Obamacare Is the Right’s Worst Nightmare -- Paul Krugman

[Jessy169]

News from New York: it looks as if insurance premiums on the individual market are going to plunge thanks to Obamacare. This shouldn’t come as a surprise; in fact, the New York experience perfectly illustrates why Obamacare had to look the way it does. And it also illustrates why conservatives should be terrified about this legislation, as it takes effect. Americans may have had a lot of misgivings in advance, thanks to vast, deliberately spread misinformation. But I agree with Matt Yglesias — unless the GOP finds even more ways to sabotage the plan, this thing is going to work, it’s going to be extremely popular, and it’s going to wreak havoc with conservative ideology.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/obamacare-is-the-rights-worst-nightmare/

Conservatives are right to be hysterical about this: it’s an attack on everything they believe — and it’s going to make Americans’ lives better. What could be worse?

The party of "screw everybody because I hate them all" doesn't have a bright future. Good riddance. May Obamacare prove to be the stake in the heart of the right-wing beast.

[UCmeNdc]

1. K&R

[Cha]

2. thank you for the article, Jessy.. and Yay!

[CTyankee]

3. Dr. K has a deepening social conscience, and I love him for it! He has moral outrage at what is

happening to the 99%, even tho he is a self confessed 1% member.

Paul Krugman is a great man. He is a voice of conscience in the editorial pages of the NY Times...

[JayhawkSD]

5. Krugman is not without clay feet

In his blog post decrying the exagerration of underfunding of pensuons, he tosses off a rather glib,

OK, there are some questions about the accounting, mainly coming down to whether pension funds are assuming too high a rate of return on their investments.

That's not the "mere detail" that he implies it is. Actual returns are in the range of 3% and unlikely to increase much, if at all, and the assumptions on which funding reports are based run 8% and even higher. Krugman knows that and, like the rest of the beltway, chooses to ignore it.

[CTyankee]

7. You didn't include the rest of the quote:

"But even if the shortfall is several times as big as the initial estimate, which seems unlikely, this is just not a major national issue."

What I take away from this is his decrying the "stick it to the worker" mentality. And remember, he's the economist with the Nobel Prize. Unlike the rest of us, he spends his whole time running models in light of past economic follies vs. present realities. And he has a social conscience. That is not a bad thing, IMO.

Also, I don't think PK "chooses to ignore" anything. That would be his own folly. Indeed, Dr. K has nearly always been right and his opponents dead wrong (and he owns up to it in the rare times that it happens). I think his track record is sterling, myself. As he said to Richard Haas on Morning Joe "How many times do we have to be right and you wrong?"

[JayhawkSD]

4. premiums on the individual market are going to plunge

Do they say what is going to happen to premiums on the group health insurance market? That might be a bit more significant, since it covers something like 80% of the population.

As I noted in another thread, the rates for my group policy went up by between 2% and 5% each year intil the ACA passed. Then it went up by 28%, 35% and 25% this year. That comes to a 116% increase, more than doubling, in three years.

[Jessy169]

6. Think about dropping your group plan and getting individual?

It is a viable option for you now. The two big reasons that people are "stuck" with whatever plan that their job offers is because of preexisting conditions and price. Now those conditions have been resolved, or so it seems. Many of the companies that package and sell group health plans are dedicated Obama-haters run by right-wing partisans. A lot of those companies will do anything to make Obamacare look bad, and a lot of employers are the same way -- these jerks will purposely become "victims" of Obamacare just to "prove" their idiotic points. Maybe none of this applies to your particular case -- just some alternative ideas.

[JayhawkSD]

8. Oh, for heaven's sake. I have United Healthcare...

...furnished by Addecco, one of the largest corporations in the world. I also have Parkinson's Disease, heart problems, severe emphysema, and have had ten strokes. You realloy suggest that I could get an individual policy cheaper than that group policy?

And please don't suggest that my conditions are inflating the cost of a group policy which has several million members.

Nor that those conditions would not affect the cost of an individual policy. They might not be cause for rejection, but if I could get an individual policy for the same premium as a completely healthy person then insurance companies will be out of business in less than a year. Either payouts to the likes of me will break them, or healthy people will buy zero policies.

[BrainMann1]

9. K&R

All day, All night good thing out of sight