Today Brings Good News/Bad News on Obamacare


The CBO released a small bit of good news/bad news about Obamacare today. The good news: they now estimate that the 10-year cost of the program will be $104 billion less than they previously thought—which, in turn, was less than they had projected in 2010. This is primarily because exchange premiums have come in lower than CBO originally estimated, which means that federal subsidies will be lower.

The bad news: the lower cost of premiums is primarily because the quality of the plans coming from insurers is lower than CBO originally estimated: “The plans being offered through exchanges in 2014 appear to have, in general, lower payment rates for providers, narrower networks of providers, and tighter management of their subscribers’ use of health care than employment-based plans do. Those features allow insurers that offer plans through the exchanges to charge lower premiums (although they also make plans somewhat less attractive to potential enrollees).”

CBO didn’t update its projection of Obamacare revenues, but if those don’t change, it means that Obamacare will reduce the deficit even more than we thought.

But here’s an interesting thing: CBO continues to project that Obamacare will lead to no short-term change in employer-based insurance. But the latest Rand poll suggests that employer insurance has increased by about 7 million since Obamacare enrollment started up last year. If that number turns out to be real, I wonder how that will affect CBO’s budget estimates? It all depends on how this feeds into their models, but it seems like it would be a positive thing one way or the other.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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