The man behind the money

Everyone’s heard that health care reform will be too expensive to implement. Two plans that have been put in front of Congress have been shot down because of their $1 trillion price tag. But where did those numbers come from? It was made up one man, and he might be wrong.

Phil Ellis is one of the senior analysts for the Congressional Budget Office (CBO); he was responsible for the estimates of the two previous bills. The Washington Post described Ellis as “the most powerful guy you’ve never heard of in the health-care debate.”  The CBO is seen as fair and unbiased in their analysis and estimates, but this doesn’t mean what they come up with is an exact science. The Post quoted Ellis saying, “ We’re always putting out these estimates: This is going to cost $1.042 trillion exactly,” he said. “But you sort of want to add, you know, ‘ your mileage may vary.” This is a problem because it basically means that the reasons that the two previous bills that were shut down were done so for reasons that might not have even been true. The CBO may do their best to accurately calculate their numbers, but they’re not fortunetellers who can see the future.

People are using the numbers the CBO generates as fact and placing too much importance on them.   They are not focusing on the specific benefits the bills will give Americans but instead the price tag. The reason that the health care reform debate even started was because too many Americans couldn’t afford it. Let’s not reframe the debate based on whether or not the government can afford it.

More than their fair share

America’s Health Insurance Plans, the group representing most of the insurance industry, launched another attack on health care reform on Thursday, October 15. They ran television advertisements that stated Medicare Advantage would face severe cuts. One ad that ran in Missouri stated that the program would lose over $100 billion. The ads also say the Advantage members “will give up more than their share. A little bit of background, Medicare Advantage is a program where seniors pay for health care through private insurers. Advantage has greater coverage but then costs more.  Of course, like the study that they commissioned, these television ads are only half true.

Politifact has written an article discussing the truth behind the matter and what the ads ignored and left out. First off is that the reason that Advantage would be losing money is because it currently takes funds from regular Medicare. Medicare users pay an extra $3 a month to support Advantage and it costs taxpayers 14% more than Medicare does per capita. The reform bills would get rid of this and make the payments into both programs equal. This isn’t necessarily a decision to cut money from Advantage but to cut a cost that taxpayers were unfairly paid for. However, it’s also important to notice that this won’t cut basic Medicare for Advantage, just for the additional services that private insurance companies provide. So in conclusion the Advantage members won’t be giving up more than their share since they have been taking more than their share for a while.

The advertisement can be found here.

The Insurance Industry Strikes Back

A new report was released on Monday that attacked Obama’s plan for health care reform. The study stated that insurance premiums would rise tremendously under the new plan and cost the average American family $4,000 more than was previously projected by 2019, and that the total cost of the policy would be over $20,000 more. However, there is a problem with the report; it was paid for by the insurance industry. PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the largest consulting firms in the world, generated the study and America’s Health Insurance Plans, the group that manages public relations and lobbying for the insurance industry, hired them.

The Democrats responded by issuing their own talking points, as pointed out by Greg Sargent on WhoRunsGov.com. They said the study is “hard to take seriously,” as it ignores several important parts of the bill which would have drastically altered PricewaterhouseCoopers’ findings. Had they included all of the special provisions mentioned by the Democrats then they would have discovered that there would be no financial problem with the bill’s implementation. They then attacked the insurance industry, claiming that the report is just an attempt to stop health care reform from reducing their profits. This is one of the most high profile criticisms from the insurance industry in recent times. Usually you hear criticisms from congressmen who may have been influenced by lobbyists but this time the industry has been directly linked to the disapproval. As the reform bill comes closer and closer to passing, the insurance industries’ campaigning should get more and more aggressive. It is highly likely that this is not the last time that the industry will try to influence opinion.

Abortion Funding

The movement against health care reform has been almost entirely because of the conservative side of this country. The arguments that they use are almost always framed around issues and ideas that stir up strong reactions in conservatives. Concepts such as death panels, giving health care to illegal immigrants, and socialism are used in arguments against health care reform in order to incite conservative backlash. The focus of this post is on one of the biggest issues surrounding the currently proposed health care bill, whether or not federal funds would be used to pay for abortions. The National Right to Life Committee was the first to make the claim back on August 13 in a fact sheet that they sent out. This talking point has since then grown to be a claim that seniors would be denied medical care that would instead be used to pay for abortions. Steven Waldman covered this in his blog on belief.net.

