DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200

The mainstream media are finally catching up to what health care activists have been saying for years: Obamacare will leaving many people out in the cold. The number of uninsured in this country will increase, not decrease, under Obamacare. And of course, the poor will get screwed the most.

States’ Policies on Health Care Exclude Some of the Poorest

"Bee Moorhead, the executive director of Texas Impact, an interfaith group that favors the expansion of coverage, said: “A lot of people will come in, file applications and find they are not eligible for help because they are too poor. We’ll have to tell them, ‘If only you had a little more money, you could get insurance subsidies, but because you are so poor, you cannot get anything.’

“That’s an odd message, a very strange message. And if people are sick, they will be really upset.”

WASHINGTON — The refusal by about half the states to expandMedicaid will leave millions of poor people ineligible for government-subsidized health insurance under President Obama’s health care law even as many others with higher incomes receive federal subsidies to buy insurance.Starting next month, the administration and its allies will conduct a nationwide campaign encouraging Americans to take advantage of new high-quality affordable insurance options. But those options will be unavailable to some of the neediest people in states like Texas, Florida, Kansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia, which are refusing to expand Medicaid.

More than half of all people without health insurance live in states that are not planning to expand Medicaid.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/us...t.html?hp&_r=0

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_1...upport-waning/
Some labor unions that enthusiastically backed President Barack Obama's health care overhaul are now frustrated and angry, fearful that it will jeopardize benefits for millions of their members...

The union plans were already more costly to run than traditional single-employer health plans.
But Obama's Affordable Care Act has added to that cost -- for the unions' and other plans -- by requiring health plans to cover dependents up to age 26, eliminate annual or lifetime coverage limits and extend coverage to people with pre-existing conditions...

"If the workers can get benefits that are as good through Obamacare in the exchanges, then why do you need the union?"

Labor unions have been among the president's closest allies, spending millions of dollars to help him win re-election and help Democrats keep their majority in the Senate...

Originally Posted by Deb C

States’ Policies on Health Care Exclude Some of the Poorest

"Bee Moorhead, the executive director of Texas Impact, an interfaith group that favors the expansion of coverage, said: “A lot of people will come in, file applications and find they are not eligible for help because they are too poor. We’ll have to tell them, ‘If only you had a little more money, you could get insurance subsidies, but because you are so poor, you cannot get anything.’

“That’s an odd message, a very strange message. And if people are sick, they will be really upset.”

As you've been droning on and on for months about evil Obama not miraculously delivering single payer or a public option, I've been telling you over and over again that the REAL battle is at the state level and getting GOP a-hole governors and state legislators to accept the Medicaid expansion (and secondarily setting up the exchanges).

The expansion is essentially free to the states and yet the GOP a-holes continue to turn it down out of spite for Obama. They'll tell you that they are not going to accept it because eventually the states will have to pick up some of the tab, but the law keeps the federal share at 90%.

This should be instructive to you as to how intransigent the GOP is to even common sense and how they don't give a magic pony's poop about the poor or just about anybody who is not in the top 10% of incomes (although they'll manipulate low income sheeple, like certain posters here, with freedom fries, Ayn Rand superman myths, and faux gun machismo). These a-holes would NEVER support single payer or a public option and therefore you should now realize that it came down to vote counting in the Senate, period - Obama has no control over that (and it is now even less remotely possible).

It should also instruct you that the real battle moves on - where once it was worthwhile to agitate can become a wasteland of the whiney that no one listens to. And worse, you're not spending your time and energy where the time is ripe to actually make a difference.

So, welcome to the party, even if late. Hopefully, you'll have the capacity to not just add this to your continuing blaming of Obama for not delivering a miracle in the Senate. Instead, you'll put your time and effort into what really counts - a state that is refusing to accept the gift of the Medicaid expansion just because it is for poor people and comes from Obama - I'm sure you're either in one or near one of those Red states run by idiots.

I'm rooting for you, but I have my doubts. We'll see.

Originally Posted by JDG 66

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_1...upport-waning/
Some labor unions that enthusiastically backed President Barack Obama's health care overhaul are now frustrated and angry, fearful that it will jeopardize benefits for millions of their members...

The union plans were already more costly to run than traditional single-employer health plans.
But Obama's Affordable Care Act has added to that cost -- for the unions' and other plans -- by requiring health plans to cover dependents up to age 26, eliminate annual or lifetime coverage limits and extend coverage to people with pre-existing conditions...

"If the workers can get benefits that are as good through Obamacare in the exchanges, then why do you need the union?"

