| Healthcare Bill Part III; Obamacare | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Mar 3 2014, 02:20 PM (48,577 Views) | |
| kbp | May 28 2015, 10:37 PM Post #1921 |
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They allowed companies to offer the same plan on and off the exchange, for which the main objective was to increase the pool size. Evidently it did not work well, at least not in a few states. About this time last year we discussed how there had not been enough time to determine the cost of 2014 coverage to use in adjusting the 2015 rates. They'd had maybe 4+ months of experience with 2014 coverage to base the next years rates on. Looks like the companies that got aggressive last year are re-thinking after a full year of coverage. . |
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| longstop | May 28 2015, 10:45 PM Post #1922 |
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longstop
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Elderly face NHS discrimination under new UN death targets Elderly people will be treated like second-class citizens and denied medical care under new targets which give priority to saving the lives of young people http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/elder/11637179/Elderly-face-NHS-discrimination-under-new-UN-death-targets.html Coming to a city near you :o( |
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| kbp | May 28 2015, 10:47 PM Post #1923 |
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The Progressive solution! |
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| kbp | May 28 2015, 10:48 PM Post #1924 |
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http://www.cnbc.com/id/102711189 Health law court case winner could be political loser The party that wins the impending Supreme Court decision on President Barack Obama's health care law could be the political loser. If the Republican-backed challenge to the law's subsidies for lower-earning Americans prevails, the GOP would have achieved a paramount goal of severely damaging "Obamacare." But Republican lawmakers would be pressured to help the millions of Americans who could suddenly find government-mandated medical coverage unaffordable — and they'd face blame from many voters if they failed to provide assistance. "If you win the case you actually have people who lost their insurance. You now share the responsibility for fixing it," said former Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., who once led the House GOP campaign committee. "And you've got a lot of pissed off people. That hurts you." Should the Obama administration win, relieved Democrats would crow that Obama's foremost domestic achievement had stood unscathed. But some say they'd have lost a potentially powerful cudgel for the 2016 campaigns: Being able to accuse Republicans of ending the assistance and disrupting health coverage for many. If Democrats lose in court, "It completely reverses the issue and puts us back on offense on health care," said Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., one of his party's chief message crafters. Democrats have frequently been forced to defend the 2010 law, including over Obama's promise that people could keep policies they liked and the snafu-plagued startup of the federal HealthCare.gov website. Not everyone thinks their party will lose politically should they win in court. Many Republicans say if the Supreme Court rules that subsidies were provided illegally, it would be the Democratic administration's fault for doing so, not the GOP's. "That's a win for us," said conservative Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. One staunch defender of the law, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said a plaintiff's victory would hurt both parties "because people across the country don't always distinguish between the two sides." The Supreme Court decision is expected by late June or early July. Conservatives and Republicans say the law's wording limits subsidies to people buying coverage in states running their own insurance marketplaces. Thirty-seven states rely on HealthCare.gov, including 34 that would be most directly impacted if the court overturns the subsidies. Democrats say the law was always intended to offer subsidies for all Americans who qualify. According to government figures, about 8.8 million people have selected coverage from HealthCare.gov for this year. That includes 7.7 million who have qualified for subsidies, paid as tax credits, averaging $263 monthly. The private Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Urban Institute have estimated that a plaintiffs' victory would increase the number of uninsured people in 2016 by 8.2 million. The most heavily affected states are overwhelmingly run by GOP governors and are home to 22 of the 24 Republican senators facing re-election next year. "If we're not prepared with a transition plan, it could be difficult to sustain the pressure that would come to cover people who all of a sudden lost their subsidy," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the No. 2 Senate GOP leader. Other damage could ripple through insurance markets, experts warn. People who