Of course, an engineer would advise that the pool is twice as large as it needs to be:
"The insurance exchanges for people with preexisting conditions aren't living up to expectations ... [ObamaCare©] set aside $5 billion to help those folks. But one year later, few people are taking that help."
Nice that the folks at the taxpayer-funded "news" organization finally noticed this; as Bob noted several months ago, " [t]he government sold 12,500 health insurance policies in 8 months and 700,000 cars in 6 weeks."
Bob pointed out several plausible, rational explanations for the underwhelming response. NPR, not so much:
"The high-risk pools enrolling the fastest are almost all in blue states."
So it's all about politics?
No, not really: the reason that so-called "blue states" are having so much "success" with these pools is that their population is already primed for the expansion of government into the health insurance biz. And, as Bob noted, it's not like folks have been beating down the door to sign up in any state.
This particular NPR piece, by the way, suffers from what we've come to call LRS (Lazy Reporter Syndrome). We've seen this before, of course, but NPR seems to have refined it to an art.
■ Example #1:
"Jose Cortes was a Spanish teacher at a college in North Carolina until strange things started happening ... By the time doctors figured out why he'd been acting so strangely, he'd been fired. Lost his benefits."
Really? What kind of college employs less than 20 people (the threshold for COBRA compliance)?
■ Example #2:
"[H]is wife, Anne ... says he had two options: Join her health plan at work, but that would take a year because of his preexisting condition."
Hello, HIPAA anyone? As long as there was continuous coverage (and the reporter never questions this), then there's no such wait.
These are such obvious, simple holes that I find it difficult to believe much else of what's being "reported" here. It's reminiscent, as well, of Bob's expose of the Baltimore Sun; that is, these are (or should be) routine parts of the fact-check process.
Or are "reporters" absolved of these?
[Hat Tip: FoIB Holly R]
"The insurance exchanges for people with preexisting conditions aren't living up to expectations ... [ObamaCare©] set aside $5 billion to help those folks. But one year later, few people are taking that help."
Nice that the folks at the taxpayer-funded "news" organization finally noticed this; as Bob noted several months ago, " [t]he government sold 12,500 health insurance policies in 8 months and 700,000 cars in 6 weeks."
Bob pointed out several plausible, rational explanations for the underwhelming response. NPR, not so much:
"The high-risk pools enrolling the fastest are almost all in blue states."
So it's all about politics?
No, not really: the reason that so-called "blue states" are having so much "success" with these pools is that their population is already primed for the expansion of government into the health insurance biz. And, as Bob noted, it's not like folks have been beating down the door to sign up in any state.
This particular NPR piece, by the way, suffers from what we've come to call LRS (Lazy Reporter Syndrome). We've seen this before, of course, but NPR seems to have refined it to an art.
■ Example #1:
"Jose Cortes was a Spanish teacher at a college in North Carolina until strange things started happening ... By the time doctors figured out why he'd been acting so strangely, he'd been fired. Lost his benefits."
Really? What kind of college employs less than 20 people (the threshold for COBRA compliance)?
■ Example #2:
"[H]is wife, Anne ... says he had two options: Join her health plan at work, but that would take a year because of his preexisting condition."
Hello, HIPAA anyone? As long as there was continuous coverage (and the reporter never questions this), then there's no such wait.
These are such obvious, simple holes that I find it difficult to believe much else of what's being "reported" here. It's reminiscent, as well, of Bob's expose of the Baltimore Sun; that is, these are (or should be) routine parts of the fact-check process.
Or are "reporters" absolved of these?
[Hat Tip: FoIB Holly R]
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