Posted on 03/23/2014 9:05:32 AM PDT by SJackson
JNS.org – In March, the Obama administration reported on Obamacare’s enrollment numbers.
Fewer people have signed up than the administration had hoped, especially among the young and healthy. For many people, even the previously uninsured, the choices in the Obamacare market are simply not what they’re looking for in a health insurance plan.
It’s easy to understand why.
Obamacare replaces a wide variety of market-determined plans with a limited number of plans containing narrow networks of doctors and hospitals and a required set of items covered. No more cheap catastrophic care plan for the young man in his first job. Families and businesses can’t choose an insurance plan that meets their circumstances and needs. Now the government sets the plans and the networks.
The result is that cancer patients are losing access to the doctors and hospitals they rely on. Parents are losing their trusted pediatricians. And families may not have access to the hospital nearest to their homes.
Consider this: In Georgia, one of the five insurers offering plans on the Obamacare exchanges has just one hospital in the entire state in its network. In California and New York, major plans exclude the world-class Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and New York City’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering.
For those with serious and chronic illnesses, there is more terrible news. Many people are finding that their expensive, life-saving medications are not covered under their new Obamacare plans.
These narrow plans with narrow networks mean fewer choices, higher costs, and difficult decisions for millions of Americans.
Some families do pay less for their monthly premiums for Obamacare-subsidized plans. Many more working families, who earn too much to qualify for subsidized plans, are paying considerably more each month for their health insurance. But the monthly premium is not the only cost in a health insurance plan.
Families are finding that their insurance won’t begin paying for care until they’ve spent $5,000, $10,000, or more of their own money toward the deductible first. And once the deductible is met, the co-insurance (the amount the plan pays) may be as low as 60 percent, leaving individuals to pay the rest of the bill for their care by themselves.
Most plans in the previous insurance market had an “out-of-pocket” cap to prevent people from losing everything in the event of a serious health problem. But in the Obamacare exchanges, some plans are offered with out-of-pocket protection only for care provided in-network. If you go to a doctor or hospital outside of your network, your insurance plan may pay nothing.
People who rely on an expensive medication—for multiple sclerosis, severe rheumatoid arthritis, or HIV for example—are seeing their medication costs skyrocket. If the medication is covered by their insurance plan, they may still have to pay 40 percent of the cost, or thousands of dollars a year, up to the out-of-pocket limit. If the medication is not covered, they must pay the full price and the cost does not count toward the deductible or out-of-pocket maximum. Their expenses then are literally limitless.
One of the most serious problems with Obamacare is that it mistakes health insurance for health care. Obamacare supporters pretend that if every person has a health insurance plan, then they are getting the health care they need. That is simply not true. As we have seen, a plan that doesn’t include your doctor or your medication doesn’t provide the care you need. But there is another serious problem quickly coming into view.
For decades, poor people in this country have been eligible for Medicaid. The amount the government pays doctors to see Medicaid patients, however, is very low. At some point, when a doctor is not getting paid enough to cover the basic expenses of providing care, he or she will stop accepting Medicaid patients, or get out of medicine altogether. That is why today Medicaid patients can wait months for care, if they can find a doctor who will see them at all.
Obamacare specifically expands Medicaid to a wider segment of the population. Young adults with low incomes and the children of low-income families may have Medicaid as their only choice in the Obamacare exchanges, based on family income. So far, enrollment in Medicaid has been more than half of the signups made under the new Obamacare rules. Who will provide care to those people? How long will they have to wait to see a doctor?
In 2008, about 15 percent of Americans were uninsured. The Congressional Budget office projects that under Obamacare, in the years 2013-2023, the percentage of uninsured will never fall below 11 percent of the population. That’s not much of a change in health insurance rates, at the expense of more expensive, less accessible health care for millions more Americans.
At it's inception at the behest of Edgar Kaiser, Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. And the reason that he can … the reason he can do it … I had Edgar Kaiser come in … talk to me about this and I went into it in some depth. All the incentives are toward less medical care, because …the less care they give them, the more money they make. Just a different system of insurance, this time round mandated by the government rather than competing in the marketplace, where the HMO model has been rejected by many consumers.
First time I remembering quoting John Ehrilchcman on FR, but essentially that's Obamacare, mandated HMOs (include Medicaid in that). Nothing wrong with Kaiser making a profit, and credit to them for developing a new system. Shame on Obama for attempting to force it on the market rather than offering it. Understandable, since Barry knows better than us what's good for us.
In fairness to John, he opposed the idea, though despite the fact that Nixon was wrong about the future of HMOs, no reason they shouldn't be in the marketplace, but a marketplace of consumer choice. Not mandated, nor subsidized by taxpayers.
Then we should now refer to it as " ObamaSurance ", the subsidy that keeps takeing !?
That was always my argument. EVERYBODY could get health care......all they had to do was walk into an ER. I could argue all day that it was just the INSURANCE they didn’t have. The only come back was ‘yes, but they have to wait so long in the ER’. My retort was always: ‘so your real problem is that people might have to wait a while for their FREE CARE IN THE ER’. They never could respond to that one; but the truth sure made the Libs angry.
Been telling people this for years. They don’t listen.
‘Offers’ should say ‘mandates’
The reason the libs wanted this had very little to do with people getting healthcare. It was mostly about making themselves feel good about themselves for ‘caring’ about people needing healthcare.
PPO’s are a choice on the governments health insurance ‘marketplace’ ... they are very expensive.
The average person cannot afford them, even with subsidies.
But they are offered.
