Hildegarde

There were elections in the United States last night, what are called “off year” elections, meaning races in a year when there is no presidential contest.

I am usually pretty up on elections. They interest me in a lot of ways, and not only elections for President.

Last  night, though, I  was less than usually engaged. It was, after all, an off-off-year election cycle.  No federal offices were on the line at all except possibly in places where somebody had died and there had to be a special election.

In my own state, the races were all local. They chose new mayors in New Britain and New Haven.  My town voted for school board.

School board elections can be very dramatic in some places, but not where I live.  We tend to agree on the big issues (like creationism and evolution, and saluting the flag, and that sort of thing), and to hunker down over who’s going to go toe to toe with Hartford over mandatory pension contributions or how many teachers’ aides we really need.

This kind of thing can get very heated, but let’s face it.  It’s also local. If you care passionately whether we should have a piano teacher twice a week at the elementary school, you live here.

Part of the reason for the lack of my usual interest last night was the fact that so many of the races I might have been interested in were billed as sure things way in advance.

I don’t know anybody who expected anybody but Christie to win in New Jersey, although apparently the double digit blow out was something of a surprise.

The New York City mayoralty race wasn’t even that interesting.  It was billed as a blow out for de Blasio, and it was a blow out for de Blasio.

The only event of interest turned out to be the Virginia governor’s race, which had also been billed as a blow out, this time for the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe.

It ended up being so close that people are wandering around shocked as hell this morning that the Republicans aren’t calling for a recount.  And the race would have almost certainly gone to the Republican if there had not been a Libertarian Party candidate in the race.

And this in spite of the fact that McAuliffe outspent Cucchinelli almost exponentially, and the national Republicans had pulled most of their money out a month before the voting happened.

If I was a Republican this morning, I’d be kicking myself for not giving Ken Cucchinelli the kind of support the party gave McDonald in years past.

But if I was a Democrat, I’d be terrified.

The blogs are full of the exit polling this morning, and what the exit polling makes clear is that almost everybody who voted against McAuliffe–and that was more than half the voters–did so because they were opposed to Obamacare.

Anger in the media isn’t the same thing as anger in the country, so I’ve been listening to the snap, crackle and pop of the Obamacare outrage with half a year.

But it’s  more and more clear that the “you can keep your plan” thing is Obama’s “read my lips” moment, and that if it had come before the 2012 elections, he would not have won that race.

And in the meantime, the spin from the Democrats is that 1) the plans that are being cancelled are just bad plans that nobody would ever want and 2) the Obamacare replacement plans are much better and provide better coverage and more coverage and 3) it’s not really about people having choice, it’s about are we going to let insurance companies sell “substandard” plans.

In other words, the Democrats seem to be incapable of dealing with what is actually the problem here.

So let me try:

1) “substandard” plans are only “substandard” by the definition of the ACA–and what the ACA calls “substandard” may be what I call absolutely great.

In fact, I guarantee it will be, since any plan that forces me to contribute to “mental health” services is substandard by every definition of the word I have.

2) It is not true that every Obamacare replacement plan means lower deductibles and lower out of pocket costs than the “substandard” plan it replaces.

In fact, of the 30 or so of us who have been talking about this lately–mystery writers tend to be freelance and to buy their own insurance–NOBODY has yet been offered a plan with lower deductibles and lower out of pocket costs.

Everyone who has actually managed to get a look at plans at all has seen nothing but higher deductibles, higher out of pocket costs, and higher premiums.

Of course, most of us have not been able to see any plans, so maybe that will straighten out.

But I’m not sanguine, and neither is anybody else.

3) The parts of the ACA that had to do with things like whether an insurance company would be allowed to cancel your policy if you got seriously sick are beside the point.

Yes, all of those things are very nice, but none of them required a 2000 page bill to get implemented.

Most states have afforded those protections to group plans for decades.  In Connecticut, before the ACA, every insurance company operating in the state was required to offer at least one guaranteed-issue (no turning you down for pre existing conditions) group-of-one plan for the self employed.

Meaning that, unlike a regular individual plan, they couldn’t cancel on you and the contract didn’t run out every year so that they’d have a chance not to renew.

And the premiums were part of a structure that kept them from getting ridiculous.

And we managed to do all that without massively overhauling everybody’s plan, requiring people to buy lots of insurance they didn’t want (mental health benefits!)

Those plans, by the way, are gone. And not because the insurance companies are being bad. They’re gone because Obamacare requires them to be gone. 

To be replaced by higher premiums and “mental health” benefits.

4) Circulating the stories of one person or another who was mistaken about her individual plan and found Obamacare better doesn’t negate the vastly more numerous stories about people who are getting screwed.  They’re really getting screwed. 

5) Stop, already, with that thing about “plans were grandfathered in unless they changed.”

The grandfathered in thing was a bait and switch.   Kathleen Sebelius, who seems to believe she’s inherited the divine right of kings, defined “changed” so narrowly that virtually no plan qualified. 

And it is Sebelius, not Congress, who determines what is in this law. 

The law contained a provision requiring Congressional staffers to buy insurance on the exchanges just like everybody else. 

This was NOT a place where the law said “the secretary will decide.”

But, no permission to decide or not, Sebilius…just changed it.

And that, I think, pretty much does away with even the pretense of representative government.  Our elected leaders can pass any law they want, but the regulatory agencies get to ignore it at will and substitute their own decisions.

6) The next tsunami on the horizon is going to be the problem of doctors, a fair number of whom are already refusing to sign on with plans offered through the exchanges.

  This is partially an issue of money (they don’t think they’ll be paid enough) and partially an issue of regulations about things like record keeping, staffing, and compliance burdens that seem to be designed to drive doctors out of private practice and into hospital employment or larger and more bureaucratized practices.

The reason that’s going to be a tsunami is that it’s going to start to hit when the employer mandate does.

Which is in 2014.

Which is an election year. 

I suppose they could delay the employer mandate yet again.

But it would definitely look peculiar.