Tag Archives: Medical Insurance

News

California: Obamacare exchanges will raise health insurance premiums up to 25%

2 Comments

The radically leftist Los Angeles Times reports on it. (H/T The Cato Institute)

Excerpt:

California’s health insurance exchange said more than 30 plans are expected to vie with one another for spots in the state-run marketplace opening next fall.

State officials, and those in other states, are eager to flex their purchasing power under the federal healthcare law by selecting only certain individual and small-business health plans for 19 different regions across California.

The exchange, branded Tuesday as Covered California, will negotiate with insurers for the best rates and will assist consumers and small businesses in choosing a plan by separating them into five categories based on cost and level of benefits.

[…]The ability of the exchange to lower healthcare costs remains unclear. Experts said average premiums could rise in the exchange because the Affordable Care Act requires improved benefits, but consumers’ out-of-pocket medical costs could decrease under those same changes.

California insurance officials have expressed concern about substantial rate hikes for some existing policyholders going into the exchange.

Under a new rating map approved by state lawmakers, the Department of lnsurance estimated that premiums for similar coverage could increase as much as 25% in West Los Angeles, 22% in the Sacramento area and nearly 13% in Orange County.

Do you want to pay higher medical insurance premiums? Can you afford it? We’ve already seen massive drops in average household incomes under this President.

According to Forbes magazine:

New income data from the Census Bureau reveal what a great job Barack Obama has done for the middle class as President. During his entire tenure in the oval office, median household income has declined by 7.3%.

In January, 2009, the month he entered office, median household income was $54,983. By June, 2012, it had spiraled down to $50,964. That’s a loss of $4,019 per family, the equivalent of losing a little less than one month’s income a year, every year. And on our current course that is only going to get worse not better…

[…]Three years into the Obama recovery, median family income had declined nearly 5% by June, 2012 as compared to June, 2009. That is nearly twice the decline of 2.6% that occurred during the recession from December, 2007 until June, 2009. As the Wall Street Journal summarized in its August 25-26 weekend edition, “For household income, in other words, the Obama recovery has been worse than the Bush recession.”

[…]Obama has failed the poor as well as the middle class. Last year, the Census Bureau reported more Americans in poverty than ever before in the more than 50 years that Census has been tracking poverty. Now The Huffington Post reports that the poverty rate is on track to rise to the highest level since 1965, before the War on Poverty began. A July 22 story by Hope Yen reports that when the new poverty rates are released in September, “even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.”

Additionally, medical insurance premiums, which Obama promised to lower, are actually up.

From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

During his first run for president, Barack Obama made one very specific promise to voters: He would cut health insurance premiums for families by $2,500, and do so in his first term.

But it turns out that family premiums have increased by more than $3,000 since Obama’s vow, according to the latest annual Kaiser Family Foundation employee health benefits survey.

Premiums for employer-provided family coverage rose $3,065 — 24% — from 2008 to 2012, the Kaiser survey found. Even if you start counting in 2009, premiums have climbed $2,370.

Why should we go forward with Obamacare, which requires the construction of these exchanges? Obama already broke his promise to cut health insurance premiums, and the full implementation of these exchanges would raise the premiums even higher. This is nothing but a ploy to justify the imposition of price controls on private health insurers so that they go out of business, and we are left with a fully government-controlled system. Then there will be no choice, no competition, waiting lists, a shortage of doctors and rationing of health care by un-elected bureaucrats. Do not give this man a second term.

Here are a few articles that I have been using lately to inform people about the problems with Obamacare:

It’s important to understand that people who oppose this law don’t oppose because we are just being contrary.  We have reasons.

News

Health insurance premiums up $3,000 since Obama was elected

Leave a comment

From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

During his first run for president, Barack Obama made one very specific promise to voters: He would cut health insurance premiums for families by $2,500, and do so in his first term.

But it turns out that family premiums have increased by more than $3,000 since Obama’s vow, according to the latest annual Kaiser Family Foundation employee health benefits survey.

Premiums for employer-provided family coverage rose $3,065 — 24% — from 2008 to 2012, the Kaiser survey found. Even if you start counting in 2009, premiums have climbed $2,370.

What’s more, premiums climbed faster in Obama’s four years than they did in the previous four under President Bush, the survey data show.

There’s no question about what Obama was promising the country, since he repeated it constantly during his 2008 campaign.

In a debate with Sen. John McCain, for example, Obama said “the only thing we’re going to try to do is lower costs so that those cost savings are passed onto you. And we estimate we can cut the average family’s premium by about $2,500 per year.”

At a campaign stop in Columbus, Ohio, in February 2008, Obama promised that “We are going to work with you to lower your premiums by $2,500. We will not wait 20 years from now to do it, or 10 years from now to do it. We will do it by the end of my first term as president.”

But are Obama’s policies responsible for the increase?

the health reform law Obama signed in March 2010 has pushed up insurance costs.

In 2011, premiums spiked 9.5%, and many in the industry blame ObamaCare for at least part of it. Premiums climbed another 4.5% in 2012, Kaiser found.

And ObamaCare will continue to fuel health premium inflation.

First, the law piles on new coverage mandates. It requires insurance companies to provide 100% coverage for various types of preventive care, bans lifetime coverage limits, extends parents’ coverage to offspring up to 26 years old, and requires plans to meet certain “medical loss ratios.” Coming up are rules on “essential standard benefits,” limits on deductibles, bans on annual spending caps, and much more.

