This Week Just Past: Extending a Hand to Veterans

More Veterans Mental Health Professionals

Sending Packages to Troops Overseas?

A Dangerous Game

If you like your health care plan….

This Week’s Salute: Helping Veterans

The Week Just Past: Extending a Hand to Veterans

“As the nation prepared to mark another Veterans Day next Monday, the nation crossed another sobering milestone this week: The Department of Veterans Affairs now has over one million veterans receiving care for wounds, injuries or illnesses related to their service.

“The landmark comes after 12 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and as advances in medicine are keeping more veterans alive and creating awareness about such conditions as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“There is no doubt that we all owe these wounded warriors a tremendous debt. In Congress, we remain committed to providing them with the all the care and support they need.  Over the past decade, our appropriations bills have increased funding for medical care, mental health screening and treatment and family support.

“But as the wars overseas wind down, thousands of troops are saying goodbye to military life and re-connecting with family and potential employers.  For the most part, retiring servicemen and women find the arms of their families open wide.  However, for many, locating new civilian employers is not as easy.

“Frankly, it’s an issue I raise regularly.  ‘What are you doing to hire veterans’ is a question I frequently ask business leaders I meet in New Jersey and Washington.

“That’s why I was so pleased on Tuesday to have the opportunity to visit the ’Hiring Our Heroes Job Fair’ sponsored by the American Legion and hosted by the Morris County Chamber of Commerce, the VFW, Employer Support for Guard and Reserve and many other organizations. As Paul Boudreau, the President of the Morris County Chamber says, ‘this is part of our ongoing efforts to match the employment needs of local businesses to the needs of veterans who need jobs.’

“And today and tomorrow, the Morristown Armory is the site of 2nd Annual Morristown Stand Down – an event which offers assistance to veterans who have had an especially hard time re-adjusting to civilian life.  The Stand Down serves hundreds of homeless vets and is providing many of the services they need including medical, dental, social services, housing, employment, PTSD/TBI counseling, legal assistance and much more.  We extend thanks for the NJ Fallen Soldiers Foundation for sponsoring this valuable event.

“The men and women who sacrificed so much to serve the nation in its time of need deserve every bit of help we can provide.  On Veterans Day 2013 and every day, I hope that all Americans will commit themselves to the lifelong success for our troops, our veterans, and their families by connecting them with opportunities for employment, education and healthcare post military service.”

          Rodney Frelinghuysen

More Veterans Mental Health Professionals

Many of the challenges facing veterans stem from the unseen wounds of war – PTSD and related issues.  Help is on the way. The Veterans Affairs Department (VA) has announced that it has met a goal of hiring 800 veteran peer-to-peer counselors and apprentices to help veterans struggling with mental health issues.

“The invisible wounds of war are often the most difficult to recognize and treat,” said Rodney, a Vietnam veteran.  “Our annual appropriations bills have funded efforts to make progress to expand veterans’ access to quality mental health services.  These newly hired counselors are veterans and are uniquely equipped to assist their fellow veterans.”

The counselors’ training should be completed by year’s end.

Sending Packages to Troops Overseas?

Our military service members work hard for us overseas. Recognizing that, Many Americans send packages and parcels to deployed troops for the holidays.

Of course, ensuring that those serving in the nation’s armed forces receive their presents and packages in time for the holidays is a priority for friends and family members of military personnel serving around the world

For more information on mailing parcels and deadlines, visit here.

A Dangerous Game: A MUST READ by Elliott Abrams for the Weekly Standard regarding America’s leadership in the world.

If you like your health care plan….

The White House effort to blame insurance companies for lost plans:

Washington Post
Fact Checker
Glenn Kessler
November 7, 2013

“The provision in the law was the manifestation of the assurance that if you have a plan you want to keep, you can keep it.  Insurance companies that chose to strip away benefits from existing plans in the interim, that canceled existing plans in the interim, they took away that grandfathering opportunity.  And that’s a reality.”

–White House spokesman Jay Carney, daily press briefing, Nov. 5, 2013

In defending President Obama’s now-discredited pledge that “if you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep it,” the White House has repeatedly tried to blame insurance companies.

White House spokesman Jay Carney’s statement above, accusing insurance companies of stripping away benefits, is typical.  Columnists supportive of the White House have piled on, arguing that insurance companies should be blamed.

