CO Insurance Commissioner Deflates “UdallGate” Claim

POLS UPDATE: State officials say that not only was Sen. Udall not intimidating the State's Department of Insurance in asking about the validity of policy cancellations, he was also HELPFUL in his questions. So much for that outrage. From Fox 31:

In separate letters Tuesday afternoon, Commissioner Marguerite Salazar and Barbara J. Kelley, the executive director of the Dept. of Regulatory Agencies, informed Congressman Cory Gardner, R-Yuma, and state Rep. Amy Stephens, one of several GOP candidates looking to challenge Udall later this year, that a fact-finding review “revealed no evidence of any intimidation, and the ‘level of coercion by Senator Udall and/or his staff’ was zero.”

On Monday, Salazar was pressed about the interaction by Republican lawmakers during her own confirmation hearing at the Capitol.

“I characterize this as a heated discussion between two staff people that happens all the time,” Salazar said, trying to downplay the controversy.

Salazar’s letter to Gardner Tuesday reiterated that position.

“Senator Udall’s staff was doing their own research separate and apart from the Division, and brought certain information to our attention, including the fact that carriers were sending notices that included renewal options,” she wrote.

“Moreover, we think the Senator’s efforts were useful.”

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(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Article By The Colorado Independent

Marguerite Salazar, confirmed by the Senate in Denver Monday as state insurance commissioner, threw cold water on state Republican outrage machine. During her confirmation hearing, she said the messages staffers for Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, who’s up for reelection, sent to her office pushing back on the number of Obamacare-related health insurance policy cancelations was routine communication and in fact bolstered the work of her staff.

As CoPols mentioned yesterday, it's only a matter of time before the facts confirm the material points of Sen. Mark Udall's objection with the widely-reported statistic that a quarter-million Coloradoans (yes, that's the right way to write Coloradoans) had their health insurance canceled. But in the mean time, the accusations that Udall had bullied or harassed a state department is losing steam all on it's own with the "victim" saying that nothing had been done wrong. 

But don't hold your breath waiting for this development to be reported very far outside the Colorado Independent. 

I support People, not Parties. I support Ideas, not Ideologies. I am an independent voter.

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Your Epic Fail Could Cost You $18K Without Health Insurance. Get Covered.

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Your Epic Fail Could Cost You $18K Without Health Insurance. Get Covered.

We’ve all done it … tried to dunk a basketball to show off to our friends, gotten overconfident and taken the double black diamond instead of our usual blue, or jogged over some black ice because we were running late.

Whether we were trying to show off or simply unaware of our surroundings, we’ve all likely experienced an absent-minded #FAIL. And too many of us choose not to get health insurance for the very same reason.

But the scary truth is, you could get hurt. And if you don’t have health insurance, getting hurt could cost you everything.

An Unintentional Fail Can Put You in the Red
Without health insurance, a small misstep could take a big bite out of your annual income. Here are a few estimates of costs an individual without insurance might pay for treatment of injuries caused by simply being clumsy*:

•    Drop a box on your foot and break your toes: $18,000 without insurance.
•    Slice your hand cooking and get an infection: $12,300 without insurance.
•    Walk into a sliding glass door and break your nose: $4,000 without insurance.

An Epic Fail Can Leave You with Nothing in the Bank
Yes, we all know that you will for sure land that [insert way-too-advanced-for-you athletic move here]. But what if you don’t? Your fail could epically drain your savings account. Here are a few estimates of costs an individual without insurance might pay for treatment of injuries caused by overconfidence*:

•    “Bet I can ride this half pipe…” Dislocate your shoulder: $11,500 without insurance.
•    “Maybe I can dunk this basketball…” Broken leg: $15,200 without insurance.
•    Try cow tipping a bull, end up with broken ribs and a collapsed lung: $10,000 without insurance.

