Baldo

Mar 25 2014, 09:46 PM

On 3/12, Sebelius was asked, "Are you going to delay the open enrollment beyond March 31?" Her answer: "No, sir"

Quote:

 

On a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services insisted that March 31 is the firm deadline to sign up for Obamacare. "We have no plans to extend the open enrollment period," HHS official Julie Bataille said. "In fact, we don't actually have the statutory authority to extend the open enrollment period in 2014."

Quote:

 

Michael Hash, who directs the Office of Health Reform at HHS, replied that the law states that the HHS secretary must set the open enrollment dates by June 2012, which Secretary Sebelius did. "Once that 2014 open enrollment period has been set, they are set permanently," Hash said.

Chatham

 

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/health-premiums-3-065-obama-224300715.html

Health Premiums Up $3,065; Obama Vowed $2,500 Cut

During his first run for president, Barack Obama made one very specific promise to voters: He would cut health insurance premiums for families by $2,500, and do so in his first term.

But it turns out that family premiums have increased by more than $3,000 since Obama's vow, according to the latest annual Kaiser Family Foundation employee health benefits survey.

Premiums for employer-provided family coverage rose $3,065 — 24% — from 2008 to 2012, the Kaiser survey found. Even if you start counting in 2009, premiums have climbed $2,370.

What's more, premiums climbed faster in Obama's four years than they did in the previous four under President Bush, the survey data show.

There's no question about what Obama was promising the country, since he repeated it constantly during his 2008 campaign.

In a debate with Sen. John McCain, for example, Obama said "the only thing we're going to try to do is lower costs so that those cost savings are passed onto you. And we estimate we can cut the average family's premium by about $2,500 per year.

At a campaign stop in Columbus, Ohio, in February 2008, Obama promised that "We are going to work with you to lower your premiums by $2,500. We will not wait 20 years from now to do it, or 10 years from now to do it. We will do it by the end of my first term as president.

2008 Promises, 2012 Reality
To back that up, Obama pointed to a memo drafted by Harvard professors (and unpaid campaign advisers), which claimed that investing in health care IT, cutting administrative bloat, and improving management of chronic diseases would cut health costs by $140 billion a year. That would translate into $2,500 in premium savings for families.

But those projections were wildly optimistic, overestimating potential savings from IT, making big assumptions about disease management, and ignoring the fact that past government interventions have always increased health care administrative costs.

Meanwhile, the health reform law Obama signed in March 2010 has pushed up insurance costs.
In 2011, premiums spiked 9.5%, and many in the industry blame ObamaCare for at least part of it. Premiums climbed another 4.5% in 2012, Kaiser found.

And ObamaCare will continue to fuel health premium inflation.

First, the law piles on new coverage mandates. It requires insurance companies to provide 100% coverage for various types of preventive care, bans lifetime coverage limits, extends parents' coverage to offspring up to 26 years old, and requires plans to meet certain "medical loss ratios." Coming up are rules on "essential standard benefits," limits on deductibles, bans on annual spending caps, and much more.

The experience with state mandates show that they only tend to grow over time, and get more expensive. The Council for Affordable Health Insurance found more than 2,200 state benefit mandates, which add from 10% to 50% to the cost of coverage.

"One of the biggest cost drivers in our health care system is the steady proliferation of federal and state-based coverage mandates," noted CAHI's Victoria Craig Bunce.

Meanwhile, ObamaCare's insurance reforms — guaranteed issue and community rating — will likely raise premiums, too.

State Experiments
States that have tried these reforms — which forbid insurers from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions or charging the sick more — have seen insurance premiums spiral upward as healthy people leave the market, knowing they are guaranteed coverage when they get sick.

"Premium rates tended to increase, sometimes dramatically" in the eight states that tried these reforms, according to a study by Milliman, a health care consulting group.

The law's backers claim the individual mandate will prevent these rate hikes, because it requires everyone to buy insurance. But experts say millions will still refuse to buy coverage and pay the fine instead.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Gruber — who helped design ObamaCare — found that the law will hike individual market premiums in three states by as much as 30%. The Congressional Budget Office said ObamaCare would push them "about 10% to 13% higher in 2016." Supporters say people will be getting more generous coverage for those higher prices, and that tax subsidies will offset higher cost for many of these families. But that will be small comfort to those forced to pay more.
[How many millions of the 320 million population get subsidies to "subsidies will offset higher cost" here?]

Perhaps the best evidence that ObamaCare won't bring costs down is a report published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine and signed by nearly two dozen leading health economists and policy experts — some of whom worked for the Obama administration. The report warns that "health costs remain a major challenge" and calls for a "systematic approach" to get spending under control.

One thing that isn't on their list of proposals: Scrapping Obama-Care and starting over.

LTC8K6

Mar 26 2014, 08:44 AM

March 11...