purchase coverage privately are in the same insurance pool as those buying from government-run networks. Many of the healthiest low-earning patients who lose subsidies would stop buying policies while many of the sickest would remain, boosting everyone's premiums and potentially threatening entire insurance markets. "You can just see the press on this and the events on this, people saying, 'I had insurance yesterday and now I don't,'" said Rob Jesmer, a Republican strategist. Cornyn and other Republicans say the GOP is moving toward a joint House-Senate proposal to provide assistance to people losing subsidies. It is also likely to weaken some of the law's requirements, perhaps eliminating required coverage for individuals or giving states more flexibility to decide the scope of required medical coverage, Republicans say. They say the bill will be ready when the court announces its decision. But first, Republicans have to unite behind a single plan, which so far they've not done. They also have to avoid alienating conservatives who'd view any steps to ease the sting of the court's decision as abetting a president and program they loathe. Failure to pass legislation temporarily aiding those who lost subsidies is not an option, many Republicans say, though there's debate over whether an Obama veto might inoculate them from blame. "The question is, can Republicans thread the needle, can they put together a bill that gets most of their caucus on board," said Dean Rosen, a health policy expert and former Senate GOP aide. "The risk for them is they can't do that, they can't be unified." In a parallel attack on the health care law, the District of Columbia federal district court scheduled a Thursday hearing on a lawsuit the GOP-run House filed against the Obama administration. The suit challenges the administration's postponement of requirements that companies insure workers and its use of funds not approved by Congress to reimburse insurers who subsidize lower-income customers. |
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| kbp | May 28 2015, 11:28 PM Post #1925 |
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| kbp | May 29 2015, 07:37 AM Post #1926 |
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A blessing in disguise???
Obamacare included funds that could be used as grants for cooperative insurance systems, though I'm not sure if such grants are still available. Most of the co-op's are not doing well, but I suppose the 'cooperative' thingy could apply to a single payer system, where the state is the ONLY insurance provider in the system. I think the State of New York is the perfect place for them to run their experiment. I say give them a good 5 years to play with, because for a single payer system to work they'll need that much time to identify the next problem and convince the people the single provider setup works best with the single payer. That way they can get rid of all the "only ones who benefit" and have the doctors and nurses on the state payroll. . |
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| Baldo | May 30 2015, 11:52 PM Post #1927 |
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Health experts see big price hikes for Obamacare Premiums could rise more sharply in 2016. The cost of Obamacare could rise for millions of Americans next year, with one insurer proposing a 50 percent hike in premiums, fueling the controversy about just how “affordable” the Affordable Care Act really is. The eye-popping 50 percent hike by New Mexico insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield is an outlier, and state officials may not allow it to go through. But health insurance experts are predicting that premiums will rise more significantly in 2016 than in the first two years of Obamacare exchange coverage. In 2015, for example, premiums increased by an average of 5.4 percent, according to PwC’s Health Research Institute. The premium increases come at a tenuous time for Obamacare, which remains under fire from a Republican Congress that wants to repeal the law, while a Supreme Court ruling on federal subsidies for the health insurance looms in June as well. “Insurers seem to be reporting higher trend, which means they are seeing bigger increases in health care costs,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “But really what’s going on here is they now have data showing what the risk pool looks like. Initially in 2014 they were completely guessing about who was going to enroll and how much health care they were going to use.” Many plans haven’t yet made public their proposed rates; Monday is the deadline for publishing and providing an explanation for rate hikes of at least 10 percent. None announced so far is as dramatic as the New Mexico plan, although a few others are also quite sharp. The Blues in Maryland and Tennessee, both with the largest market share on the exchanges in their states, are seeking increases of more than 30 percent. In Oregon, Moda Health Plan — which attracted more than 40 percent of exchange customers in 2015, despite competing against a dozen other health plans — is seeking average rate increases of 25 percent. Other plans released to date — including some