The experience with state mandates show that they only tend to grow over time, and get more expensive. The Council for Affordable Health Insurance found more than 2,200 state benefit mandates, which add from 10% to 50% to the cost of coverage.

“One of the biggest cost drivers in our health care system is the steady proliferation of federal and state-based coverage mandates,” noted CAHI’s Victoria Craig Bunce.

Meanwhile, ObamaCare’s insurance reforms — guaranteed issue and community rating — will likely raise premiums, too.

More regulation of health care companies means higher premiums. The more coverages that are mandatory, the higher premiums will go. If abortions have to be covered, then premiums go up.

Here are a few articles that I have been using lately to inform people about the problems with Obamacare:

It’s important to understand that people who oppose this law don’t oppose because we are just being contrary. Obama’s health care plan has the goal of destroying private medicine and putting everyone into a single-payer system like Canada’s. It’s not good for us to be waiting in line for MRIs for months and months, or even years and years. NO.

News

Household incomes fell and number of poor hit record 46 million in 2010

Leave a comment
Unemployment Rate (Not seasonally adusted)
Unemployment Rate (Not seasonally adusted)

From Reuters:

The number of Americans living below the poverty line rose to a record 46 million last year, the government said on Tuesday, underscoring the challenges facing President Barack Obama and Congress as they try to tackle high unemployment and a moribund economy.

The Census Bureau’s annual report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage said the national poverty rate climbed for a third consecutive year to 15.1 percent in 2010 as the economy struggled to recover from the recession that began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009.

That marked a 0.8 percent increase from 2009, when there were 43.6 million Americans living in poverty.

The number of poor Americans in 2010 was the largest in the 52 years that the Census Bureau has been publishing poverty estimates, the report said, while the poverty rate was the highest since 1993.

The specter of economic deterioration also afflicted working Americans who saw their median income decline 2.3 percent to an annual $49,445.

From Bloomberg:

Since the low point in the labor market downturn in February 2010, nonfarm payrolls have increased by 1.9 million, showing that without stronger growth, it will take years to recoup about 8.7 million jobs lost as a result of the recession that began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009.

The jobless rate rose to 9.6 percent in 2010 from 9.3 percent in 2009. Long-term unemployment, the percent of those without a job for 27 weeks or longer, increased to 43 percent from 31 percent, according to the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute.

This is the third consecutive annual increase in the poverty rate. Keep in mind that the Democrats took over Congress in January of 2007 and their first budget was in 2008, the beginning of the recession. But at least we had turtle tunnels to nowhere.

What about Obama’s new 447-billion stimulus? Will it create jobs?

Let’s see, using this article from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

Tom Porcelli, an RBC Capital Markets analyst, told The Wall Street Journal that he expected it to have “little” effect on hiring. “Mr. Porcelli was skeptical that the short-term employer tax breaks would prompt job growth. ‘I don’t think that you’re at the stage where small businesses are incentivized to hire,’ because demand is still so low, he said. ‘These companies are basically still trying to hunker down and hope that they’re around in the next year.’”  “Larry Schaffert, owner of Schaffert Construction, said Obama is ‘totally clueless of what it takes to run a business.’”

Business leaders do not think Obama’s plan would succeed in getting America’s economy growing, nor do they think it would get “unemployed people back to work”: “Business executives say it will take more than tax credits proposed by President Barack Obama to convince them to expand their payrolls to help get thousands of unemployed people back to work. Instead, they’d prefer an easing of the regulatory environment and an overhauling of the business tax structure, which would lead to lower operating costs.”

Employers cited in The New York Times said Obama’s jobs plan would not result in their hiring any additional employees: “David Catalano, who helped found Modea, a digital advertising company in Blacksburg, Va., said that he was wary of the president’s pledge to ask the ‘wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to pay their fair share.’ His company was organized as an S Corporation, in which profits are passed through to shareholders, so it would face higher taxes under the president’s proposal, he said. He added: ‘My partner and I have reinvested 100 percent of the profits that our agency has made over the last five years back into the company. If the government takes a bigger share of that from me, it directly impedes my ability to grow the agency.”

[…]People should take Obama’s claims about “job creation” with a grain of salt.  His earlier claims about creating jobs turned out to be false.  The Obama administration said that if the $800 billion stimulus package passed, unemployment would not go above 8 percent, but it actually skyrocketed to 10.3 percent less than a year later.  The “green jobs” the Obama Administration promised to create in the stimulus package are  largely non-existent. Indeed, the stimulus package’s green-jobs provisions ended up inadvertently outsourcing American jobs to China.   As the Associated Press notes, Obama is also not leveling with the American public when he minimizes the budget-busting nature of his so-called “American Jobs Act.”  That lack of fiscal honesty is nothing new for Obama, who falsely promised  a “net spending cut” in 2008, only to immediately propose massive budget increases once he was elected, including proposed budgets that would add $4.8 trillion to the national debt.

This is from Hans Bader, so I removed all his links – he likes to put lots of links to lots of facts, because he’s a lawyer. You have to click on his post to get all the links.

I don’t think numbers like those will help the Democrats. I am watching the election results come in for Anthony Weiner’s seat right now and the Democrat has lost in BROOKLYN and QUEEN’S. Can you believe that? New York is Republican. I wonder if M.C. Spinster is still a Democrat.