ObamaCare Plans Come on the Market October 1st. Get Ready

92tide

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May 9, 2000
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i noticed that today, there is an option to browse plan offerings without logging in. this option was not there a couple of days ago. i just needed to peruse the options as i plan on buying my coverage directly through Kaiser, but kept getting stuck in the registration loop.

the good news (for me) is that i will be getting coverage for my family (gold plan) for about $920 a month now. the almost identical plan i now have with kaiser is $1500/month.
was finally able to get the application and payment to kaiser. for most of past two days, i had the same types of issues with kaiser's website as i had seen with the exchange website, get almost all of the way through the process then the system freezes. i was able to go back late last night and re-log on and finish the transaction.
 

Tide1986

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Nov 22, 2008
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Interesting article:

Obamacare Losers and Why They Matter

Based on what we’ve seen from premiums to date, the individual market’s “mandate-regulate-subsidize” setup isn’t creating a universal benefit a la Medicare or Social Security or a means-tested benefit paid for through progressive taxation: Rather, it’s creating a bifurcated system in which protections for the lower middle class and the sick are funded in part through what amounts to a flat tax that falls most heavily on people making just slightly higher incomes. (...the subsidized bronze plan for a 50-year-old Connecticut resident making $40,000 costs about $2000 a year. If that same resident takes a job paying $50,000, the same plan, now unsubsidized, will cost $4200 a year — basically a 20 percent marginal tax on climbing just a little ways up the income ladder.)
...what makes this setup potentially more perverse is that it raises rates most sharply on precisely those Americans who up until now were doing roughly what we should want more health insurance purchasers to do: Economizing, comparison shopping, avoiding paying for coverage they don’t need, and buying a level of insurance that covers them in the event of a true disaster while giving them a reason not to overspend on everyday health expenses.
If we want health inflation to stay low and health care costs to be less of an anchor on advancement, we should want more Americans making $50,000 or $60,000 or $70,000 to spend less upfront on health insurance, rather than using regulatory pressure to induce them to spend more. And seen in that light, the potential problem with Obamacare’s regulation-driven “rate shock” isn’t that it doesn’t let everyone keep their pre-existing plans. It’s that it cancels plans, and raises rates, for people who were doing their part to keep all of our costs low.
 

mittman

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Jun 19, 2009
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I expected some of this, but not at this level.

Call centers in bakeries and machine shops? It is almost comical.

Some of this has to be expected though. There just had to be when a program that was not universally called for (depending on who you believe it was not even wanted by a majority) was pushed through and rushed into production due to a political window. It is obvious nobody was ready.

Add to that the sheer size of the task being taken on. Any one of these could bring it tumbling down: the huge slice of the economy impacted; interstate commerce rules to navigate, do away with, or ignore; the normal problems with bureaucracy; the number of people trying to take advantage of it for political and monetary gain.

Add to that the push and expectation for the state governments to handle it. They should have expected there would be more problems from states. Even the ones in the best condition to take this on are already struggling with loads of unfunded mandates, others that are already dysfunctional, not to mention the politically disinclined. This side of it is actually looking better in some cases than I expected. Granted my expectations were pretty low.

It still surprises how many problems we are seeing though. This was supposed to be a signature program to be remembered as a legacy of an administration. One would think they would have had more of their ducks in a row.

Honestly, I expected a large majority of citizens would not be allowed to keep their own policies. That just had to happen if they were going to set a minimum level of coverage, and remove preexisting conditions. That had to be an outright lie. All of them including Obama had to know the regulations they were putting in place made that impossible. What does "many" mean? A couple of thousand?
 
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cuda.1973

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Dec 6, 2009
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Here is the mindset of the notzys that are ramming this crap down our throats:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/30/Waxman-Selling-Individual-Insurance-is-Abuse

So, 'splain to me how or why 537 elected numbskulls know more about my health, and what sort of insurance I need or must have, than I do. They don't. Simple as that. Yet, they are the masterminds of the world, and have to be right.

