In case you’re interested in actual economic projects of how the Affordable Care Act will affect the employer health insurance market, the Robert Wood Johnson foundation has just released a report showing that while there “has been a significant erosion in employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) over the last decade,” health care reform “is expected to help reverse the trend among small employers”:

Using Urban’s Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model, researchers estimated that insurance offer rates for all firms with fewer than 100 employees would increase by 9.7 percent under ACA, from a projected 43.4 percent to 47.6 percent. The biggest jump would be seen in the smallest firms, with a projected increase in offer rates of 14.2 percent among businesses with fewer than 10 employees. When combined with a projected drop in premium costs, the report indicates that ESI coverage will increase modestly for workers employed by firms with fewer than 50 employees, as well as for their dependents.

Look:

As RWJ explains, “In general, the smallest employers will see significant benefits from the ACA. They will be able to access more affordable coverage in the SHOP exchanges, and some will be able to use tax credits to aid in purchasing coverage.” The implications for larger companies will be far more modest, but there is some evidence that the ACA may stabilize the market and help slow down coverage erosion. Read the full study here.

The Colorado Independent’s Sofia Resnick points to this recent interview with Americans United for Life President Charmain Yoest, in which Yoest is challenged on why her organization — which drafts model legislation banning abortion for the states — does not promote access to safe contraception. Yoest first dismisses the question by saying that there are “differences of opinion” about expanding access to birth control, but then claims that the issue is a “red herring”:

HOST: Is your organization in favor of helping women have more access to birth control and helping women have their birth control paid for by insurance?

YOEST: That’s actually not an issue that we address. We on life issues, on biotheics, on abortion, on end of life, on rights of conscience, but we do not address that issue because there are differences of opinion on that. [...]

HOST: But I’m just curios, why not approach birth control as an issue if the goal is to reduce abortions, to make abortion unnecessary, birth control does that. Wouldn’t that be an interesting addition to your legal pallet?

YOEST: Well, as I said, there is an awful lot of issues that can be addressed and we stay really focused to this question of abortion itself. It’s really a red herring that the abortion lobby likes to bring up, conflating abortion and birth control and that’s why we try to stay very clear on differentiating between the two. Because frankly that would be carrying water on the other side.

Watch it:

There may be “differences of opinion” about the need for contraception within AUL, but the American public is overwhelmingly behind expanding access to birth control. In fact, a recent poll found that “77 percent of respondents believe private insurance should cover most or all cost of oral contraceptives, and 74 percent believe government-subsidized insurance plans should cover birth control pills.” And 78 percent “said they believe the federal government should subsidize birth control and other family planning services, excluding abortion, at government-funded clinics for low-income women.”

Access and education about contraception could also help lower abortion rates. According to data from the Guttmacher Institute, 54 percent of women who have abortions “had used a contraceptive method,” but 76 percent of birth control pill users and 49 percent of condom users “report having used their method inconsistently.” Forty-six percent of women “who have abortions had not used a contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant.”

In its comprehensive campaign against women’s reproductive rights, Republican lawmakers have turned Planned Parenthood into the touchstone for anti-choice efforts. But as the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein notes, the women’s health organization itself “isn’t about abortion.” Planned Parenthood’s services focus on contraception, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) testing and treatment, and cancer screening and prevention. Serving mostly adults who earn below 150 percent of the poverty line, Planned Parenthood “estimates it prevents more than 620,00 unintended pregnancies each year, and 220,000 abortions.” Only 3 percent of its services actually involve abortion procedures.

That 3 percent, however, serves as the foundation for the right-wing’s anti-choice zealotry and has spurred House Republicans and five GOP-led states to vote to defund the women’s health organization this year alone. But as Americans across the country are quickly discovering, the GOP’s dogmatic battles cause very real damage.

The first to defund Planned Parenthood, Indiana passed a law that cuts state and Medicaid funding to the organization’s 28 clinics in the state (only four of which provide abortion services). In effect since May 10, the law not only eliminates the clinics’ $1.3 million a year in Medicaid funds but also strips them of “roughly $150,000 in funding for prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.” While a record number of donations allowed clinics to continue services, that help ran out yesterday. Now, Indiana’s Planned Parenthood clinics are shutting down operations and leaving thousands of Hoosiers without access to health care:

– According to Indiana Planned Parenthood president Betty Cockrum, the clinics will stop treating Medicaid patients today. “Our 9,300 Medicaid patients, including those who had appointments Tuesday, are going to see their care disrupted.”

– Without the STD prevention funding, Planned Parenthood has to lay off two of their three intervention specialists, or “health workers who track down the partners of someone who tests positive for an STD and ensure they are tested and treated.” Planned Parenthood is now left with a single specialist to address STD testing and treatment for the entire state.

