Remember “I feel your pain” -
Bill Clinton’s plaintive response to the woes of Middle America turned
into a signature line for his administration, which became a cliché in
American politics?
Every politician wanted to
connect to the pain of Americans, even in good economic times, and
especially during and after the Great Recession. The biggest political
attack against Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election related to
the exposure of his remarks about the “47 percent” and how out of touch
it made the wealthy Republican nominee to the plight of the struggling
working classes.
That was then … this is now.
Instead of feeling your pain, Harry Reid stood on the Senate floor to
tell millions of Americans impacted by skyrocketing premiums,
incompetent administration, and policy cancellations from the
implementation of the Affordable Care Act that they don’t really feel pain at all.
Democrats find themselves
hammered by an avalanche of data and personal anecdotes that demonstrate
the damage done by Obamacare. Instead of addressing those – which
granted, would take most of the time between now and the midterm
elections – the Senate Majority Leader angrily dismissed all such
information as “untrue.”
"Despite all that good news,”
Reid said on the Senate floor Wednesday, “there's plenty of horror
stories being told. All of them are untrue, but they're being told all
over America.” Reid specifically referred to an ad from Americans for
Prosperity featuring the case of Julie Boonstra, a leukemia patient
whose new plan disrupted her ability to budget for medications.
Reid blamed the brothers who own
Koch Industries and who are major contributors to AFP. He dismissed
Boonstra and apparently every other horror story as just “stories made
up from whole cloth, lies distorted by the Republicans to grab headlines
or make political advertisements.”
It’s true that Boonstra’s story turned into a dispute when others looked into her claims. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler
gave the AFP ad two Pinocchios, noting that the premium decrease for
Boonstra’s new plan (her existing plan, which she preferred, got
canceled under Obamacare) added up to the out-of-pocket limit, negating
her claims of extra expense. News media reported on that interpretation,
and a Democratic incumbent filed a complaint with the FCC to force
stations to stop airing the ad.
However, Boonstra disputes that interpretation, because while it might balance out by the end of a year, the immediate
out-of-pocket expenses are much higher in the new plan – and there is
no guarantee that the new plan will cover her current medication regime.
In fact, they declined to do so when Boonstra tried to renew the
prescription.“I went in to have a prescription filled, thinking well it's never been a big deal,” Boonstra told The Dexter Leader. “I never gave it a thought, and now it's no longer covered.” That means she will pay the full price of the medication up front, and she can’t afford to do it – even if the insurance eventually covers the cost later in the year.
Related: Obama’s Health Care Mandate - My Whim Is My Command
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Harry Reid’s dismissal of Boonstra’s pain was entirely justified. What about the pain of Catherine Blackwood, who also lost her insurance due to Obamacare and lost coverage for her cancer medication as a result?
Her previous insurance covered
Sandostatin as a treatment for her terminal carcinoid. But despite being
repeatedly assured during the problem-plagued enrollment process that
her new Obamacare-approved plan would cover the drug, she found out this
month as she was going into surgery that her plan would not
cover the drug. It costs $14,000 just since the beginning of the year,
and now Blackwood will have to cover it all herself.
What about the pain of Katherine Cadman?
She signed up for coverage through Covered California, expecting to
have access to doctors listed for her plan on the exchange. Instead, out
of 41 doctors supposedly in her network and in her area, only four were
taking new Covered California patients – and only one of those was
board-certified. Julia Turner made a similar discovery
after selecting her Covered California plan. The only doctors who will
see the San Francisco resident are clinics in the high-crime East
Oakland area.
These are just the anecdotes from the last week.Related: Obamacare Penalty - 4 Things You Don’t Know
The data looks even worse for the “don’t believe your own lying eyes” messaging strategy. When the initial rollout of Obamacare took place, the Obama administrations oft-repeated claim that the currently insured would be able to keep their plans went out the window, as insurers were forced to cancel insurance for five to six million people under now-forbidden coverage. To this day, the Obamacare exchanges have only had four million sign-ups, with as many as 20 percent of those failing to complete enrollments.
This week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated that another 11 million people with coverage from small-business group plans will see their premiums rise as a result of the law – 65 percent of all those with such coverage.
That follows a rapid rise in
small-business group plan premiums that coincides with the passage and
implementation of Obamacare. The year before the bill passed (2009), the
National Small Business Association found that the average cost for
health insurance was $590 per employee. Four years later, that average
more than doubled to $1,274 per employee – a far cry from the White House promise to “bend the cost curve downward” in health care.
When costs increase again, as the
CBO predicts, many of those small-business employers will simply opt to
dump health-insurance coverage for their employees. The workers will
have to fend for themselves in the individual markets that are
inflicting pain on millions of Americans already. Since most small
businesses won’t be required to provide coverage, the financial
incentives will all be in favor of cutting their losses.
That doesn’t take into account the tens of millions who will lose their current group insurance
plans when the employer mandates come into full force, a development
predicted not by Obamacare critics but by the HHS itself – nearly four
years ago. “The department’s mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of
small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will
relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013” – meaning those
plans will be cancelled.
Given the rapidly escalating
costs for providing insurance, even the penalties for opting out of
coverage for employees will not stop many from bailing out of group
coverage. If so, many more will end up experiencing the same pain as
Boonstra, Blackwood, Cadman, and Taylor.
Harry Reid and the Democrats can
keep ignoring that pain at their own electoral peril. It’s amazing how
quickly they have gone from feeling our pain to causing it, and then
trying to convince us that pain doesn’t actually hurt anyone. Not even
Bill Clinton can sell that nonsense.