And I am a blithering idiot. Without the gubbament to make my decisions for me, how did I ever get this far?

As dumb and helpless as we all must be, it is a miracle we did not all matriculate at API.
 

uafan4life

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Mar 30, 2001
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Well, we got some wonderful news today...

As it turns out, the employer group policy that we have - a policy which more than meets all of the ACA requirements and which we were previously led to believe (by BCBS) would be "grandfathered in" - is getting cancelled.

The BCBS rep couldn't tell us what was going to change, benefits-wise, but he was able to say that the rates will either be cheaper or more expensive.

:rolleyes:

This idiotic piece of legislation is nothing short of an atrocity and, in my opinion, anyone who continues to support and/or defend it is nothing short of an idiot.


Sent from my HTC Droid DNA using Tapatalk 2
 
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cuda.1973

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Dec 6, 2009
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Another sterling example of "Tell me again why this crap is a good idea."

http://nypost.com/2013/10/23/out-of-network-not-an-option-in-individual-obamacare-plans/

Pay more, get less!

Oh, for those of you who have not been paying attention...............I do not use a "network". Why should I pay for yet one more thing I do not need or want? I already pay 100% of my costs. How is this crap an improvement? I use the "savings" to save for the proverbial rainy day. (Even though The Regime obviously thinks I am incapable of fending for myself.)
 

cuda.1973

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Yes, interesting on how the statist mindset works. Some of us need to pay more, so that folks who didn't have any in the past get a break. And those who are paying more............well, the numbers may be high, but it is only a small percentage. (Implies we don't matter.) But, you have to sign up, or else you will not get that all important tax credit.

Yes, the tax credit...........dangling the carrot of giving you back some of the money the gubbament already robbed you of. Brilliant! That really makes we want to sign up! In fact, maybe I can sign up twice, and get twice the tax credit!

But, he almost gets it: it slices up the very middle class The Regime claims it doesn't want to harm. (Just the evil rich. And their union cronies, who have great benefits packages. Wait............don't they vote demoncrat?) His solution is to raise the bar at which the costs become punitive.

Hey............here is an idea..................let us go back to taking care of ourselves!

"No, you can't do that. You are incapable of it. Now, silence, peasant, and be gone with you!"
 

Tide1986

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Nov 22, 2008
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Here's another interesting article on the future of health care in the United States:

The Coming Two-Tier Health System

The health-care law was generated by an administration promoting government as the solution to inequality, yet the greatest irony of ObamaCare is what will undoubtedly follow as a long-term, unintended consequence of the law: a decidedly unequal, two-tiered health system. One will be for the poor and middle class, and a separate system will be for those with the money or power to circumvent ObamaCare.
The hidden truth is just around the corner—those more dependent on public insurance, mostly the poor and middle class, will have limited access to medical care.
At the same time, ObamaCare is squeezing out the middle class from affordable private insurance that correlates with far better disease outcomes than government insurance. By bloating coverage requirements and minimizing the consideration of risks fundamental to pricing insurance, the law has already increased premiums by 20%-200% in more than 40 states, according to a 2013 analysis by the Manhattan Institute's Avik Roy and others.
Despite the government's assertion that the health-care law increases insurance choices, the ObamaCare exchanges do the opposite for those dependent on them and the government subsidies they offer. The average number of plans offered in individual states has decreased from 117 in 2013 to 41 in the new exchanges; consumers in 16 states now suddenly have their choices limited to three or fewer insurers.
McKinsey reported a marked narrowing of hospital networks on the ObamaCare exchanges: In 2013, 33% of individual insurance offerings contained narrow or very narrow networks, but this year under the exchanges 68% of options cover only those limited networks.
The American Academy of Private Physicians estimates that there are now about 4,400 concierge physicians, 30% more than last year. In a recent Merritt Hawkins survey, about 7% to 10% of physicians planned to transition to concierge or cash-only practices in the next one to three years.
As America doubles down on government authority over health care, Europeans with the means to do so are increasingly circumventing their own centralized systems. In Britain, even though they're already paying for the National Health Service, six million Brits—two-thirds of citizens earning more than $78,700—now buy private health insurance. Meanwhile, more than 50,000 travel out of the U.K. annually, spending more than $250 million, to receive treatment more readily than they can at home. Even in Sweden, the mother of all welfare nations, half a million Swedes now use private insurance, up from 100,000 a decade ago.
Just as in the U.K. and other countries where governments take an outsize role in dictating health-care policy, only the lower and middle classes in America will suffer the full consequences of ObamaCare.
 