in these four states — are seeking far more modest increases. The reasons for the rising premiums are complex. Part of it, as Levitt noted, is simply that the carriers know a lot more about the health status and health care patterns of their new customers. Part of it’s rising drug prices. And the planned phasing out of certain ACA programs that were designed to reduce risk for insurers who entered the untested Obamacare marketplaces, are also causing carriers to price cautiously..In addition, those plan cancellations – and the political outcry they caused in 2013 – still plays a role. To quell the controversy, the Obama administration allowed plans that don’t meet the Affordable Care Act coverage requirements to remain in place through 2017. Insurers are still dealing with the market disruption and economic fallout of competing with those noncompliant plans. “With this much uncertainty, you become conservative, and so you raise your rates,” said Dr. Martin Hickey, CEO of New Mexico Health Connections, a nonprofit co-op seeded with loan dollars under the Affordable Care Act. Seth Chandler, an expert in insurance law at the University of Houston and author of the “ACA Death Spiral” blog, sees another market force at play. “Insurers played this strategy of getting customers in the door by experimenting with lower premiums than really were appropriate, and then hoped that those customers would stick,” Chandler said. “If they did stick, they could raise the rates.” In the health insurance industry, customers do tend to “stick” to a health plan, rather than choosing a new plan, new network, and new doctors. Affordability, already a political talking point, is a concern of consumers and advocates, who are imploring state regulators to vigorously contest price hikes that could render coverage unattainable for low-income people, even with Obamacare subsidies. “People are already having that sticker shock,” said Gabriel Sanchez, executive director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico, who ran focus groups recently among Latinos in New Mexico. The bottom line for participants, he said, was “I thought this was the Affordable Care Act?..snipped http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/how-affordable-is-the-affordable-care-act-118428.html Surprise Surprise! Who would have thought? |
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| Baldo | May 30 2015, 11:58 PM Post #1928 |
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You might like this. It was from the author of the ACA Death Spiral Blog quoted above The Cons of the ACA May 29, 2015 Recently, I was honored to speak before the PIAA, a group of insurance professionals, at the organization’s annual conference in Las Vegas. The idea was that I would speak on the problems with the ACA and Ardis Hoven, M.D., past president of the the AMA, would speak on positives about the ACA. I thought the format worked well and I appreciated the high level of discussion and civility of Dr. Hoven. Here’s what I had to say. Since you can’t use footnotes or hyperlinks in a speech, I’ve provided a few additional annotations here to show the source of some of the information. The Speech I’m here to talk about the architecture of the ACA and its problems. The ACA takes a bold risk. It places our economy and our health on an metaphorical aircraft whose ability to fly is challenged by history. It proceeds on the assumption that, whereas almost all community rating systems in health insurance have crashed in ugly adverse selection death spirals, the craft engineered by the Obama administration and its consultants is so sophisticated that it will avoid such a fate. Many will tout what they see as the success of the ACA thus far in reducing the number of uninsured and the absence of many catastrophic failures as evidence that the ACA flies. But we have not seen turbulence. It is an open question whether, long term, the ACA can survive in its present form. Let us now talk about how the ACA flies. It uses a variety of mechanisms to keep it aloft. The problem is that almost every one of them has the potential for being undermined...snipped ...... Conclusion One’s perspective on the ACA can’t be whether it helps insurers or whether it helps the medical profession. In fact it shouldn’t even be on whether more people have health insurance. The positive factor to be considered is whether it has improved health. I will concede that, on balance, it probably has — slightly. Many medical interactions are beneficial and, although supply of medical practitioners has not increased much, there are 2-4% more such interactions thanks to the ACA. In any event, whether the ACA marginally improves health is not the exclusive test. These programs have to be paid for and they come at a heavy price. The CBO now estimates the ACA will increase our budget deficit by $849 billion dollars through 2026. It is not, contrary to prior representations, paid for. If you forget about Medicaid expansion and take the net increase the uninsured as a result of the ACA and divide that by the cost of providing coverage to them, it turns over 10 years to average with premium subsidies, cost sharing reductions, the 3Rs, and