Posted on 01/25/2013 8:15:46 AM PST by Orange1998
WASHINGTON (AP) — Millions of smokers could be priced out of health insurance because of tobacco penalties in President Barack Obama's health care law, according to experts who are just now teasing out the potential impact of a little-noted provision in the massive legislation.
The Affordable Care Act — "Obamacare" to its detractors — allows health insurers to charge smokers buying individual policies up to 50 percent higher premiums starting next Jan. 1.
For a 55-year-old smoker, the penalty could reach nearly $4,250 a year. A 60-year-old could wind up paying nearly $5,100 on top of premiums.
Younger smokers could be charged lower penalties under rules proposed last fall by the Obama administration. But older smokers could face a heavy hit on their household budgets at a time in life when smoking-related illnesses tend to emerge.
Take a hypothetical 60-year-old smoker making $35,000 a year. Estimated premiums for coverage in the new private health insurance markets under Obama's law would total $10,172. That person would be eligible for a tax credit that brings the cost down to $3,325. ..........
But the smoking penalty could add $5,086 to the cost. And since federal tax credits can't be used to offset the penalty, the smoker's total cost for health insurance would be $8,411, or 24 percent of income.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
With Obamacare you don’t even have the option for high deductible catastrophic care only policies. If you are a male, you can’t even chose to foregoe pre-natal coverage, post natal (??) coverage, etc.
The most expensive drag on health insurance risk pools are generally young women with young children. Yet, with Obamacare their benefits were expanded and are now supposed to be supplemented by “targeted” behaviours.
Don’t worry, we’ll be able to smoke in the camps they send us too.
Like my friend’s dad, he never smoked until he ended up in the brig in the Navy (why, I don’t know) and then he started smoking, solely because it was forbidden.
Ina free market, that’s fine. This is not a free market enterprise, this is government intrusion.
Well, to be fair, it’s not that hard to tell. Most smokers reek.
I understand what you are saying.
But how can you voice a consistent conservative message if, on the one hand, you’re assailing the food stamp nation and the Obamaphone takers, yet on the other hand you’re championing the cause of people who abuse their bodies and expect others to pay for their resulting health problems?
In both cases, there is no free market. Taxes to prop up the 47% are just as mandatory as those we’re going to pay for Obamacare. And those who live on the government largesse are required to jump through hoops to qualify.
I’m struggling to find a consistent, across the board stance on all this stuff. The minute the government gets its hands on a program which impacts you, you no longer have the ability to march to your own drum. They call the tunes.
I guess it’s all in the semantics. Obamacare is not insurance in the traditional sense of risk sharing. It’s just universal health care posing as insurance in order to close the sale.
Insurers who provide health insurance have always had the right to charge “smokers” and others with self-inflicted health risks more for an insurance policy and some employer health plans have done the same by way of offering discounts to those who don’t smoke (which over time produces increases on those who do, as the plan’s experience dictates).
Either the health non-reform law is limiting what those increases may be, or it is allowing such increases to be “after the fact” - after someone was already previously allowed into a plan, when the person was not asked if they smoked and/or without previously charging higher premiums for smokers.
I do not oppose health care insurers charging more for smokers (many life insurance policies do as well - the average smoker dies sooner, having paid premiums a shorter time), but I would oppose such penalties against someone who had already been accepted into a plan without penalties against smoking assessed from the beginning. Looking ahead, yes; retroactive, no.
Well aren’t you just a sweet thing?
You did miss the point, which is very likely because you have been so ingrained with collectivism. That is not unusual and is the goal of the left.
What I propose is to remove the government from these systems, then we can all go back to being responsible for our own liberty. So long as we give in to the collectivists, then we will be constantly moving to dictate all sorts of behaviors that are deemed costly to the collective.
I fear that it is to late to save the republic. Too many in America have already been conditioned to accept being part of the hive and too few even understand true freedom.
Everyone seems to have already forgotten the 50 MSA’s that were supposed to have taken care of the supposed “extra health care costs for smokers.”
In addition, no one ever seems to be able to tell me how they can blame smokers for driving the costs of health care up, while at the same time they brag about the “great reductions” in smoking that have been accomplished via government demonization. So, as they take credit for the declines in smokers, they also complain about health care costs increasing and then blame the fewer and fewer people smoking.
Then the sheeple go baa, baa, baa.
I cannot quarrel with that. The only problem is that it's not going to happen anytime soon. So what can be done in the meantime to stop or at least slow the behemoth from consuming everything and everyone in sight?
I fear that nothing can be done. We have to many “republicans” that have bought into the collective mindset.
For example, when I point out the tax rates for the wealthy, even confirmed R voters respond with, “I could live on that.” Or when I talk about smoking bans being a usurping of private prop rights, even R voters say, “but I like it because my clothes don’t stink.”
I fear that we are lost and our last chance to slow the marxist movement down was defeated in November.
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