Slashdot Mirror
800,000 Using HealthCare.gov Were Sent Incorrect Tax Data
mpicpp sends this report from the NY Times:
About 800,000 taxpayers who enrolled in insurance policies through HealthCare.gov received erroneous tax information from the government, and were urged on Friday to hold off on filing tax returns until the error could be corrected. The Obama administration, under heavy pressure from congressional Democrats, also announced that it would give several million people more time to buy health insurance so they could comply with federal law and avoid tax penalties. The incorrect insurance information is used in computing taxes. Consumers can expect to receive corrected data in the first week of March. With the new data, officials warned, some taxpayers will owe more and some will owe less. Officials said they did not know why the error had occurred.
I'm tired of all this bad news about Obamacare. Could we maybe just all agree not to talk about it any more until there is some good news to report?
See that "Preview" button?
You know, I used to warn people against the Govt being so involved with our healthcare. I likened it to putting the DMV in charge of you if you got the flu. The long wait times, the surly and non-helpful govt employees there staring more at the clock than worried about you getting new plates.
But hell, I will at least admit the DMV does tend to get its mailings out on time and in proper fashion.
I know its a pipe dream, but I wish we could move the govt (especially the Feds) back more to their constitutionally mandated responsibilities. At the very least, my dealing with them could and should pretty much only be once a year.
1. Tell me how much tax to pay (simplify this).
2. Leave me the fuck alone.
I'd be 101% supportive of my federal overlords if they could just get to this point in their interactions with me. I'll be fine on my own to haggle and negotiate for my jobs, and my bill rates. I'l be happy to manage my own health care, and know what is important to save for (retirement, routine health needs, medical insurance for catastrophic needs, etc).
I seriously don't need you to play nanny state with me, I don't need you to suck up so much of my money and waste it.
I don't need you spying on me.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I fear this will not end well for those who happened to already file. I have previously dealt directly with the IRS for three filings, two of which were multi-month-long processes. In the worst case, I spent the better part of 13 months corresponding via phone and U.S. Mail regarding an amended return -- they owed me money.
I'm not sure what percentage of filers end up owing taxes versus owed refunds. I imagine the number is fewer, so perhaps less than 400,000 people were even motivated to file early. But for those that were, I could see the amendment process dragging on until 2016.
...when everything is a crime, everyone is a criminal.
They seem to be having some difficulties.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Why the FUCK does the IRS need to know anything about the state of my medical insurance?
(we can go into why other entities (twitter/google/etc) need to know, but that was a previous slashdot article)
No one is forcing an insurance company to be involved with your healthcare, idiot. Actually, now they are as a result of Obamacare.
Obama administration, under heavy pressure from congressional Democrats, also announced that it would give several million people more time to buy health insurance so they could comply with federal law and avoid tax penalties.
I really hope the King v. Burwell case goes against the government. The executive branch needs to learn they implement the law congress passes not the one they wish congress passes. If Obama and lefties suddenly are not allowed to continue to make up the rules as they go along maybe the other half of America will realize this law for the ill considered, abusive over reach of authority and corporate give away that it is.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
You are clearly no student of history (like most of the Rand fanboys here on /.) . You have not a clue as to how much better your lot is because of the many things "the government" regulates. No longer can someone sell you "medicine" that is not only ineffective but would stand good chance of hurting or killing you. No longer do a large number of our fellow citizens suffer from food-borne diseases because of shoddy processing and storage practices. And if you think you can negotiate on your own for effective health care coverage, you are clearly ignorant of the realities of that marketplace.
Marketplace insurance is just a private plan with an extra layer of government collusion.
It's a private plan with regulations to keep the price reasonable because it wouldn't be otherwise. Now your ability to get health insurance is not tied to your continued employment. No one should lose health insurance just because they lost a job. Criticize the details all you want but that part of the ACA is unequivocally a Good Thing.
Crony-capitalism at its finest.
Since these insurance companies wouldn't insure millions of people at a reasonable price until the government forced the issue it eludes me how this is "crony capitalism". It's not as if the insurance companies were lobbying in favor of insuring poor people.
That's the point, they talked of single payer and robust public option, but instead delivered....what? another layer to insurance, healthcare chain and big insurance cycle? And claimed it would be payed for by a certain quota of young people signing up, which hasn't happened either (so the thing will not sustain itself).
I laugh at people who somehow imagined this would be a European style socialized medicine, ha as if!
The executive branch needs to learn they implement the law congress passes not the one they wish congress passes.
If Congress isn't specific in their statutes then it is to the discretion of the administration how they handle the regulations. Very few laws are passed with enough specificity that the executive branch doesn't have considerable discretion in the interpretation of the statutes.
