Gallup has some recent polling on PPACA/Obamacare approval by age bucket. Below is their graph with my comments:
If the young adults like Obamacare and follow-up that liking with enrollment, the actuaries are very happy. And if the old folks who don’t like Obamacare but have not gotten to Medicare yet don’t sign up en masse, the actuaries are happy. And if the middle aged folks, even the ones who don’t want to admit that they are closer to middle aged rather than young, are blase about Obamacare and sign up at population proportionate rates, the actuaries are neither happy nor sad.
Valdivia
Great to see it explained this way and to see data about how it’s playing out as of right now.
Also–love reading your posts. I am a fangirl :)
Betty Cracker
I’m miffed at the Medicare-having disapprovers. You’ve got yours, so fuck the rest of us, eh, you greedy pricks?
BGinCHI
@Valdivia: Hey Val! Was wondering whether you’d been away or whether I had just been missing your name in threads.
Also, too, this post confirms that the future is not so bright for the haters. The youngs are not falling for the shit at Fox News.
BGinCHI
@Betty Cracker: You are only scratching the surface of their assholishness.
Also, don’t they have families? Grandkids? Nieces and nephews? Terrible job market but at least they won’t die from not having health care but they still don’t give a shit.
More smiting please, gods.
Frankensteinbeck
@Betty Cracker:
I’m thinking those numbers are skewed less by medical need and more by feelings about a certain uppity president who dared to pass it.
Valdivia
@BGinCHI:
Hi! Good to see you here. I lurk a lot lately because I have been pulled into a vortex of medical issues with my dad. Always send a happy thanks when I get a wtso email :)
How are things?
aimai
I’ve just been sort of mind boggled by the short sightedness of the hysteria –for instance McMegans but generally about whether the young invincibles do or don’t sign up. Even if the current crop of young invincibles don’t sign up right away, voluntarily, the next crop will. If when you go in to the ER they sign you up for health care the number of people who are not signed up is going to diminish very fast–and theya re going to sign you up because they can’t be reimbursed any other way. Even if, in a worst case scenario, the ACA puttered along for a few years and was in the red w/r/t young invincibles does it really matter? I don’t give a fuck about saving insurance company profits so if their risk pools are older and sicker that just reflects reality. We as a country might have to pay more in subsidies or whatever but so what? Its a drop in the bucket, a downpayment on actual health for our people.
BGinCHI
@Valdivia: Good but crazy busy. Sorry to hear about your dad! Went through that last year in a bad way with my stepfather. Awful. Hang in there, my dear.
TAPX486
Maybe my tinfoil hat is getting a bity small but given the vehement opposition to Obamacare in the GOP controlled states, is sabotage, either active by assigning Obamacare message traffic to a low priority processing queue or passive ‘oh did I forget to send the updated specs’, to be ruled out?
fuckwit
What is severely fucked up about this is that, due to propaganda and tribal identity, the people who have the most to gain by Obamacare are the most negative about it. Fucking amazing. Our media needs to be shitcanned immediately.
BGinCHI
@aimai: The silver lining might be that if all this dicking around with private insurance proves too cumbersome, the argument for single payer just looks better and better.
Dare to dream….
Valdivia
@aimai:
Thanks for saying this. I can’t believe the amount of agita I have been seeing everywhere on the internet by people I consider wonks. I totally get reporting on the problems. But the tone has been–oh noez, everything is lost, things are terrible, liberalism is the fail now. We have not only the recent example of Medicare D from a few years ago (which began as a clusterfu##) and then ran as it needed to but also the Mass example! We know for a fact that as you correctly point out people can and will sign up on the 2 and 3 year if they don’t right away. The model actually does work! Cohn (the health policy one) had a post today at TNR about sign up rates in Massachusetts and how pretty much people waited until the last minute before the deadline, so I was glad to at least see that ray of rationality.
Can we wait and see how the website functions in a couple of weeks before declaring everything lost?
