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After reading through most of this, am I the only one that thinks the thread title is off? Shouldn't it be, "ObamaCare: MY Full-Blown Meltdown Thread"
All the histrionics make for a good schadenfreude experience.
Since Obama defeated McCain in 2008 (following the summer of "Don't doubt me. EVER."), the neo-con-tantrum has been a staple around here. It is what is known in show business as "a running gag".
but my ex chooses not to carry insurance... when he needed surgery, he received a rather nice discount, the hospital, docs etc. wrote off the majority, and I fully support their choice to do so. I don't support forced charity.
AGB, can you enlighten us on who paid for the part that was written off? Do you think they just magically disappeared?
but my ex chooses not to carry insurance... when he needed surgery, he received a rather nice discount, the hospital, docs etc. wrote off the majority, and I fully support their choice to do so. I don't support forced charity.
AGB, can you enlighten us on who paid for the part that was written off? Do you think they just magically disappeared?
Hospitals give back out of their profits, it is part of their charity care. I don't know if it 100% of hospitals, but from what I understand, it is SOP for many, especially non-profit/faith based ones, like those associated with the Catholic church.
This is an older article, but the concept hasn't changed:
"CLEVELAND -- A clear picture of how much the region's big, tax-exempt hospitals give back to the community is taking shape after years of political pressure.
The Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and the Sisters of Charity Health System together spent just over 2 percent -- or $157.9 million on $7.2 billion in operating revenues -- providing free patient care in 2007, according to their most recent federal filings and data requested by The Plain Dealer.
For the first time, all of the hospitals have provided their charity care numbers based on how much it actually cost to provide that care, not how much they would charge on a bill.
In addition to their charity care expenses, the hospitals also say they lost millions more because people did not pay their bills, and Medicaid and Medicare do not fully reimburse.
"Every hospital in this town has made a significant effort to step up in terms of their ability to provide charity care and financial assistance to people who have medical needs," said Bill Ryan, president and chief executive of the Center for Health Affairs, a member organization of the hospitals. " (link)
Interesting that you choose that article, the first line states:
A clear picture of how much the region's big, tax-exempt hospitals give back to the community is taking shape after years of political pressure.
Forced charity?
Another way that hospitals/doctors absorb the cost that is written off from people who CHOOSE not to carry health insurance is to raise prices on people who do, which in turn causes their premiums to go up.
Interesting that you choose that article, the first line states:
A clear picture of how much the region's big, tax-exempt hospitals give back to the community is taking shape after years of political pressure.
Forced charity?
Another way that hospitals/doctors absorb the cost that is written off from people who CHOOSE not to carry health insurance is to raise prices on people who do, which in turn causes their premiums to go up.
That seems like forced charity to me as well.
I read the political pressure as being pressure on better disclosure, but I could be wrong. A non-profit is charitable by default, in return for a tax exemption. If you want to keep that exemption, you should meet a certain standard of charity. If it is forced charity, it is for a business that has made the decision to be in a charitable field.
I'm sure they raise prices to prevent shortfalls as well, just like businesses raise prices to make up for shrinkage. It is part of doing business and consumers have the choice to not support it by not receiving services there. In theory, anyway... I get it's not always a realistic choice when the next hospital is a hundred miles away. But the choice is there. Mandates remove choices, and I like choices.
Yeah, I bet you do. In your version of choice, other people end up paying the bills. Makes me wonder why anyone would choose to pay insurance premiums in the first place. After all, hospitals/doctors, etc--can just write them off, right?
Add this to any "we told you so" threads on Obamacare
You would think the left would be getting tired of being wrong on this thing by now...but this is definitely one issue that we, who were against Obamacare, said was an outright lie from the beginning. And now we've been proven correct. And Obama is seen as a total douche once again...
Obama admin. knew millions could not keep their health insurance
President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.
Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”
*George Schwab, 62, of North Carolina, said he was "perfectly happy" with his plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield, which also insured his wife for a $228 monthly premium. But this past September, he was surprised to receive a letter saying his policy was no longer available. The "comparable" plan the insurance company offered him carried a $1,208 monthly premium and a $5,500 deductible.
