supreme court upholds ACA

[bamacon]

We can argue about the merits of the law but today was a win for Obama and a terrible loss for the United States. The rule of law as been ignored and replaced by the will of a small group of men who have their own agenda. The Constitution is irrelevant now. Do you realize what this means to you? It doesn't matter what your political belief, you lost today. If you believe your subsidy for healthcare and any profits you make in the rigged markets is worth the loss of freedom and equal opportunity, you are a sad, selfish little person. When the time comes for the government official to determine your cost/benefit for a life saving treatment you will understand fully, even if you do not now.

This isn't anything new. The SC has had a Grand Wizard from the KKK as Chief Justice, ruled Blacks as property, upheld separate but equal, legalized the killing of babies in the womb, and said the rounding up of Americans of German and Japanese decent without any probable cause or reason was perfectly okay. And this is just a small sample of OUTRAGEOUS decisions by the SUPREME court. There was a reason why the founders were just as Leery of this bunch as the rest of govt. actually they were never intended to possess this level of power. It shows how weak Congress is in my opinion because I'd impeach Roberts ... right off the bench tonight for his incomprehensible logic.


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[Gr8hope]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/chief-justice-john-roberts-defends-steady-restraint.html
"He seemed to anticipate the dueling critiques, and used this week’s opinions to cast himself as a steady practitioner of judicial modesty."

In his dissent on Friday, Chief Justice Roberts suggested that the two opinions were entirely consistent. “Under the Constitution,” he wrote, “judges have the power to say what the law is, not what it should be.”

He based his decision on ACA on what he felt Congress intended and not the law they made but stuck to the Constitution on States rights in marriage. Consistency?

I believe he was playing politics in both instances. For ACA approval to appease leftists and voting against gay marriage to appease conservatives. His vote was irrelevant, it would pass without it.

 

[seebell]

Here's what I base that on:
CBO Quietly Drops Forecast Obamacare Will Cut Deficit
CBO Projections Indicate Obamacare Will Raise Deficits $131 Billion
CBO in 2012 did not dynamically score the bill. They never do dynamically score bills.
If I design a model which assumes the deficit will drop, and run the numbers, shazam, the numbers drop.
Plus, if you believe any Federal social safety net program will come in under budget, I have some beachfront land in Oklahoma I'd like to sell you. It just doesn't happen. Ever.

Thank you Tidewater. I think the law now requires bills to be dynamically scored. Your links are from 2014. The CBO issued a new report in June of this year as I and Mittman linked above.

From the CBO website. http://www.cbo.gov/publication/50252

CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation estimate that, over the next decade, a repeal of the Affordable Care Act would probably increase budget deficits with or without considering the effects of macroeconomic feedback.



AS for slowing health care costs, I refer you to the following:

http://www.economist.com/news/unite...are-spending-slowing-will-obamacare-cut-costs

In fairness there does seem to be a wide divergence about whether costs are slowing or not.

 

[TommyMac]

Now O'Bummer can boast that he has a pen, a telephone and a SCOTUS.

 

[seebell]

New report projects a $5.7 billion drop in hospitals’ uncompensated care costs because of the Affordable Care Act

http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/2014/UncompensatedCare/ib_UncompensatedCare.pdf

from Sept 2014

 

[BamaInMo1]

New report projects a $5.7 billion drop in hospitals’ uncompensated care costs because of the Affordable Care Act

http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/2014/UncompensatedCare/ib_UncompensatedCare.pdf

from Sept 2014

If you want a good idea of how this will all end up just take a look at Medicare. The road to Hell (or in this case: socialism/communism) is paved with "good intentions".

 

[TIDE-HSV]

If you want a good idea of how this will all end up just take a look at Medicare. The road to Hell (or in this case: socialism/communism) is paved with "good intentions".

I'd be willing to bet you change your tune in 20 years...

 

[BamaInMo1]

I will be willing to bet I don't as my reference is to how mis-managed Medicare is while being run by the gvt. We will all be sorry about all of this gvt controlled healthcare in 20 yrs or less.

 

[mittman]

New report projects a $5.7 billion drop in hospitals’ uncompensated care costs because of the Affordable Care Act

http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/2014/UncompensatedCare/ib_UncompensatedCare.pdf

from Sept 2014

This is why many of the large healthcare organizations were all for this. They get paid. They don't care who is paying.