DonkeyHotey
I don’t often go to Fox News website, but when I do it’s to read sock puppets in the comments. Which, in this case, don’t seem to exist. The comment section in the article linked to above is tame and almost interesting. Maybe the sock puppets were overwhelmed?
Terrific graphic, though.
BGinCHI
@Valdivia: Crisis capitalism. Shock doctrine. Media on 24 hours.
Where is the patient analysis of this whole issue? Not where you can most easily access news.
schrodinger's cat
Age bucket? Is that blue and does it belong to the lolrus?
Valdivia
@BGinCHI:
Thank you. And sorry to hear about your stepfather. Things seem to be calming down somewhat now that they found the right meds combo. But boy do I need a vacation from my life or something. :)
Beutler at Salon (I think) had an article this am about ACA failing in red states actually making it more likely that Reps will pay the price for sabotaging it. Worth a read. Even if it discounts the idiocy of our media giving the GOP cover for everything.
Eta: @BGinCHI: I have a theory that the Bush years and the new media have totally ruined how we understand leadership and even actual policy processes of governance (see for example the Syria article in the NYT which was written to demonstrate how ‘weak’ Obama is, I instead thought it proved our system of considering what to do works well).
PopeRatzo
Mr Mayhew, do you have any reason to believe the young adults who like Obamacare will follow that up with enrollment?
It would be nice if we could see some statistics on enrollment and who’s enrolling. There should be more transparency, don’t you think? We all have a stake in this succeeding. I don’t care for how the numbers are being protected more carefully than the NSA’s surveillance system.
Supporters of universal health care and of the president have to be the ones to scream the loudest when aspects of the ACA are not being implemented competently, and when something so important is done via no-bid contracts. It should be the Democrats in congress who are clamoring for hearings, not jackoffs like Darrel Issa.
Betty Cracker
@BGinCHI: I’ve read several wingnut screeds that posit a similar theory: The Obama people deliberately borked the launch so the country would say, aw fook it, Medicare for ALL! I’m fine with that, actually…
hildebrand
Of course, Cole’s senator plans to propose a delay in the personal mandate for a year. Time for Manchin to switch parties, no?
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: Now, that would be 11-D chess.
TAPX486
Since 1991 I have worked on more bank mergers than carter has liver pills. In 2002 bank A acquired bank B. They rushed the merger and screwed it up big time. In fact in 2004 when bank A acquired bank C they assumed bank C’s name because bank A’s brand had become toxic in most of the major markets. When bank A, renamed C, was acquired in 2008 it took almost 4 years to complete the merger. We started with some of the smaller markets, worked the kinks out in dry runs/rehearsals and daily cycles till we were blue in the face. The big markets from bank C went last once the conversion process was down pat.
Given what they are trying to do with Obamacare I doubt that they had the luxury of 4 years to get it right before turning it on for the entire country. I suspect that in the end they will get the bugs worked out but in the meantime it has given the GOPPERs a lifeboat back from oblivion. I doubt that the MSM will dig any deeper than the usual horse race and iy must be Obama’s fault. Last Sunday, before I kicked the TV, Dancing Dave an BoBo were blaming the shut down on Obama. After all he doesn’t schmooze with the congress critters enough. Why horror of horror, there are 40+ critters that he hasn’t had over for snacks and shot some hoops. Never mind that those 40+ critters would rather see a U-tube video of themselves in bed with a dead girl AND a live boy then have a photo of them in the same room with Obama. BUT; it’s still Obama’s fault
TopClimber
@Betty Cracker: It is not just the greedy, methinks, but also the poor and scared. They have already heard that some of the funding for the ACA comes from Medicare “savings” (lower payments to providers) and have been hearing about how Medicare “reforms” may be part of so-called grand bargains. It doesn’t matter if the Ryan reforms are only supposed to hit those not yet on Medicare–there are just so many folks barely getting by on Social Security who must find a few spare bucks for the Part B Medicare premium and/or MediGap policies that they are easy to scare.
