They Can't Stop Lying About Obamacare

Professional conservative health care policy wonks are paid to lie about Obamacare, because getting enough people to hate it and demand that legislators scrap the plan before it's fully implemented is the only way to stop it now.  So, people like Forbes columnist Avik Roy have to lie.  They're paid to do so.

Last week, the state of California claimed that its version of Obamacare’s health insurance exchange would actually reduce premiums. “These rates are way below the worst-case gloom-and-doom scenarios we have heard,” boasted Peter Lee, executive director of the California exchange. But the data that Lee released tells a different story: Obamacare, in fact, will increase individual-market premiums in California by as much as 146 percent.

Ezra Klein calls out the lie:

Roy got his 146 percent by heading to eHealthInsurance.com, running a search for insurance plans in California and comparing the cost of the cheapest plans to the cost of the plans being offered in the exchanges. That’s not just comparing apples to oranges. It’s comparing apples to oranges that the fruit guy may not even let you buy.

Remember, right now there's two big caveats to health insurance that Obamacare fixes:  one, plans have to have minimum coverage standards, and two, insurance companies can no longer reject people based on prior illness.  So yes, Roy purposely tried to make Obamacare look as bad as possible by comparing a cheap plan with a huge deductible that wouldn't qualify under Obamacare rules as meeting minumum coverage, a cheap plan that depending on your history you can be rejected for, to plans that do meet the Obamacare standards.

And let's keep in mind the same people who, like Roy, are paid to make Obamacare look as awful as possible are the same people who warned these exchange plans would be $500 a month or more in California.

They're not.  They're roughly half that cost.  Plus, subsidies assure that those who can't afford the plan can get help paying it, and in some cases they won't have to pay a dime.

That's the truth of Obamacare.  Those who need insurance the most will be able to get it, and get help paying for it.

Paul Krugman sums it up:

Right now, California has a basically unregulated individual market, in which insurers are free to reject whoever they choose, and charge whatever rates they choose. This means that a few young, healthy people with no record of prior medical problems can get cheap plans; these are, of course, precisely the people who need insurance least, and these plans are cheap not just because they’re only available to the very healthy but because they don’t provide much insurance. If you’re not healthy or wealthy enough to get by with this kind of insurance, too bad.

So looking at these rates tells you nothing at all about the success of a program that offers insurance to everyone, regardless of medical history, and sets fairly high minimum standards for the quality of that insurance.

But it makes for nice headlines, especially when "respected conservative policy wonks" like Avik Roy tell huge lies in order to try to convince people to scrap the program.  He has to:  otherwise, it proves government can work.