Posted on 01/04/2014 7:40:34 AM PST by artichokegrower
The last time John Nunnemacher had health insurance was 15 years ago, when his employer paid for his coverage.
Since then, the freelance graphic artist hasn't been able to afford a policy. Luckily, he didn't get seriously ill or have a bad accident -- which could have left the San Jose man bankrupt.
But as of New Year's Day, the 43-year-old Nunnemacher was once again insured.
Nearly four years after Congress passed a controversial health care law, tens of thousands of Californians like Nunnemacher can now see a doctor without begging for charity care.
(Excerpt) Read more at santacruzsentinel.com ...
I saw a doctor on Fox last night who used this example regarding additional people added to the medicare rolls...many doctors and specialists don’t take medicare. If a patient has a broken bone, finds a primary care doctor to treat them, he doesn’t know of any orthopedic doctors that take medicare, so he has to send them to the
ER for treatment. Overcrowded ER’s are going to become even more crowded.
John Nunnemacher, you are one heck of a low informed voter!
You’re probably right. I’m sure there are plenty of Graphic artists who do quite well. If this guy doesn’t it’s not society’s fault!
Obummacare will lead to a cash-only society.
Black markets to follow.
I don't know how successful this campaign will be when most of us are paying $20k/year for health insurance, later this year.
My canuck GF is a doc in West L.A. Every illegal and homey knows how to milk and bilk the system in every county and state hospital. Ever heard of ORSA? That’s what these leeches haven’t discovered yet. Free medicine, bed, birth control, the works..
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Subject: Notes from an engineer
This is what ObamaCare is really all about.........
I’m a 54 year old consulting engineer and make between $60,000 and $125,000 per year, depending on how hard I work and whether or not there are work projects out there for me.
My girlfriend is 61 and makes about $18,000 per year, working as a part-time mail clerk.
For me, making $60,000 a year, under ObamaCare, the cheapest, lowest grade policy I can buy, which also happens to impose a $5,000 deductible, costs $482 per month.
For my girlfriend, the same exact policy, same deductible, costs $1 per month. That’s right, $1 per month. I’m not making this up.
Don’t believe me? Just go to www.coveredca.gov , the ObamaCare website for California and enter the parameters I’ve mentioned above and see for yourself. By the way, my zip code is 93940. You’ll need to enter that.
So OK, clearly ObamaCare is a scheme that involves putting the cost burden of healthcare onto the middle and upper-income wage earners. But there’s a lot more to it. Stick with me.
And before I make my next points, I’d like you to think about something:
I live in Monterey County, in Central California. We have a large land mass but just 426,000 residents - about the population of Colorado Springs or the city of Omaha.
But we do have a large Hispanic population, including a large number of illegal aliens, and to serve this group we have Natividad Medical Center, a massive, Federally subsidized county medical complex that takes up an area about one-third the size of the Chrysler Corporation automobile assembly plant in Belvedere, Illinois (see Google Earth View). Natividad has state-of-the-art operating rooms, Computed Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging, fully equipped, 24 hour emergency room, and much more. If you have no insurance, if you’ve been in a drive-by shooting or have overdosed on crack cocaine, this is where you go. And it’s essentially free, because almost everyone who ends up in the ER is uninsured.
Last year, 2,735 babies were born at Natividad. 32% of these were born to out-of-wedlock teenage mothers, 93% of which were Hispanic. Less than 20% could demonstrate proof of citizenship, and 71% listed their native language as Spanish. Of these 876 births, only 40 were covered under [any kind of] private health insurance. The taxpayers paid for the other 836. And in case you were wondering about the entire population - all 2,735 births - less than 24% involved insured coverage or even partial payment on behalf of the patient to the hospital in exchange for services. Keep this in mind as we move forward.
Now consider this:
If I want to upgrade my policy to a low-deductible premium policy, such as what I had with my last employer, my cost is $886 per month. But my girlfriend can upgrade her policy to the very same level, for just $4 per month. That’s right, $4 per month. $48 per year for a zero-deductible, premium healthcare policy - the kind of thing you get when you work at IBM (except of course, IBM employees pay an average of $170 per month out of pocket for their coverage).
I mean, it’s bad enough that I will be forced to subsidize the ObamaCare scheme in the first place. But even if I agreed with the basic scheme, which of course I do not, I would never agree to subsidize premium policies. If I have to pay $482 a month for a budget policy, I sure as hell do not want the guy I’m subsidizing to get a better policy, for less that 1% of what I have to fork out each month for a low-end policy.
Why must I pay $482 per month for something the other guy gets for a dollar? And why should the other guy get to buy an $886 policy for $4 a month? Think about this: I have to pay $10,632 a year for the same thing that the other guy can get for $48. $10,000 of net income is 60 days of full time work as an engineer. $48 is something I could could pay for collecting aluminum cans and plastic bottles, one day a month.
Are you with me on this? Are you starting to get an idea what ObamaCare is really about?
ObamaCare is not about dealing with inequities in the healthcare system. That’s just the cover story. The real story is that it is a massive, political power grab. Do you think anyone who can insure himself with a premium policy for $4 a month will vote for anyone but the political party that provides him such a deal? ObamaCare is about enabling, subsizdizing, and expanding the Left’s political power base, at taxpayer expense. Why would I vote for anyone but a Democrat if I can have babies for $4 a month? For that matter, why would I go to college or strive for a better job or income if it means I have to pay real money for healthcare coverage? Heck, why study engineering when I can be a schlub for $20K per year and buy a new F-150 with all the money I’m saving?