Quote:

 

On a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services insisted that March 31 is the firm deadline to sign up for Obamacare. "We have no plans to extend the open enrollment period," HHS official Julie Bataille said. "In fact, we don't actually have the statutory authority to extend the open enrollment period in 2014."

Quote:

 

Michael Hash, who directs the Office of Health Reform at HHS, replied that the law states that the HHS secretary must set the open enrollment dates by June 2012, which Secretary Sebelius did. "Once that 2014 open enrollment period has been set, they are set permanently," Hash said.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/hhs-we-lack-statutory-authority-extend-obamacares-open-enrollment-period_784621.html

Quote:

 

It has also made it even more dishonest. The Obama administration has repeatedly said that the March 31 deadline for enrolling in Obamacare is firm. Now, we find out not only that the deadline isn’t firm but that it can be avoided simply by lying.

chatham

Mar 26 2014, 11:18 AM

I would guess, in order to increase the number of people that signed up for this joke, a lot of the dead who are also getting SS are being signed up.

Quote:

 

http://freebeacon.com/issues/harry-reid-people-arent-educated-on-how-to-use-the-internet/

Harry Reid: People Aren’t Educated on How to Use the Internet

BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
March 26, 2014 1:16 pm

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) said the fault of struggling to sign up on the Obamacare exchanges didn’t lie with the faulty website, but with the people who weren’t “educated on how to use the Internet.”

Explaining the reasoning behind the latest Obamacare delay, Reid said too many people just didn’t know to use their computer properly and needed more time. Apparently, it had nothing to do with the well-documented failings of the website that have embarrassed the White House for months.

“We have hundreds of thousands of people who tried to sign up who didn’t get through,” he said. “There are some people who are not like my grandchildren who can handle everything so easily on the Internet, and these people need a little extra time. It’s not — the example they gave us is a 63-year-old woman came into the store and said, ‘I almost got it. Every time I just about got there, it would cut me off.’ We have a lot of people just like this through no fault of the Internet, but because people are not educated on how to use the Internet.”

Quote:

 

http://healthpolicyandmarket.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-one-thing-that-could-save.html

The One Thing That Could Save Obamacare––And The Obama Administration Needs To Do It In the Next Month
Bob Laszewski

To properly price the exchange health insurance business going forward the carriers have to sharply increase the rates. A senior executive for Wellpoint, which sells plans in 14 Obamacare exchanges, is quoted in a Reuters article telling Wall Street analysts there will be big rate increases in 2015, "Looking at the rate increases on a year-over-year basis on our exchanges, and it will vary by carrier, but all of them will probably be double digits."

If the health plans do issue double digit rate increases for 2015, Obamacare is finished.

There are a ton of things that need to be fixed in Obamacare. But, I will suggest there is one thing that could save it.

The health insurance companies have to submit their new health insurance plans and rates between May 27 and June 27 for the 2015 Obamacare open-enrollment period beginning on November 15th. Any major modifications to the current Obamacare regulations need to be issued in the next month to give the carriers time to adjust and develop new products.

[...]

Here's what I would suggest.

Give carriers the ability to offer plans outside the Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum structure.

Let them offer people plans they will find attractive––premium, deductibles, and benefits.

But, require any new plans to:

• 
  
• Satisfy the 60% actuarial minimum in the statute––no "junk" plans.
  
  
• Give consumers the detail to compare the standard Silver Plan to any new offerings––full transparency.

Give carriers the ability to swap current benefit mandates (that were set by regulation not statute) for lower premiums and deductibles and be completely transparent in what those trade-offs are while still complying with the underlying statutory requirement that the plans must be worth at least 60% of total health care costs. The administration has the power to do this within the scope of the law.

[...]

wingedwheel

Mar 26 2014, 01:19 PM

Quote:

 

http://freebeacon.com/issues/harry-reid-people-arent-educated-on-how-to-use-the-internet/

Harry Reid: People Aren’t Educated on How to Use the Internet

BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
March 26, 2014 1:16 pm

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) said the fault of struggling to sign up on the Obamacare exchanges didn’t lie with the faulty website, but with the people who weren’t “educated on how to use the Internet.”

Explaining the reasoning behind the latest Obamacare delay, Reid said too many people just didn’t know to use their computer properly and needed more time. Apparently, it had nothing to do with the well-documented failings of the website that have embarrassed the White House for months.

“We have hundreds of thousands of people who tried to sign up who didn’t get through,” he said. “There are some people who are not like my grandchildren who can handle everything so easily on the Internet, and these people need a little extra time. It’s not — the example they gave us is a 63-year-old woman came into the store and said, ‘I almost got it. Every time I just about got there, it would cut me off.’ We have a lot of people just like this through no fault of the Internet, but because people are not educated on how to use the Internet.”

Can't figure out it this makes me or .