Posted on 04/28/2014 7:54:35 AM PDT by Kaslin
President Barack Obama says he has enrolled 7.1 million Americans through his new health insurance exchanges. If so, that may prove to be the easy part: the Affordable Care Act creates so many incentives for enrollees to drop their coverage that maintaining those enrollment numbers may start to resemble something like pushing millions of people up a greased poll.
For Obamacare to work, people must enroll and stay enrolled. An estimated 20 percent of those who signed up have yet to pay their first premium, and as many as 5 percent stopped paying after the first month. If too many drop out, premiums could climb until the exchanges collapse.
Unfortunately, those numbers may rise as Americans learn about the financial incentives Obamacare creates for healthy people to drop their coverage, save their money and wait until they get sick to re-enroll.
For most healthy people, going uninsured before Obamacare, at least for a time, was already a safe bet. They saved thousands of dollars per year. The odds that they would have to deal with unmet medical needs or unpaid medical bills were low.
Obamacare makes going uninsured an even safer bet. It increases premiums for healthy people and the penalty for not buying health insurance is largely toothless. So if you earn too much to qualify for subsidies or you take steps to avoid paying the penalty, going uninsured will save you even more money than before.
Obamacare even more dramatically reduces the downside of going uninsured. For example, suppose the day after you cancel your health insurance, you receive a serious diagnosis like diabetes, or cancer. Pre-Obamacare, you would not be able to buy coverage for that illness. Under Obamacare, however, insurers are required to cover you at the same premium they charged when you were healthy. You may have to wait until January for that coverage to take effect, but even so the downside risk of going uninsured is much smaller.
And in many cases, you can get coverage before January.
There are even ways to enroll in Obamacare coverage immediately:
I get viscerally anxious when I hear from intelligent, responsible people that they have dropped their family’s health insurance because Obamacare so significantly increased their premiums. But I cannot dispute that Obamacare has made that choice safer and more rational than ever before.
Keeping people at the top of a greased pole is hard enough when they want to be there. It’s a lot harder when they don’t.
It’s all going according to plan. Single payer will be here before you know it. The GOP will do all they can behind the scenes to help.
Blah, blah, blah. That is your opinion to which you have no proof, and when your party can do better then why isn't your party in the House and the Senate?
Sad, but true :(
“Blah, blah, blah. That is your opinion to which you have no proof ... “
Because I am a holdover. I’m not as PROGRESSIVE as you are. There are more of you then there are of me. My proof is empirical, which is the best kind of proof. I go by what I see, the situation at hand, rather than take pot shots with nothing behind me but slow wit and a devotion to the status quo.
My friend in California tried signing up for healthcare last week...gave ALL her info...now they want a certified copy if her birth certificate or Passport..they don’t think she is a citizen (she is) and they don’t think she is an “immigrant” either. Sounds to me like they are doing everything possible to make things NOT work.
you are a holdover of what? Get real. For your information I registered in 1979 for the Republican party and have never voted for the rat party or a rat party candidate and never will
“you are a holdover of what? Get real. For your information I registered in 1979 for the Republican party and have never voted for the rat party or a rat party candidate and never will”
Yeah, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and John McCain are long time Republicans too. Congratulations.
One - it's "pole".
Two - they've already solved this little problem by not providing a way to cancel.
Behind the scenes? Hell it's in our face.
Evidence of the GOPs hand in keeping ObamaCare alive is on the cover of Drudge.
I take it she’s looking for a subsidy on the exchange—in which case I’m glad they’re checking her citizenship for eligibility!
“Obamacare even more dramatically reduces the downside of going uninsured. For example, suppose the day after you cancel your health insurance, you receive a serious diagnosis like diabetes, or cancer. Pre-Obamacare, you would not be able to buy coverage for that illness. Under Obamacare, however, insurers are required to cover you at the same premium they charged when you were healthy. You may have to wait until January for that coverage to take effect, but even so the downside risk of going uninsured is much smaller.
And in many cases, you can get coverage before January.
There are even ways to enroll in Obamacare coverage immediately:
•If you live in one of the 25 or so states implementing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, you can get coverage immediately by reducing your income below 138 percent of the federal poverty level ($16,102 for a single adult). You can then restore your income when you enroll in an exchange plan in January — or even earlier, depending on how often your state verifies eligibility.
•If you don’t live in a Medicaid-expansion state, you can move to one, as this Idaho family did.
•If you’re pregnant, you can use one of these Medicaid options for immediate prenatal care, and/or enroll in exchange coverage effective the day your child is born.”
Severely reducing and bringing one’s income back up isn’t something that can be done by most people, so the opportunity for gaming the system here is very small. Pregnant mothers should be able to get insurance coverage whenever they need it, for the sake of the baby. Both of these arguments fall flat. There are many things wrong with Obamacare, but these two are weak arguments against it.
Why use a government exchange for insurance when you can go with a christian based insurance system.
http://www.healthshareliberty.com/
That's routine and is a GOOD thing. I had to send one as well. However, only a copy of a certified birth certificate is required, not the certified copy itself (order of words matters).
I’m glad there are such organizations but it isn’t for all people with all sorts of medical circumstances. Right from their website they say they have only “shared” $20 Million in medical expenses since 1988. That’s nothing. One person can run up $1 million in expenses now, no problem. Just read where physical therapy alone can hit a million.
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