Meanwhile, President Obama, in trying to tweak his original pledge, added this caveat earlier this week:  “If you had or have one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really like that plan, what we said was, you could keep it if hasn’t changed since the law’s passed. You’re grandfathered in.”

But there’s an interesting wrinkle to this story that few appeared to have understood. The main culprit is not whether the insurance industry has changed a plan that ran afoul of the administration’s regulations — but the law’s effective date. Let’s explain.

The Facts

We’ve noted before the tight regulations that the Department of Health and Human Services wrote while implementing the law, which affected “grandfathered plans,” those obtained before the law was signed on March 23, 2010.  That’s what Carney is referring to when he claims that insurance companies are taking away benefits—though that is just one of a myriad of provisions that could affect a plan’s grandfather status.

But how many people actually would have kept their individual plans that long in the first place?  HHS, when it drafted the interim rules, estimated that between 40 and 67 percent of policies in the individual market are in effect for less than one year. “These estimates assume that the policies that terminate are replaced by new individual policies, and that these new policies are not, by definition, grandfathered,” the rules noted. (See page 34553.)

That’s a large percentage of the plans — but it’s actually bigger than that, given the effective date. We dug into the key research that prompted this estimate, a study titled “Patterns Of Individual Health Insurance Coverage, 1996–2000.” The study noted that, for most people, buying individual insurance is a temporary condition:

“Roughly two-thirds of spells began or ended with employer-sponsored coverage. Eighty-five percent of those with such coverage before a spell of individual coverage returned to an employer-sponsored plan. Thus, more than half of all individual-coverage spells (58 percent) bridged periods of employer-based insurance.”

The study included an interesting chart, based on the experiences of more than 6,000 people, that showed how long a person had a “spell” of individual coverage. The median spell length was only 8 months. Here are the key points:

Less than 6 months:    48.2 percent

6-12 months:               16.3 percent

13-18 months:             13.7 percent

19-24 months:               4.8 percent

More than 24 months:   17  percent

Of course, the Affordable Care Act was enacted more than 44 months ago. Using the data available in the chart, we roughly calculated the Gamma distribution curve beyond 44 months. Under our model, only 4.8 percent keep the policy longer than 44 months — and that is likely an overestimate.

Translated, that means about 95 percent of people now getting cancellation notices likely purchased their plan after the effective date of the law.

A different study of a single state (California), also cited by HHS in the regulations, found that only 24 percent of people with individual coverage kept their plan for more than 48 months. In other words, between 75 and 95 percent of people in the individual market likely never had a chance to get a grandfathered plan.

This should not be surprising.  After all, the March 23, 2010, effective date is so obscure that likely few people in the individual market paid much attention to it.

(Note: there is a percentage of people who, because of an apparent loophole in the law, were able to take a one-time deal from some insurance companies to extend their plan through much of 2014, but it’s unclear how many people were given a chance to grab this opportunity — which of course will lapse next year. The administration never issued clear guidance on whether this was possible, and at least 13 states prohibited it or allowed it with restrictions.)

During the drafting of the health-care law, insurance companies had wanted to extend the effective date for grandfathered plans until Dec. 31, 2013, which would have meant that few at this moment would be complaining that they had lost a plan they liked. Of course, that would have also meant fewer potential customers for the Obamacare exchanges in the first year.

The White House declined to respond.

The Pinocchio Test

Blaming the insurance companies can only go so far. First of all, the administration wrote the rules that set the conditions under which plans lose their grandfather status. But more important, the law has an effective date so far in the past that it virtually guaranteed that the vast majority of people currently in the individual market would end up with a notice saying they needed to buy insurance on the Obamacare exchanges.

The administration’s effort to pin the blame on insurance companies is a classic case of misdirection. Between 75 and 95 percent of the problem stems from the effective date, but the White House chooses to keep the focus elsewhere.

Three Pinocchios

Recommended Reading: Richardo Alonzo-Zaldivar writes for the Associated Press that Obama administration officials are facing mounting questions about whether they cut corners on security testing while rushing to meet a self-imposed deadline to launch online health insurance markets. Read “Health website's security prompts worries” here.

This Week’s Salute: Hiring Our Heroes,

Thank you to the Morris County Chamber, the American Legion, NJ AMVETS and other sponsors of the Hiring Our Heoes Job Fair on Tuesday in Morristown!