We have to figure out a way to avoid the generational warfare that the right wing seems intent on fomenting.
Nedinwc
@Betty Cracker: I’ll bet this is mostly out of misguided fear. It’s also Fox’s biggest audience.
gelfling545
@Valdivia: People are going to be even more inclined to wait to sing up for this because they have to guess whether the Republicans are going to pull some rabbit out of a hat that will delay or change the whole thing. It must b very unsettling to wonder in the event you go ahead & sign up whether you will actually be getting insurance & whatever subsidy connected to it or if the GOP are going to screw it up somehow.
Chris
@Valdivia:
It always boggles my mind how very little it takes for something left of center to be labeled “a failure,” versus how prohibitively high the bar is for making the same assessment on the right side of the aisle.
piratedan
@Nedinwc: yeah, the PP constituency, perpetually petrified….
Anya
Someone should shut that dumb ass Senator from West Virginia — Manchin Working On Bill To Delay Obamacare Individual Mandate
pseudonymous in nc
@aimai:
This is another question for Richard, but I’m sure there’s a transitional period for the individual mandate whereby delayed and ignored and previously-uninsurable illness finally gets treated (as opposed to waiting for Medicare and hoping you get to 65) and that won’t offset the premiums from young invincibles. Basically, call it the healthcare deficit. Any sense of the costs and length of time it takes before there’s some kind of equilibrium?
Dangerfield
And just think if the emo-baggers had supported the ACA from day 1, or maybe even after the supreme court ruled it legal it would have deprived the Rethugs of one of thier main talking points against the ACA. The fact that the ACA is still underwater can be laid at the feet of the firebaggers.
Another Botsplainer
@hildebrand: Another Holy Joe. Goddamn moron, totally plays into the GOP talking points. Goddamn him.
aimai
@PopeRatzo: Nonsense. Why hold hearings? We are less than two months into a multi year process. As everyone has pointed out both Medicare part B and the Massachusetts model took a few years to shake out. Even if the website had been down for a solid month it wouldn’t make any difference to the ultimate cost or the ultimate roll out. This is an absurd amount of hysteria over nothing. Precisely nothing. And as for the “no bid” contract bullshit–the contract was let like any other. If Issa and the others had a problem with it they should have done something about it then.
TAPX486
@Anya: When does the mandate tax penalty actually kick in – on the 2013 return that must be filed by April 2014 or the 2014 return which must be filed by April 2015? If the former and the problems persist then the IRS just waives the penalty for one year. I imagine they can do that with an executive order or regulation. If the later date. then extend the open enrollment till the end of June 2014.
If the website still isn’t working by then, the issue of the mandate will be small potatoes
Valdivia
@Chris:
Exactly! I mean, go ahead Ezra Klein report the problems but to go ahead and declare it the worst ever failure of governance and planning and a train wreck and etc etc etc. Just wow. Then the same bloggers turn around today and start complaining about how the Dems in Congress are panicking about the website problems. Huh? You started the panic you idiots!
@gelfling545: I am on a listserve here in DC and someone asked if ACA would be repealed. I think as long as Obama is president the ACA is safe. By 2017 there will be millions of people with health insurance, the GOP is going to take that away from people? I don’t think so. The only game for them was to do it before people bought it, by next year it will be too late. Just IMHO.
Kristine
@Omnes Omnibus:
More over at Washington Monthly
Ronnie Pudding
Aren’t most of those young people covered by their parents’ plans?
Kay
Sherrod Brown did a meeting today here in Ohio with Democrats and he was calm and upbeat on Obamacare. He thinks the PPACA will be fine and a year from now we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.
He also said that Donald Rumsfeld, Bob Dole and Gerald Ford voted against Medicare. Now, this was supposed to illustrate that opposition to Medicare was fierce- look how far we’ve come-relax, you nervous nellies, etc.
