Tag Archives: Health-care

Commentary

Charles Krauthammer writes the column of the year on Obamacare

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Note: I am on Christmas blogging hours now, so we are only going to have posts at 10 AM and 4 PM till January 6th! Sorry for the interruption in service.

This Washington Post editorial might be the editorial of the year, so please read the whole thing.

Excerpt:

Obamacare was sold as simply a refinement of the current system, retaining competition among independent insurers but making things more efficient, fair and generous. Free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Free mammograms and checkups for you and me. Free (or subsidized) insurance for some 30 million uninsured. And, mirabile dictu, not costing the government a dime.

In fact, Obamacare is a full-scale federal takeover. The keep-your-plan-if-you-like-your-plan ruse was a way of saying to the millions of Americans who had insurance and liked what they had: Don’t worry. You’ll be left unmolested. For you, everything goes on as before.

That was a fraud from the very beginning. The law was designed to throw people off their private plans and into government-run exchanges where they would be made to overpay — forced to purchase government-mandated services they don’t need — as a way to subsidize others. (That’s how you get to the ostensible free lunch.)

It wasn’t until the first cancellation notices went out in late 2013 that the deception began to be understood. And felt. Six million Americans with private insurance have just lost it. And that’s just the beginning. By the Department of Health and Human Services’ own estimates, about 75 million Americans would have plans that their employers would have the right to cancel. And millions of middle-class workers who will migrate to the exchanges and don’t qualify for government subsidies will see their premiums, deductibles and co-pays go up.

[…]Look what happened just last week. Health and Human Services unilaterally and without warning changed coverage deadlines and guidelines. It asked insurers to start covering people on Jan. 1 even if they signed up as late as the day before and even if they hadn’t paid their premiums. And is “strongly encouraging” them to pay during the transition for doctor visits and medicines not covered in their current plans (if covered in the patient’s previous — canceled — plan).

On what authority does a Cabinet secretary tell private companies to pay for services not in their plans and cover people not on their rolls? Where in Obamacare’s 2,500 pages are such high-handed dictates authorized? Does anyone even ask? The bill itself is simply taken as a kind of blanket warrant for HHS to run, regulate and control the whole insurance system.

Remember the uproar over forcing religious institutions to provide contraception coverage? The president’s “fix” was a new regulation ordering insurers to provide these services for free. Apart from the fact that this transparent ruse does nothing to resolve the underlying issue of conscience — God sees — by what right does the government order private companies to provide free services for anyone?

Previously, I blogged about a Duke University health care policy expert’s estimate that it was going to be 129 million. I blogged about these problems from 2010 to now, study after study, maybe one post a month. No one listened. But these things were known. We knew that government was going to destroy a private health care system that was number one in the world for patient outcomes. Now everyone knows what conservatives were warning about in 2010.

The last column by Charles Krauthammer was also really good. It’s about how Obama had never realized how bad government is at doing things when compared to the private sector.

News

New York Democrats object to having their wealth redistributed by Obamacare

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From the radically leftist New York Times, of all places. (H/T Just One Minute via Ari)

Here’s the problem:

Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan. But now, to their surprise, thousands of writers, opera singers, music teachers, photographers, doctors, lawyers and others are learning that their health insurance plans are being canceled and they may have to pay more to get comparable coverage, if they can find it.

They are part of an unusual, informal health insurance system that has developed in New York, in which independent practitioners were able to get lower insurance rates through group plans, typically set up by their professional associations or chambers of commerce. That allowed them to avoid the sky-high rates in New York’s individual insurance market, historically among the most expensive in the country.

But under the Affordable Care Act, they will be treated as individuals, responsible for their own insurance policies. For many of them, that is likely to mean they will no longer have access to a wide network of doctors and a range of plans tailored to their needs. And many of them are finding that if they want to keep their premiums from rising, they will have to accept higher deductible and co-pay costs or inferior coverage.

And here’s the yummy, yummy schadenfreude:

“I couldn’t sleep because of it,” said Barbara Meinwald, a solo practitioner lawyer in Manhattan.

Ms. Meinwald, 61, has been paying $10,000 a year for her insurance through the New York City Bar. A broker told her that a new temporary plan with fewer doctors would cost $5,000 more, after factoring in the cost of her medications.

Ms. Meinwald also looked on the state’s health insurance exchange. But she said she found that those plans did not have a good choice of doctors, and that it was hard to even find out who the doctors were, and which hospitals were covered. “It’s like you’re blindfolded and you’re told that you have to buy something,” she said.

[…]“We are the Obama people,” said Camille Sweeney, a New York writer and member of the Authors Guild. Her insurance is being canceled, and she is dismayed that neither her pediatrician nor her general practitioner appears to be on the exchange plans. What to do has become a hot topic on Facebook and at dinner parties frequented by her fellow writers and artists.

