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Can the ObamaCare Enrollment Numbers Be Believed?
An anonymous reader writes "When the Obama administration announced on April 1 that an estimated 7.1 million had signed up for ObamaCare by the end of March, it seemed a nearly impossible achievement. To reach 7.1 million, sign-ups had to rocket up by 67% in just one month. That's astounding enough, but an IBD review of existing ObamaCare enrollment data shows that the mathematical challenge of reaching 7.1 million sign-ups was even tougher."
...if you like your 7.1 million sign-ups, you can keep your 7.1 million sign-ups.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
To reach the number of Christmas gifts said to be bought for Christmas, gift purchases would have had to rocket up by 67% in December alone...
You really expect to believe the numbers coming out of Washington? Gullible aren't we?
Sure, this is the worst administration for lies in our lifetime, but even before this one, they still fudged numbers. It's just the way the game is played out there.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Like most numbers that come out of government, it takes a bit of creative license. Both major parties have mastered this deception. The real question is... Are we better off now that this law is in place? To which I have to think, probably not.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
I don't care how accurate the numbers are; I care about the sloppy language. What they mean is that 7.1 million people have applied for coverage through the Federally Facilitated Marketplace.
I'm really fed up with this lazy language. It's ended up confusing millions of people who are just looking for some healthcare coverage. A lot of people seem to think that "Obamacare" is now some federal version of Medicaid, or young-people version of Medicare--a government program that pays medical expenses.
I don't care whether the Republicrats or Democans started the confusing talk; let's all be part of stopping it.
.. and all that. It'll be interesting to see their justification for the number because it does seem to buck the trends we were seeing. I'm sure it's more of a Spock-ish exaggeration rather than an outright lie. For example, they may have moved people on an existing program like Medicaid to Obamacare enrollments, which would be valid but not exactly a measure of success (I am just speculating, I don't know if they're even allowed to do that).
Or it could be true. Many people wait to the last minute; hell I haven't done my taxes and its' 4/10 already.
This ALWAYS this you crybabies whine about right up until it is your ASS being left out front of the hospital. Then it is all about SAVE ME!
You can set up a HSA instead of insurance, if you want.
Otherwise, I'll say how dare you expect the rest of us to pay for your health care because you don't want to.
I don't respond to AC's.
There were, as Obama claimed, 42 million uninsured Americans before the ACA was passed. The ACA was supposed to insure all Americans.
Here we are 4 years after it passed.
What happened?
I expect the numbers are right, but the question is what all is included. This wouldn't be just the federal web site. They're almost certainly counting those who signed up through state exchanges. They're also going to count anyone who signed up on paper. All of that is fine, as this is a measure of the program, not of the web site.
But does it include those who signed up for expanded Medicare? Those are people who weren't insured before, and now are thanks to the new law, but it's not what most people think of when they say "Obamacare."
ObamaCare numbers aren't relatively more dishonest than anything else we've heard from the no-talent rodeo clown these last 5 godforsaken years.
..Is this "News for Nerds"? It must be a slow news day, I guess.
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
President Obama personally signed up for health care 4 million times to pump up the numbers.
You heard it here first, I hope. Seems like an "At Midnight" sort of joke.
My first reaction was, the 7.1 million number is about as credible as anything else this administration says about the policies it wants to promote. Then I remembered that this particular subject is the President's legacy achievement, so it's probably less credible than usual.
Is this news for nerds? Is this directly nerd related stuff? Please, don't bring that political discussion here! It is pointless to really discuss anything was polarized as Obamacare, usually no one can discuss such subject in a clear technical objective way...
You are far from the first person to attempt what essentially amounts to tax evasion on allegedly legal grounds... let us know how that works out for you in a year or two.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No
fine, don't expect society to pay for you when you get sick
According to Betteridge's law of headlines the answer is "no.", but I feel it's a trap.
We all want freedom. I want the freedom not to pay for your healthcare when you end up in the hospital. Anyone against Obamacare has to be fore allowing hospitals the right to refuse care. At least that is logically consistent. No one is forced to buy or provide a service.
Good luck getting the opposition to support allowing hospitals to let people die at their property line.
California's exchange is well capable of providing a mere 7 Million registrations and was not ever having problems while the Federal site was the subject of so much news controversy.
I am celebrating this event because This is the first time that Bruce Perens can get insurance coverage! I operate my own company and have previously only had access to insurance through my wife's employer. All of my family, my wife, my son, and I, have each individually been rejected by private insurers for what was esentially medical trivia. In my son's case, it was because he took a test they didn't like even though he passed it.
Not everyone understands the B.S. that private insurers were permitted to put people through.
Bruce Perens.
It's amazing what technical accomplishments people can achieve when they get together, concentrate, and fire crooked ass contractors who don't know what the fuck they're doing.
There was a deadline. People put stuff off to the deadline, especially when it means it's going to cost them money.
For comparison, this page has a graph of tax-related Google queries. Big shock: they spike right before deadlines in January and April. (That's a proxy for tax filings, for which I couldn't find a decent source. I suspect that tax filings are probably even more spread out, since many people get money back and would rather do it early.)
Combined with problems that would have caused people who tried earlier to fail, it doesn't seem at all likely that numbers would go up by a factor of 2/3. If you'd told me it was an order of magnitude, I might have been surprised. IBD has a history of a negative view of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") and so I'm not especially inclined to see their incredulity is anything other than ideology.
To reach 7.1 million, sign-ups had to rocket up by 67% in just one month. That's astounding enough.
A very very large number of people, myself included, tend to wait until the last minute to do things, especially if it's not something they particularly want to do. Especially if it's something they don't especially NEED right now, and will have to pay by the month for.
Just ask the IRS for a graph of how many people self-file their taxes in April as opposed to Jan/Feb. At least there there is the motivation for getting a refund earlier. There may be some people who have conditions that need to be treated now, but I'm willing to bet that the list of healthier people who never got insurance is much larger.
Casual observation suggests, Republicans would find it very hard to believe and the Democrats would find it totally within the realm of possibilities. My brother is consultant for PeopleSoft benefits management module. According to him, about 10% of the employees enroll as soon as the period opens. After that spike there is a lull, and about 50% of the employees enroll in the last week (of a typical 4 week open period), and about 25% enroll on the last day. About 1 in 1000 miss the deadline and send despo emails and come up with sob stories why they missed it and beg to change their options. About 1 in 10000 realize they have missed the enrollment period only when they show up at a doctors offices and the friendly receptionist tells them, "Sorry Mrs McGillacady, the card is not going through". Based on that, I would say the profile of surging enrollment in the last few days/weeks seems to be consistent.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So the 'evidence' is someone who doesn't like the program in the first place, scratching his head and saying I don't believe you could sign up that many people that close to a deadline.
That's like saying, I don't believe that xxx million did their taxes because only a small percentage had completed them in early March. People procrastinate until the last minute, end of story.
Actual summary of article:
"It seems really unlikely the enrollment numbers got met because that would have meant a lot of last minute sign-ups *shrugs*"
"Oh and by the way even if the enrollment numbers got met, it probably doesn't count because if you haven't paid your first month's premium you don't count as an enrollment number for some reason because we said so"
If you play with the definition of things then you can make the numbers be whatever you want. Read a report last week that more than 1/3 of those were people that were dropped at the beginning of the year (which means there's very little real gain in number of people insured), and 1/4 hadn't actually paid. So the number is just a topical headline that they feed the media so they can pat their backs, but breaks down under serious scrutiny. Like "we've deported more illegal immigrants than the previous administration". Truth is they changed the definition of "deported" to count people who were stopped at the border and turned around, which had never been counted as a deportation before. Meanwhile the Border Patrolman's union is complaining that the administration and DHS/ICE are making their job nearly impossible, but the media won't cover them, and they actually kicked the leader of the union out of congressional hearings.
But they're the most transparent EVER!
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
Until there is solid evidence of malversation, rants of the calibre of "Gee ... those numbers are big ... so can they be true" cannot be taken seriously.
Oh, and have you filed your demand to see Obama's birth certificate yet? Be sure to demand that he proves he's got a pulse too. And demand that he be doused with Holy Water too ... just in case, eh?
This ALWAYS this you crybabies whine about right up until it is your ASS being left out front of the hospital. Then it is all about SAVE ME!
What you say could be 100% true and the ACA could still be unconstitutional. What you are doing here is attacking the person (an imaginary person) rather than attacking the argument. If you want to argue that it is constitutional your best bet would be to go to the constitution and find the parts that you think would allow for this legislation. For help you could read what the supreme court justices said about the legislation.
Just look at when they announced these numbers!
"Ahhhh, hahaha, GOTCHA!" -Obama
Plus a huge number of enrollees have not actually made an insurance premium payment so they are not really signed up and insured. What was the percentage being reported, something like 15% to 20%?
I shouldn't have to sign up for shit.
Reminds me of someone I know that was going to move to Canada... "oh, it's socialist medicine there, I'll be covered as soon I show up, right?" Uh... no, the world doesn't work that way.
Say it ain't so! Why Obama would NEVER dissemble, twist, or distort the facts, especially on something as politically important as his pet insurance-for-all scheme!
You can set up a HSA instead of insurance, if you want.
Nope. If you sign up for an HSA then you must also sign up for an HDHP (High Deductible Health Plan). But by getting an HSA+HDHP, you are conforming to Obamacare, not "opting out".
In 2016 California will become a battleground state because of Obamacare...
This solely a political piece of flame bait. If you are against AFA you'll believe any evidence that appears to support it, if you do support AFA you won't believe it. Then there is everyone else who just doesn't f'n care anymore. Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, It doesn't matter you're all self identified idealogues.
Give me apathy, or you know, whatever I don't care.
Sure, you can believe them that 7.5 million have enrolled. It comes down to how you define 'enrolled', which the government defines as "someone put an insurance choice in their electronic kart." That would be like CDW saying they sold 100,000 LaserJet printers, just because someone placed one into their basket. The reality is that that majority of the insurance plans placed into the insurance basket was never completed. And of those that did complete the process, many never paid their first premium, which ultimately gives us a much smaller number of ACTUALLY INSURED people via ObamaCare.
And how many are actually paying and thus covered? Less than 1 million.
Bearded Dragon
Suppose that instead of calling it a fine for not buying insurance, they had simply described it differently. Suppose they decided to tax everyone by a fixed amount, and then offered a tax rebate to anyone who bought insurance. Would you still feel that was unconstitutional? The government has the right to levy taxes - no question about that. And they have the right to spend money however they want, including giving it out as tax rebates to encourage particular behaviors. Yet the two situations are completely identical as far as money is concerned. The only difference is how they describe it. What makes the first unconstitutional and the second not?
Anyway, your claim about the Supreme Court is simply wrong. They've ruled that choosing to spend money in particular ways in particular circumstances is protected free speech, but they've never made any blanket claim that money=speech. For example, they still allow lots of restrictions on donations to political campaigns. You can't donate more than a fixed amount to any one candidate, and while you're allowed to buy political advertisements on your own, you can't coordinate with the campaigns you intend to support. And much more relevantly: so far as I know, they have never ruled in any context that you have a right to refuse to pay taxes or fines levied by the government.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
In the first year of Obamacare we will still have more uninsured than in the last year of the Bush administration
7.1 million sign ups out of over 300 million people for a "mandatory" participation program is truly pathetic regardless whether it is above or below what was expected. Yes yes, I know the number of uninsured was closer to 60 million, so basically you are getting adoption among the intended uninsured population of just 12%. Just 12% of uninsured people are choosing Obamacare/ACA, that is what is remarkable.
Regardless of how you feel about the fact they decided to use a regressive fine on middle class taxpayers in order to force people to buy insurance... it simply ain't working.
Sure that meager adoption rate will go up over the next two years as the fines for not having insurance go up, but that is basically it. We are still left with millions and millions of uninsured.
Is the way it should be. No one should have to pay for your runny nose or whatever. Set aside the money like any normal and prudent person would do and use it for that. If the SHTF, the catastrophic insurance has you covered.
People will pay $60 to get their hair done once a month but think paying $60 for an office visit is robbery. Crazy. Have your hair dresser prescribe the antibiotics then.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
and this article brought to you by the same people that stated Stephen Hawking would never have survived his illness if he lived in the UK and had to deal with their medical system.
https://www.google.com/search?...
The 16th amendment is extremely dangerous. It gives the federal government the constitution power to tax your income without limit or restriction. While a "free speech tax" per se might be ruled unconstitutional, when it comes to freedom regarding your money the rule is quite clear: pay your taxes or else.
So, you are "free" to not pay the insurance companies, of course, but the government is allowed to tax you as much as they want if you don't (well, if you do too, but for less at least). Maybe it might be worth it to you at some penalty level, but that can always change.
how dare you expect the rest of us to pay for your health care because you don't want to.
Such as the smokers, the obese, alcoholics and drug users who can continue with their merry lifestyles, safe and secure in the knowledge everyone else is forced to hand over their money so they don't have to take personal responsibility for their actions, right?
Obamacare (as well as Romneycare) does nothing to lower health costs or ease the burden on the system so long as people are not forced to live healthier lifestyles. All they are doing is extracting money from people simply for the sake of extracting money and giving it to insurance companies who have gotten a huge financial windfall.
Considering how people on here rant about big bad corporations, this point should have been obvious, but I guess when you can take money from people, simply because you can, that never enters into the equation.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Weren't something like 6 million people kicked out of their existing health plans and had to enroll in a new one?
So 7.1 million enrollments less the 6 million who already had health plans makes 1.1 fresh enrollments. Those numbers seem right in that case.
"The numbers turned out *much* higher than Fox News predicted, and I *know* that many people couldn't possibly want health insurance, because that brochure from the Heritage Foundation said so. It must be a conspiracy..."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...
No it doesn't. That's just stupid. You realize how much trillions are, right?
Back in the nineties, I broke my leg while I was between jobs. I was uninsured. A US Federal Government program (Medicaid) picked up the freight, paying to get my right knee rebuilt. I'd suffered a torn lateral meniscus, a broken tibia and a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament. I'd be crippled to this day had not an already existing Federal program been there to provide medical care for low-income people such as I was then.
Now, of course, I am required by law to buy insurance. The fact that the insurance premium is paid by a tax credit means nothing; except that now I'm at the mercy of an insurance company which feels that they are being forced to carry the burden of insuring me (I'm between jobs again - *sigh*). Incidentally, my deductable is over five thousand dollars.
Medicaid sure helped me a lot more than Affordable Healthcare does now; but with mandatory participation, I can certainly believe the numbers being reported. What I want to know is how many of us would have chosen AHCA over Medicaid, had we been given a choice?
Are you sure that's the right comparison? There are over 300 million people in the US, but you only have to apply for "Obamacare" if you don't have employer-provided health care, you aren't covered by your parents, you aren't qualified to draw on Medicare or Medicaid, and your obligation is waived for religious or moral reasons. This remainder only comes out to about 20-30 million.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
If you can still find such a thing (especially for a price that isn't 2x as much as a non-HSA-eligible plan with the same terms otherwise)...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Is it really that hard to believe? While I think the way the program was implemented was shitty I think half of the problem was the republican nut jobs. Not that the democrats would have probably done a substantially better job otherwise... but...