The conclusion reached by everyone that has looked into the issue, including politifact.com, is that this claim isn’t entirely false and the response that abortions won’t be covered is entirely true.  Instead what will happen is that federal funds will go to insurance plans that cover abortions in order to compensate for the money spent on them. So while the government will not be directly paying for abortions, they will be giving money to the insurance companies that do. This does not settle the problem that the Obama administration is claiming that abortions will not be paid for by the government while pro-life groups are claiming that they will. Unless the administration comes out and explains what they mean when they say that the bill won’t pay for abortions, then this controversy will continue.

Michael Moore: “The majority actually want single payer health care.”

The past two updates on my blog have been about misinformation from the conservative issue, so I thought I would turn to filmmaker Michael Moore for a liberal mistruth. On September 26, 2009 Moore said on Larry King Live that 75 percent of Americans are expecting universal health care and that a majority want single payer health care. However, Moore was wrong. By the time of his interview, several polls had come out proving him to be incorrect. A Rasmussen poll on August 10, 2009 found that only 32% were in favor of a single payer plan and that 58% were opposed to it.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/august_2009/32_favor_single_payer_health_care_57_oppose

Another poll came out from Kaiser on September 29 that stated that 56% opposed single payer and 40% supported it. While Moore may be excused because it came after his interview on Larry King, the fact remains that he is still wrong. Moore’s statement most likely came from a poll by the Kaiser Health Foundation that had been released in July, according to Politifact.com. The problem is that Kaiser did several polls and that was the only poll where the majority wanted the single payer option. This means that Moore had either not paid attention to national polls since July, or he was trying to stretch the truth to fit his own opinion. Since the publishing of this post Moore has not publicly explained that particular comment so no conclusion can be reached if he was lying or not.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/oct/01/michael-moore/michael-moore-claims-majority-favor-single-payer-h/

Wordles on Health Care

Liberal Views

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1196061/Liberal_Views_on_Health_Care

Conservative Views

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1196045/Conservative_Views_on_Health_Care

Is universal health care socialist?

One of the biggest reasons that people oppose implementing healthcare reform is that it would be considered socialism. In an interview that the RNC chairman Michael Steele gave on July 20, he was asked if Obama’s health care plan would be considered socialism, he said yes. As the Huffington Post pointed out, several other Republican politicians have labeled his health care reform as socialist as well. Many of the images and signs that pop up during tea parties depict Obama as a socialist and associate him with socialist imagery. There is a fear shared by opponents of health care reform that single payer insurance will be the start of the country turning socialist.

However, there is some question as to how true this statement is. Is universal health care really socialist and would it lead to more socialist policies? According to the History News Network, it’s not and it won’t. In an article titled Fuzzy Thinking: Obama, Capitalism and Socialism, Walter Moss talks about how the word socialism has been thrown around and misused since it was created by Karl Marx. Nearly every time the government has enacted social policies and programs the opposition has declared them to be socialist. It was the same for Medicare and Social Security. However, none the politicians who oppose the current health care reform have spoken out against Medicare or Social Security.

The bottom line is that Obama’s current health care reform is not socialist. It does not feature a government takeover of medicine in the US. It offers a public option that will compete with private health care insurance companies. It is not even a government takeover of the insurance industry. The opposition to reform based on socialism is simply hyperbole and misinformation.

Death Panels

One of the most untrue and fantastic talking points to come out of the healthcare debates is that Obamacare will result in the creation of death panels. The idea that the opposition believes is that there will be a panel of judges that determine whether someone lives or dies based on how much they can contribute to society. This would mean that their judgments would deny healthcare to the elderly and handicapped. This meme has popped up in several political cartoons by conservative cartoonists and has been featured heavily on protest signs during “tea parties.” As Politifact.org points out, the death panels claim is a complete fabrication and they say that “There is no panel in any version of the health care bills in Congress that judges a person’s “level of productivity in society” to determine whether they are “worthy” of health care.” It is an absolute fact that there is no plan by the Democrats to create these panels.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin started this meme. In a speech she gave on Aug. 7, 2009 she said that “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.” The part of the bill that Palin may have been referring to involves allowing Medicare for the first time to pay for doctor’s visits where the doctor and patient discuss living wills and other end-of-life issues.  However, this has no reasonable connection to Sarah Palin’s claim. This is only one of many talking points surrounding the healthcare debate that are counter to fact.

Healthcare Talking Points

The purpose of this blog is to discuss the latest talking points surrounding the healthcare debate and verify their accuracy.