And the best option he’s found on the exchange so far offered a 415 percent jump in premium, to $948 a month.
-and if that's the federal exchange, that means the $948/month INCLUDES subsidies! A nice $600+ jump in monthly premiums. So much for afforadable
I'm going to merge this thread into the previously existing thread on "Obamacare" (ObamaCare: The Full Blown Meltdown Thread). There's no need to have more than one thread talking about the same thing, Jkapp.
The only people who never make mistakes are those who aren't doing anything. When you give voice to your anger you're speaking through your brain's more primitive limbic system not its cortex. Is that what you want?
President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.
President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.
They will tell you what you like.
I guess we can cross stupid off the list, now we know the administration just lies.
Has anyone here had a plan that stayed exactly the same for years on end? No change in benefits, no change in cost?
There are two reasons why that's disingenuous here.
The first is that we're not talking cost-of-living increases here. We're talking the forcible replacement of an affordable healthcare insurance product with another, substantially less affordable, healthcare insurance product. We're looking at high-double-digit, even triple-digit, premium increases for cheapest available product in some markets, absent subsidies (which are facing four separate challenges in Federal courts because of the way the pre-conference Senate bill was drafted). There's enough grey area between that and 'no change' for people to take deserved umbrage.
The second is that "no change" is what people read into the explicit promise of the man re-elected last year to the Presidency, the man forever identified with this revamping of healthcare. The people whose policies ARE in fact changing, the Patients - if you will - whose Protection has become less Affordable - are feeling betrayed. The people who believed Politifact when it called Mitt Romney a liar for saying up to 20 million people would lose their existing insurance are retrospectively re-assessing his claim. The people who hadn't been paying attention to what Obamacare was designed to do are having to pay attention now.
It's not Fox and Heritage that have suddenly got people's attention. The Right have been debating this since the 1980s, if anybody was listening. What people are noticing now is their own mail and their own pocket. And that's going to keep happening for a long while yet.
Last time I was on the private market was 6-8 years ago... I had 30-80% increases then. Employers have been dropping coverage for a decade. And the decade before that we were all subjected to bouncing for. Traditions, to HMO to PPO type plans... There has never been a time of no change.
It is a needlessly disorganized transition in many ways, but in a few months it will all be sorted out and then the inflamed rhetoric will burn out...
The rhetoric will almost certainly burn out and Obamacare will become the new normal for many but that will never make it a good option. It will also never change the fact that there were a lot of blatant lies and misinformation used by this administration to get it through the legislative process. www.examiner.com/article/if-you-like-your-health-care-plan-you-can-keep-it
But for the same product. And you could choose a cheaper product if you were savvy enough to shop around. Here, all the cheap product is being taken off the shelves and - for their own good - people are being obliged to take more expensive product. "Let them eat cake," is I believe how Marie Antoinette phrased it.
in a few months it will all be sorted out
I think you mean "the media will have moved on to something else;" I don't expect Obamacare to be 'sorted out' any time soon, it's a brutally counterintuitive farrago.
Bastards! it is hard to believe that over 50% of the voters fell for this scam by re electing this president when this seemed obvious the day he started saying it.
Has anyone here had a plan that stayed exactly the same for years on end? No change in benefits, no change in cost? ...
I have a few people in meltdown mode on facebook this morning. Fox and Heritage must have ramped it up a notch...
So, it's Fox and Heritage "ramping it up" and not that the President lied and the low information voters are just now figuring out they've been had? The fact of the matter is that the information has been out there for years- many of us have been warning people about ObamaCare for years. But the media has been running cover for Obama, and the Democrats. And now that it's coming into light that the people that are going to have to pay for this train wreck aren't just the responsible, hard working people who usually pick up the pieces- but the low information ignoramuses that voted for Obama are going to get to take a bite of the shit sandwich, too-- all hell is going to break loose.
Next step: Price fixing premiums.
This, too will fail- as it always does.
And the prescription for government failure will be still more government.