What we should have had was a law that allowed people to write off health care costs on there taxes. And I mean if you owed $10,000 in taxes and your health insurance and health care costs came to $3,600 then you would only pay $6,400 in taxes. Would taxes go up? Yes. But it wouldn't be nearly as bad as forcing everybody to get health insurance who were so adamant about not having coverage. For those whose taxes are below a certain threshold you could maintain a government program to cover those which aren't paying into it via other peoples tax dollars. This way it guarantees everybody gets coverage who doesn't have a moral objection to it. Nobody would be forced to get coverage, but essentially everybody would be covered if they wanted coverage.
Then the government should have setup a non-profit to reduce health care costs. Let the for-profit insurance companies compete with a non-profit insurance company. One other thing the government should have done is set a minimum level of coverage that was substantial.
But that's exactly what the ACA does.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't know which numbers include children/dependents and which ones don't. That is an important bit of information. If the 60 million is individuals and the 7.1 million is plans, which is how it reads then the total coverage could be significantly higher. If it's the other way around then it is significantly worse.
I say this due to the fact of just how untrustworthy the Federal Government be come. And that's in all ways, not just with this new tax.
As a side note I'd really like to see real information on how many people have actually BOUGHT this new mandatory insurance. Last time I looked into it they were still keeping that under their proverbial hat. Wouldn't be surprised it was half... or even less.
Editor posts story from anonymous troll regurgitating punditry talking points (that were refuted last week BTW) and it headlines on Slashdot. Stats only lie if you misrepresent the context:
http://wonkette.com/545324/latest-awesome-fox-chart-unskews-obamacare-enrollment-thanks-fox
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
1. A lot of late signups. - People waiting for the individual mandate being delayed.
2. Cancelled plans. Remember "if you like your plan, you can keep it" except you can't. All those people who lost their plan were insured are now uninsured and that greatly enlarged the number of people seeking. So you can't compare before and after numbers.
3. Some companies dropped plans entirely and let their employees get their own. My company was on the verge of doing that but elected not to at the last minute.
4. The combined numbers of 2 and 3 is estimated at 6 million. So backing that out, we only got aout 1 million more insured. Which is important, but not anything to brag about.
5. I'm not entirely convinced that the 7.1M number is actual people being insured. Maybe that many logins were created but a login is not insurance.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The constitution gives the government the privilege of collecting taxes via the 16th amendment
(People have rights, governments have privileges granted to them by the consent of the governed.)
"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."
And via Article 1 which states
“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and General Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”
So, tell me which of those two limited cases allows the government to collect a tax with the intent of returning it as a tax credit after you do what they tell you?
Recognize that you are supporting slavery in a minor form by forcing someone to do something preemptively.
I mean it. I don't want you to pay for my hospital bills unless you want to. Hospitals should not be required to provide healthcare.
I will die if I must, but the abolishment of all forms of slavery will indeed be complete.
Give me liberty or give me death. Really, I welcome it.
Is it a Lie? Well lets do an impromtu survey...
There's 313 million people in the US.
7 million signed up.
So that's 2% of the country.
I know exactly 0 people that have signed up for it, and I live in a poor neighborhood.
I visited the site myself and couldn't navigate it well enough to find coverage...
So... how many people do you know that have signed up? Any?
Um.. most of US population is already covered though their employers/family plan. They're talking about the 40 million or so Americans who cannot get affordable coverage due to preexisting conditions, income restraints, and the like.
I'm sure they do have that many people signed up.
How many of them actually paid to be on it and wanted to be on it?
I'm assuming somewhere between none and 5.
But they've given to a lot of people for free and forced a lot of people into it.
So they have that going for them.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Otherwise, I'll say how dare you expect the rest of us to pay for your health care because you don't want to.
Not wanting to be forced to buy health insurance by a government that has no real constitutional authority to force you to buy what it tells you to is not he same as not expecting to have to pay for health care.
I just saw the nice new box on my W2 that shows "employer health insurance" payments. It was about five times what I would have paid out of my own pocket for my health care last year. Had my employer been legally allowed to hand me that money directly and allow me to pay as I go, I'd be several thousand dollars ahead of the game.
It's Anonymous Cowards like you that give Anonymous Coward a bad name.
No brain, no pain.
So you didn't sign up for selective service right.....
Well, there were really two options on the table:
1. We allow emergency rooms to refuse treatment to anyone who cannot provide proof of insurance. That would likely include anyone in a bad accident whose wallet/ID didn't remain on them. I'm sure we could start embedding RFID tags into the chest of every human being to carry their identity and insurance information, but short of that, I'm open to your suggestion on how else we determine who to treat and who to turn away.
2. We force everyone to carry insurance as a cost of living in this country, realizing that as a first world nation we aren't going to let people die in the streets, but letting them go to the emergency room every time they have a sniffle is unsustainable. Or worse yet, have people who do get into a bad accident just skip out on the bill and declare bankruptcy.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. There's literally no possible way that forcing everyone to buy insurance can cost us more than having people without insurance use the ER as their regular doctors visits short of a criminal act of swindling by the insurance companies and/or hospitals.
Except I can CHOOSE to not own a car, and I don't need insurance at that point.
Call me when I can CHOOSE to not carry health insurance.
That's why so many are crying foul.
My question is why we didn't just roll this whole broken process under medicare.
It's not like the government hasn't been in the health industry for the last century anyway.
At least then it's less confusing who's robbing you. Better the devil you know.
Figures never lie, but lairs figure....
One of the hallmarks of "excessive figuring" is using numbers that have unnecessary precision. 7.1 Million is just slightly above the 7 Million target, (which was lowered from the 42 Million) which was the number of people who LOST their coverage because of Obamacare. It has more digits than we need and certainly more digits than they have been willing/able to report up until this point. Tells me they made it up.
They INVENTED this number, likely by adding up uncertain sums, in order to be able to throw a party. "Yea! Success! Ra Ra" This was all for political show.
Don't get me started about how nebulous they are on what this number actually represents... Visitors to HealthCare.gov? Actual policies being selected? Actual premiums paid? We don't know and they are not saying, because if they do they know somebody will call them on it.
Finally, I'm quite gratified that the number really doesn't matter... That's not really what the debate is about... But, even as a matter of LAW with fines involved, you can only get 7.1 million out of 20 million to sign up, something is desperately wrong...
> This ALWAYS this you crybabies whine about right up until it is your ASS being left out front of the hospital. Then it is all about SAVE ME!
Prior to ACA hospitals were required to provide emergency medical care regardless of the person's ability to pay under the EMTALA. Granted it might not be great care, but the idea that someone would be left out of a hospital if they had a serious problem is just FUD. Theoretically people are still responsible for paying any care they receive, but in practice so often they are low income with a lot of debt already and the hospital will just write it off.
In fact, one of the reasons for ACA was because the EMTALA was a huge problem. It was estimated that about 55% of emergency care goes uncompensated. By forcing people to carry insurance, hospitals will be less on the hook for emergency care.
So to your point, with or without ACA you wouldn't be left out of a hospital, but now with ACA they can better make you pay.
Take a look, they are ALL "High Deductible" now, at least for what I was given to choose from.
Unless the first 6k-10k is chump change to you.
No brain, no pain.
Obama needed to land on an aircraft carrier to celebrate the 7 million signups, with a big banner reading "7.1 Million", but I guess the GOP wouldn't get the irony.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Didn't they find that the penalty was legal only as a tax? (even though the administration says it isn't)
If you can still find such a thing (especially for a price that isn't 2x as much as a non-HSA-eligible plan with the same terms otherwise)...
I have found the opposite to be true. I have an HDHP, and it is about half the price of a "standard" plan. Why wouldn't it be? The high deductible saves the insurance company money. Furthermore, HDHPs are bought primarily by self-selecting healthy people that expect their medical expenses to be low. The last time I went to a doctor was in 1997.
For help you could read what the supreme court justices said about the legislation.
They said it was constitutional. Good enough for me.
Are you able to show us the terms of your plan? The reason I ask is that I was offered what turned out to be a "trash plan", and the sort of things that aren't being grandfathered are rejected because they don't meet a minimum standard of care. In my case, a catastrophic injury such as in an auto wreck would not have been covered significantly.
The lady who famously confronted Obama on this issue had a plan that limited its payout to a few hundred dollars.
Bruce Perens.
Are you sure that's the right comparison?
Like I said 60 million is the better comparison. So, 7.1 million would just be 12% of the uninsured. Or 23% if you exclude a bunch of groups like you would.
But really a lot of those 7.1 million people were previously insured last year. Bottom line is that Obamacare hasn't really addressed the uninsured problem, let alone actually made structural reforms to the health care system. It is a band-aid on the current HMO/health insurance system in order to stem the tide of people dropping overly expensive insurance plans. We still are left with a system which is the most expensive in the world with poorer health outcomes.
British or American?
I just saw the nice new box on my W2 that shows "employer health insurance" payments. It was about five times what I would have paid out of my own pocket for my health care last year. Had my employer been legally allowed to hand me that money directly and allow me to pay as I go, I'd be several thousand dollars ahead of the game.
Yes, and I just got the wonderful news that despite having made no changes in my salary or withholding, I owe $4,000 in taxes and penalties this year, as opposed to the $2,000 I got back last year. Plus I now have to pay quarterly estimated taxes the first of which is due in 5 days. So something made a $6,000 difference in my taxes between last year and this year, which pretty much means a $18,000 change in income. I suppose that must be the fact that insurance premiums are no longer deductible, although what my employe was paying for my healthcare premiums was nowhere near $18,000 last year.
If my tax burden is going to go up by $6,000 a year, the least somebody can do is give me an extra $6,000 post tax to pay it with. I can't continue to have no raise, no COLA, and have Obama continue to take more and more percentage out of my paycheck.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Some of the initial proposals in what ultimate became Obamacare actually did include expanding Medicaid coverage far upward of where it is, or allowing early buy-ins of Medicare. Those ideas were swiftly rejected because, you know, socialism and stuff. And the private insurance industry would be shut out of the sweet sweet profits and we couldn't have that, no, nuh-uh.
Thus, the idea was nixed, and we're stuck with what we have for now. Thankfully, what we have is better in many ways.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
African
Yes, that is the correct number. So our rulers are telling us that 7 million out of 40 million is great.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Um.. most of US population is already covered though their employers/family plan. They're talking about the 40 million or so Americans who cannot get affordable coverage due to preexisting conditions, income restraints, and the like.
And apparently most of those people still can't get affordable coverage
You're SERIOUSLY misguided. That act ONLY means they have to help, IF YOU'RE ACTIVELY DYING.
Got Cancer? After that shit has gone malignant, they'll provide a bed the last couple days of your very short life...
Just think, you could have had universal healthcare, single payer, provided by the government, like Canada and every other industrialized nation on earth, but the moment that was proposed by Obama, the GOP had a cow, the Tea Party starting bringing guns to Town Hall meetings and Fox News screamed bloody murder that Obama was denying insurance companies their god-given right to make a profit at the expense of the American people, and the democrats caved in and let the heritage foundation proposed Romney-Care become the model for Obamacare. Wow that was a long sentence.
So you can thank Republicans for the current state of Obamacare, a plan they championed as a replacement for the original proposal, and then right after it passed into law, attempted to repeal it 51 times.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Take your hands off the keyboard, take a deep breath, and start posting again when you can express yourself without being offensive.
So....no preventative care, just reactionary care......even someone that seems fairly healthy can have untreated issues that early treatment can cure.
> They said it was constitutional. Good enough for me.
Then you are a mindless sheep that's wasting your birthright while less worthless people are risking their lives to be "illegal".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That's exactly how I feel here. How dare you expect me to pay this insurance for you? I haven't been to the hospital in years!
If I need something done to me I'm driving to Mexico anyway! Their healthcare is less expensive and higher quality!
If you tried to predict how many people would hand in term papers by looking at the numbers up to the last day before the paper is due, you'd surely conclude that there was no chance of nearly everybody handing in a term paper. But that's nothing on concluding how many people would file their tax return by the April due-date by looking at the submissions up to mid-March.
I mean, HONESTLY, it takes a few hours for most people to sign-up and everybody puts everything off until they have to.
The discussion on how it would be allowed by the constitution was a big thing when it was first past. If Obama had followed what is allowed by the Constitution he would not of had the problem he is currently having with it.
I'm just curious. Why is it that so many countries in the world have universal health care paid by the population (through taxes) yet one of the most prosperous and powerful countries in the world can't figure it out or refuses to implement it?
Is capitalist greed getting in the way or am I missing something?
Also, this is EXACTLY how car insurance works.
False. Auto insurance makes no guarantee to pay car repairs for people who cannot afford auto insurance. There is not even a sliding scale. Auto insurance only pays for those who pay in and the amount you pay in is determined by their statistical assessment of how much they are likely to have to pay out for you personally.
Also, before auto insurance was made mandatory, it was also a lot cheaper. I pay more per month now than I paid per year when I was 16 years old, and the car I had when I was 16 was 8 years old, versus the 13 year old car I have been driving. I have had 0 accidents in my entire lifetime, 0 hail damage, 0 payouts of any kind. When I was 16, insurance wasn't mandatory, but now it is.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Actually, in the UK, it really does work like that. Even if you're only visiting the UK for a 2 hour period, and manage to become seriously ill in that time, you'll get free treatment there.
Besides the other false things you have said when did the US Federal Government start requiring car insurance?
But the government taxes you under the ACA even if you have no income. If you don't buy insurance, they assess the penalties until you start earning income. They are, literally, taxing you for breathing.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Weird article, it seems to be claiming that there is some mathematical law that prevents sign-up's by increasing by 90%
I can increase any number you give me by 90%, what's the difficulty.
200000 -----> 380000
Gosh that was hard...
Unfortunately, it doesn't help the people in GOP states that refuse to expand Medicaid to cover those who cannot afford Obamacare... they're just left to die.
http://www.thewire.com/politic...
1.7 Trillion. If you have a better source, I welcome it. Much of our military budget is hidden in other budget categories via legalese. I assure you, the corruption runs deep.
http://www.globalissues.org/ar...
Over the last 10 years or so, all health insurance has gone to crap. Plans have gotten worse and costs increased at a staggering pace. Even if you have the best plan available, it's still crap. Liberals love to propagate this narrative that ignorant Republicans like to cling to "bad plans". But they're all "bad plans".
An HSA is a nice tax sheltered way to sock away your deductible. So you get to pay for medical expenses with non-taxed income.
Plus, it is a concept that fosters an adult level self reliance and personal responsibility.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I've been following the debate, and the projections of how much of a "surge" could be expected in the last weeks that were coming from conservative anti-ACA sources were all stupidly, shockingly, low. As though people do not put things off. Now that their utterly ridiculous estimates have been blown out of the water, they just cannot believe how wrong they were. Nothing surprising about that.
How many of these people are newly-insured, how many will actually pay, how many will keep paying the whole year, how many will actually be helped by having insurancee, whether the provisions in ACA intended to control health-care costs work at all--these are all questions that will take more time to answer. But one thing you can bet on, the guesses being thrown around by the rabid ACA opponents will turn out to be wildly wrong, again.
Pre-tax deductions have not changed. I don't know what wacko changes have changed your taxes, but it ain't ACA.
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?
I'm between jobs again. I'm enrolled for insurance under the AHCA. I'm getting bills from my primary care physician's office because (despite what I was led to believe) I'm subject to a $5,200 individual deductable - and that was the BEST plan I saw offered under the AHCA. Incidentally, I'm not planning to pay that bill; at least, not until I find my next job.