Exactly!! The purpose of insurance is to protect your assets in case of catasstrophy. People with little or no assets do not need insurance. They did have health care ever since hospitals were required by law to treat them though the ER just as you stated. It would have been a whole lot cheaper to provide for government subsidized walk-in-clinics to triage hospital patients to expedite the treatment process. That approach would have saved the upheaval of 0bamacare which is ruining healthcare for everyone.
ER was not the only access to health care for the uninsured as liberals would have everyone believe.
One could also go to a doctor and pay cash or go to the pharmacy and pay cash.
They talked about “universal healthcare” for a reason. The goal was always complete government control over healthcare.
It is not really insurance either. I don’t call a policy that charges $1300 a month and a $12000 deductible insurance......I call it theft.
That is what Obamacare quoted for just me and hubby.
Sorry you’re dealing with that. The President would say you’re getting what’s good for you, as would Harry Reid. What’s good for you not being good enough for them.
Yes, which can be accomplished though government control of the terms of the economic engagement as effectively as a one payer system. Not just in health care. It's called fascism. Which devoid of nationalism (Obama as a nationalist is a funny thought), is an economic system allowing private ownership with control from above.
As written, this scheme is not even “insurance”, because insurance implies some risk factor, and this is a “no-risk” policy, what with insuring over pre-existing conditions, and obtaining insurance AFTER the fact, in the instance of illness or injury. Because of the mandates written into the law, providing “free” services that many participants would neither want or need, it is more on the order of “protection money” to be paid to the local Mafia chieftain, just so, doncha know, nuttin’ BAD gonna happen.
“Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010” is the most wrongly named piece of “legislation” ever signed into law. There is no “patient protection” and the demands made upon the US Treasury render this one of the most unaffordable acts ever signed, in terms of future obligations that will never succeed in being funded.
Not dealing with it. I was just curious about what the charge would be for us. We have insurance that thanks to Obamacare has risen to $1k a month. As soon as they started talking Obamacare our insurance started rising.
If someone without insurance has cancer, can they go to the ER for chemo and radiation? I doubt they could even get diagnosed with cancer in the ER because it is a lengthy process of seeing specialists, pathology, etc. And the cancer centers won't even see you if you don't have insurance. So what happens to uninsured people with cancer?
Serious question -- not stirring up trouble.
I’ve done that too. I spend about half the year in a rural county of Wisconsin. Were that my residence and I needed Obamacare, no insurance, two companies and only HMOs on Obamacare. And, I presume, if I were not in reach of the local providers, aside from a legitimate ER problem, I couldn’t visit a doctor for a sore throat or twisted ankle anywhere except on my dime.
In the past, Medicaid. Anyone not eligible, who simply opted not to purchase insurance, my sympathy rapidly disappears, particularly today when preexisting conditions aren’t a consideration. And since they’re not, they can simply purchase a policy for coverage after diagnosis. Not my choice, but to many a few weeks delay in treatment vs purchasing insurance, perhaps for years before using it, might opt out.
Turns out there is a twist to that: the companies can't deny you a policy based on pre-existing conditions, but they can deny coverage of your pre-existing condition.
As with all of Obamacare, what the media says and what is in the language of the actual policies is like night and day.
Sorry, I don't have a link, but I will look for one if there is disagreement.
Affordable Boat Act
The U.S. government has just passed a new law called “The Affordable Boat Act” declaring that every citizen MUST purchase a new boat by April 2014.
These “affordable” boats will cost an average of $54,000-$155,000 each.
This does not include taxes, trailers, towing fees, licensing and registration fees, fuel, docking and storage fees, maintenance or repair costs.
This law has been passed, because until now, typically only wealthy and financially responsible people have been able to purchase boats. This new laws ensures that every American can now have an “affordable” boat of their own, because everyone is “entitled” to a new boat. If you purchase your boat before the end of the year, you will receive 4 “free” life jackets, not including monthly usage fees.
In order to make sure everyone purchases an affordable boat, the costs of owning a boat will increase on average of 250-400% per year. This way, wealthy people will pay more for something that other people don’t want or
can’t afford to maintain. But to be fair, people who can’t afford to maintain their boat will be regularly fined and children (under the age of 26) can use their parents’ boats to party on until they turn 27; then must purchase their own boat.
If you already have a boat, you can keep yours (just kidding, no you can’t). If you don’t want or don’t need a boat, you are required to buy one anyhow. If you refuse to buy one or can’t afford one, you will be regularly fined$800 until you purchase one or face imprisonment.
Failure to use the boat also will result in fines. People living in the desert, ghettos, inner cities or areas with no access to lakes are not exempt. Age, motion sickness, or lack of experience, knowledge or desire are unacceptable excuses for not using your boat.
A government review board (that doesn’t know the difference between the port, starboard or stern of a boat) will decide everything, including when, where, how often and for what purposes you can use your boat, along with how many people can ride in your boat and determine if one is too old or healthy enough to be able to use their boat. They will also decide if your boat has outlived its usefulness or if you must purchase specific accessories (like a $500 compass) or a newer and more expensive boat.
Those who can afford yachts will be required to do so...it’s only fair.
The government will also decide the name for each boat. Failure to comply with these rules will result in fines and possible imprisonment.
Government officials are exempt from this new law. If they want a boat, they and their families can obtain boats free, at the expense of taxpayers. Unions, bankers and mega companies with large political affiliations ($$$) are also exempt.
If the government can force you to buy health care, they can force you to buy a boat....or ANYTHING else..
Originally posted by freeper saintgermaine
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