But for the same product. And you could choose a cheaper product if you were savvy enough to shop around. Here, all the cheap product is being taken off the shelves and - for their own good - people are being obliged to take more expensive product. "Let them eat cake," is I believe how Marie Antoinette phrased it.
in a few months it will all be sorted out
I think you mean "the media will have moved on to something else;" I don't expect Obamacare to be 'sorted out' any time soon, it's a brutally counterintuitive farrago.
Exactly. I think the administration had planned on being in wag-the-dog mode in Syria by now, but they were undermined by their own anti-war base.
It was always going to be the case that, with an aging population, the only way to bend the cost curve down for the government was going to be dramatically spiking it on individual healthcare consumers. There were always going to be winners and losers; the problem with Obamacare structurally was always that it went after the wrong problem first. Because healthcare costs are actually driven upwards by the laws reform, losers really feel like losers, and winners don't feel like winners; Obamacare subsidies, if they survive legal challenge (and they really might not - the crap really hits the fan then), are one more anchor keeping the working poor from ascending into the ranks of the middle class; and one more black eye for that middle class as it bears the brunt of statist expansion as the class best placed to do so.
Not for same product. Always changes in coverage as well.
States that did their own exchanges are rolling fine. The fed exchange is going to take a bit. It's being asked to handle a lot of layers of information. But then, those states that opted for a federal system are going to have to have the patience necessary in the process of abdicating control...
Has anyone here had a plan that stayed exactly the same for years on end? No change in benefits, no change in cost?
There are two reasons why that's disingenuous here.
The first is that we're not talking cost-of-living increases here. We're talking the forcible replacement of an affordable healthcare insurance product with another, substantially less affordable, healthcare insurance product. We're looking at high-double-digit, even triple-digit, premium increases for cheapest available product in some markets, absent subsidies (which are facing four separate challenges in Federal courts because of the way the pre-conference Senate bill was drafted). There's enough grey area between that and 'no change' for people to take deserved umbrage.
The second is that "no change" is what people read into the explicit promise of the man re-elected last year to the Presidency, the man forever identified with this revamping of healthcare. The people whose policies ARE in fact changing, the Patients - if you will - whose Protection has become less Affordable - are feeling betrayed. The people who believed Politifact when it called Mitt Romney a liar for saying up to 20 million people would lose their existing insurance are retrospectively re-assessing his claim. The people who hadn't been paying attention to what Obamacare was designed to do are having to pay attention now.
It's not Fox and Heritage that have suddenly got people's attention. The Right have been debating this since the 1980s, if anybody was listening. What people are noticing now is their own mail and their own pocket. And that's going to keep happening for a long while yet.
Exactly- the unique thing about ObamaCare is that it mandates the purchase of a mandated product, but it did nothing to hide, or shield people from the costs. As a result of having to pay the tab- something rather uncommon with liberal programs- people are freaking out. This will be its downfall unless the left can come back, blame all the problems on the same old thing they always blame it on-- a sabotage by the GOP in failing to fully fund it. When liberalism fails, it's always a "lack of funding". And then they must successfully "solve" the problem by attacking the free market and insurance companies for "price gouging"- and move to fix premiums. This will drive even more insurers out of the market, leaving even more people uninsured. And the solution to this? They will propose single payer. They created this problem after all in order to destroy private sector insurance, and move to single payer.
"Dem Party is F****d." That was the subject line of an email sent to me Sunday by a senior Democratic consultant with strong ties to the White House and Capitol Hill. The body of the email contained a link to this Los Angeles Times story about Obamacare "sticker shock:"
"These middle-class consumers are staring at hefty increases on their insurance bills as the overhaul remakes the healthcare market. Their rates are rising in large part to help offset the higher costs of covering sicker, poorer people who have been shut out of the system for years."
"Although recent criticism of the healthcare law has focused on website glitches and early enrollment snags, experts say sharp price increases for individual policies have the greatest potential to erode public support for President Obama's signature legislation."
In his story, reporter Chad Terhune also quoted a letter sent to a California insurance company executive. "I was all for Obamacare," wrote a young woman complaining about a 50 percent rate hike related to the health care law, "until I found out I was paying for it."