But, you could look at it the other way. Opposing Medicare didn’t stymie their careers at all, really. I didn’t say this but I was thinking it :)
He did not get a question on PPACA roll-out, BTW. He brought it up himself. The questions/statements were “don’t cut SS”, “where is the farm bill?!”, immigration (local liberal priest asked this), fracking (state issue!) and expansion of Medicaid in Ohio.
Mike E
I will be making actuaries happy(er?) in December.
BGinCHI
@Kay: I love me some Sherrod Brown.
jon
Nothing sadder than the Heritage Foundation having to ignore subsidies to lie about young people getting screwed. It’s not easy to be against their own plan, but they are determined to do it anyway.
Anya
@TAPX486:I believe on 2014 return which must be filed by April 2015. The website has nothing to do with anything. The website was never supposed to be the primary enrolment source. People have many options when it comes to enrolment.
From obamacarefacts.com
Anya
@jon:
It’s not their own plan. Obamacare adopted the ‘individual mandate’ concept from the Heritage Foundation but nothing else. Let’s not give them credit where non is deserved.
Kay
@BGinCHI:
Can we give him some sort of leadership position? He’s really pretty good at politics, and he’s a liberal in a 50/50 state. They spent 40 million dollars and a year trying to beat him and he never broke a sweat..
gelfling545
@Valdivia: I think you are correct but I’m sure some folks worry and feel a bit hesitant. I mean, some people just a few months back, didn’t even realize it was the law!
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
I think a big chunk of it is that they’re assuming that the only way to give the rest of us good medical care is to make theirs worse. That seems as if it’s the core appeal in all the really effective anti-Obamacare lies: death panels, taking away Medicare money to pay for Obamacare, etc.
Valdivia
@gelfling545:
totally agree! it was good to see people who work on the DC exchange pipe up in the listserve and answer questions correctly and openly about risks and the future.
Anya
@Valdivia:Ezra Klein needs to get slapped over the head. Everytime I see him discuss the the website issues it was with a massive serving of clutch-my-pearls-this-website-fail-is-making-me-indignant. Get some perspective you asshole. What the hell happend to him?
Kay
@Roger Moore:
I agree. I find the “not enough doctors” scare tactic mystifying. Wouldn’t that be a good problem to have? Crank up the doctor production! It’s not like we’re artificially juicing demand. It was there, these people were around, untreated. We only get X number of doctors and then we run out, forever?
BGinCHI
@Kay: He’s President after Hilary. His running mate will be Peyton Manning.
jon
@Anya: Same basic framework, but you are right. The Heritage Foundation wouldn’t want women getting contraceptive care, for just one example.
jon
@Kay: Poor people will still not want to miss work to see doctors, so conservatives can be happy that they suffer still.
Chyron HR
@PopeRatzo:
See, it’s funny because it’s LITERALLY what you guys believe. No, wait, not funny, the other thing. Depressing, that’s it.
aimai
If you really wanted to get everyone into the exchanges stat, regardless of age, you’d offer people discounts as they age for every year they got themselves into the exchanges or had health insurance after they were eligible. So if someone could show, at age 50, that they had been continuously insured through private insurance or the ACA, they’d get a lower rate at that point. This would be good for the exchanges, to the extent that they need young and healthy people to sign up, and good for the later age brackets since people who had been continuously cared for would in theory be healthier than the mass of uninsured people. At any rate, it would work better than continually lowering the price for the young invincibles to induce them because it would work as an incentive but not lower the income at the start.
Kay
@jon:
Have you heard of “perfect attendance” and then “perfect-perfect attendance”? It’s this horrible incentive, where they can’t miss a day because the bonus increases as the year progresses. If you miss, you lose the whole thing. What they’ve basically done is make very sick people go to work among dangerous and limb-threatening machines. “I can’t miss, I have perfect-perfect”. GREAT management idea. Just fabulous.
