Liberals Try to Scare Minnesotans On Health Care

Obamacare is a disaster, and MNSure is a fiasco. Pretty much all Minnesotans know that. Obamacare/MNSure has led to higher premiums, larger deductibles and smaller networks. This fall the crisis became acute, which partly accounts for voters’ rising up against the status quo last month.

But liberals are always ready with misleading, or downright false, statistics. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports on a false claim by “the California-based Kaiser Family Foundation”:

More than one-in-five Minnesotans under age 65 had health problems last year that would give them a personal stake in the debate over repealing and replacing the federal health law.

That’s the conclusion of a report released Monday from the California-based Kaiser Family Foundation that estimated about 744,000 Minnesotans under 65 had a health problem that would block them from coverage if insurance companies reverted to rules that were in place before the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The message is: don’t repeal Obamacare, or three quarters of a million Minnesotans will be unable to get health insurance!

This is a ridiculous claim. Why? Kaiser’s count “includes people with ‘declinable’ preexisting conditions with other types of insurance, such as coverage through employer groups.” But employers buy coverage in bulk; their employees include some very healthy individuals, and other not so healthy individuals. All of those people will continue to get health insurance if Obamacare is repealed, just as they did pre-Obamacare. The Kaiser numbers are a politically-motivated fraud.

Writing in Forbes in 2013, Paul Gregory explained why horror stories retailed on behalf of the Affordable Care Act were false:

Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) incredibly determined that almost half the American population could be ineligible for health insurance due to a preexisting condition. This sure sounds like a crisis, but the HHS simply counted all Americans with asthma, bad backs, diabetes, hypertension, and other chronic diseases that theoretically could be a reason to deny coverage or charge a higher premium. …
But how many Americans with chronic illnesses are really threatened by pre-existing conditions?

According to the latest Census Bureau data, 309 million Americans have health insurance. Of these 4 percent are covered by directly purchased insurance alone. The remaining 96 percent are covered by government or company insurance or some combination. Government health insurance does not allow discrimination based on preexisting conditions. Company insurance typically does not either, insofar as the risk pool is already incorporated in the premiums, and there are portability requirements in moving from company to company.

Thus 12 million people purchased private direct purchased health insurance on the eve of Obama Care. Insurance industry studies show that one in eight applicants for private health insurance have preexisting conditions that affect their eligibility or premiums. This gives a total of 1.5 million Americans who were denied health insurance or paid higher premiums due to pre-existing conditions.

The Obama administration has lied with statistics! Instead of 150 million, there are 1.5 million Americans, who “cannot get insurance or must pay higher premiums due to pre-existing conditions.”

The Kaiser estimate cited by the Star Tribune is the same statistical lie that was exposed years ago, with regard to Obamacare as a whole. If there are a handful of people who can’t get health insurance at an affordable price because of pre-existing conditions–which is plausible, since it is impossible to insure against something that has already happened–we can subsidize those individuals at a tiny fraction of the cost of Obamacare and MNSure, if we want to do so.

Once again, liberals rely on misinformation and fear to try to stampede voters.