And think about those $4-a-month babies - think in terms of propagation models. Think of just how many babies will be born to irresponsible, under-educated mothers. Will we get a new crop of brain surgeons and particle physicists from the dollar baby club, or will we need more cops, criminal courts and prisons? One thing you can be certain of: At $4 a month, they’ll multiply, and multiply, and multiply.
ObamaCare: It’s all about political power.
The front line of apologizing for the disaster of Obamacare will be the retail pharmacists. They don’t bill online at the doctor’s office. That comes later in the mail. So most of these people will waltz into the pharmacy expecting to get whatever they want for free. And they will yell, like their Medicaid brethren, at the person standing there representing “The Man.”
I have a kind of dog in this fight, because I have now landed in the belly of the beast.
Well, so to speak. I now have an information technology job in a state Medicaid agency. They don’t set policy, they don’t govern how the system is used. They just make the computers handle the scads of data involved.
I believe in constructive answers to almost everything. I would recommend that politicians don’t forget Medicaid when seeking to reform Obamacare. Even if repealing Obamacare pro-forma, something has to be done for cleanup. And the government does have some responsibility there because it is the one that mucked the situation up so royally. I’d suggest as robust a return to the private sphere as possible, and don’t forget Medicaid there. Even getting Washington out of its picture (make it a states-alone enterprise) would improve matters immensely.
There are fewer physicians per person than in most other OECD countries. In 2010, for instance, the U.S. had 2.4 practicing physicians per 1,000 people -- well below below the OECD average of 3.1.
* The number of hospital beds in the U.S. was 2.6 per 1,000 population in 2009, lower than the OECD average of 3.4 beds.
Only someone with the naivete of a high school class president could believe that increasing demand for something that's in short supply could possibly result in lower prices. (That's about the point in time when Obama got in over his head, intellectually. They will try to pick up the slack with physician extenders like PAs and NPs but there is a supply problem there, too. There really is no feasible solution to this arithmetic problem with of the supply of health care, and Obama and the Democrats aren't even aware that it's a problem.)
I remember hearing from the chairman of a major pharmacy chain in a personal presentation. Saying he thought a plan like this would be nifty.
Well, it turns out that that golden goose needs some golden food, and oh will you accept its golden eggs on credit?
Obamacare: Hundreds of thousands of North Mexicans finally get health insurance.
Well, as an artist, he should declare one painting a year as a “masterpiece”, worth say $50,000, and sent that painting to the IRS for his subsidy.
John should take Nanzi's advice and write a novel, now that he is on welfare. John may think different when he has to go to Tijuana to get his health care, because, they are the only ones to accept Medi-Cal.
I just love how the big guns (Walmart/CVS/Wags) have agreed to give away the January rxs for free. They must have been promised reimbursement by Obama behind a closed door. Everyone knows you never recover that money if you don’t have the correct billing info at the time of sale.
Check out the comments at the link. They hate Obamacare about as much as we do.
“The front line of apologizing for the disaster of Obamacare will be the retail pharmacists. They don’t bill online at the doctor’s office. That comes later in the mail. So most of these people will waltz into the pharmacy expecting to get whatever they want for free. And they will yell, like their Medicaid brethren, at the person standing there representing “The Man.”
Walmart may be anticipating this.
They have lowered the price of many of their top 100 generic drugs in a unique way.
My bp drug used to cost $10 for a 3 month supply, now it only comes in a monthly supply at $1.77. My CVS mail in plan would cost me $24 for 3 months. So now I pay $5.31 for a 90 day supply at Walmart. I get the same generic at Walmart now and before.
Obviously, Walmart wants me in more often, so to avoid more pharmacy trips,I arranged for 2 non generics Rxes to be covered once a month and be filled with my BP meds @Walmart. The two brand name drugs cost me $20 a month versus the CVS mail in $45 for 3 months for each drug. 90 day cost at CVS = $90 versus $60 for 3 months at Walmart.
That is a $30 savings every 90 days or $120 a year on the two non generic rxes. The Walmart is 1.2 miles away and is the closest place for many groceries, again at a savings. So we don’t waste gas driving for our rxes.
My wife will be looking at her drugs to see what she can save on. Her Celebrex would be much more expensive at Walmart, but she might do very well savings wise at Walmart for her other drugs.
Walmart pharmacy notifies me by text when my Rxes are ready to pickup.
Costco apparently has similar prices. A friend at our church was terminal for a few months this past summer, and some of us bought picked up his Rxes at their local Costco. I was amazed at how low their prices were.
We had a account in our local paper about a gent that took a corporate buy out as the result of the financial crisis. He and his cat bounced around the country until he settled in our town a couple of years ago. He hasn’t worked since being bought out at age 50. He must have a 72T annuity of some type because he has just enough income to be subsidized on the exchange for $50 a month premiums. He said this is the first time he has had insurance since being laid off. Good paying full time jobs are a little hard to come by, but be he easily could have found a part time job to pay for his health insurance.
Is that in the “ACA” that if one receives a subsidy in a given year, say 2014, then works his/her way into a decent income bracket, let’s say by 2018, s/he has to pay back that earlier subsidy?
I’ve heard of estates of nursing home patients whose care was covered by Medicare having to pay back those costs from the sale of a house or farm, or other asset that couldn’t easily be liquidated during his/her lifetime. Hadn’t heard about “ACA” subsidies, that are another category altogether, having to be paid back.
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