TAPX486
@Kay: Another ‘scare tactic’ has been you’ll have to change doctors. Well since millions don’t have doctors I doubt that is going to be a problem, for them. In 1994 the bank switched to a managed care plan and a lot of us did have to change doctors. At that point most doctors either didn’t join a managed care plan or only signed up for one. The theory was what you lose in fees you gain back in volume of new patients. That broke down when everyone was on managed care and most doctors had signed up with half doz. major insurers. Over the past 5 years the bank has switched plans 3 times. Fortunately I haven’t had top change most of my doctors but it is a risk Obamacare or no Obamacare.
pseudonymous in nc
@aimai:
Oh, come on. There’s a position between headless chicken and head-in-the-sand ostrich.
The glitches will get sorted out, eventually. CGI Federal will not get other contracts. But other contracts will be awarded using the same broken procurement model, and other contractors that have exactly the same credentials — being built to win contracts, not deliver services — will take their place unless there’s a willingness to confront the procurement process.
The discussion about HC.gov is about avoiding future shitshows, whether it’s for passport applications or visa applications or job applications or financial aid or any of the other federal services that have frankly awful user-facing online services that have been hamstrung by decades of procurement nonsense.
fuckwit
@Valdivia: No, the problem with American Dictatorship Worship started with Nixon, people recoiled from it for a while but then went all-in with Reagan. By the time Clinton ran, Americans were so into Dictatorship Worship that they thought that the President determines the economy, stupid. Commander Codpeice the War President was already a fait accompli after that. The firebaggers complaining that OBAMA DIDN’T GIVE ME MY PONY WAAAH I WANT MY VOTE BACK and stayed home 2010 were just the next sad chapter in that stupid fucking drama that started with Nixon.
This is a failure of people to understand Schoolhouse Rock. It infuriates me more than anything else in politics. Congress makes laws. Presidents enforce them– they’re basically cops (with nuclear guns). The Imperial Presidency been 40 years in the making, Dictator Worship has set in deep, and who knows what it’ll take to change it.
Fair Economist
@Betty Cracker:
To me the worst part of this is that the ACA improved Medicare’s funding so it has nine more years to go before its trust fund is exhausted. If the ACA were really repealed the Medicare trust fund would run out in 2016 and so there would have to be either cutbacks or tax increases before the next President even took office. But they want others to suffer so bad they’d cut back their own medical care. Pretty classic example of eating off a curtain rod to deny somebody else the curtain rod.
Gravenstone
@Anya: He may be working on something, but I’d be shocked if Reid allowed it to reach the floor.
gelfling545
@TAPX486: Most of the people I know who are currently uninsured would switch to the local veterinary clinic to get care. Is the change doctors scare really that big a threat to most people? How many people are that attached to their doctor? The mythical change would be, in most cases, more of an inconvenience than anything. Having changed doctors a few times in my life for a variety of reasons, it strikes me as an odd thing to try to frighten people with.
Anya
@Gravenstone: I just don’t want him to give the republicans anything. They will use him to attack the ACA and the president and he’s too stupid or too much of a megalomaniac to realize it.
Valdivia
@Anya:
you made me smile. I have been having the exact same instinct.
jefft452
@hildebrand: “Time for Manchin to switch parties, no?”
NO
I am more of a purity troll then most here, but Manchin stood firm with us when we needed him to
Unlike Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, and Blanche Lincoln, who could be counted on to stick a shiv in at the worst possible moment
Not that it matters since I don’t live in WV, but If he wants to blow smoke, he gets a pass from me, If I can count on you to have my back when I need you, I’m not going to complain if you stray when it doesn’t matter
jefft452
@Anya: “Everytime I see him discuss the the website issues it was with a massive serving of clutch-my-pearls-this-website-fail-is-making-me-indignant”
Request time out error, I had to hit the refresh button
Oh! The Horror!. Oh! The Humanity!