(PERSONAL OPINION FOLLOWS)
I'll say this, though - as a mechanism to keep me in financial servitude, the AHCA is right up there with debtor's prison and serfdom as a model. I can reasonably foresee ending up a lifetime servant of the medical industry if I don't find myself a better way to pay for health care. Medicaid still exists, but there's no way to qualify for it now without facing a hefty fine. Either way, economic serfdom. Karl Marx would indeed be proud of the AHCA as a mechanism to propel a free enterprise society towards a socialist state.
7.1+ million is the number of PRIVATE insurance policies through federal/state exchanges. That doesn't count the under 26 on parent's plans, the expanded medicaid people, the previously eligible but never-enrolled medicaid families, the directly enrolled with insurance company policies, and anyone who decided to pay for their employer plan who previously didn't. Oh, and let's not forget the 5+ million blocked by Republican run states from expanded medicaid! You can't trot out a 60 million number and then only count one aspect of the law and compute a percentage off that. That makes no sense.
In 2-3 years the number uninsured will drop much farther. The penalties for not enrolling keep going up for the next few years so it will make more sense to get insurance than pay the penalty for some people and the employer mandates start kicking in as well.
Unfortunately it will be 5-8 years before we can see if the rate of growth in health care expenditures for the country as a whole goes down. If the cost curve bends downwards at all it will be a huge success in the face of the baby boomers retiring and going onto medicare. That's the WHOLE POINT of Obamacare actually. To bend the cost curve downwards before it totally wrecks the budget beyond all repair. I can't figure out the Republican plan for the future. On the one hand they want to cover the really sick by setting up high risk pools (which I'm sure after being setup they won't actually fund at any reasonable level) to cover people the insurance companies won't cover, and keep raising the medicare age to "control" costs (just check out their latest 10 year plan!). Those middle class blue-collar workers sure are going to love paying HUGE premiums after they retire but before medicare would kick in if they keep raising the age requirement.
One last comment... I'm sure the next argument will be that rates will go up next year. My god, it's like nobody ever made a chart of rate increases for the last 10 years. When haven't they gone up? Often by huge amounts. Companies charge more while reducing benefits and raising deductibles every year. The good news is the law already protects you! They HAVE to spend 80% of premiums on healthcare for their customers or cut you a check for the difference! If they raise their rates too much you get a rebate. Oh, and even the increases can be adjusted before they go into effect by state auditors if it looks like they are trying to gouge customers.
The only people who really have anything to complain about are young people. The 3:1 old-to-young insurance rate means they are subsidizing older people to some extent. 4:1 might have been fairer in my opinion.
My individual deductable is only $5,200. Hell, that's chump change to an unemployed guy like me.
Isn't medicaid expansion part of the plan?
Though the thought strikes - why not just have medicaid cover the whole population? What is the logic of tying medical insurance to a job anyway. I'm probably more likely to be sick when I'm not working!
You must have missed the part where I said "same terms otherwise." Sure, an HSA-eligible with a $10K deductible is obviously going to be cheaper than some "cadillac" plan with a $500 deductible, but it's not going to be cheaper than a non-HSA-eligible $10K deductible plan. Quite the opposite -- it will in fact be more expensive despite having the same coverage and the same deductible, and by a large margin, too.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Fixed that for you.
Plus a huge number of enrollees have not actually made an insurance premium payment so they are not really signed up and insured. What was the percentage being reported, something like 15% to 20%?
Straight out of the GOP talking points. Read the LA Times, they have article explaining it for the mentally challenged.
Are you sure that you are not the one with the political blinders on?
...
...
... "I think people are enrolling in multiple places,” he said in a conference call. “They are shopping. And what happens is that they never really get back on HealthCare.gov to disenroll from plans they prior enrolled in" ...
...
...
..."
Clue: Politicians don't have to lie when the facts coincidentally happen to be on their side. A talking point is not inherently erroneous.
That said I am not a reader of the GOP talking points, I recalled the stats from traditional media. From the liberal New York Times:
"WASHINGTON — One in five people who signed up for health insurance under the new health care law failed to pay their premiums on time and therefore did not receive coverage in January, insurance companies and industry experts say. Paying the first month’s premium is the final step in completing an enrollment. Under federal rules, people must pay the initial premium to have coverage take effect
Lindy Wagner, a spokeswoman for Blue Shield of California, said that 80 percent of those who signed up for its plans had paid by the due date
Matthew N. Wiggin, a spokesman for Aetna, said that about 70 percent of people who signed up for its health plans paid their premiums
Kristin E. Binns, a vice president of WellPoint, said that 76 percent of people selecting its health plans on an exchange had paid their share of the first month’s premium
One big company, Humana, said it had received 200,000 applications for insurance through the exchanges. “About 75 percent of the people paid, and 25 percent did not pay,”
Greg Thompson, a spokesman for the Health Care Service Corporation, which offers Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans in Illinois, Texas and three other states, said that “around 80 percent” of people choosing those plans had paid their first month’s premium
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02...
I've see what happens to people subjected to "preventative" care. One bad diagnostic metric and they end up on a whole battery of pharmaceuticals with a cascading set of side effects.
The drugs are subsidized so there's a huge hidden cost and the drugs play all sorts of havoc with the body... all of this to avoid basic lifestyle changes that would have been considered an obvious approach in the past.
"Seems healthy" probably is. That idea that "seems healthy" is not, is a big problem in modern medicine and something that supports the attitude of the other guy.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Pathetic! Get off Slashdot.
Bust your ass to either find an existing job, or figure out something you can do to create your own job.
"Except I can CHOOSE to not own a car, and I don't need insurance at that point.
Call me when I can CHOOSE to not carry health insurance."
That's not quite an accurate analog (although partial points for continuing the car analogy.)
More accurate is "I can CHOOSE not to live, and I don't need insurance at that point."
...and what's the monthly cost of a plan that will relieve you of that burden?
Chances are that the marginal cost of such a plan will DWARF that deductible.
Despite what you may have been told, insurance companies are not charities. If they are giving you something for "free", then it's being paid for somehow. Perhaps you're even the one that's paying for it. Or perhaps you are lucky and are able to MOOCH off the rest of us.
Someone, somewhere has to pick up the tab.
The overhead of running the transaction through an insurance carrier is not trivial. For smaller claims, the transaction overhead may be more than the value of the "free" service.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Not to me, it isn't. Now, I can't even fall back onto Medicaid without incurring hefty fines. The result is that now I have medical bills which ain't gettin' paid (at least, not until I get my next job).
Other important questions: how many of those 7.1 million have actually paid for the policies, and how many just went through the web site? Also, how many of these policies are insuring the previously uninsured, and how many are insuring people who lost their previous insurance due to the ACA?
I don't have those numbers. Nobody seems to have those numbers... Kathleen Sebelius has said "we don't know that" (see YouTube link below).
I have a suspicion that if the numbers were good, somehow they would have the numbers.
The DailyMail article says that a RAND Corporation study estimates that the number of previously uninsured people who have actually paid for their policies is: 858,000 (well under a million!). I haven't found a source for this. I believe they computed this number themselves, by reading the RAND report and by using the percentages in that report.
Avik Roy read the same report, and reports the number as 1.4 million +/- 0.7 million, i.e. 700,000 people to 2.1 million people, 95% confidence.
I believe this is the RAND Corporation study being discussed: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR600/RR656/RAND_RR656.pdf
References:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2594309/President-plans-victory-lap-strong-Obamacare-enrollment-Sebelius-faces-unpopular-law-blank-stare-tough-questions-remain-whos-signing-up.html
http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/30/news/economy/obamacare-premiums/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXDdmRaJy2c
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/04/09/rand-comes-clean-obamacares-exchanges-enrolled-only-1-4-million-previously-uninsured-individuals/
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Doesn't that say 39% of 1.7bn for the US.
The Fed doesn't require car insurance. However, most if not all states require vehicle owners to carry some sort of liability insurance. http://personalinsure.about.co...
Try having cancer with the old system, you'll see how much your insurance company "cares". Even with coverage, entire families would still go bankrupt.
And the thing about cancer is it seems to strike regardless of how healthy your lifestyle is.
Fact 1) 7.1 million were the number that signed up using exchange. NOT all the people that got insurance, just the number that signed up.
Fact 2) It did not include the people that were told they were approved for Medicaid.
Fact 3) It did not include the people that picked their own insurance not on the exchanges.
Fact 4)It did not included the young people now signed up on their parents plans.
You need to compare apples to apples. That is, 60 million without insurance before hand vs ??? million without insurance after hand. Trying to do 7.1/60 just demonstrates your complete inability to do honest math.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
They know full well that there are not 7.1 million newly insured people who are previously uninsured, which is basically what Carney claimed in a press conference yesterday.
About 5 million of those people are those who had their policies canceled, and about 2 million are previously-uninsured/uninsurable people who signed up. The number of people who have actually paid, out of these 7 million, remains a closely-guarded secret.
You're right about the 7.1 million. It's actually closer to a net gain of 9 million according to a RAND estimate:
http://www.rand.org/blog/2014/04/survey-estimates-net-gain-of-9-3-million-american-adults.html
See also this Urban Insititute study:
http://hrms.urban.org/quicktakes/changeInUninsurance.html
It's not capitalist greed, it's anti-free-market greed. Note that non-essential medical services such as plastic surgery and laser eye surgery continuously get better and cheaper over time. That is, I could get the same laser eye surgery today for cheaper, or pay a similar amount for higher-quality laser eye surgery. It's much the same as with computing hardware or any other relatively unregulated market, and quite the opposite of what's happening with healthcare, namely that it gets worse and way more expensive over time. I don't know why forcing everybody in the United States to buy managed healthcare plans would improve the situation at all.
Sorry - this is just an effort to redistribute the wealth, while providing the illusion that it is making health care affordable. I'm already getting bills for daring to see a physician while between jobs - bills which I can't pay. Just saying - I was a lot better off before AHCA became the law of the land.
Yes, but you try getting a proper single payer healthcare system through Congress. Senators are already bought and sold by the healthcare middlemen, there's no political will to fix the problem.
I read the internet for the articles.
The worst part is, they removed the single payer option in order to bring over some Republican votes, and in the end no Republicans voted for it. IMHO, they should have put the single payer option back in there if Republicans weren't going to go for it anyway. What would they do, vote to repeal it a 52nd time?
I read the internet for the articles.
I don't remember the exact numbers, but I remember going to my University, the poli-sci went over the numbers and the amount of money we spent on the "war" over 3 years was enough to cover all hospital costs for all of the USA and send everyone to college, assuming the average cost, for 10 years. I would personally rather have a highly educated healthy society than running about the planet killing other people who pose less threat than pollution or drunk drivers.
Such as the smokers, the obese, alcoholics and drug users who can continue with their merry lifestyles, safe and secure in the knowledge everyone else is forced to hand over their money so they don't have to take personal responsibility for their actions, right?
Healthcare concerns shouldn't force lifestyle changes on people. This will lead to people living their lives indoors in plastic bubbles because we can't risk them getting sick, ill, or even sunburned.
If smoking, alcoholism, etc. are a burden on the healthcare system, perhaps we should have some sort of tax on the purchase of tobacco and alcohol, and then use that tax to cover the costs of healthcare.
And every smoker, alcoholic, drug user, etc. does indeed have to take personal responsibility for their actions. No matter how good the health care system is or gets, they are paying with premature death.
They're talking about the 40 million or so Americans who cannot get affordable coverage due to preexisting conditions, income restraints, and the like.
The problem is that they are talking about them and not actually offering people affordable insurance.
Don't worry, that reactionary care will be a lot more expensive, so he's more likely to hit his deductible and actually use his insurance. Preventative care can so cheap in comparison that it doesn't make nearly enough profit.
I read the internet for the articles.
If Obama had the balls he could have called it a tax from the start. Then there would be an ObamaCare tax on my paystub next to the SSI and Medicare one.
While I would not have particularly like that, it at least would have not been a Harvard Con Law Professor wiping his butt with the Constitution.
This kind of dishonesty leads to all kinds of nasty consequences and corruption that are ultimately bad for business. The biggest problem isn't even the personal liberty angle. The biggest problem is really how the personal liberty angle feeds into our prosperity as a nation.
Things like predictability and the rule of law aren't just academic or theoretical issues.
There are perfectly crass reasons to care about the rules.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's absolutely stunning that 7.1 million people "signed up for Obamacare" since that isn't actually a thing that exists. They're signing up for an ACA-compliant plan through a private, third party insurance agency.
Yep, and then you would get cancer, run out of money after two weeks, and die.
If you could guarantee that you'll never get sick or injured, then insurance would be a waste of money. It's all about risk management. Hospital bills are ruinous (fun fact: they're the #1 cause of Bankruptcy in the US) which makes going without insurance risky. Worse, if you got injured and brought into an ER they would still operate on you, and then everybody else would have to share the burden (plus a big chunk of other fees associated with the inefficiency of trying to bill someone without insurance) anyway. So you're just being a selfish jerk really. You're not paying your fair share, but still expect to be treated when you get sick or injured.
If Libertarians were willing to just die on the street properly when they ran out of money after a simple injury, then the system would be cheaper for everybody. But they never follow through on this.
I read the internet for the articles.
...false dichotomy.
Option 3 is to encourage the propagation of less expensive urgent treatment facilities. Get hospitals (that are the real villan of this story) out of the situation. You could even make these non-ERs free in certain areas.
In any given situation, a hospital is the least efficient option. Their prices are complex and opaque and they crassly exploit their status as "non profits" to make out like bandits.
The percieved higher cost of American healthcare is probably entirely driven by bogus billing numbers from hospitals.
Although just about no one wants to be stuck with nothing but medicare patients. The government doesn't pay enough to keep the lights on. They are an equally untenable extreme.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That right there takes balls.
Article clearly states that the 1.7 trillion dollar number (Which is not "Trillions") is the GLOBAL military spending.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
in March from what I heard of the issue. They still have many more to go (about 3% of the American population) - but it's also going to be one of the biggest drains on the enrollment figures long-term. A complete case of short term gains in publicity for long-term consequences in the form of expenses. Pretty much typical Obama procedure.
with as much confidence as you can believe in electronic voting results.
BS - You pay unless your a college student, a citizen from another European Union country that signed an agreement with the NHS, or other select cases
From the NHS - http://www.nhs.uk/chq/pages/10...
The cost for the treatment you received in the 90s probably doubled or tripled by now, so it's questionable how long Medicaid would be sustainable
I am just curious. Why is it that the country that had the best economic climate and great standard of living was the one that did not strap all of its citizens with this shit?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Quite the opposite -- it will in fact be more expensive despite having the same coverage and the same deductible, and by a large margin, too.
Bullshit.
Believe it or not, some parts of the US have reverted to for-pay fire protection. If you don't pay, your house burns down. Tennessee for example. The homeowner was furious that the fire department wouldn't save his home, but that's the gamble you take when you opt out of coverage.
This case doesn't really apply to medical care however, because if you show up in the sick or injured to an ER, doctors ethically have to treat you. They can't just throw you out on the street and let you die, even though that's what would be most "fair" when you opt out of insurance.
I read the internet for the articles.
So....no preventative care, just reactionary care...
Actually, even with HSA + HDP there was always some basic preventative care covered at 100%, and the ACA now requires a bit more...
