Health care: 'You're going to pay more money'

Naperville Sun ^ | 4/2/2010 | JENETTE STURGES

[tobyhill]

If you're feeling bewildered by the health care overhaul, you're not the only one.

As the dust settles over the controversial law, local insurance agents are busy figuring out what it means for them and their clients.

Wheaton-based insurance agent Karla Rockwell described the new health care law simply: "There's so many weeds, we can't see the crops," she said.

That doesn't mean there aren't changes in the roughly 2,400-page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Bill and its companion bill, passed last week, she does like.

"I am in favor of mandates, of coverage for pre-existing conditions," she said. She favors the stricter rules concerning when an insurance company can rescind a policy, events she called "devastating."

What the complex changes do mean is that most insurance agents aren't entirely prepared to answer all your questions just yet. Rockwell and other members of her trade organization, the National Association of Health Underwriters, are getting constant updates on the new legislation. The complexity of the bills mean there's still room for interpretation before the laws are fully implemented, and, according to one Naperville insurance agent, a lot of "loopholes" that need closing.

[Yo-Yo]

This is because the bar measuring success was as nebulus as Zero's metric of "jobs created or saved."

The promise of reducing the deficit by 1.2 Trillion over 20 years is based on slowing the growth of health care by a 1 percentage point.

So the question is, how do you know you've really saved money by lowering the rate of increase, and that the reduction was because of your actions?

How do you know how many jobs were 'saved?'

[Leisler]

Jobs destroyed in an under pressure, decaying private sector? Greedy capitalists.

Jobs invented in government paper shuffling? Enlightened, mondernist elites!

[Safrguns]

I’m starting to think that Obamacare will actually lower health care costs......

If you pay out of pocket.

I’ve been paying out of pocket for years, and spend a fraction of what I would be if I had a coverage plan.
As we hear more and more about employers that will be dumping coverage, and doctors who are dumping (not accepting) new medicare patients, It seems to me that the end effect is going to backfire on the socialists....

Instead of expanding government control, they will simply be encouraging more free market activity by forcing more and more Americans into paying out of pocket.

Why? Because government is targeting the insurance industry... which represents the purchaser. Their assumption is that health care coverage has a very steep demand curve... like health care itself... but it does not.

I am already hearing about doctors who are working on a cash basis only. I believe that will be the new trend.
That will put market forces back into the health care industry, and thus it will lower costs.

Thanks Obama!

[heye2monn]

“I am in favor of mandates, of coverage for pre-existing conditions,” said the Wheaton-based insurance agent.

More accurately, the Wheaton-based nitwit. Even though she claims to be an insurance agent, but she clearly knows nothing about the business. She apparently does not realize that forcing insurance companies to take on everyone vaporizes the meaning of insurance.

Her industry turned a tragic corner with the health care bill and began a permanent decline. Slowly, painfuly, it will become a subsidized, over-regulated ward of the state and die on the vine.

[ODDITHER]

You said - “I’ve been paying out of pocket for years, and spend a fraction of what I would be if I had a coverage plan.”

Until last year we could have done the same thing but thank heavens we did not take the risk. One sudden onset of a rare disease in our family and the health care out of pocket expenses would have been nearly 250,000. We were not in a high risk group. We didn’t smoke or drink or take drugs. We ate healthy and got exercise.

Then I got what I thought was a sinus infection. They gave me an antibiotic and I got better for a couple of months. It returned along with canker sores in my nose,ears, mouth and digestion track along with what I thought was a terrific case of hemroids. My eyes were beet red and sensitive to the sun. My ankles swelled up and I could barely walk. I had cold and hot sweats. There I was - couldn’t eat,sleep,walk or read. The only excercise I got was going from the bathroom back to bed. I had diahrea and terrible cramps. They put me in the hospital, started me on a mega dose of steroids and started the diagnosis process. It was then when my large intestine perforated in three places and I was rushed into emergency surgery. It was then they told me I had Behcets syndrome, a very rare autoimmune disease that is mostly affects middle eastern men. Your body starts attacking the small blood vessels all over your body.
Now as long as I get an infusion every two months, I am OK and it is in remission. The infusions are about 4,000 dollars a piece. So far since January it has cost 16,000.

If you are healthy and relatively young, you certainly could carry catastrophic insurance and pay for all other expenses out of pocket, I certainly wouldn’t advocate carrying no health insurance, ever.

[Leisler]

“I am in favor of mandates, of coverage for pre-existing conditions,” said the Wheaton-based insurance agent.

In plain english.

"I favor government force, deciding/controlling/planing/dictating orders to private citizens. Citizens,property and investments are under the command of the state. Citizen businessmen and investors, individual and group, will be responsible for losses, and the political elites will claim any seeming benefit."

[Leisler]

Most people don't need any insurance. Biologically, and even productively, most people are without disease well beyond reproductive age, and the years needed to raise offspring. After that nature, naturally, couldn't care less.

Most expenses are spend on fending off, always uncessefully, death.

Since death is not a rare, accidental event, but very very common, the phrase ‘insurance’ is very bad, as classically insurance is for rare events.

But we are talking death, taxes and the state, so unclear, delusional language is not the exception.

A more accurate word needs to be made for the partial coverage of a certain event. This is sometimes called a medical savings account. With the idea that eventually, depending on how sick or old your are the savings will be exhausted/spent.

[Safrguns]

Very sorry to hear of your condition.
I’m not sure, but I thought I was careful not to use the word “insurance” in my post. If I did, allow me to correct:

I make a very BIG distinction between “Insurance” and “Health Coverage”.

One accomplishes what it was designed for.
The other is nothing less than privatized socialism.

[ODDITHER]

You refer to a plan. I assumed you meant insurance.

[Safrguns]

>>> You refer to a plan. I assumed you meant insurance.

It’s a very common assumption... one that the government takes advantage of. They call it “Insurance” when they really mean “socialized medicine”.

It’s also one of the things we as conservatives need to bring out in the forefront of discussion, by comparing health “insurance” (which is really socialized coverage), to other forms of insurance like Auto/home, where ONLY A SMALL PERCENTAGE of the insured ever file a claim.

[hinckley buzzard]

She is just a salesman. She expects that mandates and pre-existing condition coverage means she will sell more policies and make more money. It has yet to dawn on her that she will be harvesting the last golden egg from a dead goose.