Tide1986

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The idealism/fantasies of Vermonters have been shattered:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...rmont-ends-push-for-single-payer-health-care/

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) has abandoned a years-long push for a universal health-care system in the state after budget analysts said the program would require what he called “enormous” new taxes.

Shumlin had proposed what he called the Green Mountain Care plan, which would have put Vermont on track to provide publicly-financed health care starting in 2017.

But Michael Costa, Shumlin’s deputy director of health care reform, concluded the plan would have required an 11.5 percent payroll tax on all Vermont businesses and an income tax hike of up to 9.5 percent. Those taxes wouldn’t have covered transition costs to the new system, which would have amounted to at least $500 million.
 

Gr8hope

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Nov 10, 2010
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"The idealism/fantasies of Vermonters have been shattered"

The idealism/fantasies of Americans everywhere are being shattered everyday as they discover the reality of Obama's impossible promises on Obamacare. It was never possible to accomplish what was promised. It was always meant to be the path to government healthcare and ruination of our system.
 

Tide1986

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Nov 22, 2008
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Here's another article about Vermont's aborted dream -- Megan McArdle always has a well-reasoned point of view:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articl...s-lessons-for-fans-of-singlepayer-health-care

Path dependence is a running theme around here, and in no other area of public policy is it more troublesome. Health-care jobs are steady and well-remunerated compared to whatever else those workers could be doing. And that's not just true of the much-derided "specialists" who do too many procedures and charge too much; it's true of everyone in your hospital and doctor's office, from your beloved family physician to the woman who draws your blood. All those people have spent long years working to get where they are. If you suddenly change the rules and take that all away, their rage will burn with the righteous fire of a thousand suns.

So even if we could have had a much cheaper health-care system if we moved to single payer in 1970, that doesn't mean that we can get the same happy results by doing so now. Today we'd be building a single-payer system with the price schedule of our current health-care workers. Which means it would cost an absolutely breathtaking amount of taxpayer money, as Vermont just found out.
 

Tide1986

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Nov 22, 2008
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"Reality Undermines Arguments to Expand Medicaid":

http://newsok.com/reality-undermines-arguments-to-expand-medicaid/article/5381186


The appeal of Medicaid expansion is that the federal government would pay all expansion costs during the first few years, and then purportedly pay 90 percent of expenses thereafter. But the state portion of the tab isn’t insignificant. A Leavitt Partners report predicted Oklahoma taxpayers would shell out $850 million over 10 years for Medicaid expansion; that estimate was based on demographic assumptions the report acknowledged were likely flawed. So the true cost could be even greater. The money would come from programs such as schools and roads.
 

Bama Reb

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Nov 2, 2005
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What gets me is not so much that the figures they used, and promised, were incorrect. It's that they were outright lies from the beginning, and everyone from Obama on down knew it. That is, everyone except those it would effect both medically and financially.
That's reason enough to never ever trust them, or any other government entity, again.
 

crimsonaudio

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What gets me is not so much that the figures they used, and promised, were incorrect. It's that they were outright lies from the beginning, and everyone from Obama on down knew it.
Completely breaking the system is the only way they get people wanting single-payer. The clamoring or SP will come, just wait.
 

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