Health Care changes

Don't worry. Your policy will change in the not too distant future and it will cost you more $$$

Conservative groups are highlighting the case of an Arizona man with leukemia whose insurance plan was canceled because it didn’t comply with the Affordable Care Act. A news report quoted the man as saying he would need to pay $26,000 to keep the same doctor. It turns out, he was able to get a new plan, which has his doctor in its network, for a lower premium and a lower out-of-pocket maximum than his old plan.

jghedge wrote:
Try reality

That is, many have pointed out that his campaign website was really good, so why didn't that mean that he'd be good at setting up a health insurance website? The answer is that the government is bad because the government is hampered by... government!

if our special forces were in the business of protecting americans from real terrorisms which actually affects their lives...

they would be abducting and insurance and banking company managers and executives; delivering them to blacksites were cia contractors would wall and waterboard them

Now, in a perverse twist, many of the poor people who rely on safety-net hospitals like Memorial will be doubly unlucky. A government subsidy, little known outside health policy circles but critical to the hospitals’ survival, is being sharply reduced under the new health law.

The subsidy, which for years has helped defray the cost of uncompensated and undercompensated care, was cut substantially on the assumption that the hospitals would replace much of the lost income with payments for patients newly covered by Medicaid or private insurance. But now the hospitals in states like Georgia will get neither the new Medicaid patients nor most of the old subsidies, which many say are crucial to the mission of care for the poor.

“We were so thrilled when the law passed, but it has backfired,” said Lindsay Caulfield, senior vice president for planning and marketing at Grady Health in Atlanta, the largest safety-net hospital in Georgia.

It is now facing the loss of nearly half of its roughly $100 million in annual subsidies known as disproportionate share hospital payments.

I should add that cost containment is not a major part of Obamacare

actually, the ACA is already bending the overall cost of healthcare

not downwards but slowing the the accelerating increase going on for decades now

Monday, November 11, 2013
Is community rating fair?
A large part of the motivation of the Affordable Care Act is to provide insurance to those with pre-existing conditions. Under the law, insurance is offered to everyone at a price based on overall community risk, not the risk estimated by the insurance company based on a person's particular characteristics. That has been deemed "fair" by advocates of the law.

I wonder whether advocates of this view are concerned with other insurance markets. Teenage drivers pay a lot more for auto insurance. The old pay a lot more for life insurance. Life insurance companies require health screening before granting a policy. Is this a problem, or the natural and desirable functioning of markets?

In the law, having children has been deemed a pre-existing condition, although it is not quite described as such. Everyone is now expected to buy insurance to pay for pregnancy and maternity care, even those who never intend to have children. The goal is to spread the risk of childbirth among the larger community.

But having children is more a choice than a random act of nature. People who drive a new Porsche pay more for car insurance than those who drive an old Chevy. We consider that fair because which car you drive is a choice. Why isn't having children viewed in the same way?

I don't know the answer to these questions. But it does seem that fairness in health insurance pricing is being viewed very differently than fairness in pricing other types of insurance. I wonder why.

and there are the 140,000 people who had their choice of insurance they had purchased cancelled by gov. fiat with no alternative.....they're still screwed of course.