He Still Can't Stop Lying About Obamacare

Despite getting his clock cleaned by a number of health care policy wonks two weeks ago and then moving the goalposts and declaring victory while getting crushed again, it seems Forbes.com paid anti-Obamacare hack Avik Roy is at it again with yet another inflammatory if not outright false claim about how much Obamacare will raise premiums on people in California, this time stating that Obamacare will cause health insurance premiums to double for women.

While premiums will go up equally for men and women in California, women should benefit more from Obamacare’s subsidies. That’s because 40-year-old women have lower average incomes than men do. According to the Census, in 2011 the median income for 35-to-44 year olds was $36,724; however, for men it was $43,967, and for women it was $29,095.

That’s great news for women whose wages are below the national average, or whose households that are larger than the national average. But it’s terrible news for those with above-average incomes, along with those who are unmarried or childless. And it’s also bad news for the men who today pay for the disproportionate share of Obamacare’s subsidies. (Over time, the gender-based income gap is likely to narrow; for more than a decade, women have outnumbered men in American colleges, and educational status is highly correlated to income.)

So now, Roy's narrow, narrow group is "single childless women who make more than the national average but don't have any health insurance."  He predicts those women will get "hammered" and he bases this conclusion on the same debunked math that got him into trouble two weeks ago.  In other words, not only does Roy not correct his math, he then uses that same faulty math to create more awful assumptions about Obamacare.

Second, how many people fall into the category of women who make more than the national average, but somehow work for a company that doesn't offer health insurance?  Existing California law makes that whole "not offering health insurance" part difficult, if not impossible.  In fact, the entire premise of Roy's idiotic assumption that Obamacare is a "war against women" is because California requires equal rates for both sexes, and that being a woman is not a more expensive "pre-existing condition".

Roy's final assumption is that this is yet another "massive" group of people who will "drop out" of Obamacare altogether and pay the fine instead of buying insurance, raising rates on the rest of us.  but since we know his base assumptions previous to this point are all hogwash, why would this be true at all?

The answer of course is that it's not, unless you think that single, upper-class childless women who don't get their health insurance through work are a huge segment of the population.