Premeditated Incompetence

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The Wall Street Journal is running a sob story about how “Obamacare is killing my mother,” and I’m calling bullshit.

The story in brief: Mother has cancer. Needs specific medicines. Old Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy was expensive, but it was paying for the medicines. It was a “terrific plan.” In November, Blue Cross cancelled policy, blamed Obamacare. Mother finds the exchange in her state (Virginia) was not working. Got on the phone to private insurance companies, got jerked around, just found out new policy doesn’t cover the meds. Blame Obama.

Articles of Bullshit:

1. Why was the Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy “illegal” under the ACA if it was that great? The only policies actually canceled by the ACA were those with gaps in what they covered. Was Blue Cross dumping Mother as a patient and blaming Obamacare, when in fact it was Blue Cross’s decision?

2. Viginia doesn’t have its own state exchange. The federal site was working by December. Why didn’t they use it?

3. The rest of the article amounts to how Mother was jerked around by private insurance companies she contacted directly, not “Obamacare.” Humana told her things were covered that turned out not to be covered, she said. I’ve had the same thing happen to me dealing with insurance companies, but this was back during the Clinton Administration. Obamacare traveling back in time?

Why does the new policy not cover her cancer meds, when the old “illegal” one did? That’s highly suspicious. Is it that the policy has substandard pharmaceutical coverage, or is there a deductible to be met, or what? And they’ve still got time, so why not get on the exchange now and see if they could do better?

Of course they won’t, because whining is so much more fun. See also Krugman.

8 thoughts on “Premeditated Incompetence”

  1. I think the best strategy is always to call their bluff. Blackwood ends his column, “We can do better, and we must.” So what does he propose? Vaporware:

    Like every American, I want affordable health care, and I’m open to innovative solutions of all kinds—individual, corporate, for-profit, nonprofit and public. It will take all of these, and all the intelligence, creativity and self-discipline we have, as well as everything we can offer one another as families, neighbors, friends and citizens—and it still won’t be perfect. But it is precisely because health care for 300 million people is so complicated that it cannot be centrally managed.

    Very inspiring, I’m sure, but again, What is he actually proposing? The only time he gets specific is when he says what we must not do, and of course what we must not do is ObamaCare.

    I’m not aware of anyone, even Barack Obama, who is committed to defending and maintaining ObamaCare precisely as it is. I would even go so far as to propose that Barack Obama really doesn’t want to kill Blackwood’s mother, and that if it’s true that ObamaCare is doing her in then he would be eager to fix that.

  2. Remember when the WSJ was one of the two or three best newspapers in the country – if not the world?

    Sure, the Op-ed page was full of Conservative sociopaths, but the news and financial reporting were 1st rate.

    And then Rupe bought it, and performed his usual magic of degrading the news so that the reporting matched his psychopathic mindset.

    And no one wants to report on those who really might be negatively impacted financially by PPACA, because most of those are uber-wealthy people who could pay whatever was asked of them in any case.
    You know which ones I’m talking about – the people the NY Times reports as making over $500,000 a year, and finding it tough to live in their NY City luxury condo, and still pay for a beach-house, a house in the mountains, Buffy’s and Sissy’s private schools, dinners at fancy restaurants, and new his-and-hers luxury cars every two years.

    I wish I had problems like that.
    Try living like the rest of us.
    At the end of every month, we don’t have two f’in pennies to rub together. And instead, dig ever deeper into an almost empty savings account.

  3. When are the American people going to learn, it is the insurance companies who don’t give a darn. The sooner we get them out of health care the better off we will be.

  4. Some insight from the LAT:

    …In choosing to let the feds do a job that the state should have taken on, Virginia kissed off more than $100 million in federal funds that would have been available to help its 844,000 uninsured residents find the insurance they need.

    Neighboring Maryland had $165 million to do the job; Virginia spent $6 million. Virginia had 16 consumer helpers in the entire state, according to the Washington Post; Maryland, with about the same number of potential customers, had 325. It’s not surprising that Catherine Blackwood faced “repeated and prolonged phone waits” to get insurance information; the fault wasn’t Washington’s, but Richmond’s.

    The misdirection over her medication is a different story, but it appears to be an issue between the Blackwoods and Humana. The ACA doesn’t dictate which medications are or are not offered by insurers, and the law certainly doesn’t demand that information on formularies be withheld from customers. It sounds as if Mrs. Blackwood was sorely misled by Humana’s customer reps, and it seems likely that its refusal to cover her crucial medication is unjustified.

    That does point to a problem with Obamacare, just not the one Stephen Blackwood and the Wall Street Journal think it does. The problem is that the Affordable Care Act not only left commercial insurers at the center of our healthcare system, but it strengthened their grip on coverage. Many of the problems that have cropped up with the ACA are reflections of the private industry’s role, including its lousy customer service…

  6. The WSJ’s only sobs are for the dollars not in the bank accounts of the .01%. That is the ultimate goal for that paper’s owners.

  8. Pingback: The Mahablog » Another Obamacare Horror Story Debunked

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