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Posted on 10/16/2013 6:21:42 AM PDT by safetysign
Psst. Anic-Pay! Bloomberg‘s Megan McArdle (who has been on an incredible roll lately**) takes issue with the idea that the Obama administration needn’t panic about Obamacare, as long as it can get its glitch-plagued health care exchanges up and running by the end of the year. Wrong, she suggests. It’s time to panic. Now. Why? Because the exchanges are the way to sign up young, healthy people and prevent the fabled “death spiral,” in which only older, sicker people sign up for insurance, causing rates to rise and healthier people to drop out, causing rates to rise even more, etc. Young people won’t make the effort to look up insurance companies on their own when they don’t really care that much about getting insurance anyway. They won’t try 50 times to use a balky web site. ”Without the exchanges, the death spiral seems almost assured.”
But the exchanges need some time to sign people up–they aren’t going to sign up 7 million people in a day. Basically, says McArdle, by November 15 they
really need to be running at full speed, to handle the crush of applications sure to come between Thanksgiving and the mid-December deadline for buying insurance that starts in January.
If they aren’t running full speed by then, it’s in Obama’s interest to “hit the reset button and try again next year,” rather than spend 2014 circling the drain in the spiral of doom.
Instant implications: 1) Do we really want to pivot to immigration after if the debt ceiling crisis is resolved? How about pivoting to resolving the Obamacare crisis? 2) Is Obama fending off the GOP demand that he delay Obamacare so that he can delay it himself later this year? 3) If Republicans can keep the shutdown going*** for another month, will they get what they want — a delay in Obamacare — in a way that makes it look as if they had wrested it from Obama? (Don’t tell them). …..
[Thanks to @ByronYork for the tip]
_____
**–Would have written that weeks ago, but didn’t want to jinx.
***–As of this writing, the House could, for example, pass a clean debt ceiling extension while leaving the shutdown in effect.
Thank you very much!!
Time to worry - Delaware signed up their first enrollee today ... 6,999,999 to go ...
By the way.
What is the status, on the House version of healthcare reform.
Just checking...
I don’t think I ever even bothered with health insurance until after I was married (at age 30). I’m sure I had a decent policy through my employers (two large corporations) but I never looked at the details and, for the few times I went to a doctor, I just paid the bill.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. LIBs/DIMs deserve their emerging fate.
Saw the guy on CNBC who was in charge of W’s give-away, the Medicare Part D drug plan. The system was able to register SEVEN MILLION Medicare enrollees in ONE DAY! He was asked by the Lefty NYT writer, Andrew Sorkin, if he would be available to rescue ObamaCare. He just laughed.
What people OUGHT to be asking is... 'if that's the case for the sign-up...what the h%$# is going to happen when I need medical attention?'
Ha! Take a number and step to the end of the line.
Where's the end of the line....???
It's where you signed up! HELLO!!!???
Yeah me too. It was grand and I and others never realized what a blessing it was to have employer sponsored coverage. I remember when we had an employee sign up on our company plan. A few months later she ended up in the emergency room and found out it was part of the deductible. Boy did she piss and moan about that. These are the details that folks overlook. Just wait til the new enrollees discover the details and what they are not getting! Now I am 62 and buying my own and I a amazed at the crap policies and the high premiums for anything just halfway decent. Good grief. Within the last 3 years my policy went from 322 to 355 to 422 and under 0 care it will be 738 for sorta the same coverage. 5000 deductible. But hey I got maternity now and pediatric eye exams. No new cars or vacations in my future.
My company built several corporate inter-active, database- driven websites. The problem the Obamacare site faces is structural in nature. Think about a hundred-story office building.
Upon completion, it is discovered that the electrical system is 220 volts rather than 110. The HVAC system is too small to cope with the air flow. The plumbing is made up of a blend of metric and English sized piping. The maintenance manuals are written in Hindi, Aramaic, and Polish.
Now you are a contractor that is asked to bid on “fixing” the problem(s). Two questions: Do you want the job at all? If so, how much will you charge?
If you can’t convince a millenial to move out of Mommy and Daddy’s house because the rent for an apartment is just too overbearing, how can you expect them to pay $300 a month for insurance they’ll never use?
You forgot to add that the building is already occupied.
Good! Beautiful! Great! Tax money at, er, work, yeah, work!
The preciseness of the “National Electronic Federal Differential Machine” designed by Dr. Obamacabbage, (not to be confused with that brilliant man, William Babbage), echoes the exactness of the quantity being differed, zero!
Does anyone know if, under Obamacare, the deductible has to paid before treatment? In other words, if I got to the emergency room (that accepts Obamacare) with appendicitis, and the clerk checks the computer and sees I still owe $2k on my deductible for the year, can they demand payment before they wheel me off to the op room? Can they refuse the op if I don’t have the $2k?
Obama is running around to the university system speechifying about the affordability of HarryCare (if I name it after the true author, it’s not racist). What is happening is all these liberal arts institutions are turning out a whole generation of part time burger flippers with no useful degrees. They qualify for fully subsidized medicaid, so it’s a drain on the Federal Government. The HarryCare.gov website is steering them to medicade. This is what the $500 billion raid on Medicare is paying for. So basically, Obama is telling them to sign up for medicade.
My understanding is that if it is a life threatening situation, they can’t make you pay before treatment.
But if they can stabilize you and send you home, they only have to do that, and then collect payment before further treatment.
And the parking garage is 3 miles away with 22 available spaces.
Gypsy, at our local hospital I went into the ER and they did ask for $100 up front. I was uninsured at the time. Other than that, I think they are willing to work with people (aka a payment plan). Of course, this was 3 years ago. I don’t think they can turn you away.
They did check on my deductible before a scheduled imaging procedure this spring. At the time they checked, I hadn’t hit it yet, but by the time the appointment came around I had. I paid my portion of the procedure up front, then got a refund since I had already hit the deductible. Our family deductible is pretty low, though, $700. If it were to go up to $5k, I don’t know what I’d do.
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