If Obama and lefties suddenly are not allowed to continue to make up the rules as they go along maybe the other half of America will realize this law for the ill considered, abusive over reach of authority and corporate give away that it is.
You're accusing the left of corporate giveaways? Methinks you have the left and right mixed up. Abusive overreach of authority? I direct your attention to the actions of the previous administration, particularly post 9/11.
Self-insurance is a concept.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Why do we go through the process of taxing government employees? Why not just pay them proportionately and not have the IRS process them? This would accomplish several things:
1) It would save the non-government taxpayer a significant amount of money every year.
2) We could get rid of a large portion of the IRS staff.
3) It would remind government employees that they make less than the rest of us because their paychecks have to come out of someone elses.
tinfoil is a homeopathic treatment and therefore is disallowed.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Bad form, replying to myself, but the same PPO policy cost $800/month to COBRA in 2008. As a data point.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
You are clearly no student of reality. Bad drugs are sold everyday, have you not noticed all the 'call now if you've taken X medicine' commercials for law firms. Have you not seen food recalls and video of some of the filthy bacteria ridden food processing plants? Have you got your head so far up your ass that you'll defend your party line no matter what? As a student of history did you not learn socialism always fails because on a large scale it go against human nature. No one is saying get rid of all things Government, we just want a minimal amount if intrusion in our lives and a fiscal policy that supports what Government we do have. This policy of spending money that doesn't exist is quickly leading to a collapse or is basic math something else you don't understand?
Actually I am a student of history and I am not a Rand fanboy but I did like Fountianhead but I also know that it is fiction.
Like most things in life it is all a matter or degree.
The goal of government is to put in just enough regulation to keep a free competitive marketplace that works but so much regulation that it makes doing business a nightmare.
For example why is crap like Airborne "cold medicine" allowed to be for sale when the label says it does nothing. On the flipside when one of the military services wanted to buy a piece of software I worked on the "bid" came in a 50 pound box.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Check the last paragraph in this article.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The reality of healthcare politics is that a majority have and still do want some kind of gov't managed insurance to pool risk. Only about 1/4 want to go back to the way things were before ACA (link below).
IF a political entity rants to change or repeal it, they need to first specify in detail what to replace it with or change.
Every known non-trivial change will sock it to one group of people in order to benefit another, and thus wouldn't be an easy sell.
Griping is easy; presenting viable alternatives is not.
And each state CAN run it's own exchange site if it doesn't like the federal one.
http://politicalticker.blogs.c...
Table-ized A.I.
The average person can't manage their own healthcare. The do so at the detriment of all others. It costs more to not have people on insurance. Ideally, we'd have a national insurance that covered everyone via taxes, but we have a hybrid system. The biggest issues with ideals is that they're not always practical.
No matter what, we benefit by having more people with quality insurance. Just with the number of reduced trips to the ER for preventable issues, it will pay itself back in spades. Trips to the ER are magnitudes more expensive than going to the doctor for a scheduled appointment.
the other big issue is that people are worth more than they get paid. A person making $40k/year may be worth over $100k/year to the economy as a whole. If people got paid what their actual value was, there wouldn't be an issue in the first place.
No clue about Seattle, but where I live (Michigan), I can't even renew my driver's license until they send me the renewal thing approximately a month prior to my birthdate.
Not even online, because that requires a code number from the form they send you (because, you know, someone might randomly log in using the number off my driver's license and pay it for me or something).
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
We now have a government program that insures about 9 million people at a cost of about $1 Trillion. Yep, thats about $100K per person to insure those on Obamacare that were not insured before, that is cheaper?
Lets not go into the cost of the website, the problems, the excessivly high costs of the plans, the illegal changes to the law without it going through Congress again, them refusing to answer Congress on how the program is running, and on and on.
Just because your a fanboi doesn't mean the program is effective or affordable.
Oh noes, socialism!
Sign me up. We are the only first world country WITHOUT single payer, and we have the most fucked health care. I don't think that is a coincidence.
What's weird to me is that insurance companies aren't at all incentivized to reduce costs. In fact, they're blatantly incentivized towards raising costs. It really doesn't matter whether they're capped at 20% profit - their profit scales with larger overall numbers, so they're incentivized to keep costs high and push them higher in all situations. If healthcare costs rise 10%, they can push their insurance prices up 10%, and have a 10% increase in profit, even under the same percentage cap. Doctors like it too, since they'd make an extra 10% on the same procedure. Even the patients, in most cases, care far more about quality care than about the cost of care.