It's nice that the ACA gives everyone health insurance. However, it does little of anything to address the fact that health care in this country costs far more than it should (3 times as much by some comparisons to other first world countries). People need to stop interchanging "health insurance" and "healthcare". They are not the same thing.
every time they bring up obamacare there are almost instantly stories of private health insurance refusing to insure people or grossly overcharging families. The gop appear to be out of touch with what is important to people.
So people without insurance who currently pay nothing to go to the ER would instead go to an urgent care facility because it's less expensive? Outside of the fact that urgent care facilities already exist and have had exactly 0 impact on the ER problem, the basis of your logic is nonexistent. You can't make something cheaper than free - there's no incentive for someone to go to an urgent care facility in place of an ER.
I'm just curious. Why is it that so many countries in the world have universal health care paid by the population (through taxes) yet one of the most prosperous and powerful countries in the world can't figure it out or refuses to implement it?
Is capitalist greed getting in the way or am I missing something?
The common lie is to tell people that they would be paying for health care for illegal aliens. America is so full of hatred and anger, that they would rather have their entire family die of cancer than think that one cent went to giving aspirin to an illegal. It's really a sad sick state that this country is in right now, completely controlled by corporate greed.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
I've see what happens to people subjected to "preventative" care.
You'd be interested in this. Not that I'm suggesting you take time from your life to read the book, but the description is enough...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You bet, and your right. I love hearing rich people whine about this issue as if it actually effects them in real way. I feel the same way about food stamps. I really think as a nation we have some serious problems with class warfare. Do rich people really miss that 36 bucks that was trimmed off food stamps. I guess we should be like india and just let people die in the street.
Yeah, that's how much is spent globally. You said our government, yearly. I am well aware that our government is more corrupt now than ever before. But I'm not about to just start making stuff up, like you did above.
Obamacare (as well as Romneycare) does nothing to lower health costs...
Sure it does. There's way more to the ACA than health exchanges and elimination of denials for pre-existing conditions. Whether or not the provisions aimed at controlling costs actually work or not will take a long time to figure out. But ACOs and medical homes and and PCORI...
citing Al Gore on global warming, or Dick Cheney on "enhanced interrogations" .. hardly un-biased
We know that between 5 and 6 million Americans were kicked-off their insurance policies (this was well documented, all you had to do was add-up the numbers as they were reported in each state (many states have laws requiring filings for mass-layoffs, or mass insurance policy cancellations, or other things that can impact a state economy)) and we know that the Obama administration claims 7.1 million signed-up (but they claim they are unable to say how many have paid, or how many were just seeking policies to replace cancelled policies). The insurance companies are reporting that about 1/5th of the new signers have not paid any premiums. We also know that several (mostly Democrat-run) states signed-up prison inmates both to drive-up the numbers and to shift costs for prison inmate care onto the federal taxpayer. These are things we know.
There are many more, and arguably more-important things we do NOT know. For example, if you are currently uninsured you are in a place unique in American history thanks to a clause in the ACA legislation: you have no legal way to buy insurance during the next 7 months (unless you marry, or change jobs). Before 2014, any American could shop for a product like insurance on any business day of the year ... we simply do not know what the impact of new policies like this will be. We also do not know the costs of the employer mandate, because the President illegally extended the illegal exemption he gave them until after this fall's elections. (and before somebode rants about my use of the term "illegal", let me remind you that there is no law giving him that authority and the proper legal way to do it would have been to go to congress and ask for a law giving him the authority to act, which was good enough for all previous presidents). We also do not know what the 2015 rates will be, though all the insurance companies say (and the Obama administration itself admits) that they will be "significantly higher" (NOBODY's projections of "how much higher" should be believed at this time). The degree of increase might be driven-up more than expected by the president's many unilateral changes to the law (because insurance companies will have to make allowances for future potential changes) but again we cannot know the magnitude of this effect.
We need to stick to the facts and leave the extreme partisans like Limbaugh and Krugman out of it. Both supporters and critics need to face the fact that nobody is able to generate solid numbers on this stuff yet. It turns out that not only do we need to pass this law before we can know what's in it... we probably have to live under it fore several years to even see honest solid numbers.
don't any of you recall, just a few days ago, news photos showing long long long lines of people signing up at the last minute
more total right wing FUD
every single person on this site, except for young healthy people and rich people (~ 15% of the population) is better off
why ?
cause if you have employer health insurance, and have or get a pre existing condition, you no longer have to live in fear of loosing your employer insurance
if you don't have employer insurance, you can now get it at a reasonable price (all the horror storys i know of are false; lie after lie after lie from the srw)
Now that Obamacare IS the system and it IS the problem, then maybe on one side of the isle we can talk about fixing Obamacare and on the other we can talk about replacing.... and mean the same thing.
But seriously, on the left I think we/they should be happy with a compromise that sees an expansion of medicaid and some sort of very basic universal healthcare paid for with a broad base progressive tax. Not single payer for everything, just emergency medicine for all and a few sick visits. Figure another 2% on top of the medicare tax.
And for conservatives, introduce an option to opt out of the insurance market and not get fined under the individual mandate. Instead of an Insurance mandate, give people an option for a savings mandate. So you have to save up to 5% of your income every year until you have saved a certain amount of money, say $50k or $100k (indexed to inflation).
Treat the savings option like a Traditional/Roth IRA where you can invest the savings however you like, but only take it out tax free for medical expenses until retirement age. But then at retirement make it tax free up to a certain amount. Encouraging more savings and investment should also help with a retirement savings problem that we have in this country.
Situation 1) No law requiring people to buy healthcare, no law blocking insurance companies from denying you healthcare for pre-existing situations. They can even deny you healthcare for brain cancer because you have diabetes. (or worse, accept you, then deny coverage because you failed to disclose you had diabetes). People that get screwed: a) anyone that is not 100% healthy and also b) anyone that risks going without insurance but ends up needing it.
Situations 2) Law requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions, but no law requiring people to buy insurance. People that get screwed: Insurance companies, as people wait till after they get sick to buy insurance. Then after insurance companies all go bankrupt, everyone gets screwed.
Situation 3) Law requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions and also a law requiring people to buy insurance. People that get screwed: Anyone that wanted to risk going without good insurance and would have been lucky enough not to need it.
The first situation was what we used to have. The second situation is what we tried to avoid. The third situation is what we have now. Please note it only screw up assholes that tried to take ridiculous gambles and happened to be lucky enough to win the gamble.
We had a choice - screw over the sick, screw over insurance companies (which would have eventually led to a truly government controlled healthcare), or require everyone to buy insurance. We wisely made the best possible decision.
P.S.I am employed and have good healthcare - which I desperately need because I got sick (nasty virus) in college and my kidneys have slowly been dying over the past 20 years, despite the fact that I don't drink, etc. I have maybe 5 more years till I need a transplant and am clearly one of the people that will very much benefit from Obamacare.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I apologize for my mistake. You are indeed correct. I misread my source. Instead of trillions it should properly read several hundreds of billions of dollars. Wunderbar.
It's a multilayered thing. I'd say that the U.S. population is made up of the misfits and cast-offs from other countries, and as a result has very different cultural leanings than other countries. Those leanings are wonderful tools for the sociopaths that run our corporations. "Supporting others is welfare/socialism, and that's (dun dun DUN) Communism!". Or maybe "The government is taking away your right to free choice! Isn't that why you left [country of origin]?!"
People with power and influence play the rest of the population like fiddles. Those in power decided that (at least in the short term) government-controlled health care would be bad for profits, so they play on the unique insecurities inherent to American culture to achieve their goals.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
You're not paying your fair share, but still expect to be treated when you get sick or injured.
So, $12,000 for insurance to cover what cost $2000 to provide and I'm not only not paying my fair share, but I shouldn't expect to be treated when I get sick or injured. Thanks. Do you have a newsletter I can sign up for?
Just how many times expenses should everyone's health insurance cost so that you can get your treatments when you want them?
On The Media just put out some audio on this topic. They came to the conclusion that politicians on both sides (Democrat and Republican) are using some really questionable numbers. Harry Reid (Democrat) claimed 10 million, while John Boehner (Republican) was claiming that there was a *decline* in the number of people with health insurance over the past three months. http://www.onthemedia.org/stor... (7 minutes)
I love people that talk up universal healthcare in other countries but have never had to live under it. After living with it in 3 countries, I will take quality of the healthcare here rather than the crap you have to go through in elsewhere.
Obamacare is a bunch of crap that was thrown together in a few months. You can thank both parties for this mess and it should be repealed, and if a workable model can be designed and rolled out then so be it. But Democrats want the rich to pay for anything and everything, and the Republicans do not want to pay anything so you are left with two worthless parties all the way to the top. From the president on down should all be replaced, they are all failures and for the most part self serving.
As a Canadian, I can tell you that most provinces have a few months wait between the time you take up residence and the time you can get health insurance.
Yes, this is a personal experience, not a documented wide-ranging issue. But . . . I'm not an edge case, I'm part of a fairly large group. I don't believe my experiences are unique in this regard. The Affordable Health Care Act is not providing me with affordable health care, but rather the opposite.
Incidentally, Medicaid has existed since the sixties. Many people then said it would be unsustainable, yet it continued to work just fine until last year. SO . . . how long until the AHCA becomes unsustainable? It's already essentially unusable to me, but a lot of insurance companies are making money providing an insanely low level of protection.
Preventative care can so cheap in comparison ...
There is plenty of evidence that this is NOT TRUE. Two of the most common "preventative care" treatments are prostate exams for men, and mammograms for women. Prostrate exams led to so many false positives and unnecessary treatments that they are no longer recommended for most men. Many health organizations have come to the same conclusion about mammograms. They are only marginally effective at detecting real malignancies, but generate lots of false positives, and expose breast tissue to radiation.
There is a difference between making stuff up and misreading something. He provided a source for that purpose, so that truth might be found. And when it comes down to it there is little difference made in his initial point: that there is a massive amount of waste.
Perhaps they are prosperous because they aren't doing it.
Quite the opposite -- it will in fact be more expensive despite having the same coverage and the same deductible, and by a large margin, too.
Bullshit.
I second this BS call. If the insurance industry is really running a vast conspiracy to undermine HSAs, then I would like to see some evidence. I would also want to hear what possible motive they would have.
I have an HSA and a HDHP, and it is vastly more cost effective (for me) than the plans available on the ACA website.
70% of Canadian health care costs are covered by private insurance.
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Yes, the hospital 'writes it off' but then, how do they pay for it? Buy upcharging everybody else.
(and upcharging every one else for lots of other things).
TANSTAAFL
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I signed up 4 times before I got it to work. My buddy had a family so he signed up 7 and counting.
That attitude is everything wrong with your country right now. Just because he disagrees with you about what is best does not mean he is less worthy to be American.
> I don't know why forcing everybody in the United States to buy managed healthcare plans would improve the situation at all.
It's not; it's more of a deal with the devil, if you will. Forcing people to buy insurance is mostly the corporate handout part of the bill, made in exchange for things like the insurance companies loosening pre-existing condition restrictions, etc. (Whether it's a good deal is certainly up for debate, but I don't think it was.)
As I mentioned above, hospitals must help people too poor to pay, and they loose a lot of money; by forcing people to buy insurance, they can get paid. And, of course, the insurance companies are paid too, because they ultimately change more than the cost (that's how insurance works). Because the poor get subsidies, it's mostly taxpayer money fueling that machine. Additionally, it forces young people to buy insurance which is a generally quite profitable area since problems in young people are generally much less frequent and expensive to treat.
At the end of the day, though, it doesn't really do anything to fix the anti-free-market effects that created the problems to begin with. It just cements the protection racket in place (particularly with the pervasive deductible plans): pay an insurance company or pay 3x the fair price when you see a doctor.
Even if they pass a law stating it, no major medical educational center will support it. There are a lot of ethics involved with being a doctor and abandoning those ethics, even if support by law, will land you with no license to practice.
You are conflating 2 separate things: improvements in diagnostics and treatment, and access to those things. Plenty of acute care (and non-acute) treatments and tests such as CAT scans, etc have improved dramatically over the last few years, so what's your point again? Oh! Right! If the government is involved in making access to these things, it's Bad(TM). Obviously, the OP pointed out that world-wide experience shows that single-payer, universal coverage is far more efficient and - oh, yeah - compassionate than our layers upon layers of BS insurance companies and their "Utilization Review Committees", aka "Death Panels".
I don't know if what you're saying is technically correct with regard to the law, but it's certainly not how hospitals act in practice. From what I've seen a for-profit hospital will patch you up well enough that you can survive transport to a not-for-profit and a not-for-profit will provide whatever care is reasonably necessary to help you get better.
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I'm sure with a headline like this, we will all have an intelligent, objective discussion.
Encouraging people to buy health insurance certainly counts as promoting the "General Welfare of the United States". That's about the vaguest, least limiting wording I could have imagined. Allowing the government to collect taxes to promote the "General Welfare" is pretty much a blank check allowing it to do so for any purpose whatsoever.
You may not like that. You may think Article 1 should have been much more explicit and restrictive in its wording. That's fine. You're allowed to disagree with the Constitution, and you're allowed to campaign to get it changed. But for the present, it says what it says, and you don't have the right to pretend it says something different from what it plainly does say. (Morally speaking. Legally, I suppose you have the right to pretend whatever you want, but that doesn't make it true.)
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
In the first year of Obamacare we will still have more uninsured than in the last year of the Bush administration
Bullshit. Best estimate I've seen is that right now, today, the number of uninsured has been decreased by about 25%.
7.1 million sign ups out of over 300 million people for a "mandatory" participation program is truly pathetic regardless whether it is above or below what was expected. Yes yes, I know the number of uninsured was closer to 60 million, so basically you are getting adoption among the intended uninsured population of just 12%. Just 12% of uninsured people are choosing Obamacare/ACA, that is what is remarkable.
Your comment is complete fucking nonsense. 1) Of course, as you sort of admit, out of 330 million people, there are about 300 million with some form of health insurance. 2) There were 40 million without health insurance, not 60 million. 3) In addition to whatever fraction of the 7.1 million were previously uninsured, several million more have been added by the Medicaid expansion. 4) In addition to whatever fraction of the 7.1 million were previously uninsured, several million more have been added to employer-sponsored programs.
Or they would keep that money and say "you are free to try and find another employer that will give you money". Which is much more likely to happen. It is why the employer mandate is supposed to be there because too many Wal-Marts and Fast Food companies are doing just that...
One important reason for that is that consumers can tell the producers of non-essential goods and services to get lost if they don't like the price. Essential goods and services, pretty much by definition, don't have that property.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Excuse me? That whole post made no sense whatsoever! How did you get health care without insurance or a very large wallet? And don't hand me that crap about ER coverage being "free". It's not! Once you leave the hospital, you're going to have to make a detour through the business office where you'll get a full walletectomy before you can leave, and if you don't have cash, you'll have the collection agency knocking at your door.
If Libertarians were willing to just die on the street properly when they ran out of money after a simple injury, then the system would be cheaper for everybody. But they never follow through on this.
Fuck you! plenty of them are willing to run that risk. I have at least two family members who were found dead in early middle age. Both died of causes that if they had been visiting a doctor probably would have been caught and treated. They made life style choices that left them without insurance, knowing full well that if they had a major problem it would bankrupt them they never got checked out. Lots and Lots of people choose that.
Yes if you show up at the ER "we" pay the cost of stabilizing you, but by no means treats something or puts the rest of us on the hook for years of chemo treatments for something like cancer.