Labor unions have been among the president's closest allies, spending millions of dollars to help him win re-election and help Democrats keep their majority in the Senate...

Your crocodile tears for union workers with cadillac health insurance plans is hilarious.

Funny, how fast you all throw your 'principles' to the wind for desperate grabs at political gamesmanship.

From today's Washington Post, business section, I thought this article would be pertinent to the discussion.

By Ezra Klein, Updated: May 24, 2013

Health Reform Watch, Sarah Kliff’s regular look at how the Affordable Care Act is changing the American health-care system, is being written by Ezra Klein today. Sarah, unfortunately, is doing some firsthand reporting on America’s dental system. You can reach Sarah with questions, comments and suggestions here. Check back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon for the latest edition, and read previous columns here.

For all the speculating in Washington about how the Affordable Care Act will work — much of it, I admit, from me — there’s been too little attention given to the best evidence we have on the subject: How the extremely similar reforms in Massachusetts have worked.

Will employers drop coverage after Obamacare? Probably not. (Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters)


Take employers. There’s real concern that companies will see the Affordable Care Act as an opportunity to drop health insurance for their employees and let taxpayers pick up the tab. For those with more than 50 full-time workers, that’ll mean paying a $2,000 to $3,000 penalty for each one, but that’s a whole lot cheaper than paying for health insurance.

The Massachusetts reforms, if anything, were even friendlier to this sort of dumping. The penalty for employers was a paltry $295 per worker. Compared to the average cost of an employer-provided health plan in the Northeast — $17,099, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s 2012 Employer Health Benefits Survey — that’s a pittance. It seemed almost irrational for employers to keep offering coverage.

“The benefits we were giving guys who left employer-sponsored insurance were way more generous than what the federal plan gives them,” says MIT’s Jonathan Gruber, a health economist who helped design the Massachusetts reforms. “And we didn’t have much of an employer penalty. I predicted employers would drop coverage.”

But they didn’t. To Gruber — and everyone else’s — surprise, employers expanded coverage. “In the seven years since Massachusetts enacted its law,” says a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, “the number of people covered by insurance through the workplace increased by about 1 percentage point, running counter to the rest of the nation, which saw employer-based insurance decline by 5.7 percentage points.”
The report argues that people simply misunderstand why employers offer health-care benefits. They’re not doing it as a favor to employees. And they’re not doing it because anyone is making them. After all, prior to the Massachusetts reforms, employers could stop covering their employees without penalty. That’s true now in every other state in the nation, too. And yet 61 percent of firms offer health-care coverage. If anything, the Massachusetts and national reforms are making it pricier, not cheaper, for them to drop insurance.

Employers offer health insurance because employees demand it. If you’re an employer who doesn’t offer insurance and your competitors do, you’ll lose out on the most talented workers. An employer who stopped offering health benefits would see his best employees immediately start looking for other jobs. That was true before the Massachusetts health reforms. And it turned out to be even truer after them.

PricewaterhouseCoopers found that Massachusetts’s individual mandate had two unexpected effects. First, it led to a lot of employees signing up for employer-based coverage they’d previously rejected. “About a quarter of the uninsured are offered employer-sponsored insurance and don’t take it,” Gruber says. “If the mandate will affect anyone, it will affect those guys.”

Second, it led some workers to march into their boss’s office and ask for insurance. The study notes that “the percentage of small employers offering coverage in Massachusetts rose from 45 percent to 59 percent between 2005–2011,” even though insurance premiums actually rose for small employers.

The Massachusetts experience might not prove an apt guide to the national experience. Though the Massachusetts reforms are architecturally similar to the Affordable Care Act, they didn’t have to contend with a political party working relentlessly to undermine their implementation. Moreover, Massachusetts is a relatively rich and liberal state that already had a fairly high rate of health insurance.

That said, there are a couple other reasons to expect that employers won’t be eager to drop coverage. First, because employer-provided health benefits are not taxed, employers can pay their workers more by paying them partly in health-care benefits. Let’s say an employer decides to stop offering health benefits but, in a bid to keep employees happy, promises to give them the cash value of their coverage. The employer would have to spend more on the wages than it spends on the benefits, as the wages are taxed. For the record, I think this is a very stupid way to construct our tax code, but that’s how it works.

Second, the fraction of employers actually affected by the health law’s mandate is very small. “You’ve got 5.7 million firms in the U.S.,” says Wharton’s Mark Duggan, who served as the top health economist at White House’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2010. “Only 210,000 have more than 50 employees. So 96 percent of firms aren’t affected. Then if you look among those firms with 50 or more employees, something on the order of 95 percent offer health insurance. So it’s basically 10,000 or so employers who have more than 50 employees and don’t offer coverage.” Those companies probably employ around one percent of American workers.