Auto insurance and repair has plain old economics going for it - as spare parts become more available later in a car's production run, the costs drop. Home/flood insurance seems like it would be subject to the same upward incentive in home prices as health insurance, with the caveat that housing prices usually remain relatively stagnant outside of a bubble and there's not much the insurance companies can do to affect pricing anyway.
Healthcare, though, becomes a problematic outlier relative to other types of insurance - how do you lower costs when almost all the players have a tangible incentive to help costs rise and the ability to do so, and even the consumer has an ambivalence to cost as long as quality is maintained/improved and the cost burden doesn't reach a certain (unknown) untenable threshold for a large enough percentage?
That's the problem the US is attempting to deal with in healthcare, at its' core. It's probably the most complicated economic and policy problem possible - how do you regulate a market that has almost nothing providing natural balancing factors? Supply and demand are effectively nonexistent, healthcare isn't optional (and never really was, even before the ACA), and all the players are rewarded for pushing on the same side of the scale.
Here in CA, especially around the LA area, this hasn't been so true this year. There have been a few news reports about how people are finding that they can't even get an appointment inside the (usually) 3 month window the mailer gives them, because the DMV is so overloaded. So, to make the deadline (what I saw reported was for license renewals) people have to go in without an appointment and usually waste an entire day. I had to get mine renewed (birthday 1/26) and my appointment made online (mid December) was about 3 weeks out. Even then the place was packed on a Saturday, and it took about 90 minutes (no test, just redo thumbprint, eye check, new pic).
Some won't directly say it, but it's basically due to the massive increase in requests for new licenses, since the new rule kicked in to give licenses to illegal aliens in CA.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
Seattle hasn't had a Republican mayor for about 80 years. The city council is all Democrats except for the one socialist.
If you don't like the government there - surprise you don't actually like Democrats, regardless of what your govrrnment-school teacher told you.
so you want people to live shorter more painful lives and the system to cost 10-100x more than countries that handle healthcare responsibly
the simple truth is healthcare and healthcare insurance is not voluntary. it's mandatory
because you can spout eloquently all you want about independence and freedom, but you don't understand the subject matter. when you break your arm, you're not shaking it off and going on with your life, you're going to the hospital
and we're not refusing you if you can't pay, because we're not sociopaths
and when you can't pay your bill you're shafting us
being an irresponsible freeloader is the actual real life effect of your uneducated "ideology", not real freedom
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It looks like that changed as of January 2015.
If you can't mod them join them.
Yes, but in fact Obamacare was mostly written by the drug and insurance companies, who both win big on the deal. The party of limited regulation threw in the clause that prohibits the operation of the free market by preventing medicaid from negotiating prices with drug companies. So the drug companies get to price their drugs as they please. The "rational" for this is that they need this money for R&D (how many times have you heard this?) whereas in fact they are going back to their shareholders and explaining how they are keeping their R&D costs under control and making big, fat profit (off sick people).
1. There is a lot of pressure to reduce costs even in the commercial insurance world. Obamacare forced insurers to pay out a lot more in costs (through a lot of things such as birth control required to be covered with no copay) and they can pass some but not all of the costs along to the employers and individuals who buy the insurance. The Obamacare "mandate" penalty is a lot less than what insurance actually costs and the bigger the delta, the more people who will eschew insurance. Those that eschew insurance are going to be the suckers, ahem "young healthies" who have few or no expenses and subsidize the people with multiple poorly-controlled chronic diseases who cost a bundle. Therefore the insurers can't simply keep raising costs forever.
2. Medicare and Medicaid pay for something like 75% of all medical charges in the country and they absolutely are decreasing what they pay hospitals and physicians (to the point they generally pay below the actual cost of providing services, especially Medicaid.) They are highly incentivized to reduce costs because it makes the federal and state budget deficits associated with their operation smaller.
3. Physician and hospital reimbursement is largely determined by Medicare. If you participate in Medicare (nearly all doctors and facilities do), your pricing structures are essentially set by CMS's "allowable charges" as laid out in the RVBRS. The actual reimbursements paid also don't vary much as private insurers know what Medicare pays (it's public) and stick pretty close to the Medicare rates.