Not Sweating the Small Stuff Can Quickly Add Up
While investing in an adult-sized roll of bubble wrap might keep you from injuring yourself (we don’t recommend this), even the healthiest person can’t avoid getting sick. Although many people can make it through this year’s common cold without a visit to the doctor, many illnesses require medical attention. Here are a few estimates of costs an individual without insurance might pay for treatment of illnesses*:

•    An asthma attack and visit to the ER: $4,000 without insurance.
•    A kidney infection and five-day hospitalization: $8,200 without insurance.
•    A heart attack and five-day hospitalization: $10,500 without insurance.

Get Covered, Colorado!
The simple truth: The costs of being uninsured are too high. One accidental misstep, ill-advised stunt or circumstance that’s out of your control can send your healthcare costs spiraling and launch you into serious debt.

The good news is that recent changes in healthcare have made getting health coverage more affordable. If you’re between the ages of 18 and 29, you may also be eligible to purchase a Colorado Young Adult, or CYA, plan available on Connect for Health Colorado. These CYA plans, also known as catastrophic plans, are designed for young people who are in good health. Because they’re intended to protect you from high cost medical emergencies, they cost you less in monthly premiums.

You may also qualify for help paying for your insurance, which may help you significantly lower costs. Find out if you qualify.

Learn more about new health insurance options at COHealthOP.org and follow the Get Covered, Colorado! campaign with #GetCoveredCO. Don’t forget: to be covered by January 1, you need to sign up for health insurance by December 23.
*Source: Healthcarebluebook.com

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Insurance “Cancelations?” In Colorado, Don’t Believe The Hype

An example of said hype.

A fascinating story this weekend from the Denver Post's Michael Booth:

More than two-thirds of the 250,000 people whose health policies the state Division of Insurance said last week were "terminated" have actually been offered renewals of existing plans through 2014, according to research by U.S. Sen. Mark Udall's office.

Thousands more of those can keep policies because they were "grandfathered" under different Affordable Care Act rules, Colorado insurance companies said, complicating the raging debate over Obamacare…

One consumer advocacy group said that while the impact on the small number facing an absolute cancellation is real, "there's been a lot of hype and not a lot of drilling down into the facts."

"It's been a small and vocal minority, exacerbated by support from those who oppose Obamacare," said Dede de Percin, director of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, a supporter of the Affordable Care Act.

Part of this is a function of Colorado having a separate, and by all accounts better functioning system and rules than other states. Consumers and even health care advocates locally are constantly having to respond to horror stories from elsewhere, exaggerated and sometimes real, which are either way wrongly applied to the situation in Colorado. Rules from the Colorado Division of Insurance already more or less allowed the "renewals" into 2014 that Obama has proposed nationally. Booth reports that Sen. Mark Udall, having proposed legislation that would have allowed existing policies to renew for two years, found the figure of 250,000 policy "cancelations" in Colorado disproportionate and started asking questions. It will be interesting to see if these findings affect how Udall proceeds with that legislation.

It's important to remember also that these "cancelations" are almost entirely within a very small segment of insurance plans, those offered on the individual and small group markets. As CNN reports, at least some of the uncertainty in relation to the status of insurance and renewal options is directly the fault of insurance companies–but has been wrongly laid at the feet of the Obama administration.

In Colorado, Humana sent a…letter that received an rebuke from state Insurance Commissioner Marguerite Salazar.

That letter told 3,400 Humana policyholders in Colorado that they had to make a decision within 30 days or risk losing their coverage. And just like in Kentucky, the 30-day window ended before the state exchange opened.

"I was disappointed to see a letter that appeared threatening and incorrect going out to consumers. The last thing we need is more confusion," Salazar said of the letter. Her office required Humana to retract and resend the letter and to apologize to its policyholders.

CNN's report this weekend documents similarly threatening and inaccurate letters sent to policyholders all over the country by insurance companies. In some cases, consumers were wrongly told their policies were going to be swiftly canceled, but insuerers failed to give consumers their full range of options–even failing to mention the existence of the exchange marketplaces. Many of these horror stories have been circulating for weeks, misreported by a confused media, and seized upon by Republicans in their never ending quest to undermine President Barack Obama's biggest policy achievement.

