Should-Read: Scott Lemieux: Hacktacular!

Should-Read: Scott Lemieux: Hacktacular!: “The New York Times has given op-ed space to Avik Roy, so he can prove that you can’t spell ‘reformicon’ without ‘con’… http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/06/hacktacular-30

…Roy’s answer to the CBO analysis that 22 million people would lose insurance under the BCRA in order to fund a massive upper-class tax cut is quite simply pathetic:

It’s likely that, if the Senate bill passes, more Americans will have health insurance five years from now than do today. The Congressional Budget Office believes that solely because Republicans would repeal the A.C.A.’s individual mandate, by 2026, more than 15 million fewer people will buy health insurance, regardless of what senators do to direct more financial assistance to the poor and the vulnerable. That’s not a flaw in the Senate bill; it’s a flaw in the C.B.O.’s methods…

The flaw in the CBO’s analysis is that… it’s scoring the bill being proposed by Senate Republicans, as opposed to some hypothetical bill passed by a future Congress that would provide more generous subsidies for the poor rather than brutalizing the poor to pay for an upper-class tax cut. It’s embarrassing that Roy would type this s— and it’s embarrassing that the Times would publish it.

And now, the punchline:

Roy emails back:  “As a matter of policy, I don’t discuss with the press my conversations with policymakers.” So, if you’re curious whether he helped write the plan he has been touting in a number of op-eds and interviews, Roy isn’t saying, but “yes” seems like a fairly safe assumption.

I dunno, maybe the Times should make him answer this question before it publishes his feeble propaganda as if it was serious analysis?

Jonathan Chait: Defenses of Senate’s Health-Care Plan Pathetically Dishonest: “The task of giving an intellectual sheen to this facially absurd message has fallen upon Republican health-care adviser Avik Roy… http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/defenses-of-senates-health-care-plan-pathetically-dishonest.html

…who has sold the Senate bill in an enthusiastic media blitz…. Currently… insurance plan[s]… cover… 70 percent of your expected medical expenses. The Republican plan would cover just 58 percent of expenses. The difference comes out of customers’ pockets in the form of higher deductibles, which would rise from $3,500 a year on average to $6,300 a year. This, argues Roy, would create a “thriving, consumer-driven individual insurance market.” Sure, Democrats may complain, but “Republicans have a different view of what a safety net should look like.” In fact, rather than argue for higher deductibles, Republicans have spent the last several years insisting deductibles are already too high. The excessively high deductibles on the exchanges have constituted the GOP’s most popular talking point. (To take one example out of jillions: GOP senator Johnny Isakson: “Most of those 20 million got bronze policies with a great big deductible and not much insurance.”)…

Right-wingers do have a vision of a system with high-deductible insurance. They like it because they believe people would make shrewd decisions about what medical care to buy and what to skip, bringing down costs. Honest conservatives (like Ross Douthat) admit that, to make a system like this work, Republicans would need to give low-income people generously-funded medical-savings accounts, from which they could draw to pay their costs. The Senate bill doesn’t do that. It just sticks poor people with medical bills they can’t possibly cover.

The second defense of the Senate bill is even more sweeping. Throwing people off Medicaid will not harm them, argues Roy, because it is “a program that researchers have shown has health outcomes no better than being uninsured.”… As Benjamin Sommers, Atul Gawande, and Katherine Baicker point out in a new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, there are lots of studies about the effects of Medicaid…. People benefit from having health insurance…. Roy’s tactic of cherry-picking… is exactly the kind of rhetorical contortion necessary to justify a plan lacking any widespread public support.

Update: Roy emails back: “As a matter of policy, I don’t discuss with the press my conversations with policymakers.” So, if you’re curious whether he helped write the plan he has been touting in a number of op-eds and interviews, Roy isn’t saying, but “yes” seems like a fairly safe assumption.