The really screwy thing about healthcare it's essentially a government run market and health "insurance" is a third-party prepayment system. If we wanted to decrease the out of pocket for most people, it would be in having health insurance revert to actual catastrophic insurance instead of being a prepaid system and allowing balance billing (the patient pays the difference between the charged amount and what insurance pays.) That would currently be against several laws but the only reason it's illegal is that it makes a lot of sense, and would result in a relatively small number of people in highly politically valuable groups losing a bunch of discounts, subsidies, and freebies.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Keep in perspective that the "too low" Medicare and Medicaid payment schedule that the hospitals and doctors claim they can't survive on is still much higher than is paid by any healthcare system in any other country on the planet. So why is it that doctors and hospitals in the US charge more than in Japan, Germany, France, the UK, etc., while at the same time delivering inferior medical outcomes? Are they stupider or more wasteful? Or do they just have a higher profit margin? As a patient, I want to pay for healthcare, not profit margins.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
It's not even comparable as the entire setup here is different compared to a fully socialized system. There simply is nothing like the Medicare and Medicaid payment schedule in those countries as the government directly owns, administers, and runs the healthcare system rather than using independent contractors as in the U.S. The "cash price" that one might encounter in such a system as a foreigner is going to be a lot different than the cash price here because ironically that actually is a free market, while our "cash prices" are directly controlled by the government.
One huge reason that things cost so much more here is regulatory compliance. That is fairly minimal in directly government-run systems as the government isn't very interested in grossly running up its own costs in a fully socialized sytem. But with independent contractors, sure, make them document everything in quadruplicate and check 187 checkboxes in a very clunky inefficient mandated electronic medical record system for every patient visit and spend billions and billions of dollars in complying with arcane HIPAA, JCAHO and CMS regulations. (Note that the one fully socialized system in the U.S., the VA, is exempt from all of that.) And then fine them/reduce their reimbursements if they don't jump through all of the hoops properly. It saves the government a little money but costs the healthcare system as a whole a fortune.
The whole bit about "poorer outcomes" is mainly a combination of cherry-picked facts and factors well outside of the control of the healthcare system. For example, infant mortality in the U.S. as reported by the "socialized medicine is teh awesome" crowd is higher than most European countries. Why? We have a very different method of counting what a live birth is than Europe (they count a lot of extremely preterm births as "nonviable stillbirths," we do not), and when we use the same metrics as they do, our stats suddenly look a bunch better. Our survival rate for extremely preterm births is #1 in the world and also cancer mortality is very low as well. You don't see them touting those stats though. We do have some issues with certain populations essentially ignoring their health (such as having a higher smoking rate than most of Europe) but that is a cultural issue and has remained very resistant to even massive interventions by the healthcare field. You can't blame the healthcare field in the U.S. for that.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
You know, I used to warn people against the Govt being so involved with our healthcare. I likened it to putting the DMV in charge of you if you got the flu. The long wait times, the surly and non-helpful govt employees there staring more at the clock than worried about you getting new plates.
But hell, I will at least admit the DMV does tend to get its mailings out on time and in proper fashion.
I know its a pipe dream, but I wish we could move the govt (especially the Feds) back more to their constitutionally mandated responsibilities. At the very least, my dealing with them could and should pretty much only be once a year.
1. Tell me how much tax to pay (simplify this).
2. Leave me the fuck alone.
I'd be 101% supportive of my federal overlords if they could just get to this point in their interactions with me. I'll be fine on my own to haggle and negotiate for my jobs, and my bill rates. I'l be happy to manage my own health care, and know what is important to save for (retirement, routine health needs, medical insurance for catastrophic needs, etc).
I seriously don't need you to play nanny state with me, I don't need you to suck up so much of my money and waste it.
I don't need you spying on me.
I live in Quebec Canada and I love our system. It is one reason I would never relocate to the USA. My health care costs me about $100/mo each for my wife and I. My daughter and her husband pay about three thousand in taxes for the two of them and their three kids. And we have a drug plan too. I could go private or public, and chose public. Our plan will never bankrupt me or require me to choose between drugs or food.
Drugs
It costs me about $15/mo each for my wife and I plus I get my prescribed drugs at 20% of cost. I can elect to chose generics, if they are available and I do so because it saves me some money. And we have a ceiling on what our drug expenses are, before our copay pay becomes zero.
My daugher has MS and her drugs are $30,000 per year (not a typo, 30k). Her out of pocket drug cost is the rate / month with $2k per year ceiling, for life.
Our doctor visits are free, as are prescribed mri scans, xrays, hospital stays. In other words, medicare (single payer system) works.
We include free ambulance service. And no, unlike the negative antagonistic thinking against affordiable care, people in Canada do not abuse either the medicare, drug plan or ambulance services.
Dentistry is excluded for children under the age of 8, as are eye exams. Free eye exams and some lenses for seniors who are 65+.
I will be needing hearing aids within 5 years. Some of my older friends have pacemakers. I believe I have an allowance of $2k for hearing aids. Re pacemakers, the doctor chooses from a list of pacemakers. It and the installation costs the patient a big zero. Included in our public insurance are things like wheel chairs, installation of in-home stair elevators (for those whose bedrooms are on a second floor, and other things that would allow an person/couple to remain autonomous.)