That last point is really the most important when trying to evaluate the present state of health care reform. Nobody can deny at this point that the troubled initial rollout of the exchange websites has given the right wing ammunition to assail the Affordable Care Act. Conservative opponents of the law also have a rhetorical "gotcha" on the President and Democrats, whose blanket assurances that "if you like your plan you can keep it" never really made sense–since health plans change just about every year for a lot of the people "affected." Many of the individual market policyholders lumped in with the massive numbers of reported "cancelations" were accustomed to regularly shopping around for a better deal on coverage.

Republican attacks on Obamacare, as we've seen in Colorado, are willfully exploiting the confusion evident in these latest stories. The conservative mediasphere has deliberately hyped outright falsehoods, even before this latest round of incomplete and misleading information. Lawmakers like Colorado's Rep. Cory Gardner have freely misrepresented the facts to help paint the worst possible picture of the implementation. You'll recall Gardner received one of these same "cancelation" letters, which purportedly demanded a 150% premium increase for a "comparable plan." Gardner has waved that letter around on national television and in congressional hearings ever since. But Gardner never released any information about his existing plan to allow an "apples to apples" comparison–nor do we know if his is one of these plans that could have been renewed again anyway.

This weekend, in the midst of all the doom and gloom health care press this week, here are these reports that start walking bacl the half-truths and misreported complexities we're seeing in this debate. In the nearly a year between now and the 2014 elections, we just don't see how the law's opponents can keep the low-information rage going. Despite all the chaff being thrown in the air today, by then, too many people will know better.

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Gardner: Insurance Website Troubles A Big Fat Conspiracy

Rep. Cory Gardner (R).

Federal contractors responsible for the so-far notoriously glitchy HealthCare.gov, the health insurance marketplace website set up under the Affordable Care Act to provide insurance options in states that chose not to set up a site themselves, today testified before the GOP-controlled House Energy and Commerce Committee. They were there to answer for the considerable trouble the federal exchange site has experienced since launch–far more than in states like Colorado who built our own insurance exchanges. As Politico reports, both Republicans and Democrats had pointed questions about the federal exchange website's embarrassing failures:

Diana DeGette of Colorado agreed. “I want to stress that for the Affordable Care Act to work, these problems need to be fixed, and these problems need to be fixed fast,” she said. “We need to see clear examples of improvement, and we need a timeline for when it will be functional.”

While some Republicans had constructive questions, others couldn't resist taking political potshots that had more to do with their longstanding dogmatic opposition to health care reform that the subject at hand. Some veered into the downright silly with their (to put it mildly) highly speculative conclusions. We're sorry to report that includes Rep. Cory Gardner of Colorado:

Most of the Republicans managed to stay on point and stick to the important questions without drifting into Obamacare-bashing. But not all of them…

Ralph Hall of Texas noted that his constituents “hate the Obama law.” Shimkus declared that “when [Nancy] Pelosi said we had to pass this law to find out what’s in it, we’re finding out.”

Steve Scalise of Louisiana complained that “there are so many broken promises with this law. If you like what you have, you can keep it … Costs were going to be lower.”

Even Cory Gardner of Colorado, who pried out an important admission from Campbell — that CGI had built a browsing feature and was asked to turn it off — didn’t just suggest that decision helped break the website. He suggested it was something darker: a deliberate political decision “to hide the real cost of Obamacare from the American people.” [Pols emphasis]

Got it? It couldn't possibly be that the exchange website was unable to cope with the traffic from actual insurance buyers, let alone millions more armchair policy wonks who would have sat there endlessly querying the system for idle pursuits if a "browsing" feature for insurance rates was enabled. You see, this wasn't incompetence, or inadequate planning, or anything boring like that at all. Like everything President Barack Obama has ever done since becoming president, the breakdowns at HealthCare.Gov are just a cover up for the really bad stuff!

