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Officials Say HealthCare.gov Site Now Performing Well
The much-discussed health care finance sign-up website HealthCare.gov has benefited from the flurry of improvements that have been thrown at it in the last several weeks. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid spokesman Aaron Albright told Fox News Saturday that "[w]ith the scheduled upgrades last night and tonight, we're on track to meet our stated goal for the site to work for the vast majority of users." CMM spokeswoman Julie Bataille. "said the installation of new servers Friday night helped improved the response times and error rates, even with heavier-than-usual weekend traffic." If you've used the site this weekend, what has your experience been like?
To test it, they want you to put in all kinds of personal information. No thanks.
I'm unemployed and without insurance. If I go to the dentist's office to get a small no-anesthesia filling, as I did last week, they will accept $116 from an insurance company but will charge me $167 for exactly the same procedure because I'm a cash payer. When an insurance company pays them, they deduct the difference between $167 and $116 as a "loss" to reduce their taxes. Obviously, they've got quite an incentive to do that.
It's not just dentist's offices. Those are the shenanigans going on with tens of thousands of health care providers across the US, it's to the tune of tens of billions of dollars of "losses" pulled out of thin air, and it has to fixed before any of this is going to improve. Subsidizing private insurance companies with taxpayer money and mandating that people sign up with them while allowing insurance companies to keep skimming profits out of the system and penalizing cash-payers is the wrong thing to do.
BOSS: Our mandate is to make this site work for the vast majority of users in two weeks. Otherwise we don't get a bonus. And by "we" I mean "I". ... well, I just thought you could hire a few competent engineers for a change. That might get the job done.
ENGINEER ERNIE: But there are millions of users! Right now the site can only handle 200 simultaneous users, and we just don't have the hardware for more. If we work our asses off and spend a bunch of money on servers, we might be able to get it up to ten thousand. That's nowhere near the vast majority.
BOSS: Damn it, I promised my son I'd buy him a Cessna for his birthday. I need that bonus! You guys had better think of something quickly.
ENGINEER DAVE: I think I have an idea...
BOSS: Spit it out, man!
ENGINEER DAVE:
BOSS: Look, I tried that. It was nixed by the big shots -- they don't want to develop a reputation for competence, okay? You've gotta figure something out that works with our current human capital.
ENGINEER ERNIE: Uh, I have an idea. Say again what the mandate was?
BOSS: We have to make the site work for the vast majority of users in two weeks.
ENGINEER ERNIE: That's what I thought. So if we just drive away all the users right now, then we will have no users in two weeks, right?
BOSS: Yeah... how does that help?
ENGINEER ERNIE: Well, what's the vast majority of zero?
[Silence]
ENGINEER DAVE: But... but...
BOSS: Shut up and start sabotaging the code, or you're fired.
ENGINEERS: Yes, sir!
Canada has more health care than Americans do, and they're not slaves.
Are you completely sure that health care is slavery?
there's no such thing as something cheaper than mandatory insurance
anyone who doesn't get insurance is someone who thinks they don't need insurance. while those who get insurance really need it. so costs are spread amongst fewer people and they go up, if you respect the "freedom" of some freeloaders to be stupid and irresponsible
then those assholes without insurance break their arm and get sick anyway, and then they avoid the bill because they can't afford it, and the taxpayer has to bail out the hospital
so you pay for it anyway, in the most wasteful, stupid way possible, and you pay for irresponsible freeloaders
that's why healthcare is such a joke in the usa and is so incredibly expensive
now forcing 50 year old to buy childbirth insurance does sound crazy so you fix that specific problem, you don't jettison the entire superior idea
any questions?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And those younger women are paying for old people's heart attacks. The old people are paying to prevent flu epidemics from getting younger males sick. And men tend to have a part in making babies and it is much cheaper to pay for IUDs and pills than kids. Especially unplanned ones.
Not only does every first world country other than the US have some sort of universal healthcare/single payer system, the US spends more than every other country for healthcare for a lower level of care/poor outcomes.
USA! USA!
I think much of the opposition to health insurance reform is because the costs to treat the uninsured are hidden. People who receive health care and do not have money or insurance cost hospitals (and patients and shareholders) a lot of money. When they pass these costs on, I think the hospitals should be required to break out these costs as separate line items on the bills they send to their patients and the insurance companies. I feel people would be much less opposed to health insurance reform when they see exactly how much they are paying to treat the uninsured. I do not think a civilized person can think "let them die in the streets" to be an option.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Which of these other countries do you speak of that I would have gotten better treatment or a better outcome?
In any modern developed country other than the US, you would have gotten similar treatment and since we know you responded well to treatment, you'd have the same outcome. Obviously you can't get a better outcome than successful treatment.
For people without insurance, of course, the outcomes are often vastly different because in the US that means they'll likely have to delay treatment.
At least not in my case. I was paying $165 for a better than platinum level plan.
Were you paying the entire bill for that plan? Did you have a large deductible? Most people that get health insurance have a major portion of the tab picked up by their employer. They think they pay $165 or whatever their price is because they never see the actual full cost of the plan. I've spent a LOT of time looking at health insurance plans in recent years. I have NEVER seen anyone get a plan with that much in the way of features for that kind of price unless they were paying a huge deductible. I had a catastrophic coverage plan a few years ago that had a $5000 deductible but had pretty good coverage after that and the price was around $150/month. But that first $5000 was entirely on me.
I run a manufacturing company. We provide health insurance for our employees and have picked up 50% of the cost. Our group rate for a pretty good 80/20 HMO with a zero deductible (roughly equivalent to a gold plan) cost about $525 per employee per month. Net cost to our employees is around $260/month since the company pays half. The plans we've found under the new regulations for the Affordable Care Act will give similar coverage for about $200-300/month (varies with age but always a lot less than current cost) or almost a 40% reduction in total premium over what we pay now. Furthermore a lot of our employees will qualify for subsidies so the coverage will cost even less.
While this whole roll out has been a fiasco, at the end of the day the people who work for me are mostly going to end up with similar or better coverage for less money. Furthermore their coverage will not be tied to their employment with us which is LONG overdue. No one should EVER lose health coverage just because they lost a job.
Slavery. Good one.
If you don't want to participate in this society, don't. Sure, none of the civilized countries in Europe will take you, but maybe you can get into Rwanda. Then you can see firsthand what actual slavery looks like.