What The Media Won’t Talk About: 17 Million Uninsured are Eligible for ACA Tax Credits

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Thanks to ObamaCare, an estimated 17 million Americans who are now uninsured or who buy their own insurance will be eligible for tax credits in 2014.

The Kaiser Foundation does actual healthcare policy, and they have a new report out today in which you will find more information than you will get all day from any mainstream media outlet.

“We estimate that about 17 million people who are now uninsured or who buy insurance on their own (“nongroup purchasers”) will be eligible for premium tax credits in 2014.”

Instead of focusing on 17 million people being eligible for tax credits, the media is busy running with the GOP narrative that Obama lied, the website sucks and affordable healthcare for everyone is a scam (see a and b). Allow me to translate for you: Help real people or report on things from a self-referential, egotistical basis in which the pundit’s political calls about this President’s exact choice of words are much more important than actual policy impacts? Gee…

So: Obama lied in 2009! He said you can keep your plan and lots of people are not being allowed to keep their crappy plans that don’t really cover anything. Republicans are very upset that people are stuck with actual insurance instead.

As the media falls over itself once again chasing a GOP narrative, try to ignore that there is no mention that back in 2009, it was Republicans who won Lie of the Year award for Sarah Palin’s totally fictional “Death Panels” that meant Obama was going to kill her baby. Yeah, that was so rational and policy based and the media loved it.

Obama’s statement that you could keep your insurance if you liked it underestimated that many of your insurance plans were so crappy that they would no longer be offered under the new healthcare law because they do not qualify as actual insurance. So, yes, he did not realize just how badly you were getting screwed. Very sorry. That is just like Sarah Palin trying to keep you from having access to affordable health insurance by lying to her base and getting them riled up enough to threaten lawmakers in order to intimidate them into voting against affordable, regulated healthcare insurance.

Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) was not impressed with this latest narrative and today she pointed out that many people aren’t being told that there are cheaper options in exchanges. They just get the cancellation notice and the media scoops them up for “journalism” sans information and veracity. It seems rather obvious that it is just this sort of corporate behavior that created the need for ObamaCare, but apparently millions of Americans being routinely screwed over when it comes to their health is no big deal. Nowhere near as important as the exact wording Obama used in 2009.

Dylan Scott at TPM did a special report on the real scandal of how insurers are hiding ObamaCare benefits from customers:

Across the country, insurance companies have sent misleading letters to consumers, trying to lock them into the companies’ own, sometimes more expensive health insurance plans rather than let them shop for insurance and tax credits on the Obamacare marketplaces — which could lead to people like Donna spending thousands more for insurance than the law intended. In some cases, mentions of the marketplace in those letters are relegated to a mere footnote, which can be easily overlooked.
The extreme lengths to which some insurance companies are going to hold on to existing customers at higher price, as the Affordable Care Act fundamentally re-orders the individual insurance market, has caught the attention of state insurance regulators.

But we hear nothing about the actual scandal.

Republicans who are so concerned with Obama’s “broken healthcare promise” are, at the same time, completely unconcerned when a corporate insurance company denies coverage to a person who paid in for years, or a corporate insurance company’s website doesn’t work, or a corporate insurance company takes advantage of consumers with the help of the GOP by not informing them that they can get much cheaper insurance through the ACA exchange.

Sarah Jones

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