ONW
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Really? Do you have a good link?
ACA Running Thread
- Thread starter Wrangor
- Start date
- Latest activity Latest activity:
Really? Do you have a good link?
"According to a HELP Committee document about bipartisan aspects of the health reform bill the committee passed July 15, 2009, its final bill included "161 Republican amendments," including "several amendments from Senators [Mike] Enzi [R-WY], [Tom] Coburn [R-OK], [Pat] Roberts [R-KS] and others [that] make certain that nothing in the legislation will allow for rationing of care," and reflected the efforts of "six bipartisan working groups" that "met a combined 72 times" in 2009 as well as "30 bipartisan hearings on health care reform" since 2007, half of which were held in 2009 [HELP Committee document, 7/09]. And according to the Senate Finance Committee's September 22, 2009, document detailing the amendments to the Chairman's Mark considered, at least 13 amendments sponsored by one or more Republican senators were included in the bill.
ONW
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Attaching amendments to a bill they don't support and vote against...brilliant.
Not expanding Medicaid really did two things. It dropped subsidy eligibility for exchanges from 133% of the FPL to 100%. And of course, it left a whole lot of people left without any affordable way to buy coverage.
All Ive heard publicly is that a lot of accounts have been set up. The WSJ speculated that only several thousand people have signed up via the FFE due to the technical challenges. I don't think HHS has reported any enrollment #s.
Hopefully these issues get fixed prior to 12.15 the cut off for 1.1 coverage.
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I think "hundreds of thousands of enrollees" is perfectly acceptable for the first week, especially given the inadequacies of the federal site. I was just poking at rj over his giddiness on 10/1.
From what I read this morning, 40,000 New Yorkers have signed up and 29,000 Californians. It's hard to read to much into those numbers as those are two states that had lower costs through the exchanges and both states had well designed websites.
2&2 Slider To Leyritz
Well-known member
So instead of our group policy renewing on 1/1/14 as it always has in the past, ours is now renewing for next year on 12/1/13 to avoid the Obamacare uncertainty for an additional 11 months because we can't get premium certainty for 2014 yet. The downside ot that is that, for those of us who have already met our annual deductible for 2013 under our HDHP, the deductible resets on 12/1 instead of 1/1, so we lose a month's worth of services that we have in effect already paid for. Fuck you, Obama!!
bcobbdeacs
Well-known member
2&2,
yet again getting a little hyperbolic, you should direct this to your insurance co, they could just forgive the deductible until 12-31 or better yet set the renewal to 12-31 so that you would not get screwed.
yet again getting a little hyperbolic, you should direct this to your insurance co, they could just forgive the deductible until 12-31 or better yet set the renewal to 12-31 so that you would not get screwed.
Milhouse
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no, he has no thoughts. just hysterical menstrual rants.
2&2 Slider To Leyritz
Well-known member
The answer we got to that was "no", without any technical explanation. We did note that all of the other possible companies that we comparison shopped were also tied to 12/1 as the effective date to avoid the Obamacare uncertainty, but I don't know the reason for it. Maybe CH can chime in if he knows why that is apparently the standard.
This is a strategy that a lot of employers across the country are using. It does put off some of the rate increases from the ACA for up to 11 months buts its a one time move.
Moving deductible credits for many carriers is a very manual process. In the small group market, its generally not done. For one, the products aren't likely priced this way (i.e. an extra month of no dedcutble) so it would be a significant financial hit to the carrier. There could also be some issues with HSA plans given only preventive can be covered pre-deductible.
It does stink though. Go get all that care in November!
http://nation.time.com/2013/10/09/time-running-out-for-obamacare-fixes/
"...Aside from the risk that fewer people will get health coverage if web sites are not repaired soon, another long-term concern raised by the computer problems is the composition of the insurance pool. Says Ario, “The people who most need coverage will get it. They’ll be patient and they’ll work through the glitches. The people who don’t need it now will be less patient. The easier the enrollment, the better the chances of having a balanced insurance pool.”
Balancing the pool so that risk is spread among a diverse population, which will keep prices in check, depends on exchanges attracting young and healthy Americans who are typically cheap to insure. These people, who are not in need of major medical care right now, may give up on glitch-prone exchange web sites. Imagine a 20-something chided by his parents to get health coverage he might not think he needs and encountering error messages and delays signing up. This scenario, according to Ario, could go something like this. “Gee, Mom, I really tried and I waited on that site for an hour, but I couldn’t do it.”
If the coverage plans sold through the Obamacare exchanges are stacked with sicker and older Americans, insurers will have to raise prices for 2015 plans. If people balk at those premiums, the exchange system itself could be in danger."
