It sure looks like it...
Posted on 09/13/2014 4:42:13 AM PDT by Kaslin
Yes according to Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein and the Commonwealth Fund. But all these folks were cheerleaders for the Affordable Care Act from day one.
Sarah Kliff, another ObamaCare supporter, estimates that health reform has enabled about 5 million people to become newly insured. But that’s only about 10 percent of the uninsured. What happened to the mandate that required that everyone have health insurance this year or face a fine? Turns out that the mandate doesn’t actually apply to millions of people. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 90 percent of the uninsured are exempt from the mandate.
Certain exemptions are written into the law itself. For example, the mandate doesn’t apply to American Indians, to people who have religious objections or to people who earn too little to be required to file an income tax return. But as I wrote at Forbes the other day:
… the administration has piled on with 14 ways people can avoid the fine based on hardships. These include homelessness, domestic violence, being evicted from a residence, having a utility cut off, property damage from a fire or flood, and even a canceled insurance plan. Also, people can avoid the penalty if a close family member has died recently or if they have medical expenses resulting in substantial debt.
It gets worse. Many of the people who signed up didn’t pay their first premium. Of those who did, many have stopped paying. For example, Aetna is estimating that by the end of this year they will have lost about 30 percent of their initial enrollees. There is a report of similar attrition out of Florida, which has apparently lost one fourth of its initial enrollees already. The administration, which has access to national numbers, has refused to release any information on such “buyer’s remorse” since May.
Underlying all this is the fact that millions of newly insured people didn’t understand what they were buying, even though their premiums are being heavily subsidized. As Lena Sun, writing in the Washington Post, reported:
Nonprofit organizations across the country are being swamped by consumers with questions. Many are low-income, have never had insurance and have little knowledge of the health-care system. The rampant confusion poses a potential hurdle for the success of the health law: If many Americans don’t understand how health insurance works, that could hurt their ability to use their benefits – or to keep their coverage altogether.
Health insurance guru Robert Laszewski puts it this way:
So what you’ve got is an insurance industry that did not do a good job in gearing up for a population that has never had health insurance before, an Obama administration that did a horrible job on the back end, resulting in a flood of calls to insurer call centers, and a population that is low-income and is not health-insurance literate. Put those things in a bag and you’ve got a problem.
So if ObamaCare is failing miserably at insuring the uninsured, what difference does it make? Even though the health insurance mandate is affecting very few of the uninsured, it is having a major effect on people who are insured.
Up to 80 percent of the people who had individual insurance last year will lose their coverage by the time all the ObamaCare rules completely set in. Up to 90% of the plans that cover people at work will lose their grandfathered status. In many of these cases, people are being forced to buy richer and more expensive plans – with more coverage than they want or need. In other cases, they may lose insurance altogether.
Early reports are that the trend of small business to dump their health plans and move employees onto the exchanges is occurring faster than was expected.
Depends, is it working as a legitimate solution for existing ah.............no, or is it working as another scam
Wow! It is working so well that for the first time in my adult life, I cannot afford to pay for health insurance.
“Early reports are that the trend of small business to dump their health plans and move employees onto the exchanges is occurring faster than was expected.”
Could very well happen within my company. I have no illusions.
One step closer to single payer government run healthcare. Oh, Joy! Oh, Happiness!
Obamacare adds more layers to the existing medical billing scam.
The very popular and successful hospital in my town and many local doctors refuse to accept Obamacare.
So why, if the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010” is working so well, are there FEWER people with medical insurance coverage in 2014 than there were in 2008?
Different people now have coverage, while many others who once had coverage, have had it stripped away, and even those who have coverage, find that it is much less adequate than once was generally held to be widely available as of 2008.
While some folks have been subsidized (mostly those who have gamed the new system), everybody else is paying MUCH more for less effective and less relevant forms of coverage, with much larger co-pays, wait times, and exclusions which had been covered before. And the ranks of the uninsured are GROWING, as more and more, wage-earners and persons of limited means find either their insurance is unaffordable (despite the title of the “Obamacare” law), or simply does not serve their needs, and they drop the coverage altogether, relying on charity and sheer luck to protect them from the vicissitudes of life.
Americans now pay more for medical insurance
than their mortgage.
BUT THEY CANNOT ACTUALLY SEE DOCTORS or get
QUALITY CARE.
This cannot possibly end well.
I can’t afford health insurance now either. I got Obamacized big time the last few years. His policies killed the economy which affected my paycheck in a very big way and I had to draw out of savings to keep the boat afloat as his policies caused the price of just about everything to rise pretty dramatically. Now the savings is just about gone and we are barely hanging on. This from being a guy who had savings put back for retirement and able to buy just about anything I wanted and take vacations or trips to just about anywhere I wanted to before (yeah I was spoiled...lol) I know there are millions just like me and I’ve talked to plenty in the same boat. We need this POS prez gone yesterday.
As much as it’s not working now imagine how much it’s not going to work when the Supreme Court rules that the federal government does not have power under the law to provide premium subsidies to people in states which have not created their own exchanges.
I want to pass a statute that there is a requirement to eat peanut butter sandwiches and that all have to buy them from my peanut butter sandwich store.
Is Obamacare working?
Is anything in Amerika working?
Same here, due to Obamacare, I lost my insurance. I suspect far more people are uninsured now that the Democrats have fixed’ insurance.
> Is ObamaCare Working?
Yes, it is destroying America as Obama intended.
That's an important question to ask, because it may be working for some but not for others. Is it working for people who were previously insured? Is it working for those who were uninsured? Is it working for employers? Is it working for insurance companies?
It's also important to define what "working" means for each of these groups.
Ironically, it's probably "working" for the overall concept of health insurance in the U.S. because more and more people are coming to realize that they can't afford their health care no matter how it is financed.
It sure looks like it...
“... health reform has enabled about 5 million people to become newly insured...”
Uhmmm, Boo Chit!
60% of those people previously had private insurance and only signed up for Obamacare after their carrier ended coverage after the nefarious law mandated certain changes in coverage they could no longer package and sell.
“If many Americans don’t understand how health insurance works”
Yep. That sums it up right there. Most Americans assume that getting rid of all pre-existing conditions is a wonderful idea. The evil rich insurance companies should give free health care to everyone.
There are millions like us, but no news organization, including FOX will report it.
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