Tag Archives: Obamacare

News

In North Dakota, 35,000 lose their health care plan, but only 30 sign up for Obamacare

Leave a comment

I know that Obama talked a lot about wanting to help people without insurance find insurance, but so far all he done is make a lot of people lost their insurance (and more to come in 2014!).

Here’s a story from ABC News.

Excerpt:

More than 35,000 customers in North Dakota face discontinued health coverage because their plans are being scrapped due to new requirements under the Affordable Care Act.

The three major health insurers in North Dakota were asked to report to state regulators their enrollment figures and cancellations resulting from the health reform act, commonly known as Obamacare.

The state’s largest health insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota, covers about 31,600 members – 17,000 in small groups and 14,600 individuals – whose insurance plans are being discontinued.

That combined figure represents 8 percent of the North Dakota Blues’ 400,000 membership total.

[…]The total number of North Dakota residents who must switch coverage is 35,585, according to the tally by the state Insurance Department.

“You have almost 36,000 North Dakotans who either are or will be losing their health insurance policies, and this is after they and all Americans have been told they will be able to keep their health insurance,” Insurance Commissioner Adam Hamm said Friday.

The premiums are all going up because Obamacare mandates new coverages, which people did not have on their old plans. They didn’t have those coverages because they didn’t need them. For example, people who weren’t addicted to drugs didn’t request treatments for drug addiction. But now we all have to pay for it, whether we use it or not. That makes prices go up!

More:

Under the new requirements, deductibles for individuals or small groups are generally capped at $2,000, with an exception allowing caps of up to $5,000 for individuals and $3,000 for small groups.

Total out-of-pocket expenses now cannot exceed $6,350 for an individual or $12,700 for a family.

Nationally, estimates of the percentage of policies that will be discontinued under the new coverage requirements have ranged from 40 percent to 67 percent, Krystopolski said.

In most cases, plans failed to meet the new requirements because they did not cover maternity care or because the deductibles were too high, she said.

So how many of those 35,585 people that the Democrats kicked out of their insurance plans have found new ones on the Obamacare exchanges?

Almost none:

Besides collecting information on cancellations, Hamm’s office asked the three major health insurers to report the number of enrollments under the new health insurance marketplace provided by the Affordable Care Act.

As of Friday, the three insurers have logged 30 enrollments covering 37 people, a number Hamm called “concerning.”

Remember that these figures only represent the effects of the individual mandate. Things are going to get a lot worse when the employer mandate takes effect in 2014. For those of us with health care through our employers, our day is coming.

News

Duke U. researcher: 129 million people will lose health insurance under Obamacare

2 Comments

From the Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

If Obamacare is fully implemented, 68 percent of Americans with private health insurance will not be able to keep their plan, according to health care economist Christopher Conover.

Conover is a research scholar in the Center for Health Policy & Inequalities Research at Duke University and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In an interview with The Daily Caller, he laid out what he estimates the consequences of Obamacare’s implementation will ultimately be.

“Bottom line: of the 189 million Americans with private health insurance coverage, I estimate that if Obamacare is fully implemented, at least 129 million (68 percent) will not be able to keep their previous health care plan either because they already have lost or will lose that coverage by the end of 2014,” he said in an email. ”But of these, ‘only’ the 18 to 50 million will literally lose coverage, i.e., have their plans entirely taken away. This includes 9.2-15.4 million in the non-group market and 9-35 million in the employer-based market. The rest will retain their old plans but have to pay higher rates for Obamacare-mandated bells and whistles.”

Conover also says it is hard to imagine President Obama didn’t know these statistics when he was flacking for his health care bill by promising Americans they could keep their health insurance if they liked it.

“If President Obama himself believed this the first time he said it, he was poorly advised,” Conover said.

“The problem is that he said it at least 24 times, most of which occurred after his own rule-writers had estimated that 49-80 percent of small employer plans would have lost their grandfather status by 2013, along with 34-64 percent of large employer plans. The same rule estimated that each year 40 to 67 percent of non-group plans not already grandfathered would lose their grandfather status. Given how extensively presidential statements — especially to a joint session of Congress — are vetted and fact-checked, it is pretty inconceivable that President Obama was not aware that he was engaged in some degree of truth-twisting.”

Surprise! It looks like what the Democrats wanted was to destroy private health insurance, after all. The nice thing about this is that finally the low-information voters who elected Obama are getting to see why it might be a good idea to get their political news from somewhere other than the Comedy Channel.

News

Obama administration decides to exempt Obamacare from fraud prevention rules

Leave a comment

From the radically left-wing New York Times, of all places.

Excerpt:

The Affordable Care Act is the biggest new health care program in decades, but the Obama administration has ruled that neither the federal insurance exchange nor the federal subsidies paid to insurance companies on behalf of low-income people are “federal health care programs.”

The surprise decision, disclosed last week, exempts subsidized health insurance from a law that bans rebates, kickbacks, bribes and certain other financial arrangements in federal health programs, stripping law enforcement of a powerful tool used to fight fraud in other health care programs, like Medicare.

The main purpose of the anti-kickback law, as described by federal courts in scores of Medicare cases, is to protect patients and taxpayers against the undue influence of money on medical decisions.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, disclosed her interpretation of the law in a letter to Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, who had asked her views. She did not explain the legal rationale for her decision, which followed a spirited debate within the administration.

It’s all exempt from oversight laws:

Most of the buyers are expected to be eligible for subsidies to make insurance more affordable. The subsidies, paid directly to insurers from the United States Treasury, start in January and are expected to total more than $1 trillion over 10 years.

Ms. Sebelius said the Health and Human Services Department “does not consider” the subsidies to be federal health care programs. She reached the same conclusion with respect to federal and state exchanges, built with federal money, and with respect to “federally funded consumer assistance programs,” including the counselors, known as navigators, who help people shop for insurance and enroll in coverage through the exchanges.

What could go wrong? What could go wrong if the government hires “federal consumer assistants” like ACORN workers and other “community organizers” in order to administer federal subsidies? I think it will be fine. It will all work out great.

Oh, wait. I suppose that it’s possible that something like this might happen:

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) spent almost $29 million to cover Medicare Part D prescription drugs for 4,139 individuals “unlawfully present” in the U.S. and thus ineligible to receive federal health care benefits, according to an audit by Daniel Levinson, inspector general of the Department of Health & Human Services.

[…]CMS “inappropriately accepted 279,056 PDE [prescription drug event] records with unallowable gross drug costs totaling $28,990,718” between 2009 and 2011, Levinson reported. Total federal expenditures under Medicare Part D during that same two-year time period came to $227 billion.

Medicare Parts A and B cover hospitalization, skilled nursing care, doctor visits, and other medical services and supplies. The IG previously reported in January that CMS had also paid $91.6 million to health care providers to cover 2,600 ineligible illegal aliens.

Now failure like this could never take place in the private sector, because companies would go out of business. But in the government, they just borrow a trillion or two more from your children and call it even. That’s why we should never let the government get involved in things that are best handled by free trades between buyers and multiple sellers who must compete with each other. Health care is not something you hand off to a monopoly. At least, not if you expect transparency, affordability and quality.