"...Aside from the risk that fewer people will get health coverage if web sites are not repaired soon, another long-term concern raised by the computer problems is the composition of the insurance pool. Says Ario, “The people who most need coverage will get it. They’ll be patient and they’ll work through the glitches. The people who don’t need it now will be less patient. The easier the enrollment, the better the chances of having a balanced insurance pool.”
Balancing the pool so that risk is spread among a diverse population, which will keep prices in check, depends on exchanges attracting young and healthy Americans who are typically cheap to insure. These people, who are not in need of major medical care right now, may give up on glitch-prone exchange web sites. Imagine a 20-something chided by his parents to get health coverage he might not think he needs and encountering error messages and delays signing up. This scenario, according to Ario, could go something like this. “Gee, Mom, I really tried and I waited on that site for an hour, but I couldn’t do it.”
If the coverage plans sold through the Obamacare exchanges are stacked with sicker and older Americans, insurers will have to raise prices for 2015 plans. If people balk at those premiums, the exchange system itself could be in danger."
bcobbdeacs
Well-known member
Response to CHDeac,
According to NC insurance commissioner, He was working on the exchange and had plans to have 5-6 insurance carriers in the pool giving 25-30 options but after McCrory took office he told insurance dept to stand down because NC was not going to participate and would use the Federal exchange. The Feds have no incentive to invite outside participants into the exchange thereby not giving NC residents any advantage of rate competition. This is from the News and Record a few months ago.
According to NC insurance commissioner, He was working on the exchange and had plans to have 5-6 insurance carriers in the pool giving 25-30 options but after McCrory took office he told insurance dept to stand down because NC was not going to participate and would use the Federal exchange. The Feds have no incentive to invite outside participants into the exchange thereby not giving NC residents any advantage of rate competition. This is from the News and Record a few months ago.
Deacon923
Scooter Banks
one part of ACA is turning out to be good, or at least not harmful, and is actually saving some money.http://nation.time.com/2013/10/14/obamacares-reviled-medicare-cuts-have-turned-out-better-than-expected/
Deadbolt
Well-known member
Not possible. Obamacare is the harbinger of the apocalypse.
I hadn't heard that. Thanks
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the-start-signs-of-trouble-at-health-portal.html?_r=0
"Deadline after deadline was missed. The biggest contractor, CGI Federal, was awarded its $94 million contract in December 2011. But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process. As late as the last week of September, officials were still changing features of the Web site, HealthCare.gov, and debating whether consumers should be required to register and create password-protected accounts before they could shop for health plans..."
..."By early this year, people inside and outside the federal bureaucracy were raising red flags. “We foresee a train wreck,” an insurance executive working on information technology said in a February interview. “We don’t have the I.T. specifications. The level of angst in health plans is growing by leaps and bounds. The political people in the administration do not understand how far behind they are.”
Robert Gibbs just said the rollout of the health portal was "bungled badly" on MSNBC
"Deadline after deadline was missed. The biggest contractor, CGI Federal, was awarded its $94 million contract in December 2011. But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process. As late as the last week of September, officials were still changing features of the Web site, HealthCare.gov, and debating whether consumers should be required to register and create password-protected accounts before they could shop for health plans..."
..."By early this year, people inside and outside the federal bureaucracy were raising red flags. “We foresee a train wreck,” an insurance executive working on information technology said in a February interview. “We don’t have the I.T. specifications. The level of angst in health plans is growing by leaps and bounds. The political people in the administration do not understand how far behind they are.”
Robert Gibbs just said the rollout of the health portal was "bungled badly" on MSNBC
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WakeandBake
Well-known member
I'm starting to change my mind about Obamacare. I think its going to destroy America. The devil is in the details as laid out here....
ConnorEl
Well-known member
Yep. He's convincing. And smart!
The Week By Edward Morrissey 5 hours ago
Yahoo lead story --
Rarely has a government program rollout resulted in the level of disaster as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges over their first two weeks. The White House refuses to release enrollment statistics that should be easily gleaned from internal systems serving the exchange sites, if those servers actually remained up and running. On both of its two weekends, technicians spent long hours attempting to fix the myriad problems that stymie consumers, only to have the problems persist — even when site traffic should be low, as CNN's Elizabeth Cohen discovered on Monday.
Small wonder, then, that no one really knows how many have managed to actually buy a health-insurance policy through the federal exchange. The Daily Mail sought out answers from the insurance industry, and got estimates of 51,000 after one week — a pace that would have just two million people covered properly by the March 2014 deadline to comply with the individual mandate, far below the 30 million uninsured that the ACA was intended to serve.