If you get the feeling that even after these startup problems are fixed–pretty much no matter what happens–Gardner and friends are not going to be happy, that's probably because you're right. They won't ever be happy. The rule of Hanlon's Razor states, and we tend to agree, that one should "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." But in today's unhinged political climate, where's the fun in that?

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Yes, Trolls, The Insurance Exchange is Working

Rep. Cory Gardner (R).

AP's Kristen Wyatt reported yesterday:

Officials with Connect For Health Colorado said 226 people have signed up for insurance using the exchange, for a total of 305 people getting coverage. That's the tally from the exchange's first week, Oct 1-7.

It's a smaller number than reported in other states running their own exchanges. Kentucky, for example, had more than 18,000 people signed up by Oct. 9, and tiny Rhode Island had 580 signed up by Oct. 3…

Republicans were predictably quick to jump all over on this "failure."

A Republican critic of the new health care law, U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner of Yuma, said Colorado numbers are an embarrassment given how much the state spent marketing and explaining Connect For Health Colorado. Gardner cited ads at Denver Broncos games and TV campaigns.

"Look, if you spent $21 million on a bake sale and sold 10 dozen muffins, that would be a complete disaster," Gardner said. [Pols emphasis]

Except, as FOX 31 reports, the lowball figure of Coloradans who have actually completed a purchase of health insurance in the first week of operation of the insurance exchange isn't the whole story:

Connect for Health Colorado, the marketplace associated with the federal Affordable Care Act, saw 162,941 unique visitors during the period between Oct. 1 and Oct. 7, operators reported. Of those, 18,174 people created accounts. [Pols emphasis]

The thing to remember is that consumers shopping for health insurance on Colorado's new insurance exchange are shopping for coverage that begins in 2014. The number of people who sign up in the first few days the site is available, particularly as the inevitable startup kinks are worked out, is not really relevant at all. Far more important are the 18,000+ accounts created by consumers now in the process of selecting plans. A more accurate yardstick of the plan's success will be the number of people covered through exchange-purchased insurance policies by January 1st. By that we mean both 2014 and 2015, by which time officials have set a goal of 136,000 getting coverage through the exchange. The only purpose in harping on the numbers from the first week of shaky operations is to misleadingly disparage the system for political motives.

And really, folks, likening the sale of health insurance to muffins is just an insult to your intelligence.

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A Few Words About Rep. Cory Gardner’s Health Insurance

FRIDAY UPDATE: Rep. Cory Gardner on CNN's Crossfire last night, Stephanie Cutter grilled him on his claims of a massive premium increase for a "comparable" plan to his current $650 per month family policy:

We wish Cutter had zeroed in on Gardner's claim about his "100 percent increase" right at the end–he mentioned his current $650 monthly premium, but it doesn't get explored before Rep. Keith Ellison interjected with discussion of rates in Minnesota. Cutter does point out that rates in Gardner's district for a family policy, especially once subsidies are factored, are distantly below the figure Gardner claims he must now pay for "comparable" coverage to his current plan. Nobody we've talked to has been able to reconcile Gardner's shocking claim of well over a 150% increase, mostly because Gardner hasn't supplied enough information about either his existing plan or its supposed replacement to make that possible.

But as the Colorado Independent's Mike Littwin opines today, that might not be the point.

Cruz claims Obamacare has already been a disaster for America, even though it has barely begun. Rep. Cory Gardner claims Obamacare has robbed him of his insurance, although he refuses to give out any details. This is the paranoid world of GOP political theater.

It would be nice if reporters would make Gardner prove what he's asserting and nobody can reconcile, but even if they don't, his claims will be validated by his constituents as the Affordable Care Act takes effect, or proven false by them. We wouldn't wish the horror story Gardner describes on anybody, but it just doesn't add up. What's more the ACA is having lots of positive effects right now that his constituents can see with their own eyes.

Whichever way it comes out, we hope the truth about Gardner's health insurance claims gets as much attention as Gardner is getting right now with his insistence that the sky is falling. Original post follows.