Some people will never forget where they were when they heard Pearl Harbor was bombed, or JFK was assassinated,
I’ll never forget the day I had to hit “refresh”
The Hindenburg, the Titanic, – nothing compared to having to hit “refresh”
People will be suffering from PTSD for decades
Ripley
@gelfling545:
I work in university-based healthcare and I think this one flops with all but older Medicare recipients and the wingnut true believers (often the same people, of course). Young people seem inured to seeing different doctors virtually every visit, and roll with it, and in my community practice, the working-class people I see use urgent care and experience much the same – different docs, rolling with it. The upper SES folks I encounter in both settings could give a rat’s ass: they’ve been insured forever and it’s not going away now, so unless they’re tea-people stupid, it’s off their radar to even consider.
So yeah, seems more trope than reality.
Lurking Canadian
@Kay: more of the vile legacy of Ayn Rand. Training twice as many new doctors would be as bad as the current doctors going Galt! Obviously the new doctors will be inferior, or they’d already be doctors.
Valdivia
@Anya:
also, too–his complaint about the fact that there was no hold music, wtf?
I think he has been borged by the Village.
Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable sock puppet
@fuckwit: “What is severely fucked up about this is that, due to propaganda and tribal identity, the people who have the most to gain by Obamacare are the most negative about it. Fucking amazing. Our media needs to be shitcanned immediately.”
What really gets me is how conservatives luuurve to advertise themselves as the Great Defenders of Personal Responsibility, but then they go totes batpoopers over the individual mandate. THE ONLY FOLKS THIS MOSTLY WOULD INCONVENIENCE IS THE 27-30 YEAR OLDS (ASSUMING UP TO 26 THEY HAVE COVERAGE THROUGH THEIR PARENTS); THOSE OVER 30 ARE MOST LIKELY TO START HAVING THEIR OWN FAMILIES, AND EVEN IF NOT, THOSE OVER THAT AGE WHO DON’T WANT HEALTH INSURANCE ARE MORANS.
Yikes, sorry for the ALL CAPS, but the blindness that falls over folks due to tribal identification and ideological “rigidity” (which actually isn’t very rigid if your opinions change based on what the “libtards” are championing this year) leaves me utterly gobsmacked.
Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable sock puppet
@BGinCHI:”He’s President after Hilary. His running mate will be Peyton Manning.”
As an orange-blooded Denver native, I love me some Manning the way I loved Elway — behind the center, NOT in the political arena.
OK, I actually don’t know what Manning’s true political beliefs are, but given that he’s made a commercial with the friggin’ CEO of friggin’ Dominos Pizza, I think it’s best I don’t know.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
In one sense, it would be a nice problem to have, since it would mean more people having access to care. OTOH, it takes a lot of time to train a doctor, and it takes even longer to build a bunch of medical schools to train more doctors. We may find that adding a bunch more patients means that our current doctors are overworked, or that they have to prioritize and shunt more of their duties off to physicians assistants and nurses, or that it’s harder to get appointments for minor things.
Of course, that assumes that patient load will increase with the number of people having insurance. That seems logical, but we know that a lot of those people are already getting care, albeit not through insurance. There’s some expectation that we’ll actually save money overall by reducing usage of expensive, drastic care like emergency room visits, and some of that savings presumably comes from it being less work to catch and treat things early. If that’s the case, we may not see a big increase in doctors’ workloads.
xenos
@Anya:
The Heritage plan, also named “ACA’, was never offered in good faith. It was intended to look like a politically-correct market-based reform, but the individual mandate was always a poison pill. The idea was to show that the only alternative reform to Hillarycare would be something so unpalatable that we would all be better off with no reform at all. It worked pretty well, really, in first diverting and then killing the energy for reform.
In the intervening 20 years other countries have developed individual mandate systems, and they have proven to be very good at forcing pricing down. Hillary 2.0 was absolutely right, though as a ‘bot I am loathe to admit it.