Posted on 09/07/2017 8:53:15 PM PDT by TBP
The Affordable Care Act added millions of mostly poor people to the insurance rolls. But the law is driving premiums so high that middle-class people can no longer afford insurance. Several million are expected to drop coverage in 2018. Under ObamaCare, poor lives matter. Middle-class lives? Not so much.
The ACA is actually two laws glued together: a vast Medicaid expansion to cover the poor and a federal takeover of individual insurance markets, previously regulated by states. Since that takeover, individual premiums have more than doubled, and they’re predicted to rise another 25 percent to 35 percent next year.
The mandatory benefit package and community pricing regulation are largely to blame, according to actuarial experts. The state insurance commissioners who testified at Wednesday’s hearing all said insurance buyers in their states would benefit from less federal regulation.
They’re right. Premiums will never go down until ObamaCare’s regulations are repealed. That would liberate the middle class to buy affordable insurance without hurting the poor on Medicaid.
ObamaCare apologists never mention buyers who don’t qualify for subsidies. Under the law, individuals earning over $47,520 and couples earning over $64,080 must pay the full premium. No compassion for middle-class folks. They’re chopped liver.
In 2017, the average premium for a family of four buying on the eHealth site — which sells market-rate plans directly to consumers — reached $14,300 with a whopping $8,322 deductible. That means shelling out over $22,600 before seeing a penny from insurance. You can pay your mortgage for that. Ouch!
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Insurance is not healthcare. I have been in healthcare a very long time. I have never seen an insurer perform cpr, surgery, check blood pressures or write rxs.
Have you.
Meanwhile, hospitals are closing,mpeople like me are getting bills monthly about 300 to 500 dollars then I still have to pay my premiums,all of it. That’s not healthcare. Thats middleman.
Insurance and banking became one industry several years ago and they are going to kill us with this.
You’re not living in this country now but you still insist on promoting your absurd ideas here? Get lost.
Thanks to the market distortions directly caused by socialist medicare and the increased cost of paying the middleman (insurance) to set the prices of healthcare for everything from open heart surgery to routine visits for the sniffles.
Only in a Free Market can there be true price discovery. This is economics 101 and you failed.
You’re hitting too close to home, many or maybe most still have not realized that much of our vaunted medical care consists of chronic medication which does little or nothing positive but generates all kinds of additional illness. Unnecessary and ineffective indeed!
I am one hundred percent convinced that pharmaceutical companies are behind a drive to make sure that ALL Americans are on daily medications for multiple conditions. That is why goalposts are kept moving for blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure. My wife recently had blood drawn and her blood sugar was 100, this is what a sane person calls perfection but her lab report had a note on it saying her blood sugar was “slightly elevated”, apparently the lab is pushing a standard of 65 to 99 for blood sugar. This is nothing short of insanity. Anyone with a reading below 90 should be trying to raise his blood sugar. I have been type two diabetic for eleven years, I take NO medicine and I am doing better than those who take medication. I actually feel better when my blood sugar is between 120 and 130 and my last checkup showed ZERO damage to kidneys, liver etc. from my diabetes.
The doctor congratulated me on that and then tried to put me on blood PRESSURE pills because my systolic hit 142. I politely declined. I turned down the cholesterol medicines fifteen years ago, that is nothing but a scam to sell medicine and is causing all kinds of problems for people who allow themselves to be pushed into taking meds for cholesterol.
You're making the mistake of assuming that health insurance is no different than auto insurance or homeowners insurance where the thing you're insuring has a fixed value that the insurance company can use to set its rates.
The only way your idea works is if your premium remains the same for the rest of your life and the only medical procedures that are covered are the ones that exist on the day you get the insurance.
It's the advances in medical care that are doing more to drive up the cost of the insurance. It's easy to compare your current insurance cost to what you were paying ten years ago, but you're not getting the same care today that you had ten years ago.
We could have the cheapest medical care imaginable if we go back to the world my grandfather lived in ... where an insurance claim rarely involved anything more complicated than a broken bone, and anything much more serious than that was likely to be fatal.
