From yesterday:
Azar and Wyden getting snippy at the @SenFinance hearing: Wyden asks why insurance coverage has gone down by 7 million, Azar responds that "I thought the ACA was taking care of it." Wyden shot back that its "kind of hard with all the sabotage."
— Robert King (@rking_19) March 14, 2019
I am experiencing the frustration of an academic as I have three relevant papers that I can’t say much about right now.
Paper #1 looks at the enrollment changes in the last ten days of the 2017 Open Enrollment compared to the same time period in 2016. The last ten days were the first ten days of the Trump Administration. Policy and messaging matter and we’ll talk a lot more about that when the paper is published this summer.
Paper #2 examines the impact of advertising on enrollment. Unshockingly, it matters a lot. This paper is part of an invited submission for 2020.
Paper #3 we just submitted for the first time last week. Pricing matters and odd pricing situations matter a lot. In this case, the Trump administration’s policy implementation helps enrollment out.
There has been significant barriers to access for Medicaid. There have been significant barriers erected to the exchanges. Policy matters. A policy choice to actively and positively use the current framework to decrease the uninsurance rate has a reasonable chance of achieving that goal. It did over the last six years of the Obama Administration. A policy choice of either benign indifference or active obstruction of the goal of decreasing the uninsurance rate will, unshockingly, not achieve that goal.
On the Road and In Your Backyard
JPL
The choices made by the administration have caused suffering for far too many. Thanks David for highlighting this.
WereBear
It’s true. Even if on the surface some lives look like they are going on the same, there’s cracks in the foundation.
bemused
Arthur C Brooks is on msnbc hawking his book Love Your Enemies. I am not impressed.
Steeplejack
@bemused:
Yeah, weak tea.
rikyrah
Good for Wyden calling these muthaphuckas out ??
bemused
@Steeplejack:
Granted I didn’t hear all he said but I think he should have shown his work, all those potential enemies he has learned to love.
dnfree
I look forward to your further revelations when you can discuss them further. This makes me so angry—sabotage followed by “the ACA isn’t working!”
I also like the title of the post being a pun. Yes, policy matters, and obviously Azar is being disingenuous.
narya
As an aside, I am so glad you got the opportunity to do this work in this setting! I always appreciate your posts and your insights, and we’re all better off with you in a position to make these cases to a different and wider audience.
Greg
Instead of all the papers, just collect your posts in the form of a book, and it is the text for health policy until single payer happens.