The only selfish jerks are people like you who want to impose your life style choices on everyone else because you can't afford the real cost of the protection YOU insist on having.
My own health insurance costs are going to double this year! People who support the ACA are thieving assholes with entitlement problems.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Yes, that is the correct number. So our rulers are telling us that 7 million out of 40 million is great.
Over a period of six months??? It's fucking fantastic!!! This is a problem that has been seemingly intractable for DECADES, and now we see an 18% reduction in SIX MONTHS!!!
Also, it's probably more like 9 million out of 40 million. (Subtract from the 7.1 those who previously had insurance, then add in the newly-insured from Medicaid and employer-sponsored programs.)
Well then the first case to get to the Supreme Court would probably have been the one wending its way through the court system now based on the "origination clause". (I have lost track of where it is currently) The Constitution states that all tax bills must originate in the House. The ACA originated in the Senate. The defenders of the ACA claim that it originated in the House, but the only thing in the ACA that is the same as the bill which the House passed is the number of the bill (the bill passed by the House with that number was on a completely unrelated subject and all of the words, including the title, were replaced in the Senate version).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I am just curious why the US is willing to pay 50-100% more than the rest of the world for health care per person for outcomes that aren't any better and in some cases worse than the rest of the world.
Weren't something like 6 million people kicked out of their existing health plans and had to enroll in a new one?
Probably more like 5 million. Then in addition to the 2.1 million, you need to add in the expansion in Medicaid coverage and in employer-sponsored programs.
Primarily for political reasons. Because it would be SOCIALISM!
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Anyone that doesn't believe this is possible has never filed taxes on April 15th. Just try to call the IRS anytime over the next five days and see what you get. People push everything off to the last possible moment. The same is true in registering to vote, getting a haircut, homework, work projects, etc. If you have a week to do it, no one does it on day one. The vast majority do it on the final day. Just the nature of people.
If you truly cannot afford it, the federal credit kicks in to defray the monthly cost. You can be compliant with the law at basically no cost to yourself if all you take is a Catastrophic or Bronze-level plan. After the credit, I'm paying $30/mo for low deductible/out of pocket health ins. with no co-insurance, for example.
And hospitals having to write off expenses from uninsured ER visits costs many billions of dollars each year -- which get passed on to the premiums of everyone who does pay for insurance. Isn't that a bit unfair?
Actual summary of article: "It seems really unlikely the enrollment numbers got met because that would have meant a lot of last minute sign-ups *shrugs*"
"Oh and by the way even if the enrollment numbers got met, it probably doesn't count because if you haven't paid your first month's premium you don't count as an enrollment number for some reason because we said so"
Payment is the final step in the enrollment process. No payment, no enrollment. Its pretty simple, if you haven't paid you haven't bought anything.
... "I think people are enrolling in multiple places,” he said in a conference call. “They are shopping. And what happens is that they never really get back on HealthCare.gov to disenroll from plans they prior enrolled in"
"Matthew N. Wiggin, a spokesman for Aetna, said that about 70 percent of people who signed up for its health plans paid their premiums
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02...
Because we privitized health care and is very hard to invert the process this far.
Health care is a 2billion+ industry. That won't be disbanded until you pry it from their cold, dead hands.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
If you're making the argument that the feds shouldn't provide tax credits for certain behavior, I'm generally in agreement with you. I don't think they violate the constitution, but let's ignore that for a second. Are you saying that tax credits for the ACA would be unconstitutional but all of the other tax credits are OK? Or are we just talking about striking down tax credits entirely?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I'm not sure you understand the concept of 'insurance'
I have an HSA and a HDHP, and it is vastly more cost effective (for me) than the plans available on the ACA website.
Same here. And that is why I didn't bother arguing with that fucking troll, but just limited my response to the 1 word that best fit: "bullshit" ;-)
I suppose that must be the fact that insurance premiums are no longer deductible
Nothing changed with regard to deductible status of premiums, and if you're paying quarterly taxes now, it's because your employer switched you to an independent contractor position and not an employee.
I can't continue to have no raise, no COLA, and have Obama continue to take more and more percentage out of my paycheck.
Can you identify a change in tax rates caused by Obama? With an actual source? ACA has several tax provisions, but none of them include a tax hike on personal income. According to http://www.irs.gov/uac/Affordable-Care-Act-Tax-Provisions, there are only new deductions, not new taxes, apart from the penalty for declining to carry health coverage, but that doesn't affect you.
Can ANY number be believed?
After all the Bible-literalist 6-day creationists don't believe that Pi = 3.1415926535.....
Because it says in the Bible that it is 3
You can't eliminate the people who don't have the money to pay for care with a wave of the "false dicohtomy" hand. Let's say we get our less expensive urgent treatment facilities (a great policy, by the way). What do you do with people who show up and can't even pay for those?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Still not equivalent... states require persons to minimally have insurance to cover the other guy if you are at fault... you do not have to have insurance to cover repairs to your own vehicle... as you are now with health insurance for your own body.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I don't think it's really "capitalist greed" since Britain and Canada (among others) are comparably capitalist to the USA. ... I do not believe that it is possible to import anything remotely like it to the US of A.
I've lived for extended periods under both the Canadian and British systems. The huge difference is that, in those countries, I had the feeling that people involved in health care were actually trying to help people. In the US, we have tort lawyers, drug patent lawyers, doctors who believe they should receive more compensation than anyone else, hospital administrators who compete to have the finest art on the walls and the most comfortable helicopters, etc.
I'd take the Canadian system any day. My children were both born there, and along the way received some fine emergency care which they needed.
But
At least when you do get a new job, if it doesn't have employer-based insurance, the exchanges can't prevent you from getting insurance because of your pre-existing condition.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Not in an emergency; which is probably what he is thinking of.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"I've been getting all my news from sources telling me that this was going to be a disaster and that goals would never be reached. None of my friends signed up, so based on my anecdotal evidence there must be a conspiracy here."
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS DOING ON SLASHDOT?!?
You want to spread whiny, partisan, maliciously misleading horseshit? Go to RedState or Breitbart; that's their stock in trade. It doesn't fscking belong here. Get this garbage off Slashdot now.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
NO
Not just because it's Obama. It's because it's coming from a politician and all politicians lie. Try to name one who doesn't.
But the government taxes you under the ACA even if you have no income. If you don't buy insurance, they assess the penalties until you start earning income. They are, literally, taxing you for breathing.
Bullshit. If you have no income, you're eligible for Medicaid.
If Obama had followed what is allowed by the Constitution he would not of had the problem he is currently having with it.
Exactly what problem would that be?
Bunch of baloney. The reason why they can afford to pay for everyone's health insurance while having approximately the same tax rates (+10/-5%) is that the US of A is carrying the big military stick around for them. What are the defense budgets for European countries? It's laughable.
I would love to see what other Western countries would spend on their defense if the US did not.
Just think, you could have had universal healthcare, single payer, provided by the government
Except that Australia (at least) is backing away from that as fast as it can because of the mounting costs. Heck; you get penalties for NOT having private health insurance.
"Provided by the Government" means "provided by taxpayers".
Well, if the first deadline was coming up, wouldn't it make sense that enrollment numbers jumped up? I'm pretty sure that there are a lot more tax returns filed in the first two weeks of April than the first two weeks of February...
Goddamnit do any of you people read what I wrote? THE PLANS ON THE ACA WEBSITE ARE NOT COMPARABLE TO HSA PLANS.
Of course they cost more than your HSA-eligible plan; they have more coverage and lower deductibles!
Back before the ACA, when I was shopping for health insurance on sites like ehealthinsurance.com, there were in fact plans that had the same coverage and the same deductible as an HSA plan offered by the same company. In fact, the plans were exactly the same except that one version was HSA-eligible, and the other was not. The only difference was the fact that the HSA-eligible version of the otherwise exact same, completely comparable plan had much higher premiums than the non-HSA-eligible version.
The ACA has only made things related to HSA-eligible plans worse because a) they're a lot less common now in general (for example, my employer no longer offers one, but apparently used to), and b) you can't buy one from the federal exchange / ACA website.
FYI, I would love to have an HSA-eligible plan since my wife and I are both under 30 years old and healthy, yet just the employee-paid half of my wife's coverage costs something like $400/month. But I can't have an HSA-eligible plan, because neither my employer nor the ACA website offer one, and I'm not about to buy an individual plan outside the ACA website because that fails to qualify for the subsidy and would therefore be even more exorbitantly expensive. (It also doesn't help that by the time the people running the ACA website got their shit together the open enrollment period at my job had already ended and now I'm locked in for the year...)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I'm not interested. Wake me when fair is fair and we all have equal access to a single-payer system that has no profit built in. Until the capitalists are thrown out of the system, it's soiled.
So 7 states get 590,000 and you find it hard to believe that 29 states could reach 2m? I think the mathematically challenged person is the author. 590,000/7=84,286 people per state, rounded up to the nearest person. If we apply that to the other 29 states we get 2,444,286 people signed up from those 29 states, which blows that prediction out of the water..
Apparently the possibility that people might take advantage of the "no pre-existing condition" clause of the ACA to get insurance when something catastrophic happens disturbs the insurance companies' bottom line deeply.
I'm still in disbelief that an idea that bad was able to become law. Especially when there's a similar idea that makes far more sense and solves many of the same problems: coverage for post-existing conditions.
We'd always hear stories of someone getting cancer and being unable to work during their treatment and therefore unable to pay the premiums for their insurance. Why they hell did they have to pay those premiums? They got cancer while they were paying for coverage, so that coverage should cover the treatment of that cancer no matter how long it takes regardless of whether they continue to pay or not.
Strangely, I never heard anyone debate that idea. Indeed, I've had essentially no success getting anyone on the internet to even understand what I'm talking about. I've made analogies to homeowners insurance and your house burning down, but people seem unable to comprehend that you buy insurance to cover the cost of illness, not the cost of doctor bills, and so once the illness occurs, the insurance company should pay up, even if you decide to switch to a different insurer during your treatment. ...and, naturally, the new insurer then wouldn't care about your pre-existing condition because your previous insurer, the one you were paying when you acquired the illness, would be the one paying for its treatment.
Not that I don't think single payer makes more sense, but if we're going to attempt a free market solution, we should at least attempt one that actually makes sense. Require coverage for post-existing conditions and require up-front pricing for all medical procedures. The free market's functionality is caused by consumers shopping around for the best price. If they aren't doing that, it's obviously going to fail to control prices. For that reason, flat copays (you pay $20 no matter what the visit costs) must also be illegal, and instead copays must always be a percentage of the final bill, to encourage consumers to continue to look for lower prices even if they aren't paying most of the bill. If you lower the cost of insurance to a point where people can afford it, and regulate it well enough that people know that they'll actually get what they think they're paying for (since otherwise the simple desire to not get screwed will deter people from buying insurance), all it would take would be a few well-designed ad campaigns to the effect of "even 18-year-olds can get cancer" to get everyone to buy some insurance.
Of course, that still ignores the question of whether we want a future where adults with chronic illness are unable to get insurance because their parents didn't have coverage on them before they were born, but the only solution to that is single-payer, and we've ruled that out for some fucking reason. Apparently there are people out there who would honestly rather just keep their money and just die if they get cancer, I guess, much like how there are people who'd rather not pay for the police and just get shot if someone doesn't like them. I guess we can't infringe on the rights of the insane by making them pay for things they don't want but would probably use anyway if they needed to.
Such as the ... the obese ... who can continue with their merry lifestyles, safe and secure in the knowledge everyone else is forced to hand over their money so they don't have to take personal responsibility for their actions, right?
Selective quoting, because in principle I agree with your point. However, I know that some (and I must stress some) obese people don't actively chose to put their health in danger on a whim or shirk personal responsibility. Some people are obese because of events in their past (eg. violent sexual abuse) have framed their thinking in different ways.
For example (this is a real example):
Abuser: You would look prettier if you lost a few pounds
Abused: (message = putting on weight will stop the pain)
Later in life: Stress = pain; putting on weight will stop the pain; therefore eat a bit more.
Now, how exactly is the said obese person living a merry life here? It's actually a pretty wretched existence. In this particular example, we solved the problem by my wife seeing a psychologist and working through all the issues. It took 2 1/2 years to resolve things, and the outcome is great: no fad dieting but constant, sustained weight loss and a better outlook on life. Because no health insurance sees obesity as a psychological problem, we paid for those sessions out of our own pocket. It would have been nice to offset even a bit of the cost, but that's the way things are.
I know this wasn't the point you were trying to make. But maybe, just maybe, there needs to be a little compassion for those who at first glance look like they are shirking personal responsibility. Maybe they are. But maybe, just maybe, they aren't.
The entire ER free loader myth is just that, a myth. I believe Forbes pegged the costs of uninsured visiting emergency rooms in the US to a little under 1% (yes that's less than a single percent) of health care costs. They described it as a 'rounding error' in their report.
On the other hand the failure of the Government to pay for actual expenses for Medicaid/Medicare patients costs providers significantly more. That's the primary reason fewer and fewer hospitals and doctors accept Medicaid patients nowadays; it actually costs them money to see someone on a Government plan once their actual expenses are calculated.
So complain about health care costs all you want but in reality it is costing people with insurance a hell of a lot more to cover the costs of people with Government care than it is for people with no care whatsoever.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
I'd say the Article 1 portion..."power to lay and collect taxes" and "provide for the...General Welfare." Seems pretty straight forward.
So you aren't eligible for Medicaid? I did you check? The Medicaid rules vary by state, but the Feds did expand Medicaid coverage as part of the ACA. But you may live in a state that rejected the expansion in order to make the ACA more painful for people like you, so YMMV.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
ObamaCare's numbers are wrong just like Evolution is wrong and Global Warming is wrong. All these are just cunning ploys to distract us from the fact that they want to take away our guns.
Are you saying that after your $5K deductible is covered, you won't get any coverage from your private in surance? Or that $5K is permanent financial destitution? How does this scenario really play out?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
How many do things at the last minute? Homework, tax returns, bill pays, website traffic, contract signings, same thing goes for sign-ups. If demand were linear jobs would be easier, but instead it's lumpy. Given a deadline a great majority will wait until the last minute so it doesn't shock me whatsoever. Anyone who thinks the number of folks wouldn't spike hard ahead of a set deadline has never had to deal with demand.
It's not; it's more of a deal with the devil, if you will. Forcing people to buy insurance is mostly the corporate handout part of the bill, made in exchange for things like the insurance companies loosening pre-existing condition restrictions, etc. (Whether it's a good deal is certainly up for debate, but I don't think it was.)
Not quite an accurate assessment. The reality is much simpler and goes like this:
1. We want to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage due to preexisting conditions
2. In order for that to work, you MUST force everyone to have coverage. Otherwise more and more people would just wait till they get sick to sign up. Driving the insurance companies out of business.
3. If you force everyone to have coverage, then you MUST have uniform standards of what is "coverage". Someone might create a new "insurance plan" which provides no real coverage for no real cost in order to circumvent points 1 and 2. I'm sure every anti-ACA person would LOVE to "sign up" for $10 "insurance" that provides no real coverage just to stick it to the man.
So there you have it, due to the simple desire to account for preexisting conditions, the rest (which is the part that most anti-ACA people seem to object to) logically follows.