administrative costs about $7,600 per person. And in addition to racking up our already bloated deficit, there will be be taxes, fees and subsidies that have their own perverse incentives. Some have estimated the cost of providing a currently uninsured person an additional year of a quality life at over $200,000 possibly over $1 million. That’s enough that we have to look hard at whether there might be some better and simpler alternatives. As we move forward ought to be looking not at Obamacare vs. The Bad Old Days Where Evil Insurers Deprived Sick People of Coverage but rather to a variety of alternatives ranging from, yes, Bernie Sanders Single Payer plan to, better, libertarian plans to use market mechanisms more effectively to perhaps better yet, lots in between. Yes, Obamacare has gotten off into the air, but if they would honestly call “Mayday,” it is my hope that a variety of people would try to help out. http://acadeathspiral.org/2015/05/29/the-cons-of-the-aca/ |
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| kbp | May 31 2015, 09:42 AM Post #1929 |
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...If you forget about Medicaid expansion and take the net increase the uninsured as a result of the ACA and divide that by the cost of providing coverage to them, it turns over 10 years to average with premium subsidies, cost sharing reductions, the 3Rs, and administrative costs about $7,600 per person. I believe, from best I can tell, that is supposed to be $7,600 ANNUALLY per person. Reads a little confusing. |
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| kbp | May 31 2015, 09:52 AM Post #1930 |
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The 2014 coverage was based on estimates put together in 2013. The estimates of 2014 for 2015 coberage were mostly all in place after the initial 3-5 months of Obamacare, so they had little to nothing to base their premiums on except the fact that the 3-R's would cover most losses and the companies got the 20% OH & Profit no matter what happened. The 'can not fail' system is about gone and they have a much better idea how much it costs ...based on Uncle Sam paying the subsidies on time if SCOTUS does not upset that cart! |
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| kbp | Jun 1 2015, 09:44 AM Post #1931 |
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It's somewhat ironic that they report on the limits the GOP can do working according to parliamentarian procedures, laws and regulations... ...regarding a law Barry and his crew just keep illegally re-writing! |
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| kbp | Jun 1 2015, 10:00 AM Post #1932 |
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Recall that a chunk of the $2500 savings we'd all get each year was to come from the NEW records systems Barry was selling us...So the cost saving system cost more than expected, and We'll need to install costly new security systems to make it safer, and There will be a cost increase for cyber insurance to cover what was supposed to save us money on our health insurance. We're stuck hoping that it will save money some time in the far off future, presuming it would have been worse without the new systems! . Edited by kbp, Jun 1 2015, 10:02 AM.
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| kbp | Jun 1 2015, 10:26 AM Post #1933 |
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Purely an effort to redirect any disappointment in Obamacare towards those terrible insurance companies owned by the 1% ...or some such BS. If the premiums go up on that "$70 premium" policy mentioned and the person covered is still making only $25,000 a year, the subsidies will cover the entire increase. The subsidies paid are based on the cost exceeding a set percentage of the eligible participant's income. What I get from the article is that at least 44% of Covered California customers have absolutely no financial ability to pay the deductible or out-of-pocket expenses, which are a minimum of about $2,050/year on top of the $70 or whatever per month premium charges they can barely afford. The structure is an obvious problem put in place for a future $olution. . |
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| LTC8K6 | Jun 1 2015, 07:43 PM Post #1934 |
Assistant to The Devil Himself
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Simple... Lower their premiums and raise their wages. Oh wait, they may get paid, but it might not be "wages"... Edited by LTC8K6, Jun 1 2015, 07:44 PM.
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| kbp | Jun 2 2015, 07:52 AM Post #1935 |
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...skyrocketing drug costs ...higher-than-expected care costs ...other expenses Well, now we're getting the MSM excuses! No mention of pre-existing conditions, economic class that does not care for themselves well, structure of Obamacare caters to sick and poor, health care pools absent the healthy redistribution because the economic class it serves can't afford out-of-pocket anyway.... Imagine a system that taxes itself and is too costly for those it serves ...Obamacare! . |
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