In my search, I have not found a single source that conveys correct information in a manner that is simple to understand. After reading false information on www.whitehouse.gov about premiums, I decided something had to be done. It is not my intent to tell you whether or not health reform is right or wrong or if it's constitutional. I simply want you to know the facts.
To the best of my ability, I will provide the facts in a manner that most anyone can understand. I will provide links to my sources so that you can look them up and verify the information for yourself. I will also provide a list of sources that have been found to provide inaccurate information and should be avoided. If you have a question that you would like me to answer, please let me know and I'll do my best to find the answer for you. In the end, I want you to be able to make an informed decision about this legislation for yourself.
I've been doing my best to stay out of discussing this sort of thing online, as it usually just ends up turning ugly. So since I'm a teacher, I won't actually say my opinion on the matter, but just play devil's advocate and be nit-picky with your points so you can revise them and make them stronger, or abandon them all together, okay?
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that there is a lot of misinformation out there on this topic and that there is certainly a need for an someone smart who's actually taken the time to read the official reports and bill to explain the good and the bad without any bias. One major concern I have with the blog is that you're referring to the legislation as "Obamacare" which is the derogatory term invented by the right-wing media to describe it. It is not referred to as such in Congress or the moderate or left-wing media. Think of it this way, you wouldn't expect to find a whole of neutral, accurate, trustworthy material in a blog titled "The Truth about Niggers", would you?
As I said early, I agree that there's a lot of sources right now that you simply can't trust, including journalists and politicians. And yet, it seems you are blindly trusting the CBO in all your arguments. What makes them so trustworthy? Many of the arguments I've read about the cost of the bill actually attempt to discredit the CBO's estimates, claiming that they're frequently underestimated (though I don't know if these are necessarily true).
I will admit that it is misleading PR for the White House to say that your premiums will definitely not go up as a result of the legislation (and in fact, they may very well down!) It would be like the government saying the cost of milk won't ever go up, since there's just as many factors going into the price of a gallon that they really don't have any control over. I think the White House is simply printing the most liberal estimate of what could happen, but certainly not the whole story. More conservative estimates I've seen have said that at best it might just keep the cost from getting out of hand (since unchecked the cost will continue to rise at a higher rate than inflation). Perhaps our actuary brothers would be better at doing the math here, but I know that when you're dealing with a risk pool you can only talk about probability. I think what the White House claims is within the realm of probability, but certainly not the only outcome. And it's certainly not fair to label it a lie the same way as when someone in the right-wing media talks about how the bill will call for death panels, which is completely improbable. Likewise, what you're saying is within the realm of probability, but also not the only possible outcome. So what about your arguments makes them more accurate than another?
I agree that title does not appear to support the legislation. I've changed the blog title to The Truth about Health Care Reform. I just don't think that it is as catchy. If you have a better name let me know.
ReplyDeleteI trust the CBO because they have spent more time and effort in compiling this data than any other group in the nation that I'm aware of. Those who try to discredit the CBO projections do not understand its mission. Which I explain in the Will it lower the federal deficit? post.
I will get to covering to lies that the right is spouting out as well. My view is that a lie is a lie. Although there are more pronounced lies, I felt that it would be important to first talk about costs before moving on to topics on the periphery.
Dave, can you go five minutes without promoting your Black History blog?
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The name is admittedly less catchy, but it also sounds less biased, and more becoming of a blog claiming to be balanced (although the term Obamacare is still in your URL). You could, of course, change the name to "The Truth about the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010", since that is the name of the bill, but that is obviously too long to be catchy. A compromise might be "The Truth about H.R. 4872", which is the bill's number in Congress. This would be advantageous in that it is the official name that someone in government would recognize, and your using it would increase your credibility the same way as if I were to write a mechanical engineering blog and reference technical terms. The downside, of course, is that no one outside of government would recognize the name. You would have to explain what it means at some point, or perhaps call it "The Truth about H.R. 4872 and Health Care Reform." When I was searching the Internet for information, if I saw someone use the actual name of the bill I instantly awarded them credibility. You may want to do the same.
ReplyDeleteIf I were you, I'd still be a bit more careful with the word "lie", since you probably don't want to end up in the same class as Congressman Joe Wilson. Even though you want to simply say that a lie is a lie, it is clearly a general term and more specific ones could be used. Death Panels are just something Sarah Palin made up and not based on actual information as to what the government was planning. We could call this a fabrication. When the White House says your premiums won't go up, they are basing it on actual information, only they're being economical with the truth, omitting important information, or perhaps exaggerating. At best, we could even call this a half-truth. It seems to me that it would help the mission of this blog of sorting out all the information out there if you were more specific about how much we can trust different information instead of just using blanket terms.
I do want to say that what you've said so far about the CBO and their estimates is correct, and that their report is being interpreted in ways they never meant it to be. But at the same time I'm not sure that your claim that employers will be forced to pass the cost on to their employees is necessarily any more probable. Perhaps if Brent were to stop making jokes about my awesome Black History blog and run a Poisson distribution he could let us know (and yes, I'm aware that Poisson doesn't apply here. I just don't know the names of any other mathematicians).
Black History month should be every month, because every month Blacks are making history.
For my job, I project how much things that have already happened are going to end up costing in the end. As if there wasn't already enough uncertainty involved with that, projecting what things are going to happen in the future and then what they are going to end up costing is pretty much the least exact science ever. There's enough uncertainty involved that you can probably support a doomsday scenario as well as you can a sunny future just by changing some basic assumptions. So when someone tells you how things like this are going to play out in the long term, it just tells you what they want to happen. It doesn't make it any more likely that things will actually happen this way. All you can really do is observe how something is behaving right now and figure out how best to adapt to the current deficiencies in the system. This was true of health care 10 years ago, it is true today, and it will be true 10 years from now. There will never be a point at which health care requires no more reform.
ReplyDelete-Brent
Yeah, it seems to me that since so many factors determine what your premium is going to be (your current and future health care needs, size of your family, who you work for, who insures you) there is no way you can make a large general statement that will cover how the legislation will affect individuals. The only way you can say for sure is to be in touch with your insurance company and ask them how the legislation will affect you. As I understand it, they should be sending out letters to policyholders fairly soon to let you know. It may be good news or it may be bad, but one thing is for certain, it will be accurate.
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