The only real solution is two fold:
a) eliminate health insurance as a concept, people pay directly
b) make the *health care* more affordable
Apparently the indoctrination has been successful with you. In reality the government's power derives from the people. The Constitution is not there to specify what rights the all-powerful government has deigned to grant upon us mere mortal citizens, it is in place to keep the government in check. It specifies what the government is allowed to do and what it is not allowed to do. Somewhere along the line the people forgot this and allowed the government to seize a great deal of power that is beyond it's authority.
that still ignores the question of whether we want a future where adults with chronic illness are unable to get insurance because their parents didn't have coverage on them before they were born, but the only solution to that is single-payer
I didn't explain that clearly. What I meant to say was, like, say someone's born with cerebral palsy, but their parents didn't have coverage for them at the time. That's a pre-existing condition for that person's entire life, even though that person couldn't have planned ahead and obtained coverage for it before they were even born. So my post-existing coverage idea doesn't help them out at all, nor does it help with any childhood illness which the parents similarly didn't have coverage for. I suppose some people are OK with allowing children to suffer just because their parents are idiots, but it doesn't sit well with a lot of people who realize that they could just as easily have found themselves in the same position. When you allow people to suffer because of situations outside of their control, you're saying it's OK for people to allow you to suffer for reasons outside of your control. A lot of people think it's a good trade to help those people out if it means they'll similarly be helped out if they're in need. The big issue here is that this is being argued by adults, who already know they're not one of those unlucky children, and so they don't care that it could have happened to them because it didn't happen to them and there's no risk that it's going to.
With that in mind, since the whole point of insurance is that people pay into it before the risk is realized, it makes sense that people should be covered even before they're born since there's risk from the moment of conception. ...but an individual can't control what coverage they have until they're old enough to work and buy that coverage themselves. It's not really fair to just tell someone "you're fucked because your parents suck," especially when it's a problem that disappears when you acknowledge that no sane person really wants to not have health insurance, and so it makes sense to just provide it for everyone from the moment of conception and let them pay for it later in life via taxes, much like how our children pay for child services keeping them safe from abusive parents by paying for it for other people's children when they're old enough to pay taxes.
I signed up on the last day myself. Waited as long as possible in the hope that the Congress or Senate would get rid of it, but no joy. I would rather sign up and have medical coverage than not sign up and have to pay a penalty while getting nothing in return.
Kathleen Sebelius just announced her resignation. It's likely tied to the HealthCare.gov debacle although she is merely a scapegoat. Perhaps it also has to do with the supposedly funny numbers.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
I'm employed, mostly pretty healthy, and have had no catastrophic injuries or other issues in my history, and have a pretty decent plan through my employer, but I pay through the nose for that. And; doctor choice in my county is VERY limited: they don't seem to like my provider. If I had the choice, I think I'd consider medicaid, and pocket the difference. But I am gainfully employed, so fuck me, right?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"This shit is so unconstitutional"
please point to me where the constitution say we can't have mandatory insurance?
Perhaps you mean to say "I don't like it, so I'm going to say it' unconstitutional because I have no clue what the Constitution says?"
" How dare you fine me for not buying your services."
It's a fee, not a fine. If it was a fine it would be assigned after you failed to buy insurance on a case by case basis. IT's an amount set in the bill, hence fine. An important distinction. Which isn't to say you have to like it., only that you sound like an idiot when you scream at the wind and the term you use is incorrect.
It's a service you will use, sooner or later.
"Money is speech according to the Supreme Court, and so I say no to Obama care."
Supreme Court said no such thing.
"I'm making use of my first amendment by not giving my money to this system."
That has nothing to do with the first Amendment
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Life saving emergency care is required. Once the immediate issue is over, they can discharge you.
Of course that more expensive and incredible short sighted, because it will likely become an emergency again if not properly treated until the issue is healed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Such as the smokers, the obese, alcoholics and drug users who can continue with their merry lifestyles, safe and secure in the knowledge everyone else is forced to hand over their money so they don't have to take personal responsibility for their actions, right?
I have just one thing to say to you about this comment: Fuck you, you ignorant prick.
Ok, I have a few more things to say.
Smokers, the obese, alcholics, and drug users are addicts. As an obese person who is, in fact, a compulsive eater through no fault of my own (a combination of emotionally distant parents and a childhood sexual abuse thanks to the neighborhood pedophile), who knows plenty of smokers, drugs addicts, and drunks from my work in Twelve Step programs, this disease of addiction is very difficult to overcome. That's why you find drunks, smokers, obese people, and drug addicts who do their very best to kill themselves through their addictions. If you actually knew anything about addiction, you wouldn't had said such a foolish thing.
I didn't sign up.
I won't sign up.
They can't MAKE ME sign up.
If they attempt to seize my assets and make me a criminal for doing NOTHING on my part, there is going to be trouble.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
" Note that non-essential medical services such as plastic surgery and laser eye surgery continuously get better and cheaper over time. "
that applies to ALL treatments. I can't thing of any medical treatment that doesn't apply to.
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A large part of that cost is caused by states artificially limiting competition to a few providers in their State. they only let their buddies in and then we get all surprised when with a lack of competition we get bad service at inflated prices.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
ACA among other things expands the Medicaid program you are so fond of. Except in states where Republican governors play politics with people's health. Imagine you were earning just enough not to qualify for Medicaid.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
you sir, are a complete retard.
yeah, those fatsoes sit on their couches, eating their pizza, and may cost loads in healthcare.
and then theres you, you are a prime example of health, you go out running, you go out hiking, you bicycle, and you like to drive cars as a proper american.
now theres a very nonpatriotic american, not driving a car, but instead has a big property, and stays healthy same as you, but does not expose himself to traffic.
how DARE YOU MAKE HIM PAY FOR YOUR INCREASED RISK DUE TO TRAFFIC?
where the fuck do you draw the line?
this is why fatsoes can be covered by a fair system where EVERYONE INSURES EVERYONE, and you can be covered while doing your sports, and such.
Family of four.
50 dollar deductible
Full coverage
1000 a month.
300 dollars cheaper for me then it was a decade ago.
Now, if you live in a state where the politician are actively fighting ACA, then you may be screwed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That book has been thoroughly trashed and shown to be full of lies and ignorance.
Yes, you one anecdote sure throws out all the data showing how much it helps.
"all of this to avoid basic lifestyle changes that would have been considered an obvious approach in the past."
lifestyle change that Dr. also advocate, and have been doing so for 100 years.
" That idea that "seems healthy" is not, is a big problem in modern medicine and something that supports the attitude of the other guy."
No, it isn't.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Beyond that, there's the impact on my credit rating. A poor credit rating can even be cited as a reason for not hiring a person, making it doubly hard to overcome.
Oh, well - a cane is a reasonably cheap object. I could even make one myself for free, if needed.
"does nothing to lower health costs "
false. Maybe you should read them?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
your example show you don't understand how insurance works
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"My own health insurance costs are going to double this year!"
no they aren't, please stop lying.
OR show us some proof. The Pubs have been frothing at the mouth looking for that to happen. Maybe yuoi should contact the RNC and tell them you will go on the air with your solid proof for a million dollars?
" People who support the ACA are thieving assholes with entitlement problems."
As someone who makes 6 figures, has read the ACA, will get no subsidy, and knows the ACA will be an overall good thing for the country I find you statement offensive.
As would any informed thinking person.
Call me when I can CHOOSE not to support the military.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But what's the actual out of pocket maximum, reasonably speaking? It should be listed on your plan. I mean, being out several thousand dollars is bad, but if we're talking about a catastrophic injury that could potentially cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's a pretty good outcome--one that shouldn't financially cripple anybody as long as they eventually get a job again. We'd all love to have zero-deductible free insurance, but it's just not mathematically possible.
The fact that you have to stick with your own insurance rather than dropping onto Medicaid is a function of your state's Medicaid rules. Being unemployed, you may well have qualified for Medicaid in a different state. If your state rejected the Medicaid expansion and that cost you the opportunity to get subsidized care, it would be good to have a chat with your state representatives, because they're sticking it to you intentionally in order to make the ACA look like it's not working.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
You are about to be schooled becasue I am really tired of the meme the south has been trying to shove down everyone's throat.
Here are some excerpts from the Declaration of Causes of Secession. Its all about slavery.
The real question is, can you accept new factual data and change you view? That is something only a thinking person can accomplish, so I have my doubts.
Georgia:
" For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery."
Mississippi: Note the sue of the term 'products'
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin"
South Carolina:
"But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation."
texas
She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-w...
Those aren't even the most disturbing parts of the declarations of secession
Consider yourself schooled and I look forward to your apology and forming an actual fact based opinion.
Or digging you heals in and rebutting the the brilliant rebuttal of 'Nu-uh'
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They've got universal health care, we've got Republicans. The two are mutually exclusive.
i believe an early provision of the ACA was that employers reveal their contribution toward the individual's health care premium on the W-2. the employee contribution to the premium has been there for a while.
most people with employer-sponsored plans are being migrated to high-deductible/HSA plans.
employer share of traditional plans was supposedly approaching $10K/yr ("average" employee with "average" number of dependents). HSA plans are considerably less.
Otherwise, I'll say how dare you expect the rest of us to pay for your health care because you don't want to.
You're not paying for your healthcare, your insurer is. The only one here expecting others to pay for them is you.
Some people go in to the ER for their yearly checkup. Can't afford the $200 doctor's visit, so they hit up the $2,000 emergency service and get the whole work-over. Then the hospital says, "you're good", and sends them home with a bill that gets forgotten about. It's cheaper to have them go into the $200 doctor's visit than to pony up for the ER.
They can't discharge you until you are stable and capable of taking care of yourself. Both of which, they must prove.
The US really does go batshit crazy when somebody attacks us, especially when the attack is on civilians; I think something on the order of 1 or 2 thousand jihadists have been killed in Iraq and Afganistan for every casualty in 9/11. Sooner or later people will figure that messing with the US is just like kicking a hornet's nest.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It's all a big Pres Obozo lie.
News is out that HHS Field Marshal Kathleen Sebelius is TOAST as she has resigned effective immediately.
Big questions 1) Money. The back end of ObozoCare has never worked so where did the money go, i.e. in whose online checking account ?
2) Who will go to Federal Prison ? Those who signed up to ObozoCare plus the 200 million others who do not want to pay for some one else's
health care !
3) Does Sebelius ouster mean that Pres Obozo can dump Michelle and marry Sebelius before Obozo leaves office ?
Ha ha
If there's a 'socialized medicine' policy that distinguishes this, I'm totally on board. Unfortunately that's not Obamacare.
People do not scale. What you can do in Singapore is NOT what you can do in the US.
The Progressives have successfully re-enacted the Tower of Babel.
Now let's just put a bow on this turd and get on with reform.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The great thing about this debate, is that at some point we will get a definitive answer. Probably not from the administration, they claim they don't keep track of those metrics. But we'll find out some how.
Remember the back half of the HealthCare.gov website that hadn't been started when the whole thing was supposed to be done, that's the part that keeps track of people's enrollments, movement from one plan to another, pays the government's part of their premium, etc. That is where the real numbers will come from.
The administration's "we don't keep track of those metrics" line may be code for "the backend of HealthCare.gov is working yet".
Also, this is EXACTLY how car insurance works.
False. Auto insurance makes no guarantee to pay car repairs for people who cannot afford auto insurance. There is not even a sliding scale. Auto insurance only pays for those who pay in and the amount you pay in is determined by their statistical assessment of how much they are likely to have to pay out for you personally.
Also, before auto insurance was made mandatory, it was also a lot cheaper. I pay more per month now than I paid per year when I was 16 years old, and the car I had when I was 16 was 8 years old, versus the 13 year old car I have been driving. I have had 0 accidents in my entire lifetime, 0 hail damage, 0 payouts of any kind. When I was 16, insurance wasn't mandatory, but now it is.
Not quite, Auto insurance is hedge against damage costs. This cost can be divided into two sections, damage to your car and damage to everything that isn't your car. This is why most countries have two levels of insurance, cover for anything you hit or cover for anything you hit and your car. Obviously the former is cheaper. So if you hit a car that isn't insured, because the accident is your fault your insurer will pay out. Before I travelled to the US, I only thought it was your health insurance system that was fucked up, when I got there I learned your auto insurance system is equally as screwed.
Insurance is a means of distributing risk, the people who pay insurance and don't claim pay for the claims that are paid out (as well as operating costs and dividends for shareholders). The more people who claim, the more premiums/tariffs will rise. This is why your auto insurance is increasing in price, there are a lot more claims with much higher payouts and this must be covered by all premiums. Insurance is quite socialist when you learn about it, well apart from the people running the scheme living high on the hog from it... wait, that's exactly how communism works in reality.
Now the insurers I use in Australia are not for profit. Meaning they don't have shareholders taking a slice of my premiums for themselves. Also, we have universal health care provided by the government which provides a minimum standard of care at the lowest cost. The lowest priced health insurance I can get in the US is US$2,500 per year. I pay for top hospital cover in Australia (the highest you can get) for A$850, the minimum cover is A$350. As Medicare levy (1.5%) is a separate line item on my tax and I earn A$70,000, the amount I pay is 1050 p/a. So for A$1900 (US$1790) I get full hospital cover with physio and major dental (basic dental is included in all plans) for 700 less than the cheapest plan for me in the US.
Universal health care done right leads to cheaper and better care for everyone. Australia is far from the only example. What the US needs to do is take it out of the hands of the politicians and hire someone who's actually worked for a universal health care provider. Even the UK's NHS for all it's flaws is so far superior to the US's system it's not funny.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Except I can CHOOSE to not own a car, and I don't need insurance at that point.
Call me when I can CHOOSE to not carry health insurance.
That's why so many are crying foul.
My question is why we didn't just roll this whole broken process under medicare. It's not like the government hasn't been in the health industry for the last century anyway. At least then it's less confusing who's robbing you. Better the devil you know.
You can choose to not drive, which means you can forgo car insurance. Same thing with health insurance. You can choose to not be alive, which means you can forgo health insurance. But like driving, a person being alive means that on average, they will go to the doctors and cost society money. We're just asking that they pay their fair share before they drink it away at the bar.
Analogy fail! You can choose not to own a car. The only way you can assure us that you'll never need health care is by not living in the first place.
Yeah, right. A large part of that cost is in the profits of insurance companies. A single payer non-profit system would take care of that. Unfortunately that wasn't politically possible.
Of course the finance company may require that you carry coverage on your own vehicle if you want a loan to buy it.
If there was a way to guarantee that you'd pay cash up front for all of your medical care or go off and die without bothering the rest of us, I'd be all for allowing adults to opt out of having health insurance. But there isn't. If you go to an emergency room and don't pay, the rest of us get stuck with the bill. If you get major surgery done and declare bankruptcy, the rest of us end up eating it. Somehow, we have to deal with those people. Right now, we deal with them by letting it slide and making responsible people cough up the difference.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
not just for most people, but also for the system; it encourages people to save money, and price-shop, and not get care they do not really need. The Republicans have REPEATEDLY offered that as a national plan only to see the Democrats refuse to vote on it and then run to the cameras to tell the American people that the GOP has no ideas and no plans and offered nothing. The GOP plans have almost always included HSA accounts that each individual owns, can roll-over from year-to-year, and can even pass-on the money from as inheritance for their survivors when they die. Some GOP plans for Health Savings Accounts even proposed having the government pre-load the account for any child when its born, so the average American (who rarely needs much care in the first half of life) would accrue a VERY large balance in their account by the time they got out of college. For all your day-to-day stuff like immunizations you pay out of pocket or from your HSA, and for really bad stuff like multiple busted bones, appendicitis, heart attacks, cancer, etc you use the high-deductible insurance (getting the "deductible" from your HSA).
