Tag Archives: Health Insurance

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Pro-life family wins case to avoid paying Obamacare surcharge on health insurance

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Great news from Life News.

Excerpt:

A pro-life leader and his family who lost their health plan due to Obamacare filed suit in federal court this year. The family was suing because they were being forced on to the state’s health insurance exchange, which only offers plans that require them to pay for other people’s abortions.

Barth and Abbie Bracy had insurance through a private insurer, but Obamacare forced the insurer to cancel the policy effective later this year. Forced on to the Obamacare exchange, the Bracys were left only with plans that include a mandatory surcharge used to fund the elective abortions of others. Ironically, Barth Bracy is executive director of The Rhode Island State Right to Life Committee and has warned people of exactly the problems his family is now facing.

The lawsuit also challenged secrecy clauses within Obamacare which forbid Americans from being told prior to enrollment whether the plans they would purchase on an exchange will include abortion coverage. The clauses also forbid Americans from being told how much of the premium is a federally mandated abortion surcharge that pays for other people’s elective abortions.

Now, their attorneys, Alliance Defending Freedom, have informed LifeNews that the Bracy family won’t be forced to pay Obamacare’s abortion surcharge.

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys voluntarily dismissed their lawsuit against federal and state officials Wednesday after the addition of Obamacare plan options that, for the first time in Connecticut, will not require participants to pay for others’ elective abortions. Despite the Connecticut change, many American families are still being forced to pay hidden abortion surcharges.

“Americans should not have to pay a special fee for other people’s abortions in order to take care of their own family’s health,” said ADF Senior Counsel Casey Mattox. “The Bracy family has experienced first-hand the kind of deception that was used to pass and that continues to pervade this law. While we are pleased that Connecticut families will now have a choice to avoid paying this abortion surcharge, it is a shame that other families won’t have that choice, and that most Americans don’t even know that they must pay this secret fee.”

Federal law forbids taxpayer subsidies for elective abortions; however, the Affordable Care Act requires every exchange plan that includes abortion to collect a separate fee that is used exclusively to pay for abortions. The ACA further forbids disclosure of the abortion surcharge to customers.

So it’s not just this family that won the case – it’s the whole state!!! I think this is just amazingly awesome. We need more people like this to take on the government, and thank God the ADF is there to defend them. We need more Christian lawyers who are willing to take cases like this.

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Video: Obamacare architect admits deceiving the public was needed to get it passed

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CNS News reports.

Excerpt:

A key architect of Obamacare has been caught openly boasting about taking advantage of, what he calls, “the stupidity of the American voter.”

MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber spoke at a panel on October 17 on the political hurdles Obamacare faced in 2009-10. The video was unearthed and posted on Youtube by American Commitment.

Gruber was instrumental in crafting the legislation that was signed into law in March 2010.

In the midst of his explanation, Gruber bragged about the multiple deceptions the Obama White House perpetrated on the American people:

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. So it was written to do that. In terms of risk related subsidies, if you had a law which made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to get the thing to pass.”

This is a jaw dropping disclosure of the political lengths those in the Obama Administration were willing to go to avoid the hard truths about their signature legislative achievement.

This story is in the news, but this isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about Gruber.

Last November, I wrote about an interview with Jonathan Gruber.

Gruber said this:

“We currently have a highly discriminatory system where if you’re sick, if you’ve been sick, if you are going to get sick, you cannot get health insurance,” Gruber told host Chuck Todd. “The only way to end that discriminatory system is to bring everyone into the system and pay one fair price. That means that the genetic winners, the lottery winners, who’ve been paying their artificially low price because of this discrimination, now will have to pay more in return. And that, by my estimate is about 4 million people. In return, we’ll have a fixed system where over 30 million people will now, for the first time, be able to access fairly priced and guaranteed health insurance.”

So if I’m a man who chooses not to use drugs, I am a genetic winner, and I need to pay more to cover the substance abuse treatment coverage for those genetic losers who do choose to use drugs. If I’m a man, who doesn’t want to be a woman, I have to pay more in insurance to cover the sex-change surgery of men who do want to be women. If I’m a man who marries and has kids, I have to pay for the IVF of the career feminists who never marry and wait until they are 40 and want suddenly want IVF. And so on.

So according to Gruber, this law was about redistributing wealth from the beginning.

Imagine Obamacare applied to auto insurance. It would be like paying more for your auto insurance on a low-risk SUV to cover people who drive expensive motorcycles, which are more risky. You aren’t subject to high risk, but your must pay for those who are. That was the whole point of the law. And eventually, more mandatory coverages will be added for politically correct treatments like IVF, breast enlargements and sex changes, as is done in other socialized health care systems in the UK (breast enlargements, IVF) and some provinces in Canada (sex changes).

Think about that when the insurance premiums for Obamacare exchange plans finally get published and the premium are much higher. They. Knew.

UPDATE: The Daily Caller reports that University of Pennsylvania has now pulled the video but the one I linked to above is still live.

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Why are insurance costs going up?

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Well, one reason why is because the costs of elective treatments are being covered now, and that means that the costs for them are being distributed to everyone else.

Here’s the leftist Washington Post to explain.

Excerpt:

Aetna this week announced it will start covering gender reassignment surgery next year for federal workers on the insurer’s plans. And the company said it will begin rolling out this coverage to many of its commercial plans over the next couple of years.

For years, many health insurance plans have denied coverage for gender reassignment benefits. But with the medical community recognizing gender identity disorder as a diagnosable condition, there has been a growing acknowledgement recently among employers and policymakers that insurers need to be covering these treatments, which otherwise can carry prohibitive costs.

Regulators in eight states and the District of Columbia now ban discrimination against treatments for gender reassignment. In the past four years, the number of large employers covering sex reassignment surgery in their health plans grew from 49 to 340, including at 28 percent of Fortune 500 firms, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

This year, the U.S. government has weighed in considerably. In May, Medicare reversed a decades-old ban on covering gender reassignment surgery in response to a 2013 lawsuit. Advocates said the Medicare decision could put pressure on more insurers to ensure equal benefits for transgender Americans, who make up 0.3 percent of the adult population.

[…]Without insurance, the out-of-pocket costs for gender reassignment vary greatly. Some people may only need hormone therapy, which costs hundreds of dollars a year. The cost of surgery, for those needing it, could be tens of thousands of dollars.

The Washington Post is very much in favor of making this “covered”.

Now when I think of health insurance, I think of car insurance. With car insurance, you pay when there is an accident. The collision is unexpected, but it is covered. But it is increasingly the case with health insurance that elective treatments are called “health care”. I think the trend is that the number of these treatments will increase as more and more of these elective surgeries get added to the mandatory coverages. And if you look at other countries, IVF (some provinces of Canada) and breast enlargements (UK) are covered.

I certainly don’t want to pay for any of these “coverages” but as these treatments become mandatory coverages, I will be paying for them. Even if I don’t use them. My premiums will go up so that other people who do use it can have it without having to pay for it.