(Note: This column did not appear in the April 3rd issue of The Post.)
You may have noticed earlier this week that the woman who plays Olivia Pope, the carrot top who spends most of his time on a snowboard and a comedian with a daytime talk show all have one thing in common.
Each tweeted in support of President Barack Obama’s health care law, the Affordable Care Act, on Monday, which was the last day to sign up for insurance through the government’s marketplaces.
After the health marketplace website, healthcare.gov, failed miserably in October, the White House announced Tuesday that 7.1 million Americans signed up for health care via the Democratic legislation. That beats the 6 million projection by independent federal analysts late last year and the 7 million that was projected before the website stumbled.
Still, critics of the law are carving a place for it in history books as the second most polarizing issue of the Obama era, behind only Obama’s presidency itself.
There are some valid questions about this 7.1 million figure: How many are “young invincibles” who will pay each month for insurance they won’t often use, balancing out the older, sicker people who now have health insurance they didn’t used to have and will use regularly? How many already had health insurance but had to get a new plan? And how many have actually paid their premiums, which is required to start a policy after signing up?
Though I haven’t scooped all of America’s Washington bureau reporters to tell you answers to those questions, I can tell you why each of them matters.
In the case of the young invincibles, as far as I can tell, there’s no solid figure from independent federal analysts that says how many need to sign up to keep costs low. Some folks are tossing around a 40 percent figure, but that’s the amount of the potential market represented by adults ages 18 to 34, not the amount that needs to enroll to offset expenses of the old and the sick. So keep that in mind as early reports trickle out soon describing how many young folks signed up.
If someone’s insurance was canceled because of the ACA, it’s because it didn’t comply with the new standards. That doesn’t mean it was a “junk” policy as some Democrats might say, but it could simply mean that it didn’t offer coverage for mental illness treatments, or it took gender into account when determining premiums, deductibles or other payments or coverage. So keep that in mind if statistics show that many of the 7.1 million had coverage that was canceled.
Lastly, the government hasn’t said it’s planning to disclose the number of people who are paying their premiums. When — rightly — pressed on the question by reporters, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney noted that signing up for health care through the “Obamacare” exchanges enters an individual into a private contract with a private company. So then you’d have to turn to insurers to figure out how many people are actually paying. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says insurers have told the administration that the number is about 80 or 90 percent, but — for the time being — you’d have to consider the source of that information. Sebelius, whose job and reputation were apparently on the line over this law, obviously wants it to look like a success.
Speaking of success, what does that look like in this case? House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican from an Ohio congressional district near Cincinnati, says success looks like a total repeal of the law. Politically, that makes some sense for a man representing a party that did not cast one vote in the House for the law back in 2010.
But, practically, doesn’t success look like keeping health reform on the table? Former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also wanted health care reform, so it’s not an Obama issue — it is a bipartisan issue shared by many presidents.
And now that millions of Americans have health care they didn’t used to have, either through private insurance or through Medicaid expansion, Republicans can’t take it away. So they’ll have to work with Democrats to make the law better if they want to be a part of the conversation on how the law is implemented by the administration.
(By the way, those celebrities from my first paragraph were Kerry Washington, Shaun White and Ellen DeGeneres, if you didn’t know.)
Joshua Jamerson is a junior studying journalism and local editor at The Post. What are your thoughts on the ACA? Talk public policy with him at jj360410@ohiou.edu.