Also of interest to the Democratic consultant: A Josh Barro column on Obama's promise that "if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan." It was never a reasonable pledge, Barro argues, and it's being proven false. He called this "a good thing" because "a lot of existing health plans were bad." Reforming the nation's health care system "was necessarily going to have to change a lot of people's health plans," Barro wrote.
The Democratic consultant said none of this is news to him, but he wonders why Obama wasn't honest with Americans. He predicted surprise and outrage over higher costs and lesser coverage. "We will own this problem forever," the Democrat wrote.
"I gave you four surplus budgets, all those jobs, declining poverty." According to Philip Rucker of the Washington Post, that is what former President Clinton told Virginia voters while campaigning for his pal, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. While Clinton was not referencing the current president, it's fair to wonder about Obama's legacy if he leaves office without more progress on jobs and a budget deal that tames the nation's debt. "Clinton didn't have an insane GOP caucus to deal with," said a White House official when posed the comparison. "I know you like to think (Clinton is) the Golden Age of politics but things are different."
And the irony of her situation is not lost on her. In a recent email addressed to her former boss, Illinois Congressman Bill Foster, and other Democratic colleagues, she wrote:
“I spent two years defending Obamacare. I had constituents scream at me, spit at me and call me names that I can’t put in print. The congressman was not re-elected in 2010 mainly because of the anti-Obamacare anger. When the congressman was not re-elected, I also (along with the rest of our staff) lost my job. I was upset that because of the health care issue, I didn’t have a job anymore but still defended Obamacare because it would make health care available to everyone at, what I assumed, would be an affordable price. I have now learned that I was wrong. Very wrong.”
For Klinkhamer, 60, President Obama’s oft-repeated words ring in her ears: “If you like your health plan, you will keep it.”
Probably not.
When Klinkhamer lost her congressional job, she had to buy an individual policy on the open market.
Three years ago, it was $225 a month with a $2,500 deductible. Each year it went up a little to, as of Sept. 1, $291 with a $3,500 deductible. Then, a few weeks ago, she got a letter.
“Blue Cross,” she said, “stated my current coverage would expire on Dec. 31, and here are my options: I can have a plan with similar benefits for $647.12 [or] I can have a plan with similar [but higher] pricing for $322.32 but with a $6,500 deductible.”
She went on, “Blue Cross also tells me that if I don’t pick one of the options, they will just assume I want the one for $647. ... Someone please tell me why my premium in January will be $356 more than in December?”
The sticker shock Klinkhamer is experiencing is something millions of individual policyholders are reeling from having gotten similar letters from their private insurers.
As UCLA Public Policy expert Dr. Gerald F. Kominski told CBS News this week, “Half of the 14 million people who buy insurance on their own are not going to keep the policies they previously had.”
Part of the reason those policies will be more expensive, he explained, is that Obamacare is requiring insurers to offer “a better product with better protection.”
Congressman Foster, Klinkhamer’s former boss who has since been returned to Congress, told me by phone Friday, “A very large number of people are very grateful” for Obamacare.
So I guess privatizing Medicare is out of the question then...
This being the entire point of Obamacare as a 'step in the right direction' - "Oh, see how badly things went when we tried to go the Republican route of universal privatized healthcare."
I've seen the same line parroted from a range of perspectives on the left, from panicmongering at Salon over the crypto-Republicanism of Obamacare to triumphalism from Robert Reich at this death-knell for free-market advocates in the healthcare industry.
Here's the thing: anybody realistic understands that healthcare is not even potentially a free market. There is not a match between need and means that allows goods to find their level; goods on the market are not perfectly private (i.e. non-rivalrous and non-excludable). You can be turned away for a heart transplant. Your doctor can have a full schedule. There can be a national shortage of flu vaccine. You can be triaged.
Once you understand that, your two questions become: how do you structure that market to control costs, absent a market mechanism? And how do you make sure everybody can access that market?
