One of the under-appreciated beauties of the ACA is that we no longer have to blame hospitals, physicians, drug or insurance companies for any disliked changes to US healthcare.
We can simply blame Obama and move on.
You know, let’s give this stupid anger over a “lie” a rest. The Republicans lied every possible way about Iraq. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. I don’t even want to get into Reagan’s nonsense.
Is this really the best you got to be so flipping angry about?
Because seriously, Republicans have been spending 8 years working their asses off to create anger and outrage about Obama, complete with constantly manufacturing shit out of whole cloth to try to attack him with.
Frankly, considering the Republican monomaniacal focus on doing everything to smear and destroy this legislation, it’s a miracle it works as well as it does.
Not to mention the Republicans have been crying for years about “Repeal and Replace” but not once have they come up with something to replace it with.
Though I’m guessing it’s the old system.
The legal industry has been very successful in bamboozling people about the cost of medical torts/malpractice insurance. the maintan that the costs of all this are minimal. sorry, i beg to differ-when a neurosurgeon has to pay upwards of $250,000/year for insurance, that adds tremendously to the cost of his services. Around here, we have lawyers boating about million dollar malpractice awards…my ex-wife’s OBY-GYN doctor quit practice because she wasn’t able to make money 9after paying for insurance). This highly educated MD now works in real estate. i guess that doesn’t get factored in, either.
A sack of nickels? Remember the book “To Kill a Mockingbird”?
People in that book used to pay their medical and legal bills with fruits and vegetables. Atticus was a real saint and he accepted potatoes as payment for his services.
This is going to require a hell of a cite.
At least he wasn’t working for peanuts.
This is exactly my experience. I’m self-employed, so I’m paying the full amount and am not talking about employee contribution. Before ACA, my rates typically went up 8-15 percent per year. With ACA, my rates have skyrocketed by 90 percent the first year and 75 percent the second year. I have had to choose worse and worse plans to keep it affordable and now have a shitty high deductible plan. I’m paying $11,300 a year in premiums and have a $12,900 deductible before my insurance pays anything, so I’m looking at potentially paying out nearly $25k before getting any insurance benefits (other than annual checkups).
And, yes, all who brag about their premiums going down are effectively getting welfare from the government. That’s fine, and I don’t blame them, but don’t pretend that insurance rates or health care expenditures are going down.
This monstrosity is so bad that I now am in favor of socialized, single-payer health care. It can’t be worse than what we have now.
I’m self employed. Pre-ACA I had affordable insurance that covered pretty much everything. When my gallbladder was removed my only out-of-pocket was the TV bill.
Now I have a plan I can just barely afford. I co-pay out the ass. When I went to my cardiologist for a one-year post-stent followup, my “specialist co-pay” cost me more than what the practice charges uninsured individuals.
Definitely. ACA apologists conveniently forget that Obama promised time & again that ACA would reduce the cost of healthcare. But even the most favorable interpretations have to admit that it hasn’t helped.
Me, I’ve found myself paying higher & higher premiums, even as the quality of the insurance offered has steadily declined. (Higher copays. A 10% coinsurace appeared, then this year it became 20%.)
Another factor is that more & more insurance plans are moving to so-called “skinny networks,” which basically means they don’t have a lot of doctors in-network, and if you go out of network, they pay at a reduced rate, or perhaps not at all. (And yes, you are on the hook for the balance of the money owed.) I found articles sugesting that even Blue Cross is starting to trim its network, at least in some states.
Blue Cross definitely does it in PA. So does the other major insurance company in my region. Both have several “tiers” of networks, with significantly higher premiums for the larger networks. “If you like your doctor (or hospital), you can keep your doctor”. Maybe so, if I’m willing to pay 50 to 100 percent more for the larger network.
I just found out that the maintenance drug my wife is on costs three times as much under my new policy as it did last year. It’s not a major expense, but it makes me wonder how much other prescriptions are going to cost this year.
As I said, I am so disgusted with the cost, complexity and regulatory burdens of Obamacare, I’d be willing to go to single payer.
As cites, this report says that Blue Cross of Illinois is trimming its network by about half, while this report says that Blue Cross of Texas is dropping its PPO option, and will offer an HMO plan that fewer doctors accept. The latter cite specifically mentions that this is being done because they had to pay out too much money under the old plan.
This is false for most definitions of “reduce the cost of healthcare,” including total per capita spending and average individual out-of-pocket spending. There is a reasonable and serious debate on the issue, but it most definitely has two sides in contrast to your claim here.
Question for those whose premiums have gone up: Is that before, or after the subsidy?
I don’t get a subsidy because my insurance is provided by my employer. My premium did go up a little; $6/pay period, I think. But it also went from a Silver plan to a Gold plan.
Before subsidy. Being self-employed, I don’t know what my MAGI (modified adjusted gross income) will be for the year, so I don’t estimate to get the subsidy. I don’t even know yet what my 2015 MAGI was, or if I’ll get a subsidy when I file my tax return.
As an illustrative point, my previous Blue Cross marketplace Gold insurance cost me $992 a month. Blue Cross wrote a letter late in 2015 saying this plan would cost $1,303 in 2016, an increase of 31 percent, BUT it would no longer be eligible for ACA subsidies. If I wanted a similar ACA-eligible Gold plan, it would cost $1,780 per month, or 79 percent higher. They explained that they lost too much money with ACA customers who signed up and underwent expensive care. They decided they could offer plans not eligible for subsidies for less than subsidy-eligible marketplace plans. Does this sound like the ACA is saving anyone any money?
I can’t afford $1,780 a month, so I went with a different company and got a high-deductible Bronze plan that still costs me nearly a thousand a month.
At those rates of increase if mine was $75 per month in ~2010, it would have been like $5 per month back in 2000. I don’t think so.
That assumes 25% increases annually. The actual figure is more like 10%. According to the average increases, your $75/mo. 2010 plan would have cost more like $30 in 2000.
Prior to Obama, the cost for me to buy insurance was infinite - I could not buy it at any price. Now I pay $300/mo. So for me the price has dropped by an infinite amount. I have never made a claim on my insurance either. I pay more every year for insurance in the USA than I paid in actual medical costs in 12 years living overseas where I paid cash for all medical services. In the 12 years I lived overseas, I had about $2000 in medical costs.
Some of these anecdotes are horrifying. I don’t know what a better system is, but it sure as hell isn’t unACA.