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Rep. Cory Gardner.

The latest cause célèbre in the debate over the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. "Obamacare," concerns a dramatic claim being made by GOP Rep. Cory Gardner about his own family's health insurance. As the Colorado Independent reports:

Colorado Republican Congressman Cory Gardner has been railing against the law since before it passed. Two days ago, he wrote an op-ed for the Colorado Springs Gazette about how he never accepted federal employee health benefits when he went to Washington in 2010 and now his family’s private insurance plan has been cancelled because of “the myriad new regulations, requirements and mandates of the president’s health care law.” Gardner doesn’t offer any details about the provider or the plan nor any specifics on why it got canceled. He wrote that, if he decides to stick with his provider, he’ll have to pay more. He doesn’t say whether he can now find a better plan at a lower rate somewhere else or if he’s even tried. Righty blogger Michelle Malkin reported yesterday that Gardner is carrying the policy cancelation letter around with him as a prop…

Here's the relevant portion of Rep. Gardner's Gazette op-ed:

When I was elected to Congress, I chose not to enroll in the Federal Employee Health Benefits program that is available to Members of Congress and their staffs. Instead, I purchased insurance from the private market because I wanted to be enrolled in the same health insurance network that all Coloradans have access to. It's the same type of plan that many of my friends and neighbors in Yuma and across Colorado have…

Recent analysis has shown that average premiums in Colorado for the individual market will increase between 23 and 25 percent. Moreover, premiums are expected to increase by 17 percent in the small group market. After my current plan is discontinued, the closest comparable plan through our current provider will cost over 100 percent more, going from roughly $650 a month to $1,480 per month. [Pols emphasis]

Let's unpack the things we know and don't know about Gardner's claim that his insurance premium will increase from $650 per month to nearly $1,500 per month. Talking with health insurance experts–who we'll disclose do support Obamacare–the first thing they question is the strikingly low figure for Gardner's "existing" insurance relative to what he claims he'll have to pay for an "equivalent." According to this study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the 2013 average for an employer-based family health insurance total premium is over $16,300 per year. With that in mind, Gardner's current $650 monthly non-group premium for his family of four could be considered abnormally low–and that's before we learn any details about coverage, deductibles, and other considerations that Gardner has not bothered to disclose.

And that's where Gardner's grandiose claim of this massive increase gets really dubious. Was Gardner's old health insurance a high deductible "catastrophic" insurance plan? Did it not include some (or any) of the "essential health benefits" mandated by the Affordable Care Act, such as lab tests or mental health services? We don't know any of those details, but for determining the truth behind Gardner's allegation, those details are absolutely vital.

Gardner makes much of a claim by Barack Obama during the debate over health care reform that people could "keep" their existing plans. In the text of the law, this refers to "grandfathered" plans that existed before March 23, 2010, and they have to provide enough coverage (no lifetime caps, coverage of children until age 26, etc.). If they don't? Well, they're part of the problem we're solving with health care reform, and that's why better plans are about to be made available through the exchange. What's more, a large percentage of Gardner's constituents are going to get help paying for insurance bought through the exchange–admittedly not Gardner, whose congressional salary of $174,000 per year makes him ineligible for help. For more on benefits of Obamacare in Gardner's district, read this.

Bottom line: In Gardner's op-ed, he quotes "estimates" from sources unknown that premiums "individual market will increase between 23 and 25 percent." The Congressional Budget Office originally estimated more in the neighborhood of 10-13%, and that's before the subsidies for an estimated 57% of policyholders kick in. Some newer studies indicate the predicted rates of increase under Obamacare have been wildly overblown. Above all, no one can show us any rational figures that reconcile with Gardner's claim of an over 100% increase for the "closest comparable" plan. Until Gardner is willing to open the proverbial books and show precisely what the apples-to-apples differences are between his existing plan and his "equivalent" new one, we're just not buying any of this–and reporters need to ask Gardner for the proof.

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