I find two words in that report very telling:
1. "likely" there is no belief that it is guaranteed.
2. "Uncompensated" health care systems were already socializing medicine by raising prices to where the insured were bearing the load of what the uninsured could not pay for.

This may make costs go down in the short term, but I can't see it in the long term. One of two things has to happen. Quality will go down, Prices will continue to go up. Insured people in the U.S. are not only subsidizing the uninsured, they are subsidizing research and development, and the legal costs of the rabid lawsuits. All this does is to force more people into the quagmire. What we have done is attempt to fix the problem with more of the cause of the problem. The big healthcare conglomerates get paid and the problem continues, we just have an additional layer of abstraction between the service and the cost of the service.

I had a long discussion with my parents about this a while back. I may have referred to that discussion in another thread, I am not sure. (Dad was all for this BTW). When I asked them how they paid for healthcare before they had insurance paid for by his employer, he said they ran a tab at the doctor's office. What was happening was the market was working. The doctors could only charge what their clients could afford. The preponderance of insurance actually caused costs to rise to where people had to have insurance to have healthcare.

 

[RTR91]

I've mentioned before my mom is an OR nurse at a hospital in Montgomery. Went over to their house yesterday for a little bit. She talked about the ACA a little bit.

She said one of the doctors mentioned the below scenario last week as something that happens in his office.

Patient walks into the office for consultation.
Doctor examines and recommends surgery.
Patient: "I have insurance."
Doctor: "Great. How much is your deductible?"
Patient: "Uhh.... $5,000."
Doctor: "It's not going to cost $5,000. It's going to cost $2,000."
Patient leaves office and doesn't come back.

The doctor's point - just because more people have insurance doesn't mean they're all getting the care they need.

 

[NationalTitles18]

I've mentioned before my mom is an OR nurse at a hospital in Montgomery. Went over to their house yesterday for a little bit. She talked about the ACA a little bit.

She said one of the doctors mentioned the below scenario last week as something that happens in his office.

Patient walks into the office for consultation.
Doctor examines and recommends surgery.
Patient: "I have insurance."
Doctor: "Great. How much is your deductible?"
Patient: "Uhh.... $5,000."
Doctor: "It's not going to cost $5,000. It's going to cost $2,000."
Patient leaves office and doesn't come back.

The doctor's point - just because more people have insurance doesn't mean they're all getting the care they need.

Absolutely true. And at the same time as deductibles generally went upwards, Flexcard amounts went down and restrictions on use went up. Which leads me to believe the issue is control more so than access.

 

[TIDE-HSV]

I've mentioned before my mom is an OR nurse at a hospital in Montgomery. Went over to their house yesterday for a little bit. She talked about the ACA a little bit.

She said one of the doctors mentioned the below scenario last week as something that happens in his office.

Patient walks into the office for consultation.
Doctor examines and recommends surgery.
Patient: "I have insurance."
Doctor: "Great. How much is your deductible?"
Patient: "Uhh.... $5,000."
Doctor: "It's not going to cost $5,000. It's going to cost $2,000."
Patient leaves office and doesn't come back.

The doctor's point - just because more people have insurance doesn't mean they're all getting the care they need.

I've come to think of that as the tragedy of "The Bronze Plan."

 

[Bodhisattva]

People don't realize how much money they are taxed for health care or how much is deducted from their pay check for insurance premiums. That's many thousands of dollars a year that's out-of sight, out-of-mind.

People only focus on their deductible and their co-pay. For a routine checkup, they expect to pay $25. Think about that. One expects to pay a highly skilled professional examining your health $25. People pay more than that for an oil change.

The expectations and incentives around healh care are all out of wack.

 

[Tidewater]

I've come to think of that as the tragedy of "The Bronze Plan."

That is sort of what a high deductible is supposed to do: scare aware those who may not really, really need a procedure.

I wonder how much of the "slowing the increase in health care costs" are a result of the above-mentioned scenario. You believe you need a procedure. You discover your costs, then decide you don't need a procedure that much.
Except, maybe you do need it that much, but you are just deferring treatment until it is a bigger (and perhaps more expensive) problem.

 

[NationalTitles18]

That is sort of what a high deductible is supposed to do: scare aware those who may not really, really need a procedure.