Market analyst Bob Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, put the number much lower than that — at just 5,000. Insurers are seeing the same enrollees repeatedly purchasing, rejecting, and repurchasing plans, thanks to the poor performance of the federal exchange system, which serves 36 states. "One carrier exec told me that yesterday they got seven transactions for one person," Laszewski wrote on Friday, "four enrollments and three cancelations." The repeated re-enrollments have insurers so spooked that they are staring to worry that "some of these very few enrollments really don't exist."
Then there are the prices for the plans, which have given Americans their first taste of sticker shock from ObamaCare. The Department of Health and Human Services tried to get in front of the big jumps in premiums by claiming that the HHS-approved prices were "lower than projected," but Forbes' Avik Roy pointed out that the projections used by HHS for comparison were for 2016, not 2014. Prices for comparable coverage doubled, according to an analysis of HHS data by Roy and the Manhattan Institute. And for some the prices quadrupled.
But just how comparable is the new coverage? On Monday, the Chicago Tribune reported on another facet of newly-restructured plans and premiums stemming from the multiple mandates of the ACA, and found that enrollees will pay a lot more in premiums — and then a lot more out of pocket anyway.
The Tribune's Peter Frost found that a typical user in the system — a 33-year-old single father in this case — would see his premiums "more than double" from its current average of $233 a month. But if the single dad wants his premiums to remain in range, he'll need to sign up for an annual deductible of $12,700. The average deductible before ObamaCare for this consumer would have been $3,500.
Nor is that an isolated example, although it's on the far end of the spectrum. In order to keep prices low, 21 of the 22 approved plans on the Illinois state exchange have deductibles of more than $4,000 for individuals, and $8,000 for families. Frost notes that the average employer-based coverage puts the individual deductible at $1,100.
Consider what this means to the consumer. First, the government forces Americans to buy comprehensive insurance when many don't need it. At $466 a month, the single father in the example above will spend about $5600 a year on comprehensive insurance, which would far outstrip the medical expenses for most 33-year-old single men who might expect only a wellness check and perhaps a couple of acute visits to a clinic for urgent care a year. At retail costs, even with labs, that's going to run less than a thousand dollars a year at most.
Now, though, his insurance won't even cover that much. Before Illinois consumers see any benefit at all from their insurance policies, they will have to spend more than $4000 each year out of their own pocket — and without the benefit of health-savings accounts (HSAs) to use untaxed income for that purpose. That means that some consumers will spend much more each year over and above their newly-inflated premiums, making it less and less likely that they will ever see any benefits from their mandated insurance policies other than avoiding the small fine from the IRS for non-compliance.
Thanks to the new mandate on insurers to cover the uninsured with pre-existing conditions at community rates, most people will choose to pay that fine anyway, and buy the insurance only when serious illness or injury occurs that requires hospitalization or extended treatment. That mandated risk on insurers is one reason that premiums and deductibles have skyrocketed.
The result is a parody of an alternate, free-market model of reform. Rather than demand that consumers buy comprehensive insurance, the alternate model would have emphasized catastrophic coverage with high deductibles, which before ObamaCare were low-cost options for healthier consumers who wanted to indemnify themselves against unexpected major costs. Removing insurers from routine maintenance care would have restored price signals and competition to the family-practice market, which would have provided incentives for doctors to re-enter it. Consumers could then have used their HSAs, which are discouraged in the ACA system, to cover their own routine maintenance, and insurers could have returned to their proper role: Indemnifying people against major loss, not acting as wellness managers. That role properly belongs to patients and their physicians, not insurers and certainly not the government.
Thanks to the ACA, we have the worst of both worlds. Some consumers now have to pay enormous premiums for coverage they can't access until they pay enormous out-of-pocket expenses first, while insurers have to cover even more risk, and providers have to deal with even more red tape. When voters start paying through the nose in this system, they will soon recognize that the administration's ideas of reform are as workable in real life as their ObamaCare exchange website.
It appears Joe Biden was right "this is fucking huge...", he merely forgot to add "piece of shit".
SEE ALSO: James Franco's 6 favorite books
View this article on TheWeek.com Get 4 Free Issues of The Week
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Yahoo lead story --
Rarely has a government program rollout resulted in the level of disaster as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges over their first two weeks. The White House refuses to release enrollment statistics that should be easily gleaned from internal systems serving the exchange sites, if those servers actually remained up and running. On both of its two weekends, technicians spent long hours attempting to fix the myriad problems that stymie consumers, only to have the problems persist — even when site traffic should be low, as CNN's Elizabeth Cohen discovered on Monday.