Just look at the quality, convenience, and costs for things like LASIK to see what happens when government backs-off from controlling an area of medicine and leaves consumers and market forces to work their magic. Dentistry is another area where consumers shop, often with their own money rather than a 3rd party payer, and the quality and options have skyrocketed while competition has flourished. You can go to any reasonable-sized city in the US and get excellent dental care with little or no waiting at prices not much higher than a decade ago. Dentists are everywhere.
What we have now is a mess. It was a mess before Obamacare, and it's worse now. The government FORCES hospitals to treat everybody even if they cannot pay. The government promises to provide free or low-cost care for the poor (Medicaid) and low-cost care for the elderly (Medicare) but when the care is provided, the government short-changes the doctors and hospitals often paying them only half. As a result, all the unpaid and government-mandated costs get shifted onto the bills of the private "consumers" which causes the "sticker price" for health care to rise, and drives private insurance rates higher. Governments and big insurers then negotiate special rates (but the providers are not stupid, so thier "costs" rise and the sticker prices rise too). Rinse. Recycle. Repeat.
is a stuttering clusterfuck of a miserable failure.
Now that Obamacare IS the system and it IS the problem
So it is the system, even if nobody is using it?
The "best" solution would be lowering Medicare enrolement age to birth. It would require a re-work of some of the rules, but a single payer by the largest "insurance" group in the country would be better than current (and previous). Given the numbers I've seen, it'd be much cheaper and with better coverage.
Learn to love Alaska
You really think Patty Murry, Maria Cantwell, Jim McDermott and so on are 'actively fighting ACA'?
Good for you.
You live in an amazing place compared to WA or even OR..
I am curious, did you accidentally omit mentioning a subsidy you 'earned' that I do not have available?
No brain, no pain.
Yeah but then again emergency car repair places don't have to fix your car at everyone else's expense if you show up at their door, so the distinction actually makes the case for the ACA. We're already paying for everyone to get health care, we're just doing it in about the dumbest way possible by waiting until they crawl into the ER willing to put themselves in debt forever.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
It doesn't matter how many signed up for this. Answer this, how many times have you put an item in your online shopping cart and logged off without buying it?
Same with enrollment. Just because you sign up doesn't mean you're going to pay for it.
And don't forget that out of this 7 million, how many of these lost their insurance because of ObamaScare (over 1 million). And how many are getting it only because it's another nearly-free hand out by the government? And don't forget how many of these are inmates in our prison systems. And how many are those that died and are still signing up for it, along with voting.
And the beat goes on...
I'm just curious. Why is it that so many countries in the world have universal health care paid by the population (through taxes) yet one of the most prosperous and powerful countries in the world can't figure it out or refuses to implement it?
It wasn't really a problem until recently (like 30-40 years, remember, politics moves slowly). When healthcare is cheap, it doesn't really matter how much it costs. If insurance cost $50 a month, the government could pay for it, or private citizens could pay for it, and people might complain but it would work out either way.
It's only recently that it's gotten expensive (mainly because of aging populations and improved treatments), so now it's turning into a real problem. Not just for Americans, but also for other countries where the government manages the healthcare.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
One important reason for that is that consumers can tell the producers of non-essential goods and services to get lost if they don't like the price. Essential goods and services, pretty much by definition, don't have that property.
How does food fit into this hypothesis you've put forward? Does it not count as non-essential?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There's some reasons anonymous cowards don't put their name... they're usually trolls or lying sacks of shit. In the case of this article, it's both.... and all the other trolls come out to play.
/. i've been a reader here for ten years now (or so). You have a small faction of radical conservatives/anarchists/fascists who routinely derail discussions with their political bullshit, demean the people around them, and routinely try to censor posts through moderation abuse. I expect more of you than to have bullshit stories based on some fucking delusional dumbass unwillingness to live in reality, and hatred for their fellow humans... especially ones so blatant as this. Are you news for nerds, or some radical fascist conservative propaganda rag?
Republicans and teabaggers have waged a 5 year war against a program (the ACA) that is fundamentally conservative, having been written by a conservative think tank, and already implemented in one state as a conservative program. THE only reason they're against it now is because of Obama. It shows that on the street the people who are against Obamacare think that the ACA is much better (because they've fallen for all the outright lies by conservatives) https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and http://pollingmatters.gallup.c...
Republicans have deluded people into believing their bullshit, and now when the program is actually living up to what was expected, the anonymous cowards who are so deluded into believing their own bullshith they can't understand why their lies and misbegotten fantasies aren't matching up with reality. Look on this thread. Al there are are a bunch of whiny little bitches who can't accept that the program is working. Why do all these people HATE their fellow countrymen so much? Have we bred so many sociopaths that this type of behavior is now considered normal?
When the hell did complete stupidity become something to strive for?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I'm a software contractor, and insurance was too expensive for me (~1200/month to cover me and my spouse). I got on the exchanges and found a gold plan that was half the cost. So now I'm insured. I feel secure for the first time in years. I am using preventative care. I don't worry about what will happen if I change jobs.
On top of that, while I was uninsured, my daughters were on Medicare because their mother (my ex-spouse) has a relatively low income. So now they're covered and not leaning on the taxpayers for it.
I would rather have had single-payer, because I believe it would have driven down costs better. But I am overjoyed that this law happened.
We consume food at a much lower marginal utility. We've progressed far enough in our provision of food and water that we produce enough that we now consume them way down on the marginal utility curve. If we were starving hunter gatherers, we'd gladly trade our last beads and monkey skulls for a little bit of food for the same reason. For a variety of reasons, we haven't yet progressed to the point where medical care is provided that far out on the curve (although some of it is--lifesaving antibiotics that would have been worth kingdoms can now be bought like Skittles). Once machines that automatically perform heart surgery are available right next to the vending machines that clog our arteries, we'll wonder why we ever had this conversation.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
So you feel that supply and demand does not operate in the area of healthcare?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
They also said that the 2nd amendment guaranteed the right of private citizen's to own and carry firearms. That good enough for you that you will demand that your politicians stop trying to pass laws contrary to that opinion?
It's crazy all the faux "news" types that are here. I put you in the same bucket of shit as the birthers and the chemtrail conspiracy theorists
Would that be taxing me for breathing in? Some liberals and progressives have already demanded that the government regulate and tax what I breath out.
try this one out. Not everyone uses the ER.
I have no idea how you could have gotten that from reading my post and the link I provided. Supply and demand work perfectly well in healthcare. But for lifesaving health care, the demand curve is basically vertical where supply and demand meet in the real world. The demand curve for essential goods approaches infinity as quantity approaches zero and drops off rapidly after your essential needs are met. That means that you're almost completely insensitive to price until the supply increases beyond that point.
If we ever get to the point where there are a bunch of heart surgeons milling around for every one person who needs heart surgery, we'll be way down at the same point on the demand curve as we are for rice and fresh water. But that's not where we are.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
So you are saying......right now, there is a lot of demand for every heart surgeon, and heart surgeons are expensive. BUT, if there were lots of heart surgeons, then heart surgeons would be as cheap as rice and water (ok, maybe a little more expensive).
However, you think that between those two extremes there is no change in the curve? It's just one or the other?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You might be interested to know that in 1792, a Congress chock full of members of the founding generation, passed a law to implement the 2nd amendment, the first sentence of which reads "A well regulated militia being necessary to the national defense", mandating that every able bodied person (they meant men) to own or acquire a gun and provide powder and shot for it and to present it for inspection by militia leaders on demand. So, the founders, who had just gotten finished ratifying the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, were quite OK with mandating that the citizens buy or do something that they might not ordinarily do or want to do. Given the requirements of defense in 1792 and the requirements to not, for instance, leave folks on the road after an automobile accident if they can't prove they can pay for treatment, I don't think the founders would disagree much with a mandate to have health health insurance one way or another.
You're clearly trying to lead me to something really clever, but I'm just not getting there. This is all pretty basic economics, so what am I missing? Is there a way you could say it without the use of question marks?
No, it's reasonable to assume that the demand curve is more or less smooth and continuous. "Essential" goods act just like any other normal goods once you're out to a certain quantity. But below that, the demand curve shoots off into the stratosphere. That happens for water or food. It happens for critical medical care. It doesn't happen for Troll dolls or DVDs.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
You're clearly trying to lead me to something really clever,
Probably not, you give me too much credit.
Mainly I'm trying to understand what piece of economics knowledge you are missing to make you think that medical costs wouldn't respond to a more free market. For example, if we stopped artificially limiting the number of heart surgeons, that would most likely reduce the cost of heart surgery.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, I have a degree in economics, so it's probably not that I'm missing the basics of supply and demand and need to be led there one sentence at a time. It's more likely just that I'm not claiming that increasing the supply of medical care won't reduce the price.
The post I originally responded to noted that non-essential care has dropped in price as if that's evidence that Evil Socialism is driving up the price of essential care. But it's not as though non-essential care is an unfettered free market and critical care is heavily regulated. They're both highly regulated markets with limited supply of specialized caregivers. The key difference is that non-essential care is (surprise!) non-essential, so the shape of the demand curves in the critical regions differ and the equilibrium prices at easily-reached supply levels differ.
If you want to talk specifically about how to increase the supply of critical medical care, that's an interesting topic. There are a whole lot of reasons why it's not the simplest thing in the world to do, but it's definitely interesting.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Hmmmm. Plenty of economists have written about how to make healthcare cheaper by increasing price transparency, for example. I'm surprised you haven't read any of that, since you seem to have a degree in economics.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The problem with these discussions is that the person with the really shallow understanding thinks he's maneuvering the conversation somewhere clever and the person who actually knows what he's talking about assumed that the clever "end" they were driving at was just one of the axioms at starting point of the discussion that everybody sort of leaves unsaid. It's like trying to sit still and nod politely while somebody ploddingly explains to you the joke you just told.
Look, price transparency is good. Markets are good. I understand that supply curves slope up and demand curves slope down. Now that we have that out of the way, do you have something substantive to contribute, or am I wasting keystrokes and inviting more of this facetious self-congratulatory horseshit?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
You said that medical prices can not be pushed down because they are essential, thus don't respond to free-market pressures. That is my understanding of what you said. You are wrong in that point, I've given you a couple different ways that they do respond to free market pressures, and suggested where you can look to find more ways.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And if you'd gotten seriously ill, you'd be hundreds of thousands in the hole. It's called "insurance:" your premiums don't cover your costs unless bad things happen...
In the rest of the world we debate how to keep the health care system going and everyone to get access. The complaints about the Affordable Healthcare Act fit a pattern.
Only in America do you have debates about
Healthcare - we should run the most expensive system or try to get costs inline.
Guns - everyone else controls them and less people die from them. The debate gets no where but you do kill 25,000 people a year with them.
Politics - it cost a billion dollars to run for president, millions to run for a federal or state office, but money doesn't pollute your political system. Its seems hard to find politicians that aren't on the take.
The economy - Thanks for the global financial crash of 2008, and not bringing one bank guy to justice for the trillions of dollars US citizens and the rest of the world lost.
So yes after the 2008 bullshit i got my bank to move all of my investments out of America. They have tripled since then and im about to retire early.
The rest of us are just going to sit back and watch you burn.
P.S. the news will never give you any real answers since they are obsessed with the false need to have both side of every argument, even if one side is stark raving nutz. But you can watch CNN and find out that the only thing happening in the world today is a plane crash in the Indian ocean. And bigfoot/aliens/ the muslin-terrorist-obama conspiracy is to blame for the plane crash.
It doesn't matter if the federal gov't is lying about the number of people enrolled. The federal gov't lies to its citizens all the time, for political perception management. And we've never seen Republicans lie about what the gov't has done and not done. /s
The key thing to realize is that the federal gov't is not going to be able lie to the actuaries who set policy premiums. And after business health insurance pools sets its rates later this year, and states/businesses opt in, or drop out, we'll know by 2015 if the ACA seems to be working, or was a bald faced lie.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Sorry to rain on your parade, but no way is the ACA a "long term" solution to the health insurance problem in the US. Politicians will be back to the drawing board at some point before 2030.
The other problem is that the ACA will only marginally control health care costs (according to the CBO). Overall, health care costs are going up, regardless. What the ACA really addresses is the health insurance collapse the country would have been headed towards if it didn't change the status quo in 2009.
But your perspective is much more accurate, compared to a Republican partisan. I hope there isn't huge bad news on this front before November, this year.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I really don't understand you guys. I really, REALLY don't. I mean, how can anyone believe that a for-profit healthcare can be both better, cheaper and more fair than something run by society? But as soon as anybody opens their mouth to challenge this view, they get 1) modded down, and 2) called 'socialist' or 'communists'. I can only assume that this is an expression of what goes for 'faith': the ability to reject clear facts in order to avoid having to change your mind.
To paraphrase Terry Pratchett - there are certain people who one one hand wouldn't believe it if a high Priest told them the sky was blue, and could show them signed affidavits to that effect from any number of people of good standing, but on the other hand are perfectly willing to bet their lives on the word of a stranger they've met in the pub.
Now, to my mind, and you can call me socialist or worse - and I shall wear that title with pride - that mindset is exactly why America is no longer the greatest nation in the world. You seem to have closed you minds, so how could it be any other way?
The cost has doubled and tripled because gov't has been regulating all aspects of the medical industry before the PPACA, and its aided pharmaceutical companies and hospitals (and doctors) to gouge the crap out of customers. In every other developed country, they all get medical care, while sufficiently containing costs. The US has the most inefficient health care system in the world. That means we pay 2.5x more money for the same treatment as other countries. But its the greatest system in the world, if you're rich.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
What is this AHCA you're talking about? There's the PPACA, or ACA. Are you talking about your screwed up Florida system of health insurance?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
It was considered unconstitutional since Congress can only regulate commerce. Sitting on your butt isn't considered being a participant in anything unless you are the federal government then you are actively being inactive and therefore you can still be regulated. When Congress realized 99% of the people would realize this is complete BS they made the argument that eventually everyone would be an active member. However, that isn't exactly true. Someone who dies suddenly (IE a plane crash) may never actually have had to use a hospital. Even the Supreme Court realized this was complete BS and ruled that Congress really wasn't really regulating commerce but leveling a "tax". If we did make that assumption that Congress can regulate you and the Republicans weren't completely stupid they wouldn't have fought the law. They could have simply tried to passed a bunch of similar stupid laws to highlight the law's idiocy. For example, everyone will eventually die and right now the government is forced to cover the costs of everyone who can't pay for their funeral. So how about a law mandating a minimum life insurance to cover your burial? I'd figure out how few people NEVER drive a car (theirs or someone elses). If that % is small enough I'd pass a law mandating that everyone must always carry car insurance and get a drivers license regardless if you own a car. But no they aren't that smart and would rather make everyone tired of hearing about how the law is wrong.
