It’s no secret the president and his surrogates are trying mightily to keep their sales job for health reform on track—even if that means handing out misleading data. Campaign Desk was pleased to see the AP’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar pick up on a point we had made a few days earlier. In a critique of a NewsHour story that left a lot of health care misconceptions on the table, we noted that health reporter Betty Ann Bowser had passed along this stat from the shop of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: “as many as 129 million Americans under age 65 have preexisting conditions and could be rejected for coverage if the law is repealed.”
Most of those people have coverage under employer-sponsored health insurance, and wouldn’t be affected at all if the law is repealed. Preexisting conditions don’t matter with that kind of coverage. Everyone in an employer group is usually in. It’s a different story with people in the individual market, where fewer than 20 million people get their insurance. But the NewsHour didn’t go there.
Zaldivar, whose readers number in the millions, did—which makes his piece so important. Setting the record straight is always good, especially if it involves all the president’s men (and women). He pointed out that those with employer coverage are already protected when they change jobs or health plans. An old law limits waiting periods for preexisting conditions, and new employers must give credit if someone had coverage under a previous plan, and that credit often eliminates any waiting period.
Zaldivar looked closely at the statistic Sebelius was peddling. “The new estimate by the Health and Human Services Department is more than twice as high as a figure that supporters of the law were using last year. It just might need an asterisk,” he told readers. That’s a polite way of putting it. When Zaldivar looked at the different estimates of how many people might be rejected, he found that the administration had at one time projected a range of 50 to 129 million people with preexisting conditions that might cause an insurer to say “no.” The lower number was based on a count of people with health problems that would qualify them for state high-risk pools. The higher end included people with other conditions, like asthma, which could mean insurers would charge higher premiums or exclude coverage for the particular health problem in question.
Was the administration using the higher number for drama? The worst case is usually more compelling, no? We’re glad the AP was on this one.
>"Most of those people have coverage under employer-sponsored health insurance, and wouldn’t be affected at all if the law is repealed. Preexisting conditions don’t matter with that kind of coverage. Everyone in an employer group is usually in."
Many US employers avoid hiring people over 40 or anybody who has even the slightest hint of illness come up in their background check. Its because of the cost of health insurance soars when (as obama said) that one sick employee. thats because our system prices healthcare in the worst way possible.
In Canada, everybody gets gold 100k a year healthcare - they pay around 1% more in taxes than we do for it, and healthcare is not connected at all to your job, so the blacklisting wehave here just doesn't happen.
Many 40+ Americans who have lived in both places find they are employable in Canada, but even if they are a perfect match to a job, they often are not hired in the US.
You mention the individual market, and I think that should be covered more. Many people think that somehow, the insurance they would buy as individuals under the healthcare plan will cost what group rates cost here. They can't do that because that would anger the insurers who wrote the bill. So the older self employed in the US, even if they can afford one of the cheaper plans, in the final analysis, will end up frozen out of an affordable solution if and when they actually get sick. (The sick are that 10% that cost money that the insurers try to avoid. If it wasn't for sick people, healthcare in the US would be affordable. thats why for profit healthcare is inherntly at conflict with the goal of healing people. That problem needs to be faced, the system as we have it now is designed to take money from people and keep them sick.) They will still find themselves unable to afford healthcare. Remember, these plans have to be self supporting and their risk pool will be older, sicker people. So, its doomed to fail because it wont be able to do anything to save money. More and more people are only working a few hours a week so more and more people wont have any option that works for them. They will have to do what many MA residents have done, move elsewhere because they can't afford to both buy insurance and pay for their healthcare's costs, like drug prices, at the same time.
> "It’s a different story with people in the individual market, where fewer than 20 million people get their insurance. But the NewsHour didn’t go there."
#1 Posted by Marion, CJR on Fri 11 Feb 2011 at 04:29 PM