By the way, more or less the same plan is provided in Europe, Russia, Australia, Mexico, Cuba, Israel, and other places. I know not about your medicaid. Is it similar?
Lets hope your opting out is worth it. With the rapid changes in technology today and in the future, there is not guarantee you will have a steady job after age 55. There is no guarantee your employer will provide a comprehensive a medical plan if your enrolment in the government plan will cost less for the business. Your life expectancy is today, beyond age 80.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Right, that's why a lot of middle class families are now paying more for worse insurance than they were before Obamacare...
Prices have been going up by huge (often double digit) percentages every year for a long time and that started LONG before the ACA was passed. I run a company so I have seen it first hand for years. Those cost increases cannot be endlessly absorbed by employers. If costs go up faster than the population then sooner or later some people are going to end up with either more expensive coverage or worse coverage or both. To pretend that we can have both rising costs but not have people pay more is to be in denial of economic reality.
The whole point of insurance is to spread the risk and the cost. The health care system in the US had to change and any change you make is going to benefit some and cost others. To deny some people access to health insurance to keep rates lower for others is immoral and wrong. To tie one's ability to get health coverage to having a job is even more immoral and wrong. Your employment should have nothing to do with your access to health insurance.
Nice revisionist history there.
I didn't state anything that isn't a fact. Prior to 2014 it was literally impossible for millions of people to get insurance for reasonable rates unless they had access to a group plan through an employer. If you had a pre-existing condition you were screwed.
Speaking for myself and my staff, we dropped our health plan at our company and sent everyone to the exchanges. Everyone in our company found coverage that was roughly comparable to what they had before for similar or less money or in a few cases they picked high deductible plans. In rough numbers our health plan before 2014 cost about $600/person/month and the company picked up half of that amount. Post 2014, most people are paying between $150-250/month out of pocket and the company doesn't pay a dime. This has allowed us to hire extra staff and buy some equipment we couldn't previously justify. Speaking for myself I went from a HMO to a PPO with an HSA which is better coverage for the same money. Best of all, if I were to change jobs or the company were to fold, every one of those people would still have health coverage.
My family of 5 coverage was $160 per month, $35 copay, no deductible. Here comes Osamabinladencare, one adult person is now $1200 per month for almost the same coverage
Oh bullshit. Either you had a ludicrously good deal or you are lying and I'm pretty sure you are lying. $160/month to cover a family of 5? I run a company an have been looking at health plans for years and have NEVER seen a plan like that. There isn't an insurance company out there that could make a dime underwriting coverage for a family that size at that rate.
Help me out here, because I really don't understand how it works....but how are you supposed to pay for private health insurance if you lose employment?
Might be tough but the important bit is that you have the OPTION to maintain your coverage which you didn't have before. The point you missed is that it used to be that if you lost your job you IMMEDIATELY lost your health insurance and you had ZERO alternative options except for maybe COBRA which is only a stop gap and an expensive one at that. Borrow the money, dip into savings or get another job but you can take your insurance with you. Even if you can't pay for it you can still sign up again at a later date when you can afford it regardless of your job situation. Got a pre-existing condition? Prior to 2014 you were screwed because no company would insure that condition for any amount of money. Prior to 2014, anyone who was self employed had very few options and they were almost universally shitty with huge deductibles.
Well, I am not aware of anyone whose insurance is only going up 3-5% per year and am not aware of anyone for whom their insurance didn't got up by at least 30% when Obamacare happened.
Then you haven't looked. I run a small company and we closed our company sponsored plan in 2014 because it was double the price of the plans available through the exchanges. Price increases in 2015 were low single digit percentages for most of our employees including myself. I'm intimately aware of the prices both before and after 2014 and on the average.
Personally I got coverage that was better than our company plan for roughly the same amount of money out of pocket plus I now have an HSA on top of that. Some folks in our company are paying much less per month. A few are paying more, mostly those who are very close to retirement age and smoke.
Furthermore because we dropped the company sponsored plan we save about $250 per month per employee so we were able to hire more people.
Even so..when did it become the Fed govt.'s responsibility to protect the stupid from themselves?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yes, I have noticed that bad drugs reach the market. I've also noticed why - a steady erosion of the effectiveness of the regulation of the pharmaceutical industry. That erosion is paid for by that industry.
I have noticed the food recalls, too. Who do you think issued the recalls, you moron? That's right - government regulatory agencies. Without them fare more people would sickened or killed every year.