– To reduce costs, all 28 clinics will close tomorrow and employees will be sent home without pay. Only one clinic in Indianapolis will stay open Wednesday but will close Thursday.

– Should the law remain in place, Planned Parenthood stated that “it must close eight” of its clinics: “two Indianapolis locations and clinics in Bedford, Hammond, Michigan City, New Albany, Terre Haute and Muncie.” The shuttered clinics would significantly restrict help for the 85,000 Hoosiers the states’ clinics currently serve.

Hoosiers are not the only Americans feeling the full weight of the GOP’s anti-choice attack. Planned Parenthood in Minnesota announced yesterday that it will close six clinics of its 24 clinics because of budget cuts to Title X funding for low-income women and families. None of the six clinics perform abortions, “but provided services ranging from contraception to cervical cancer screenings to testing for sexually-transmitted diseases.”

The irony of the GOP’s anti-choice dogma is that the attack on family planning clinics like Planned Parenthood actually serve to increase the number of abortions in the U.S. As the Guttmacher Institute reports, high abortion rates reflect a greater incidence of unintended pregnancies that often result from a lack of access to effective contraception and to quality health care. The factors that lead to higher abortion rates are the same factors Planned Parenthood seeks to address. Indeed Guttmacher noted that, had the state’s Republican lawmakers successfully eliminated Title X funding as proposed, “Minnesota would see a 17 percent increase in unintended pregnancies [and] a 24 percent increase in abortions.”

Annamarie Andriotis of the Wall Street Journal reports that the government is lowering premiums for the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) — the high risk insurance pools that serve as a bridge of coverage for Americans with pre-existing conditions — in an effort to attract more enrollees into the fledgling program:

Even fans of the effort say it may be too pricey, cumbersome and unrealistic to reach the right people. Already, the existing version has had problems: Only about 22,000 people—a small fraction of the potentially eligible— have signed up. “Why is this only reaching a small number of folks when we have a much bigger problem,” says Larry McNeely, a senior associate for policy advocacy at the National Coalition on Health Care, a nonpartisan group advocating for comprehensive health-system changes. “We haven’t really cracked this problem properly.”

Under the new pricing structure, premiums will fall as much as 40% in some states. In Florida, for example, policyholders age 55 and older will pay $376 a month for standard coverage, almost 40% less than the current rates and a savings of $3,000 a year, according to data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

There are several things to say about this: first, it’s slightly disappointing to see a story about premium decreases framed in “but it’s still not good enough” terms. Given the current trend of escalating health care costs, a reduction is a novelty that may help make coverage more affordable to more people.

But secondly, the relative unpopularity of the PCIP program highlights the failure of health policy proposals that seek to further fragment the health system. Part of the reason why PCIP premiums are still so high is because it’s terribly expensive to insure groups of sick people. They spend all the premiums they kick in and then some. It’s why the Affordable Care Act includes an individual mandate to encourage healthier individuals to purchase coverage and why you hear Democrats talking about universal coverage as a means of lowering costs. Conversely, the GOP is looking at proposals that would deregulate insurers and allow them to market policies exclusively to healthy people (i.e. sell policies across state lines); the sick would be placed in government-funded high risk pools. And here we see how that’s working out…

Since McKinsey released the methodology to its employer health care survey yesterday afternoon, researchers like Aaron Carroll have raised concerns about some of the questions asked, but Steve Benen points to something even more troubling: the company’s chutzpah. That is, even though McKinsey now claims that it did not mean for its survey to act as a economic predictor of how employers will act, its original press release packaged the report as a study of how health reform “will affect employee benefits”:

Note the new statement again: “We understand how the language in the article could lead the reader to think the research was a prediction, but it is not.” Apparently, McKinsey intends to parse the meaning of the word “will”?

Indeed, Republicans who’ve begun using the findings as a political weapon have no use for these nuances. House Speaker John Boehner’s office argued last week, “A survey by McKinsey & Company says businesses planning for the onslaught of ObamaCare taxes, mandates, regulations, and penalties have two choices: stop offering health care for their employees, or eliminate full-time jobs and keep wages low.”

“Not intended as a predictive” analysis? I guess Boehner missed the fine print, too.

And McKinsey used this frame despite the uncertainty it heard from the employers it surveyed and the general difficulty of predicting how businesses will respond to unknown economic factors several years down the road:

When asked how much their companies spend on medical and prescription drug benefits per full-time employee – something you might expect a health benefit pro to be intimately familiar with – 58.3% said they didn’t know.

As Paul Krugman notes this morning, “It’s pretty clear that McKinsey was trying to drum up/scout out business, and someone had the bright idea of weighing in on policy debate on the Republican side. Bad idea, and nobody should be quoting this study for that purpose.”