Health Savings Account, where perhaps there would be a sliding scale matching my contributions on some basis inverse to my income level. That's not for everyone, but perhaps a sane Republican and a thoughtful Democrat could co-sponsor such an amendment.

As to the six million losing insurance, what really happened was, their old policies were substandard by the terms of the ACA, and rather than upgrade the policies, their insurers cancelled first, then offered them alternatives. Probably the increase in premiums was greater than a simple upgrade would have required. A lot of those people would have been sorry if they ever got really sick, when they discovered all that was NOT covered, after paying all those premiums for all those years.; April 16, 2014 at 3:34 PM
elwood p suggins said...: Let me see if I get this. To insure the uninsured, we make the insured uninsured. Then we make the formerly insured pay more to become reinsured so we can then insure the uninsured for free. Sound about right??

And from ancient history, here is a quote from a White House aide's memo on Hillarycare after a recent Clinton library dump: "We have a line on p.10 (of a draft of the president's January 1994 State of the Union address) that says 'You'll pick the health plan and doctor of your choice'. I know that it's just what people want to hear. But can we get away with it? I am very worried about getting skewered for over-promising on something we know full well we won't deliver". Sound familiar??

And speaking of being "factually challenged", as reported by Forbes, a very recent RAND Corp. study indicates that only 1.4 million of the alleged 7.1 million exchange signups (20 per cent in round numbers) were by the previously uninsured. The study was admittedly small, but all that really primarily means is that the statistical margins of error are larger than normal and not that the results of the study itself are necessarily illegitimate/invalid/inaccurate.

Accordingly, there is a 95 per cent probability (pretty good odds, no??) that the actual number of previously uninsured enrollees is between 700,000 and 2.1 million.

In that regard, utilizing the most optimistic scenario and not taking into account that some, even many (??), of the enrollees are not really covered due to lack of premium payment, which makes the actual number smaller, only 4-6 per cent of the previously uninsured have actually obtained coverage under ACA. That is a pretty dismal result of a program which had one stated objective of quality, affordable healthcare for all, no??

As to those who lost their coverage and signed up under ACA, it is not only both specious and spurious, but silly as well, to include them in the 7 million count. They had coverage, then they did not, and now they do again. Sounds a lot like a wash to me, not to mention voodoo arithmetic. This also holds true for those who renewed their Medicaid coverage who are also counted in the total by the administration.

And with further regard to the first group, there is quite a bit of evidence out there that, unlike Siarlys (I am happy that ACA apparently worked for him), a significant number of them are finding that while premiums under the exchanges may sometimes be a little cheaper, they are usually getting what they pay for, and are having "sticker shock" relative to deductibles, co-pays, co-insurance, etc. such that ACA is actually much more expensive overall than what they had before.

And when it comes to wealth redistribution as mentioned by Gary, we have a situation where the top 1 per cent pay 30 per cent of all Federal taxes, the top 20 per cent pay 90 per cent of them, and it is still simply not enough for Siarlys, et al.

Is it really worth it?? As I have previously noted, it made MUCH more sense (simpler, cheaper, easier, etc.) to have gone after only the original 17% and leave the 83%, who were generally quite happy, alone.

Gotta be some ulterior motives/politics/agenda/ideology, and not the interest of the people or the country, at work here, you think??; April 18, 2014 at 8:57 AM
Siarlys Jenkins said...: No elwood, no matter what volume of words you spew forth, you don't get this at all. The point is to insure the uninsured. The way to avoid uninsuring the already insured would have been to adopt a single-payer plan, taking away the option of insurance companies to cynically cancel existing policies, rather than merely amend them to comply with the law.

I'm familiar with the basic methods of social research sampling, and it would be difficult to conceive of a way the RAND Corporation could, on such short notice, randomly sample a representative group of those who just signed up for insurance. Finding and identifying the target population (given appropriate privacy constraints on the information individuals provide when registering) from which to select a representative sample, would be almost impossible.

Yes, there are copays and deductibles, but when you have subsidized insurance, each of us should pay SOME amount when we use covered services, don't you think? The basic preventive measures are either free or have very modest copays, more extensive use of services will carry more extensive share of cost.

As far as I'm concerned elwood, any income over somewhere in the range of one to five million dollars can be taxed at 100%. After a few years, corporations would stop paying $70 million compensation packages, it just wouldn't do any good. Thus, the money would either have to be invested in new production, or returned to shareholders, or paid in more substantial compensation to wage laborers. That would be good for the economy, for saving the pension funds, and the government wouldn't need to be involved in so much anti-poverty spending. Who needs food stamps when you can make $15 an hour and up, plus have employer-paid health insurance? Also, sports tickets wouldn't cost so much, because there would be no point in even the most sought-after star being paid more than a couple of million a year.

No, elwood, I don't think so. There are all KINDS of ulterior political motives swirling AROUND the ACA, not least from the Republicans, but the Democrats are hardly innocent. Still, the motivation for passing an Affordable Care Act was indeed the interest of the people and the country, and it is doing more good than harm.; April 18, 2014 at 6:18 PM
Gary Fouse said...: Siarlys,

So the point is to insure the 15% uninsured and in doing so screw with the insurance of the other 85%.

Great.; April 18, 2014 at 6:39 PM
elwood p suggins said...: Siarlys--thank you, insuring the uninsured is exactly and precisely one of my main pernts (points, for the uninformed). In its almost 70 years of existence, I don't suppose RAND is in much of a habit of publishing flawed studies, else it would probably not still be around. I have conceded that the sample is small, with the resultant larger margins of error.

However, as an example only, even if RAND's numbers should be in error by a factor 50 per cent, which I believe is doubtful, less than 10 per cent of previously uninsured people are now insured as a result of ACA. Not very impressive, at least to me.

As you often challenge others to do, and since you are apparently an expert in the field, go evaluate the RAND study, find its weaknesses and inaccuracies, specifically describe them to us, and then tell us what the "real" numbers are, rather than just dismissing it as you often do with contradictory data.

And I cannot for the life of me see how you can say it is doing more good than harm when the number of people who are, on a net basis, now paying more for insurance with less coverage than they had in the past significantly exceeds the number of previously uninsured who now have coverage.

What don't you get about this?? IT AIN'T WORKING, AND IT WON'T WORK, EITHER AS PROMISED OR EXPECTED!!!!!; April 19, 2014 at 8:38 AM
Siarlys Jenkins said...: Its working just fine elwood, but you are in a state of denial because it wasn't supposed to work.

There are many flaws -- like I said, a single payer system or a public option would have precluded a lot of those flaws.

Bottom line, Republicans have denounced the ACA from day one because if it worked, it would be a credit to Barack Obama's presidence, and the Republican Party Line was to make him a one-term president, to deny him any accomplishments, the health and safety of the American people be damned. They are keeping up a drumbeat of opposition precisely because it is beginning to work, and they can't stand the thought that it might stand the test of time in spite of all their denunciatory sound bytes.; April 19, 2014 at 2:56 PM