People who want “coverage” for pre-existing conditions are simply freeloaders who want someone else to pay their bills.
Yes and no.
There is a section of the population, for which this is a valid criticism. I agree.
There is however another (big) section who for whatever reason, can some day lose their job. They get laid off, or move. The company moves. Another company takes the market.
At which point, they become one of those, with a pre-existing condition.
We live for a long time. Many things can happen to any one of us.
It is critical, that our healthcare, provides for that.
It is simply too expensive, anymore, to leave some people not covered.
Hippa laws made insurance portable. Of course, you had to pay full price for it, but it was still less than Obamacare.
Also, hospitals are required to treat you in an emergency.
Just what the sorry ba$tard wanted
I ask them what do I do if I cannot pay for my insurance premium anymore as I have to choose between that and my home mortgage which one should I choose?
I ask them if I quit my health insurance and I get sick with cancer, is your plan for taxpayers that can't afford both mortgage and health insurance, to sell their homes, since there is a mandate to have insurance, not a home?
They never answer. Health insurance premium $1276 a month. Home mortgage $845 a month.
Don’t pay. You get diagnosed then sign up. They won’t catch you the US government is incompetent.
“Please rid us of this disaster once and for all.”
It certainly isn’t a disaster for Democrats since it represents another step toward Democrats having absolute power over
us all.
Isn’t it grand!!!
/s/
IMHO
If your insurer has ObamaCare plans (even if you are not enrolled in one), they are making up their losses on those plans by screwing you.
ObamaCare is making the middle class the new UNEMPLOYED...
I’m currently working on a $1.5 million dollar medical bill for a person who earns minimum wage.
Explain to me the insurance policy that balances those two sides of the equation.
OK. I shouldn't have said "the premium remains the same." What I should have said is, your premium should not go up because you got sick while insured or because you got sick and needed to change insurers. Obviously, the premium may go up because of inflation and to account for high-cost drugs and procedures.
We could have the cheapest medical care imaginable if we go back to the world my grandfather lived in ... where an insurance claim rarely involved anything more complicated than a broken bone, and anything much more serious than that was likely to be fatal.
Right. Consider how hugely expensive telephony is today, compared to what it was in Gramps's world. In 1950, New York to LA for 10 minutes cost $6.70 ($68.03 in today's miserable dollars, according to the Fed). And you had to place the call through an operator (listen to Sgt. Friday call Utah). Mobile phones existed, but were hugely expensive, bulky, and you needed to go through an operator to place any call. Picture phones existed, but only as an exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Wanting to know what time is sunset was a trip to the library.
Nowadays, you carry the internet in your pocket. Want to know when the sun sets? Just ask your phone! Mall rats using Facetime are a common sight. A call from New York to LA is the same as a call across the room.
I bought my current phone from B&H Photo Video. I bought my current plan from T-Mobile ($42.50/mo for unlimited voice and text and three gigabytes of high-speed internet). I could have bought phone insurance, but it would only cover the physical phone, not the need to use the phone, which is too cheap to bother insuring, in any case.
Clearly, the cost of telephony has come way down since Grandpa's time, and the quality has gone way up!
Notice that no third party payers were involved in my telephony purchase. There is a free market for phones and telephony. Could that be why it is so cheap?
There is no free market for healthcare. The reason healthcare is so expensive is that the industry is dominated by third-party payers (the government and the insurance cartel). Their involvement has so distorted the health care market that there is no way to know what any treatment, high-tech or low, should really cost.
The healthcare market needs a radical restructuring!
It is Taxes and Mandates + plus a national single risk pool
I have to pay for abortions, sex changes, condoms, in every geographical location, on top of all the taxes
There is a medical equipment tax for example, even if I don’t need medical equipment someone does and I pay a portion of it through the plan.
People don’t get it, when you have an HMO you are paying for everyone and not just yourself.
Wasn’t that the goal of ObamaCare (and the nationalized healthcare system that has to replace it when it inevitably collapses)? To make it an added “right” provided by taxpayers (joining Section 8 housing, SNAP/WIC/foodstamps, Obamaphones, etc.)...
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