“I’m for it,” she said. “But what is the reality of it?”

Man, I love the taste of the liberal tears on a cold Monday morning. It tastes like… victory (in 2014). What is the reality of it? Maybe if you stopped reading the New York Times, you would know the reality of it.

Well why are healthy people with $10,000 New York policies losing their coverage? Did those policies not provide free contraceptives? Not at all:

The predicament is similar to that of millions of Americans who discovered this fall that their existing policies were being canceled because of the Affordable Care Act.

[…]But while those policies, by and large, had been canceled because they did not meet the law’s requirements for minimum coverage, many of the New York policies being canceled meet and often exceed the standards, brokers say. The rationale for disqualifying those policies, said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, was to prevent associations from selling insurance to healthy members who are needed to keep the new health exchanges financially viable.

Siphoning those people, Mr. Levitt said, would leave the pool of health exchange customers “smaller and disproportionately sicker,” and would drive up rates.

I must have written over a 100 posts warning people about the effects of Obamacare from 2009 to November of 2012, and no Democrats would listen to me. Well, now they know what conservatives knew before the 2012 election. And just wait until the employer mandate hits and drives 129 million people of their existing health care plans by the end of 2014. 

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News

Americans shocked by high deductibles of Obamacare health plans

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The Wall Street Journal reports.

Excerpt:

As enrollment picks up on the HealthCare.gov website, many people with modest incomes are encountering a troubling element of the federal health law: deductibles so steep they may not be able to afford the portion of medical expenses that insurance doesn’t cover.

The average individual deductible for what is called a bronze plan on the exchange—the lowest-priced coverage—is $5,081 a year, according to a new report on insurance offerings in 34 of the 36 states that rely on the federally run online marketplace.

That is 42% higher than the average deductible of $3,589 for an individually purchased plan in 2013 before much of the federal law took effect, according to HealthPocket Inc., a company that compares health-insurance plans for consumers. A deductible is the annual amount people must spend on health care before their insurer starts making payments.

[…]That means some sick or injured people may avoid treatment so they don’t rack up high bills their insurance won’t cover, according to consumer activists, insurance brokers and public-policy analysts—subverting one of the health law’s goals, which is to ensure more people receive needed health care. Hospitals, meantime, are bracing for a rise in unpaid bills from bronze-plan policyholders, said industry officials and public-policy analysts.

How high are the deductibles? The article says that “Total out-of-pocket expenses under bronze plans are capped at an annual $6,350 for individuals and $12,700 for families of four”.

Is the government really helping people with a plan that has that high of a deductible?

More:

“They’re seeing sticker shock” in transitioning to the more-comprehensive coverage, and “once they start to use the policy, they will see a second sticker shock” of high deductibles, said Jamie Court, president of public-interest group Consumer Watchdog in California.

For example, the patient’s typical share of the cost of having a baby through normal delivery—$6,150, according to one insurer’s estimate—would be almost entirely an out-of-pocket expense for a person holding a bronze policy with the average $5,081 deductible.

“The anger is going to grow, because people are really stretched to buy these policies, then they’re going to have to reach into their pocket for another five grand before it does anything for them,” Mr. Court said.

[…]The average insured American spent $1,241 on out-of-pocket health-care expenses in 2012, according to Truven Health Analytics Inc., which analyzed medical claims from employers.

This article from the radically leftist New York Times explains that the Obamcare web site did not even DISPLAY the deductibles to the people who were shopping for plans.

Excerpt:

For months, the Obama administration has heralded the low premiums of medical insurance policies on sale in the insurance exchanges created by the new health law. But as consumers dig into the details, they are finding that the deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs are often much higher than what is typical in employer-sponsored health plans.

Until now, it was almost impossible for people using the federal health care website to see the deductible amounts, which consumers pay before coverage kicks in. But federal officials finally relented last week and added a “window shopping” feature that displays data on deductibles.

[…]In El Paso, Tex., for example, for a husband and wife both age 35, one of the cheapest plans on the federal exchange, offered by Blue Cross and Blue Shield, has a premium less than $300 a month, but the annual deductible is more than $12,000. For a 45-year-old couple seeking insurance on the federal exchange in Saginaw, Mich., a policy with a premium of $515 a month has a deductible of $10,000.

In Santa Cruz, Calif., where the exchange is run by the state, Robert Aaron, a self-employed 56-year-old engineer, said he was looking for a low-cost plan. The best one he could find had a premium of $488 a month. But the annual deductible was $5,000, and that, he said, “sounds really high.”

My guess is that most of the people who have been buying plans would have been comparison shopping based on  the premium. They have no idea about this high deductible. So what they’ve really signed up for is to pay $300 a month or so for what amounts to no health care coverage whatsoever – they will probably not reach the limit of the deductible. Is it any wonder that the Democrats voted to exempt themselves (and their political allies) from their own health care policy?