I’m one of the people in CA who has an individual policy w/ Anthem, and who got a letter saying my rates were going up about 40% this year. Will this bill do anything to prevent that?
I’ve seen a lot of liberals saying this will be a pre-cursor down the line to what most other countries have – UHC, single payer, you know the rigmarole. How? This is the exact opposite of that. It’d be like saying the Patriot act is a pre-cursor to an expansion of civil liberties. Or DOMA is a pre-cursor to the liberalization of gay rights.
This is it. The insurance and pharmaceutical companies are pleased as peaches.
I’m really cinical about the thing and yet I do think this weak but progressive reform also took place because in reality no one could expect to pass strong reform that would had caused many people in key industries to lose their jobs. An impossible proposition in this economy. So what we got had to pacify elements that traditionally had killed reform in the past.
In the end I expect that ten years from know, just like Bob Dole, many republican leaders of today will express relief that health care reform was made or that it was the basis for more changes. Universal coverage is something that any truly civilized society must have.
I don’t really have anything original to add, so I’ll just repeat the point already made that this bill is primarily not a cost control bill. Instead, it sets up a system which will make it easier to control costs logically in the future. Other advanced countries have controlled their costs compared to us by instituting a universal system. We’ve just moved strongly toward a universal system, and so this bill is an important first step, but there’s still much work to be done.
This year? Not a chance. From some conversations I was having with some friends of mine who own their own businesses, they are looking at ways to game the system already. The plan (as far as they can make plans at this stage, considering the state of flux this thing is still in atm) is to basically either drop their employee health care completely and just pay the penalty (since it would be cheaper), or to change the rate from 80/20 (which it currently is) to 60/40 or even 50/50…which ever costs them less.
I have no idea if these schemes are practical, but supposedly they have their financial people crunching the numbers for them. Regardless, at least according to these folks, the employees are going to be paying more, unless the government comes out with a group plan…which I don’t see happening soon. In the mean time though, unless all the loopholes are closed (:dubious:), I think companies are going to game it to their best advantage.
My WAG is you are screwed in the short term if your insurance rates have already gone up. On another message board, people were talking about some way for individuals to game the system (again, as they THINK it will be) where you basically pay the penalty and then somehow get government insurance, but I wasn’t following that discussion to well, and it seemed like a load of horseshit to me.
Why would your friends drop coverage for their employees? Don’t they need to attract qualified people? Don’t they realize that if they refuse to provide health care for their employees–out of spite, it seems–they’ll only get crappy employees who can’t get jobs at the decent employers?
Companies today don’t provide health insurnace for their employees out of charity, they provide health care because health care coverage is an abosolute neccesity for most adults, and no grown-ups with children and mortgages would dare to go without coverage. Sure, WalMart and McDonalds don’t have to provide their interchangable minumum wage workers with insurance, but any company that wants to hire skilled adults must, or they’ll find they aren’t able to hire skilled adults, only flakes.
I’ll answer. You are probably shit out of luck because to placate conservatives the portion of the bill that allowed the Feds to regulate rates was removed.
It may not matter in the long term, as a practical form of UHC thats not tied to employers, is going to lead to job migration and presumably cause a darwin upheaval in the workplace. In short hopefully , the pendulum starts to shift back to an employee market where companies come up with incentives to both stay and attract future employees.
In the short term, the employment market is crap at the moment anyways and your not going to see a huge migration of employees until a more solid version of UHC comes online.
Truth be told, I don’t want a handout or help from the gov’t for myself. I can take care of myself. I just don’t want too cozy a relationship between the feds and my health insurance provider. With all the additional regulations that this bill does add, I can’t help to wonder if its, in the words off Bill Maher, a giant BJ for the insurance companies.
I have an honest question about the funding of this.
According to the LA Times, part of the funding comes from:
$27 billion in new taxes on pharmaceutical companies.
$20 billion in new taxes on medical device makers.
$60 billion in new taxes on health insurers.
There must be some kind of ‘progressive’ logic behind these tax increases, but for the life of me I can’t figure it out. There are shortages of supply in health care, and the answer is to tax health care suppliers and use the money to increase demand for the things you just punished industry for making? It sounds like madness.
If you wanted to be logical about it, wouldn’t you tax the things that actually increase health costs? Skiing, perhaps? Motorcycles? Fast food and junk food makers?
What did medical device makers due to America that has earned them the duty to bear an additional $20 Billion of the nation’s health care costs?
And if the government is subsidizing the purchase of health insurance and medical devices, does anyone not realize that this tax will be revenue neutral, because it will raise prices the government has to pay - with the money it raised in taxes which caused the raise in prices?
I honestly can’t figure this one out. I get the tax on tanning beds - they increase the risk of cancer, so you tax them to discourage tanning, which saves money for the government, and you get money to pay for the cancer they’ve caused. But pharmaceutical companies and device manufacturers are suppliers of the things the government wants to give America. Why would you tax them?
Spite? What has spite got to do with it? They are making a calculation as to which is going to cost them least on a per employee basis. They know their costs are going to go up regardless, but they are looking for ways to minimize those increases. Also, they probably figure that their competitors are likely to come up with similar conclusions and take similar steps.
Personally, I doubt they will drop health care completely since, as you say, that might lose them good employees, at least until the governments supposed group plans start rolling out (anyone want to hazard a guess when that might be?). What they will probably do is shift more of the burden onto their employees from 80/20 to something more like 60/40 or even 50/50.
One of my friends was telling me they were paying about $2000/month/employee atm (the employees were paying around $300 atm/month). So, I guess they could give people the option…pay more or simply drop their coverage and pay the government penalty. The employees would be obliged to then get coverage or pay penalties of their own, from what I understand…and, once the government plans are available, that might be a better option regardless, if the pro-HCR folk are right.
No…they don’t do it out of charity. It’s always been tied to employment. However, the times, they are a changin’. A big part of this plan by Obama et al is to disassociate health care from employment, so why be surprised when companies are already starting to look at the feasibility of doing so? Regardless of what they do or don’t do, the folks I was talking to are absolutely, 100% sure that it’s going to cost them more after this bill is signed than it did before. Should they just suck up the additional costs themselves? They have to factor in employee retention along with their additional costs and try and come to some kind of new balance, no?
I don’t know…and they probably don’t either. Yet. The final plan hasn’t come out yet, after all, nor is it likely to any time soon, since Obama is only signing the unmodified bill into law today. That’s why they have their financial (and probably HR) people crunching the numbers and weighing the options, and trying to guess what their competitors will do. You seem to think they are doing all this out of spite (towards whom, I wonders) or in a fit of rabid right wing pique (ironic, since I know two of these guys voted for and supported Obama…as did I in the last election). The truth though is that it’s neither…it’s merely people trying to figure out how to keep their businesses going under this new set of rules, and what is the best way to accomplish that.
Well, stocks for those companies went up yesterday, and my local paper (SJ Merc) had interviews with a medical device manufacturer who thinks it’s a net gain-- they get taxed a bit more, but they get more sales.
In addition, the hospitals seem thrilled about not having to subsidize health care for those who cannot afford it, and who get their treatment and then go bankrupt without paying. The drug companies also expect more sales - they also got a longer term for patents.
I haven’t heard from any happy insurance companies though.