The greater horror
John Brummett
Confession serves both the soul and a desire for a relationship of trust with the reader. Vigorous disagreement is fine. An omission of relevant fact is not.
So, I confess. A letter-writer in Northwest Arkansas was correct.
He took me to task last week for failing to report an essential element in a column assailing the Trump administration for not opening a special federal enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act—aka Obamacare— during the coronavirus emergency.
What I left out was that anyone faultlessly losing job-related health insurance at any time has 60 days during which to enroll in Obamacare, even without the opening of a special enrollment period for everybody.
Let me make clear that a special enrollment period for everyone is infinitely better in that it’s high-profile, convenient, and universally accessible. That’s why Democratic politicians and the self-interested health-insurance industry asked for it nationally, and it’s why the Obama-resenting Trump administration declined. Twelve states and the District of Columbia have opened such periods on their own and stimulated substantial business.
But that’s no justification for leaving out a fact, which left the damaging impression that I was purposely omitting relevant information because it was inconvenient to my argument.
As I told the letter-writer in an email, it’s no excuse that I left it out only because I didn’t think about it. I was focused on the broader failure of the Trump administration to open a special enrollment period. I was preoccupied with the yet more outrageous issue of the Trump administration’s wanting to kill Obamacare altogether—leaving no enrollment for anybody ever—for raw and resentful political reasons, and to do so without anything to put in its place.
Obamacare’s regular open enrollment period is November and December. A special enrollment period would let anyone sign on and sign up. The existing individual application process can require paperwork to provide proof of loss of employment and insurance.
UnitedHealthCare has announced it’s going back into Maryland’s Obamacare exchange, which it abandoned in 2017, and looking at doing so in other states.
What happened over the early years in Obamacare was that insurers abandoned ACA exchanges because they didn’t believe they could design competitive rates while costs soared. People weren’t universally participating. Republicans were discouraging participation. And plans encompassing equally priced coverage for pre-existing conditions were expensive.
What’s happening lately is that health insurers are surveying the coronavirus landscape and noticing that the ACA’s health exchanges— especially as federally subsidized— may present a practical and mildly alluring option for the newly jobless and uninsured.
Heavily subsidized private insurance bought on the Obamacare exchange would be a better deal than what the Trump administration offers, which is laughable, or cry-able. It is for you to walk around without health insurance and for the government to pay your hospital bills directly if you get the coronavirus and have hospitalization-level complications, but not for anything else.
Obamacare is far better than that, offering comprehensive coverage including for pre-existing conditions and at premiums that, while still too high, have stabilized in the last year nationally and even dropped in some places. More to the point, those premiums are governmentally subsidized at high levels for low-middle-income customers such as those newly living on unemployment benefits. The lowest income level is eligible for Medicaid.
If you’re going to be dependent on government money anyway, why not ante up if you possibly can afford it for a deductible and co-pay to get full health insurance with premium subsidies through Obamacare? Wouldn’t that be better than the White House’s silly promise to pay your bills only if you wind up sick enough to become hospitalized from a singular and potentially lethal condition?
Yet the Trump administration declined to permit open enrollment in this crisis, and, worse, is still determined from extraordinary political smallness to try to end Obamacare altogether through frivolous-seeming litigation pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
I confess I left out a basic fact and deserve chastising.
It doesn’t excuse my omission that the Trump administration deserves disgust for keeping Obamacare dormant in a crisis and wanting to end it, mainly because Trump’s primitive political base viscerally opposes anything associated with that supposed Kenyan Muslim.