Teaser - The Entitlement Society w/ Libby Watson (10/05/21)
Death Panel
Death Panel
4.8 • 588 Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2021
⏱️ 5 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | To hear the full episode, become a patron at petriam.com slash netpanel pod. |
| 0:06.4 | I mean, that's the thing. It's like, we're all talking about this and the extension or rather |
| 0:11.2 | the expiration of the cobra subsidies is not, it's not even on the table. Like, it's not even |
| 0:16.0 | being talked about. I mean, that, it lasted like six months and now it's gone. And there's, you know, there's so much going on that this, you know, it's not even, it's not even up for debate. You know, no, I honestly, I brought it up to Jeff and he was like, oh yeah, I forgot about that. And I forgot about it until one of my friends, Casey, who I talked about in the piece, you know, she was like, oh, shit, now I got to pay |
| 0:38.9 | for Cobra. I was like, oh my God, yeah, that did happen. And it's just so bizarre that it was such a |
| 0:43.9 | short-lived thing. I think when, you know, when Biden first took office and it became clear quite quickly |
| 0:51.3 | that A, the dream of the public option even was dead and B, that |
| 0:56.3 | the kind of strategy for dealing with healthcare during the pandemic was going to be based |
| 1:02.3 | on extending more subsidies to health insurers. I got into kind of a mode where I was just like, |
| 1:09.2 | well, if there's ever an opportunity for them to continue to subsidize insurance companies, they're going to keep doing it. And this is one of those opportunities. You know, they could have, they could easily have extended the COBRA subsidies another six months or a year or whatever, saying, well, there's still a pandemic, you know? I mean, it's actually, you know, now that they've done that, I guess it |
| 1:27.8 | would have actually been quite a good thing to do that. But it hasn't even been on the table at all. So, you know, the fact that something like this isn't even up for discussion, you know, with all the stuff going on right now, it's kind of crazy. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in this piece that you wrote Libby, which was called Cobra Subsidies Die with a Wimper, I mean, we've talked a lot and we've been calling out all these expiring pandemic protections for a while now. |
| 1:51.0 | But, you know, the real horrific cliffs that we're seeing are kind of right now are the ones that, you know, we really didn't like in the first place. |
| 2:00.0 | Like there was nothing wonderful about this CRA subsidy because what it did was it took basically the most |
| 2:06.7 | expensive way possible to give people crisis insurance. And it did that instead of doing something |
| 2:13.4 | like, you know, really expanding Medicaid eligibility or you could have passed Medicare for |
| 2:18.6 | all. Instead, what they decided to do was to do this sort of standalone COBRA subsidy, which would |
| 2:25.0 | cover people who were getting fired from their jobs, who were losing their employer-sponsored |
| 2:29.8 | health coverage. And COBA typically starts at like 1.5 the premium amount per month. You know, |
| 2:36.8 | there is a, there is a bonus fee added on to all COBRA care in order to sort of buffer the |
| 2:43.8 | fact that you're out of the risk pool, right? And so this is what Congress did. This is what, |
| 2:48.0 | this is what they decided to do to protect people that were losing |
| 2:52.1 | their private insurance through their jobs was rather than, you know, give them some sort of secure |
... |
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