Which is all to say that, for most companies, the Affordable Care Act won’t bring much change at all, and so there’s little reason to expect their behavior will change, either. And if it does change, it might not change in the direction we expect. “What happened in Massachusetts is not what I predicted,” Gruber says. “But it happened.”


© The Washington Post Company

I don't argue what can't be argued with folks convinced the current pres is almighty and right and I don't post things like check stubs which would prove it online so deleted all.

This is partly why Obama should have never been elected president in the first place.

Originally Posted by Danilynn

At first I thought health care for all would be good.

Health care for all is good. That's not what anyone in the US political classes has aimed at, though. They've elected instead to force health insurance down our throats.

The two are quite different things, as any remotely honest, self-aware person would be quick to tell.

Originally Posted by 1995 Millennial

This is partly why Obama should have never been elected president in the first place.

Obama's got nothing to do with it. The ruling class was always going to feed us shit and call it cotton candy (and why wouldn't they? For ages, most of us have smacked our lips happily and asked for -- demanded, even -- another tasty portion). The specific individual who temporarily occupies the nominally-head chair is practically irrelevant in the face of a movement with the elites whose time has come.

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

From today's Washington Post, business section, I thought this article would be pertinent to the discussion.

What should be noted from this insightful article is the uncertainty of whether what happened in Mass., under the much older and fully implemented Romneycare, has the potential to happen again nationally now under Obamacare, which has yet to fully roll out.

The article follows the big news this week out of California that premiums under that state's exchange will be far less that originally predicted. It remains uncertain if that California outcome will come anywhere near being repeated in any other state.

The common element is UNCERTAINTY.

I bring this up to contrast to ---

Originally Posted by Danilynn

At first I thought health care for all would be good.

Now I am not so sure.

Let's take my employer based healthcare and what it was until this year and what it is now.

2012:

Premiums: $75 every pay check to cover me, my husband and our 2 kids.
Deductible to be met before they started paying: $2500 for the whole family per year.
co-pay: $15 for dr visits, $50 for hospital ER visit unless admitted.


2013:

Premiums: $234 every pay check to cover only me and 1 of the kids. I had to take my husband and youngest daughter off because it was an additional $150 for him.
Our youngest daughter is now on my husband's work insurance with him, that premium $ 256.50 every paycheck.

In December 2012 it cost us $150 plus deductible and co-pay every month for insurance.

In January 2013 it started costing us $981 every month to be covered.

I am about to have to have my husband drop our youngest from his plan and me drop the oldest from my plan and go beg the CHiPs plan to insure them. It has got to be cheaper. We will probably be turned down.

So tell me again how this is a good thing?

Because I am not seeing it. I hope they force us to drop dependents from our plans. because from having spoken to the social workers at the CHiPs office, if our respective employers make us drop coverage we can get the girls insured through them for way, way less than we are now being forced to pay.

It's interesting the specificity of the information in this post regarding the increase in monthly premium from $75 to $981 - more that a full order of magnitude, in just a year, with no stated change in family situation or life event.

What's even more interesting is the certainty that this, if by some miracle were true, is somehow related to "health care for all" (I have to assume that this is a reference to Obamacare) when most of that hasn't yet been implemented and the great deal of uncertainty of how it is going to play out - as I noted above.

What's most amazing, however, is the unthinking knee-jerk reactions that such magic pony poo elicited from some posters here. Pretty typical.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epo...plan-1130.html

Originally Posted by playwrite

Your crocodile tears for union workers with cadillac health insurance plans is hilarious...

-Apparently, PW misunderstands my intent for posting this:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epo...plan-1130.html


My thought was "Ha ha ha, dumbasses! Serves you right!"

Originally Posted by JDG 66

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epo...plan-1130.html



-Apparently, PW misunderstands my intent for posting this:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epo...plan-1130.html


My thought was "Ha ha ha, dumbasses! Serves you right!"

The same thing goes for the RC church. Sorry Chase...

Originally Posted by playwrite

It's interesting the specificity of the information in this post regarding the increase in monthly premium from $75 to $981 - more that a full order of magnitude, in just a year, with no stated change in family situation or life event.

What's even more interesting is the certainty that this, if by some miracle were true, is somehow related to "health care for all" (I have to assume that this is a reference to Obamacare) when most of that hasn't yet been implemented and the great deal of uncertainty of how it is going to play out - as I noted above.