The simple answer is people think
1. The government can't manage anything
2. Everything the government does is ridiculously expensive
3. The free market is better
We could quite easily make doctors like the police and fire department. You pay for those through taxes and you can expect a certain level of service. If you live in a town where the police budget isn't big enough you will hear people complaining about not having a cop arrive to a scene of a crime for hours. You can of course imagine the fun of people having a medical emergency and having to wait to see a doctor. Also as noted you'll have to raise taxes to pay for the hospitals. Most people don't want to pay the additional taxes which is why the government is making you still pay which is stupid since if you have to pay for insurance how is that different from having to pay a tax? Anyway the last part of this is if we did make hospitals like the police/fire dept you would essentially kill the health insurance market since anyone could simply go see a doctor. This, of course, will mean many people will lose their jobs.
Some asides: While the Democrats say "death panels" wouldn't exist they are full of it. Anyone with common sense will immediately realize we simply can't spend $1M a day keeping someone alive or paying outrageous sums on experimental procedures for patients who are terminally ill. Someone somewhere has to decide how much we will spend to save your butt. If hospitals are like the police it won't be you making that decision. Also we would all have the opportunity to complain that the rich still get better healthcare since the rich will simply hire private doctors or go to special clinics where they can be kept alive for $1M a day.
More than I have.
Sorry - I mean't under the Affordable Health Care Act. I figured /.'ers would be able to handle an acronym.
I got health care by going to a hospital. Medicare paid for it.
If the same thing happens to me today, you're right. I'll be on the hook for a $5,200 deductable plus a considerably higher balance of unpaid expenses (the "walletectomy" you described.
At the end of the day, all I know is that under the Affordable Health Care Act I have no access to medical care unless I'm prepared to accept and cover both a large deductable and a significant portion of the overall bill. I suppose that being between jobs right now, I shouldn't worry bills I can't pay and money I don't have, but I'm not planning to remain unemployed and broke forever.
No, you DO NOT unless you have children, or are elderly, or disabled. But that's OK, some ignorant mod didn't know that either. So yes, younger, healthier single people are being put in debtor's prison (it's house arrest) by the government.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
NO! democrats lie, cheat and steal! Just look at the kennedy family! They probably had the seiu members sign up and not pay! Just like they are cooking the books by having criminals in jail and prison sign up and not pay!
Do I hear idiot, moron, socialist, pin-headed, liars, cheating, stealing, democrats among us?
No, you DO NOT unless you have children, or are elderly, or disabled.
And back to your original point:
But the government taxes you under the ACA even if you have no income. If you don't buy insurance, they assess the penalties until you start earning income. They are, literally, taxing you for breathing.
That is complete bullshit. The following groups are exempt from the penalty: Individuals with income below the income tax filing threshold; Individuals for whom the cost of getting health insurance (net of ACA subsidies) would exceed 8% of household income in 2014; Individuals in states that did not accept the ACA’s Medicaid expansion who would have qualified for Medicaid under the expansion; Members of Indian tribes; Members of certain religious faiths; Members of a health care sharing ministry; Individuals not legally in the U.S. (undocumented aliens); Incarcerated individuals.
If I can trust the rest of your story (which, frankly, I'm doubting at this point, since so much of your objection is pure fantasy with no basis at all in reality), then you qualify for all of the first 3 exemptions.
Single payer equals zero competition. You get Social Security office or DMV. Bad service with worse results.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
OK, one more thing about the penalty, for further information, see pages 53651-53655 and 53659 of “Shared Responsibility Payment for Not Maintaining Minimum Essential Coverage”
A sudden increase in enrollments just before a deadline, that is just ridiculous. People don't wait for the last minute to do something, that is against human nature.
Obviously, Obama must be lying. You know how those people are.
>>If you truly cannot afford it, the federal credit kicks in to defray the monthly cost. We, the conservatives, don't want our too hard to earn dollars being taken from us by generational theft and GIVEN to those we would not choose to give to!! The ILLEGAL ALIENS!!! >And hospitals having to write off expenses from uninsured ER visits costs many billions of dollars each year -- which get passed on to the premiums of everyone who does pay for insurance. Isn't that a bit unfair? Yet another reason to STOP providing FREE care and FREE anything to ILLEGAL ALIENS!!!
That's simply not what I said. I said that the primary reason for the difference in pricing between "essential" and "non-essential" medical goods is the shape of the demand curve at and around the equilibrium quantity. I'm not sure how many different ways I can exlain it to help you understand, especially given the fact that I've said explicitly that both of them respond to market forces perfectly well. Continue with your lecture if you will, but it's pretty clear now that I'm not the one who is missing something.
The interesting question in economics is never, "Does X market respond to market forces?" because every market responds to market forces. The interesting question is, "What does the market look like and why is the outcome what it is?"
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
So the question is, did the ACA screw you, or did your state screw you by rejecting the Medicaid provisions of the ACA that were designed to cover people with low income? It's quite possible that you should be on Medicaid right now according to the way the law was originally written. Your anger may well be misdirected.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I used to subscribe to IBD but stopped because their political news is all far right wing to the point of absurdity. It carries as much credibility as Fox News
Um... wow. Way to not understand the law and the insurance markets. I love it when people trot out the 300 million number because it shows just how obviously un/misinformed they are about the thing they are criticizing.
No, I'm genuinely curious about this. It may be more than you have, but is it a crazy unreasonable amount? Are we talking $10K? $100K? $1M? Because the plan you have should have a reasonable out-of-pocket maximum for a serious problem, and it should be far, far below the actual medical bill. For a Bronze Plan, your individual yearly out pocket maximum for a debilitating injury would be $6,350. That's bad news for anyone, but it's a lot better than being stuck with the bill for getting your hip or knee surgically reconstructed, as you problably know better than the rest of us.
The reason I'm pushing this is because every time somebody has become the "Joe the Plumber" face of getting screwed by the ACA in the national news, it has turned out that they actually had very good (often better than before the ACA!) options available to them. The only exception to that is people who fall below the income level for the normal ACA markets and who should have been covered by Medicaid but aren't because their states decided to screw them in order to score political points. It sounds like you're probably one of those people.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
As a personal side note, when did the GOP bring up a bill to force all insurance companies to offer medical coverage to *all*, and not refuse due to "pre-existing conditions"? Did I miss that?
Did they also have, in the same bill that I missed, where > 80% (or is it > 90%) of the insurance money was to be spent on healthcare, and 10% on "administrative costs" (including CEO's bonuses)?
mark, in the home of the cowards and suckers
None of my GP doctors charge less than $120 for an office visit. Then there is the cost of drugs and blood tests. I cut my own hair so I don't have to pay $12 to go to a hairdresser. The whole point of insurance is to distribute the cost of care amongst those subscribed so it was affordable to all. What it ended up doing was driving up the cost of care for everyone. Now we have government involved so the quality of care is going to go down while the cost is going to skyrocket. In the end, the only people who will end up benefiting are the politicians.
Or how about if the pro-gun lobby decided that anyone who did not buy a gun that year would get taxed an extra $5,000?
"This shit is so unconstitutional" please point to me where the constitution say we can't have mandatory insurance?
That's not how the Constitution works. See the 10th Amendment, which reads in full, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Meaning, broadly speaking, that the federal government gets ONLY those powers enumerated in the Constitution, and if you want to say that something is constitutional, the burden is on YOU to prove it so. To my reading, nowhere does it mention forcing citizens to purchase anything from another privately-owned entity.
If you want to try to coerce the citizens to buy insurance using the power of taxation... go for it. But don't expect everyone to like it and don't call it constitutional unless you can show that it is so.
OK, good to know what you said.
You missed the point of the comment you were replying to though, who was basing it in the idea that if the market were more free, it would be cheaper and better.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
1. PPACA sets up a tax liability for all and a tax credit for those who gets health insurance.
2. Congress has the power to levy taxes (Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 and amongst other places in Article I, Section 8 as well as the 16th Amendment)
3. Constitution does not forbid congress to pass legislation that enables citizens to receive tax credits. And the congress did that by the creation of an agency to help people get health insurance. "Federal and State Exchanges"
4. Therefore, PPACA is well within the power of congress according to the constitution.
The Supreme Court found this to be the case so if you think it's unconstitutional, you'll have to take it up with the Supreme Court. Although, they are highly unlikely to want to hear the case again.
You may think Obamacare is bad, in reality, insurance premiums are high because hospitals have to make up for its huge amounts of bad debt from treating people without insurance and can't play for their treatment. And since hospitals can't refuse emergency room patients, they take a huge loss. Not to mention, it clogs up the Emergency Room so that someone who absolutely needs Emergency Care may not receive it in time. To make up for that, the hospitals charge insurers a huge amount and provides really bad service. The wait time at certain hospital ERs are 4 to 6 hours. To fix the problem. you need to keep people out of the ER, make hospitals charge less.
The PPACA attempts to do that by: 1. Encouraging people to get insurance. It's ok if you don't, you'll just have to pay some more taxes.
2. If you have insurance, you go get seen by a doctor before you have to go to the ER. This reduces the stress on ER and ensures that the hospital's bad debt is reduced.
3. Hospitals are put on a new plan to get paid. Instead of a set fee for providing a service, they are now paid to manage the health of an individual. Before the incentive was to do as many tests and treatments with the patient as possible since the government paid up for each one. Now the hospital is paid a set fee to provide care towards 1 patient per month at a certain standard of care. If they do too many tests, that will eat into their margins. If they do too few tests and the patient gets really sick, then they fail the quality of care test and they get penalized on the payment. Either way, the hospitals will be incentivized to provide good quality of care without going overboard. And this will reduce the cost of care overall, which will in turn reduce healthcare insurance premiums.
Full disclosure: I work for a major pharmaceutical company on the impact of PPACA on their ability to access physicians and sell their products.
You found two examples of cases where the preventative care ended up being overzealous, and concluded that all preventative care is a bad idea?
I read the internet for the articles.
Apparently you can't read to the next sentence?
In 2-3 years the number uninsured will drop much farther.
Ya, no shit. Because the fine will go up more people will be compelled to buy the insurance. Still doesn't mean it is "affordable" or sustainable. This is a band-aid solution to prop up the health insurance system with more unwilling participants.
Despite what you may have been told, insurance companies are not charities. If they are giving you something for "free", then it's being paid for somehow. Perhaps you're even the one that's paying for it. Or perhaps you are lucky and are able to MOOCH off the rest of us.
Someone, somewhere has to pick up the tab.
Isn't that why the Republican's created the Free-rider penalty when they first wrote ACA under Regan, and kept it every time it was introduced in the various states and in Congress something like 8 times? The plan conforms to the screw-over-the-little-guy, subsidize-the-big-guy neo-con economic model. Now the question of why did a Democrat pick it up and run with it, and why do Republican's now hate it are of intrest.
"In the U.S., the uninsured rate dipped to 15.6% in the first quarter of 2014, a 1.5-percentage-point decline from the fourth quarter of 2013. The uninsured rate is now at the lowest level recorded since late 2008." Yippie we are almost back to 2008!
Sounds to me like really bad public policy. But nothing in the Constitution bans congress from passing that law.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
As we were told multiple times before the ACA was implemented, it's NOT a tax:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/09/obama-mandate-is-not-a-tax/
Yes, I think you are right on the constitutionality issue. People get tax refunds for all sorts of things... "Cash for clunkers" comes to mind. And nothing in the Constitution prevents a regressive income tax. Which is what a tax penalty mostly applied to middle class families that feel they can't afford Obamacare or employer provided plans really is. I warned people ahead of the Supreme Court case that it wasn't likely to be overruled because the mandate was just a tax based on some criteria that wasn't constitutionally protected.
But I think there is probably a constitutional line someplace, I mean if the health insurance mandate was a criminal or civil penalty instead of a tax penalty based on income then it would be considered unconstitutional or if the money was spent towards supporting some particular speech or religion, like giving people a tax credit for buying just the books on Oprah Winfrey's book club list or a tax penalty if a person doesn't buy a cross, or mandating dues payments to the Party.
Funny enough I think the Massachusetts RomneyCare model is actually unconstitutional, under the state constitution. Because Massachusetts constitution specifies a flat income tax and only allows deductions under the income tax and not extra taxes ... like a penalty. But as far as I know there has been no legal challenge.
A single payer healthcare system does not equal zero competition. Medicare is single payer and there are many medical providers competing for Medicare customers, as evidenced by the plethora of ads during the enrollment period at years end. Single provider systems are (close to) zero competition. The VA system is an example of this
What I can't believe is the deafening silence about the fundamental legal ethics issue inherent to ObamaCare.
Are people so used to abusive legal practices, in our "Land of the Lawsuit" that they think that nothing can be done about them?
A right to ethical practice of law certainly arises under the 9th Amendment, as a right retained by the people. Even the appearance of ethical conflict of interest must be avoided whenever possible.
If the federal government has some role in health care, does it really need a law of over two thousand pages to accomplish that role?
Shouldn't a law of, say, ten or twenty pages suffice? Something that ordinary people can read and understand.
For the legal professionals in Congress (both elected and staff), and the legal professional in the Executive Office, and the legal professionals in the judiciary, all to combine together to write, approve, and uphold a law of this enormous size and complexity goes far beyond any reasonable exercise of government authority.
It can only be presumed that the law was padded out to create future demand for the legal professionals writing it. Doubtless they will have all kinds of consulting opportunities down the road. Perhaps the Bar associations made some "campaign contributions" as well, or promised other forms of support to various key participants, to make this law happen.
The US legal profession clearly understands basic economics: create an artificial demand for the services of a profession, and the members of that profession can demand more for their services.
This isn't just a problem with health care: every time the legal profession pulls one of these scams and adds lots of unnecessary complexity to the legal system, it makes it that much harder to fight this kind of thing down the road. Further, every time we let the government getting away with violating rights reasonably asserted under the 9th Amendment, it makes it that much harder to assert rights under that amendment in the future (this creates a contradiction in the legal system, which in turn helps create artificial demand for the services of legal professionals, since contradictions by their very nature make things harder to understand).
Given that the Obamacare law clearly violates the right to ethical practice of law, it violates the Bill of Rights (and every legal professional involved in implementing it violated their oath to uphold that Bill of Rights). The law needs to be pared down to a reasonable size, without propaganda, and clearly written to allow the typical educated adult to understand it.
The principle that the government that governs best, governs least is not just about government, it's also a fundamental to ethical practice of law.
You can choose not to buy health insurance under Obamacare. If you make this choice you will pay more in taxes (the individual mandate tax). Just like if you choose not to buy a house, you will pay more in taxes (no mortgage interest deduction).
And yet we spend twice as much on entitlements as on defense.
The opposite of progress is congress
that's what's really at issue here.
There is no need for obamacare, there is no need for 80% of the 'health care crisis" bullshit.
The Only Reason we have a 'healthcare crisis" is because of agencies like the FDA that allow public poisoning and the 'modern' medical information that's killing people.
Get smart, stay away from 'Doctors's seek out Naturapaths for true health.
The population of the US is around 313 million. Why is it so hard to believe that 7 million signed up? Have people been lying about not having health insurance all this time? Yes, it was "odd" that the number spiked at the "last minute", but don't you think the people who couldn't access the site were waiting...trying...and then signed up when the site finally got fixed? Common sense.
America's new health care plan: "tourism" to the UK.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
They also said that the 2nd amendment guaranteed the right of private citizen's to own and carry firearms. That good enough for you that you will demand that your politicians stop trying to pass laws contrary to that opinion?
First, it is arms, not firearms. It does not specify or limit types of arms. However, the constitution does specify a framework for laws and judicial review. Therefore it is reasonable to allow laws to specify or limit types of arms (unless you think your next door neighbor has a right to have nuclear bombs).