I wonder how much of the "slowing the increase in health care costs" are a result of the above-mentioned scenario. You believe you need a procedure. You discover your costs, then decide you don't need a procedure that much.
Except, maybe you do need it that much, but you are just deferring treatment until it is a bigger (and perhaps more expensive) problem.

I know for a FACT that the latter is happening a LOT.

 

[TIDE-HSV]

That is sort of what a high deductible is supposed to do: scare aware those who may not really, really need a procedure.

I wonder how much of the "slowing the increase in health care costs" are a result of the above-mentioned scenario. You believe you need a procedure. You discover your costs, then decide you don't need a procedure that much.
Except, maybe you do need it that much, but you are just deferring treatment until it is a bigger (and perhaps more expensive) problem.

That was one of the poorly-thought through aspects of the ACA. I represent the largest AL-based, non-medical, 501(c)(3) in the state. In fact, I started it. At least 80% of our 700+ employees have to be federally defined as "disabled." Here's the "Catch-22": These people are the people that Medicaid was designed for - the kind for whom you're going to provide care one way or the other, usually the "other," the ER, most expensive of all clinics. Since we have more than the minimum number of employees, if we didn't provide a health insurance plan, we'd be fined under ACA. If you want to see some hair-raising insurance rates, try forming a plan for employees like these. If we didn't, the ACA fine would be a bit short of a couple of million a year - not acceptable for a nonprofit, both with accrediting agencies and the IRS. So, we have to do the best we can do, which is to provide a plan we know is short of where they'd be on Medicaid. However, no elasticity is provided in ACA for these types of employees. It just wasn't thought through...

 

[NationalTitles18]

That was one of the poorly-thought through aspects of the ACA. I represent the largest AL-based, non-medical, 501(c)(3) in the state. In fact, I started it. At least 80% of our 700+ employees have to be federally defined as "disabled." Here's the "Catch-22": These people are the people that Medicaid was designed for - the kind for whom you're going to provide care one way or the other, usually the "other," the ER, most expensive of all clinics. Since we have more than the minimum number of employees, if we didn't provide a health insurance plan, we'd be fined under ACA. If you want to see some hair-raising insurance rates, try forming a plan for employees like these. If we didn't, the ACA fine would be a bit short of a couple of million a year - not acceptable for a nonprofit, both with accrediting agencies and the IRS. So, we have to do the best we can do, which is to provide a plan we know is short of where they'd be on Medicaid. However, no elasticity is provided in ACA for these types of employees. It just wasn't thought through...

That's what happens when you "have to pass it to know what's in it" and when you shut out different ideas and are unwilling to compromise or wait. The ACA was poorly thought out, yes. It is a ticking time bomb. It is unworkable in its present state and will be replaced with something much different at some point. There is something terribly wrong with a law that is supposed to make insurance more affordable that does just the opposite for many people, that has no fallback for the poorest of the poor, that hurts many in the middle class, and that takes coverage away from those who had great insurance and replaces that with an 80/20 plan with high deductibles and high copays and coincides with reducing tax-deferred options like flex plans. I have seen no change for the better. In fact, mostly just the opposite.

 

[Jessica4Bama]

I have a question. Me and my SIL's take the same pregnancy preventer pill . Anyway, I pay nothing, and they pay at least $15 per month. Why is it different? I am single, and they are married, but mine is for health reasons as to why I take it. Is that the reason? I was told by the gnyo that it had something to do with Obamacare, but I wasn't sure what that was.

 

[Tide1986]

I have a question. Me and my SIL's take the same pregnancy preventer pill . Anyway, I pay nothing, and they pay at least $15 per month. Why is it different? I am single, and they are married. Is that the reason? I was told by the gnyo that it had something to do with Obamacare, but I wasn't sure what that was.

It should be free. There appear to be loopholes though for self-funded student health plans, grandfathered health plans, and plans for religious institutions. If she's covered under one of the loopholes, it could explain the co-pay. Otherwise, I assume her health plan is in violation of the law and could be reported.

 

[Jessica4Bama]

It should be free. There appear to be loopholes though for Medicaid, grandfathered health plans, and plans for religious institutions. If she's covered under one of the loopholes, it could explain the co-pay. Otherwise, I assume her health plan is in violation of the law and could be reported.

I don't think they are. One SIL is a physical therapist with insurance through her job. My other SIL has a Blue Cross family plan that is paid for by our family business.