What's most amazing, however, is the unthinking knee-jerk reactions that such magic pony poo elicited from some posters here. Pretty typical.

Actually, there are several states that have (wink-wink, nod-nod) encouraged this behavior to use as a club against ACA. The $150 a month premium in 2012 seems low to me. A generaous employer might do that, but then running the bill up in the following year doesn't make sense ... unless it's a political ploy.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Actually, there are several states that have (wink-wink, nod-nod) encouraged this behavior to use as a club against ACA. The $150 a month premium in 2012 seems low to me. A generaous employer might do that, but then running the bill up in the following year doesn't make sense ... unless it's a political ploy.

An employer-backed insurance for a family of 4 at $1000/month? At best, I don't think we're gettng the full story here.

Originally Posted by playwrite

An employer-backed insurance for a family of 4 at $1000/month? At best, I don't think we're gettng the full story here.

Danilynn lives in Mississippi. I know the all-GOP state government is actively trying to discredit the ACA. They plan to disallow the Medicaid expansion in the state with the highest Medicaid-eligible population, and will lose a huge amount of Fed money in the process. That may be the justification the insurers need to jack rates.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Danilynn lives in Mississippi. I know the all-GOP state government is actively trying to discredit the ACA. They plan to disallow the Medicaid expansion in the state with the highest Medicaid-eligible population, and will lose a huge amount of Fed money in the process. That may be the justification the insurers need to jack rates.

if that is the partisan plan, *no one* will be able to afford healthcare. Even the wealthy will be driven to the wall in the cost spiral, except for the tenth of a percent. This might be similar in effect to explicit rationing. If the GOP is successful in retaking Congress, defunding ACA and MEDICARE, it may just be what is needed to destroy the healthcare industry AND the insurers AND Big Pharma. In three more election cycles after that, the US economy will be in ruins and so will the GOP. The 1T will be rebuilding from the ashes.

problem: We have to live through it.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Health care for all is good. That's not what anyone in the US political classes has aimed at, though. They've elected instead to force health insurance down our throats.

The two are quite different things, as any remotely honest, self-aware person would be quick to tell.

Indeed. In some cases remotely honest, self-aware general practitioners are beginning to opt-out of the system altogether. Here is a family doctor who simply stopped accepting health insurance of any kind as payment, instead taking cash payments only. The results? He was able to cut his prices in half.

I suppose the only real question is what to do with all of the surplus bureaucrats…

Health care for all is good. That's not what anyone in the US political classes has aimed at, though. They've elected instead to force health insurance down our throats.

The two are quite different things, as any remotely honest, self-aware person would be quick to tell.

Originally Posted by Copperfield

Indeed. In some cases remotely honest, self-aware general practitioners are beginning to opt-out of the system altogether. Here is a family doctor who simply stopped accepting health insurance of any kind as payment, instead taking cash payments only. The results? He was able to cut his prices in half.

I suppose the only real question is what to do with all of the surplus bureaucrats…

I think I agree. Insurance is pretty much of a racket, I've always thought.

Originally Posted by Copperfield

Indeed. In some cases remotely honest, self-aware general practitioners are beginning to opt-out of the system altogether. Here is a family doctor who simply stopped accepting health insurance of any kind as payment, instead taking cash payments only. The results? He was able to cut his prices in half.

I can often negotiate a lower price with my doctor if I don't use insurance. They turn out to be about the same, I expect we will see much more of this in the future.

Originally Posted by The Rani

I do the same with my dentist, and yes plenty of docs are already getting out of the insurance game. It's too much of a hassle.

Not only is private insurance too much of a hassle so is the government version of it as well. Unless the government bans this sort of deal making we may yet see a return of the free market in health care. Given the dismal effects of government intervention this would not be a bad thing.

Originally Posted by Galen

Not only is private insurance too much of a hassle so is the government version of it as well. Unless the government bans this sort of deal making we may yet see a return of the free market in health care. Given the dismal effects of government intervention this would not be a bad thing.

Negotiate some thoracic surgery and get back to me.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Danilynn lives in Mississippi. I know the all-GOP state government is actively trying to discredit the ACA. They plan to disallow the Medicaid expansion in the state with the highest Medicaid-eligible population, and will lose a huge amount of Fed money in the process. That may be the justification the insurers need to jack rates.

A lot of people think it is just that. Everyone I know across the board in different industries here has experienced the same thing. The editor letters to the newspapers are constantly full of this here.

My employer is a French American company. Headquarters are in France, home office for North America is in New Jersey. We had great benefits, the same until January as the French employees got.