Small wonder, then, that no one really knows how many have managed to actually buy a health-insurance policy through the federal exchange. The Daily Mail sought out answers from the insurance industry, and got estimates of 51,000 after one week — a pace that would have just two million people covered properly by the March 2014 deadline to comply with the individual mandate, far below the 30 million uninsured that the ACA was intended to serve.
Market analyst Bob Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, put the number much lower than that — at just 5,000. Insurers are seeing the same enrollees repeatedly purchasing, rejecting, and repurchasing plans, thanks to the poor performance of the federal exchange system, which serves 36 states. "One carrier exec told me that yesterday they got seven transactions for one person," Laszewski wrote on Friday, "four enrollments and three cancelations." The repeated re-enrollments have insurers so spooked that they are staring to worry that "some of these very few enrollments really don't exist."
Then there are the prices for the plans, which have given Americans their first taste of sticker shock from ObamaCare. The Department of Health and Human Services tried to get in front of the big jumps in premiums by claiming that the HHS-approved prices were "lower than projected," but Forbes' Avik Roy pointed out that the projections used by HHS for comparison were for 2016, not 2014. Prices for comparable coverage doubled, according to an analysis of HHS data by Roy and the Manhattan Institute. And for some the prices quadrupled.
But just how comparable is the new coverage? On Monday, the Chicago Tribune reported on another facet of newly-restructured plans and premiums stemming from the multiple mandates of the ACA, and found that enrollees will pay a lot more in premiums — and then a lot more out of pocket anyway.
The Tribune's Peter Frost found that a typical user in the system — a 33-year-old single father in this case — would see his premiums "more than double" from its current average of $233 a month. But if the single dad wants his premiums to remain in range, he'll need to sign up for an annual deductible of $12,700. The average deductible before ObamaCare for this consumer would have been $3,500.
Nor is that an isolated example, although it's on the far end of the spectrum. In order to keep prices low, 21 of the 22 approved plans on the Illinois state exchange have deductibles of more than $4,000 for individuals, and $8,000 for families. Frost notes that the average employer-based coverage puts the individual deductible at $1,100.
Consider what this means to the consumer. First, the government forces Americans to buy comprehensive insurance when many don't need it. At $466 a month, the single father in the example above will spend about $5600 a year on comprehensive insurance, which would far outstrip the medical expenses for most 33-year-old single men who might expect only a wellness check and perhaps a couple of acute visits to a clinic for urgent care a year. At retail costs, even with labs, that's going to run less than a thousand dollars a year at most.
Now, though, his insurance won't even cover that much. Before Illinois consumers see any benefit at all from their insurance policies, they will have to spend more than $4000 each year out of their own pocket — and without the benefit of health-savings accounts (HSAs) to use untaxed income for that purpose. That means that some consumers will spend much more each year over and above their newly-inflated premiums, making it less and less likely that they will ever see any benefits from their mandated insurance policies other than avoiding the small fine from the IRS for non-compliance.
Thanks to the new mandate on insurers to cover the uninsured with pre-existing conditions at community rates, most people will choose to pay that fine anyway, and buy the insurance only when serious illness or injury occurs that requires hospitalization or extended treatment. That mandated risk on insurers is one reason that premiums and deductibles have skyrocketed.
The result is a parody of an alternate, free-market model of reform. Rather than demand that consumers buy comprehensive insurance, the alternate model would have emphasized catastrophic coverage with high deductibles, which before ObamaCare were low-cost options for healthier consumers who wanted to indemnify themselves against unexpected major costs. Removing insurers from routine maintenance care would have restored price signals and competition to the family-practice market, which would have provided incentives for doctors to re-enter it. Consumers could then have used their HSAs, which are discouraged in the ACA system, to cover their own routine maintenance, and insurers could have returned to their proper role: Indemnifying people against major loss, not acting as wellness managers. That role properly belongs to patients and their physicians, not insurers and certainly not the government.
Thanks to the ACA, we have the worst of both worlds. Some consumers now have to pay enormous premiums for coverage they can't access until they pay enormous out-of-pocket expenses first, while insurers have to cover even more risk, and providers have to deal with even more red tape. When voters start paying through the nose in this system, they will soon recognize that the administration's ideas of reform are as workable in real life as their ObamaCare exchange website.
It appears Joe Biden was right "this is fucking huge...", he merely forgot to add "piece of shit".
SEE ALSO: James Franco's 6 favorite books
View this article on TheWeek.com Get 4 Free Issues of The Week
More from The Week:
The culture war is over, and conservatives lost
The world's most unusual vending machines: A slideshow
Did God have a wife?
Like The Week on Facebook - Follow The Week on Twitter - Sign-up for The Week's Daily Newsletter
View Comments (845)
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