What Obamacare does is try, imperfectly, to answer that second question. It expands Medicaid coverage - without making Medicaid an affordable deal for healthcare providers, which tends over time to limit actual access to a Medicaid provider. It subsidizes healthcare costs for lower-income persons - without controlling costs, and in fact with the introduction of reforms such as community rating and guaranteed issue that provably increase costs. It imposes bureaucratic requirements on insurers, insured parties, and healthcare providers, all of which increase the costs of healthcare. The net effect of raising the price point of a market, even an imperfectly free market in quasi-public goods, is to reduce the accessibility of that market: which is why Obamacare answers the wrong question, and makes the right question harder to answer.
The privatization of Medicare, insofar as it would represent an addressing of the first question, is an entirely separate matter. People already have access to Medicare (some who have no need of it; a decent chunk of the maligned 1% are over 65). The problem is the unsustainable cost of that program. "Privatization," whatever that eventually meant, would be an attempt to make the cost sustainable and preserve the program. Obamacare is an attempt to make healthcare truly universal without considering sustainability. That's the difference.
Someone please tell me why my premium in January will be $356 more than in December?”
And the answer, ceteris paribus, is that ten (say) other people can have premiums $35.60 lower in January.
The question then becomes, why are we loading the burden onto a 60-year-old, when surely the point was to shift premium costs onto people less likely to make claims?
And the suspicion becomes that that shift actually is happening that way, it's just that the kludgeocracy of Obamacare creates such burdens on the system as a whole that Sue should be experiencing a $600 hike, but it's being weighted heavier onto other people.
When Massachusetts reformed its healthcare market in 1996, the result was a 40% hike in premiums over the next ten years, across the board. And there were still 10% of people uninsured in the state. After the implementation of PatrickCare in 2007, there are still 5% of people uninsured, average premiums are still higher, and access to doctors is worse.
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Has anyone here had a plan that stayed exactly the same for years on end? No change in benefits, no change in cost? ...
I have a few people in meltdown mode on facebook this morning. Fox and Heritage must have ramped it up a notch...
No, this time it was NBC News that lowered the truth on the American people. People in his administration knew people would lose their insurance and face higher costs.
Has anyone else noticed NBC has not been with the President's program since the debacle with Republicans this month? Of course, they still have MSNBC pulling the weight for the administration, but NBC (THE LEGITIMATE NEWS ORGANIZATION) is shifting away from this administration. I think someone in control at NBC has seen the light and the narricism of this administration.
Post by AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP on Oct 29, 2013 10:00:00 GMT -5
I don't concede the point that healthcare is special and cannot exist in a free market, consumer driven environment. This is like saying doctors are not human. Doctors, like every other person in the labor force can- and will compete, undercut their rivals, and attempt to deliver a better product at a lower price. They don't do it now, because they don't have to. The government, colleges, and universities as well as medical associations, and others have colluded to keep prices high. And of course the fundamental problem that I keep repeating- the patient is not the customer. Your employer, if you have an employer plan, is the customer of the insurance company- not you. The insurance company, not you, is the customer of the "in network" doctor. As a result- individuals have no sway, and really no incentive to sway the providers anyway.
individuals have no sway, and really no incentive to sway the providers anyway.
I don't disagree with your assertion that the market as structured conspires against the individual; but, the purest health insurance market is in catastrophic care. At that end, no individual who needs catastrophic care is in a position to shop around: nearest hospital, best they can do to patch you up, on if necessary/possible to the next nearest that can finish the job. The insurer there necessarily has to try to stand in place of the patient making rational choices for herself, because the patient in extremis doesn't have the option of bleeding out on the way to a more efficient or less greedy facility elsewhere. And, by the way, nobody in this market is looking at the patient's ability to pay for the necessary services that keep her alive. It's not even theoretically the case that an insurer breaks even over the lifetime of a catastrophic care policy that includes a claim. The bet by the insurer has to be that it doesn't come to that, and the bet has to be hedged with enough premium payors that it feels pretty confident of winning the bet almost all the time.
That isn't a free market. It can't be made free. No market mechanism will guarantee that the best available healthcare in an emergency will also be the most affordable; price, the limiting factor in a free-market transaction, is an afterthought in emergency care.