Cool interactive demographic/geography map of who benefits from Obamacare

[AggregateDemand]

The unemployment rate was 2% higher at the beginning of 2013 than it is now. ACA is doing virtually nothing. Medicaid expansion states observed a decline in uninsured that was 1% higher than non-Medicaid expansion.

Bias statisticians seek to credit ACA for suppressing costs, when the recession is the real causal factor. Statisticians seek to credit ACA for declining uninsured rate, though more people are actually working or being forced to buy health insurance.

Besides the 1% uptick caused by Medicaid expansion, ACA's only real claim to fame is that it cut many jobs from 40hrs to 29hrs, and then piled an individual mandate on all of those people who now must work 2 jobs to get by.

Unless you are in the bottom income quintile, and you have no interest in ever finding employment, this president is the biggest a-hole since Nixon.

[AggregateDemand]

You think Republicans would have trotted out these totally real people who totally are now only working part time and totally exist to do TV ads where they talk about their completely 100% real situation that actually happened in this midterm.

It's in the part-time employment data. Republicans don't need to trot out anyone.

This is just like the minimum wage debate. People making up all sorts of moderately-hilarious fairy-tales about why the rules of economics don't actually apply, rather than doing something that actually works.

That said, I did forget to mention the tax on "Cadillac health insurance", which is putting some downward cost on premiums by creating disincentives for companies to socialize the health insurance premiums and services of upper-management with the wage workers.

[AggregateDemand]

lol, right-wingers are getting more and more deranged and divorced from reality. First the Obama recovery doesn't exist, now the non-existent recovery solely responsible for the dramatic and unprecedented increase in health insurance coverage.

The recovery has been equal parts employment and people dropping out of the workforce. It has not been particularly robust from a socioeconomic standpoint, especially since distribution still lags behind what W achieved. Furthermore, people complain about the exorbitant $7T price tag.

If someone built you a shed, and then they tried to pass it off as a modern home, you'd be justifiably angry, not deranged. The deranged individuals are those who refuse to acknowledge that a shed is a shed.

[AggregateDemand]

Except it's not? U6 has plummeted at the same rate. Independent tracking of underemployment like Gallup has also declined.

Employers have known the mandate is coming since 2009-2010 so the U6 rate is not going to rise upon implementation. Instead, the rate of underemployment will remain considerably higher than it was prior to the recession.

Also, we aren't really interested in U6, rather the difference between U5 and U6, which represents the underemployed. In 2006 the difference was 2.7%. In 2014, the difference is still 4.7% underemployed. Discouraged workers never reached more than 5.7% at the height of the 2009 unpleasantness.

Underemployment has been very stubborn during this protracted recovery.

[AggregateDemand]

This assertion is partially unverifiable because it assumes a counterfactual. But how does that theory apply to Medicare, a subsidized system Republicans also accuse as incentivizing price-gouging?

The recession caused retraction in the enrollment rate growth for Medicare Advantage, Medicare Part D, and other services. ACA cuts Medicare Advantage, but not until next year. The Bush administration would tell you that Part D functions like a market regardless of enrollment rates, but those claims are a bit dubious.

Local variance between states with/without Medicaid expansion are not really indicative of what ACA does for our nation. Likewise, many of those in the 29-hr two-job demographic will be in states without Medicaid expansion. Others may be in states and localities where the minimum wage puts them just above the Medicaid subsidy threshold.

All of these anomalies, particularly the extraordinary effectiveness of the program in the home state of the Senate minority leader, shows haphazard planning and general laziness on the part of Congress and Obama to make sure this bill actually works for people.

As I've said before, ACA sort of randomly passes around penalties, benefits, taxes, subsidies, etc. until it's nearly impossible to figure out who wins and who loses. The macroeconomics are mostly negative or lackluster considering projected costs.

[AggregateDemand]

The series for Medicare Advantage alone isn't enough to disentagle the effects of ACA, since you can claim ACA mandated effects became embedded in the firms' future calculations. The raw data is indicative only for the 2008-2010 period, maybe, and during that period there was still steady growth in HMO enrolment.

Why would HMO's be particularly relevant? The income effect of a recession pushes down spending, meaning less comprehensive coverage and higher deductibles and out-of-pocket limits. If consumers are incurring higher risk, they probably want the certainty of an HMO.

Perhaps disentanglement is problematic, but arguing that ACA is a primary cause for declining cost growth during the Great Recession is like arguing that blustery downdrafts are the reason Isaac Newton took an apple to the noggin.

It's never easy to predict what any policy does for an entire country, especially one with 300 million people. When I made that point, it was about whether the ACA changes behaviour in people to become enrolled. Not surprisingly, they did. I focused on counties by state borders since there would be less economic variation between the two sides.

I didn't argue that ACA doesn't affect behavior. When DC launches healthcare.gov and they tell the citizens that the individual mandate is going to exact its pound of flesh, Americans will rush to sign up, especially if DC tells them the government might give them subsidies. The individual mandate, which is largely unpopular and of questionable constitutional authority, and rising employment rates did most of the work. The "good" government policy (Medicaid expansion) contributed 1% to the decline, according to the data.

The heterogeneity is well known, but as a reform supporter I will blame particular people for refusing federal aid for the Medicaid expansion. But there's something else in this paragraph, though; a belief, almost, that a heterogeneous policy is worse than no policy at all. This is something with which I disagree, especially given that the current act was already a compromise between Congress majorities with the Republican administration.

Even Republican take free money. The government will only help the citizens, as long as the state of residency is willing to help the government hide the true cost of the program from the CBO. In this case, ACA expansion pays 90% of the cost, which is much better than regular Medicaid, but still problematic for many states. Makes you wonder why DC would jeopardize expansion over such a paltry sum. It looks like they really wanted to watch people genuflect at the altar of ACA, and in McConnell's case, it worked like a charm, but as Senate Minority Leader, he probably got every waiver on his list.

In Texas, Medicaid expansion would allegedly cost over $1B per year, which would require 5% bump in general fund revenues. It's not cheap. Texas is supposedly seeking a waiver to only expand for children. I also heard other scuttlebutt that Texas will expand Medicaid only if they get a waiver to put all Medicaid block-grant funds into an exchange, to which the Federal government allegedly replied, only if the exchange is a state-run exchange according to the ACA regs.

Some states are more willing to let the federal government run their show, and some states get preferential treatment from DC. It's just a game. No one cares about the citizens. Everyone cares about who gets to control them.