The Affordable Care Act

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by Tom Joad

Good. The sooner this Obummercare debacle fails, the sooner we can get on the road towards a real solution, Medicare for all.

http://www.pnhp.org/

Think your boy Trump will take care of that for you?

[bobabode]

Originally Posted by Tom Joad

Good. The sooner this Obummercare debacle fails, the sooner we can get on the road towards a real solution, Medicare for all.

http://www.pnhp.org/

The stated goal of the ACA from the beginning was single payer. The problem with burning down the ACA as you suggest is that a lot of people will be injured or die needlessly while the rest of the country waits for "Medicare For All" to appear from the ashes.

[bobabode]

Originally Posted by Boreas

Think your boy Trump will take care of that for you?

He's got his already.

[Tom Joad]

Originally Posted by bobabode

The stated goal of the ACA from the beginning was single payer.

Gimee a break Dude.

Originally Posted by bobabode

The problem with burning down the ACA as you suggest is that a lot of people will be injured or die needlessly while the rest of the country waits for "Medicare For All" to appear from the ashes.

Obummercare is a suck ass program written by the Insurance and Drug company lobbyists. It leaves tens of millions uninsured and even more tens of millions underinsured with overpriced government subsidized policies with such large co-pays and deductibles that most people can't afford to use it.

The sooner it dies, the better IMO.

[JJIII]

Originally Posted by Tom Joad

Obummercare is a suck ass program written by the Insurance and Drug company lobbyists. It leaves tens of millions uninsured and even more tens of millions underinsured with overpriced government subsidized policies with such large co-pays and deductibles that most people can't afford to use it.

The sooner it dies, the better IMO.

Bam!

...

[Tom Joad]

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/ite...with-obamacare

Obamacare has increased coverage -- although not as much as one might have hoped. The percentage of people uninsured has fallen from around 17% in 2013, when only a few coverage-related provisions of the ACA were in effect, to around 11% in early 2015, after the major changes kicked in in 2014. That's six percentage points, or millions of people -- but it's still much less than half of the pre-ACA uninsured.

There has also been a lot of controversy over the impact of Obamacare on health insurance prices. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the weighted average pre-subsidy price of a silver plan on the exchanges only increased by 3.6% from 2015 to 2016, which certainly seems good. But one way the ACA keeps premiums reasonable is by pushing people into plans with high levels of cost sharing. The average silver plan has a combined annual deductible (including prescriptions) of more than $3,000; the deductible for an average bronze plan is close to $6,000. In other words, one reason that insurance premiums are affordable is that those premiums don't buy you what they used to, as insurers shift more and more health care costs onto their customers.

[whell]

Originally Posted by bobabode

more...

"Here's the money quote: "Medical costs associated with caring for the new individual market enrollees were, on average, 19 percent higher than employer-based group members in 2014 and 22 percent higher in 2015."

The Blues are implying that these costs are higher than they expected, but the report actually tells a very different story: It demonstrates exactly why the Affordable Care Act was a necessity.

The reason that new enrollees tend to be sicker than the previous pool of patients in the individual market, and consequently are using more services and costing insurers more, is that sick people were systematically excluded from the individual insurance market prior to 2014. The mechanism was exclusions for pre-existing conditions, which were outlawed by the ACA."

http://www.latimes.com/business/hilt...htmlstory.html

Does the author of this piece think that insurance carriers didn't know that they might have to start enrolling folks wiht pre-ex medical conditions in 2014, and therefore not price those individual policies appropriately? Does he think that the pre-ex rules were somehow a surprise to health insurers?

This is probably reflective of one of the primary reasons that "new enrollees tend to be sicker..."

http://www.modernhealthcare.com/arti...NEWS/160119850

But the insurance industry has criticized the administration, arguing that people are gaming the system so they can get health coverage whenever they want without facing a penalty, which drives up insurers' costs. More specific complaints have said the CMS is not doing enough to verify that someone qualifies to enroll outside of the open enrollment window.

“We are concerned that policies that were put in place to cover the uninsured and grow a new market are increasingly subject to abuse,” Blue Shield of California said in a letter to the CMS late last year. “This includes the expansion of special-enrollment periods with no requirement of documentation or validation as in other guaranteed-issue markets.”

[Rajoo]

Obama Care expanded insurance coverage on the pretext of lowering insurance costs without really addressing the underlying reason for the high cost of health insurance. In other words every one involved in this racket got theirs and more, except for the small businesses and individuals without a group plan. Brilliant.

[MrPots]

Originally Posted by bobabode

The stated goal of the ACA from the beginning was single payer. The problem with burning down the ACA as you suggest is that a lot of people will be injured or die needlessly while the rest of the country waits for "Medicare For All" to appear from the ashes.

That never bothered the medical industry or most people in our capitalist society before...why now?

If you can't afford lifesaving treatment, you die. Should have planned better. Right? Isn't that the American position?

[MrPots]

"Foundation, the weighted average pre-subsidy price of a silver plan on the exchanges only increased by 3.6% from 2015 to 2016, which certainly seems good. But one way the ACA keeps premiums reasonable is by pushing people into plans with high levels of cost sharing. The average silver plan has a combined annual deductible (including prescriptions) of more than $3,000; the deductible for an average bronze plan is close to $6,000. In other words, one reason that insurance premiums are affordable is that those premiums don't buy you what they used to, as insurers shift more and more health care costs onto their customers."


So what you have are folks shelling out $10,000 a year for very mediocre health care. One well visit once a year and if you're lucky a blood workup. After shelling out for that insurance premium who can afford to pay the doctor visit and all the deductibles on top of it.

And you pay it year in and year out. In 10 years you've shoved the equivalent of your entire retirement savings into health insurance...with what to show for it? Nothing. If you have a major medical issue, you might come out even. Otherwise you're just throwing money hand over fist to the insurance companies, and you are punished by law if you do not.

Isn't this a great country?