You have to factor in is it worth it. Bariatrics is another thing, a lot of plans don’t cover that and if they do that adds 1-2% to the cost of the plans. People talk about the price increases, but they don’t talk about the fact that they are either increases that would’ve happened anyway or they are price increases due to better coverage.
If the costs go up more than they would anyway, is what you get in return worth it. Personally I think so. Some people who lost bare bones plans and had to pay twice the premium for a more comprehensive plan may not agree though.
I’m gonna say fail, simply because it is so divisive. Some people are happy to have insurance for the first time, others have lost coverage they liked, but half the country is pissed and ain’t no one gettin’ along.
The saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Clearly “it” was broke, but now it’s just broke different, and half the country is pissed.
It’s far from perfect, but the reason half the country is pissed, has little to do with the ACA. It’s because RW media and the liars in the GOP have created a false narrative that has little resemblance to the real world.
I don’t think it was Obamacare that was so divisive. I think the problem is the political landscape in this country today: ANY plan Obama proposed, to and including doing nothing at all, would have been equally divisive because it is in the interests of various sectors to be divisive. A lot of what people are pissed about is the “death panels” and other crap that isn’t even part of the program in the first place.
Depends on the customer. If you’re a 55-year old with cancer, now you’re paying for maternity coverage and your co-pays might have risen as well. YOu may also have lost your doctor, since one way insurance companies have kept costs lower than they otherwise would have been is to narrow the networks. There’s just less choice all around, so those consumers who valued choice above all are understandably disgruntled.
Other losers are those in co-op plans. Some professionals in NY state had great insurance that met ACA standards in every way, but still had to go away because it wasn’t a diverse pool. Those people had to be thrown into the larger pool to bring other people’s costs down.
This is why I get annoyed that defenders of ACA continue to lie to defend the President’s original lie. They claim, “Oh, those people had crappy insurance anyway”. Or, their insurance just didn’t fulfill the social goals of ACA, so they also lost their insurance. Not only that, but for these professionals, ACA plans have less coverage than what they had before. So to claim that everyone’s getting better coverage is not exactly accurate. Plus there’s the cadillac tax, which is specifically designed to worsen the insurance plans of some unions in the name of equality.
It’s not done yet – it’s only actually been implemented for a matter of months. But so far, the signs are good. The number of uninsured are going down significantly, and rates are going down in many states. A small number of people may have been hurt by the bill, but far, far more were helped.
If we look at it realistically, with questions like “are more Americans getting health care, and are Americans in general getting better health care” and “is the American health care system stronger or weaker than before”, then so far, it’s a success. We won’t know how much of a success it is for several years, most likely.
I agree with that. My attitude in this thread is different from the other thread we’ve been going back and forth in for over a year. That thread asked, “What do you think of the health care law?” This thread simply asks if it’s a success. Objectively, it is, if you measure success by whether more people have been helped than hurt.
One thing that has gone unmentioned though is the effect on the US budget and taxpayers. If it reduces the deficit, then yay, more success. But if it blows up the deficit, then everyone is hurt and the law becomes a net negative.
If you’re a 55yo with cancer, Adaher, you’re not shopping for insurance anyway.
If you’re a 55yo with cancer, Adaher, and you have a low-cost, low-benefit plan (the sort that was declared insufficient by the ACA), that plan isn’t paying for your treatments anyway.
If you’re a 55yo with cancer, Adaher, and you don’t have insurance, prior to ACA you wouldn’t be able to get any policy.
The problem for cancer patients is that the cost controls that discourage testing and expensive procedures, plus the narrower networks, degrades their care. On top of that, they get to pay for things they’ll never use, like maternity care.
I’m also getting tired of everyone thinking that all the plans that Obama lied about you being able to keep were “crappy”. Some of them were, but some of them made a lot of sense for certain people. For a healthy person that had no desire for kids with assets they could tap in an emergency, a $10,000 deductible plan with no maternity coverage made sense. Nothing “crappy” about that plan, in fact it’s more what insurance was traditionally about than a plan that pays every time you need a strep throat test and a prescription for generic antibiotics.
An overlooked aspect of the ACA is the upgrading of medical records.
The hospital where I work is implementing some of these upgrades now. While we won’t be paperless, we will be ‘paper light’ by seriously upgrading our computer systems.
One benefit of this computer upgrade is that our new computer system will troll pharmacy records and give me the patient’s actual prescriptions, so no more situations where I am relying on a patient’s memory of his medications or dosages. I will have the actual, complete information. This may ‘out’ doctor shoppers who visit many docs for many prescriptions so narcotic shoppers, beware.
The best change for me as a nurse is that the doctors will now be typing their orders into a computer instead of writing them. I have wasted an incredible amount of time over the years deciphering the handwriting of doctors and making calls to them to clarify orders. This simple change (having doctors type their own orders) will reduce all kinds of errors. I don’t know why it took and act of Congress to make this simple change. The orders will be complete from the start (no forgotten info) and the risk of missed or misheard orders that in the past were just called out to a nurse for later transcription to paper will be reduced.
Of course, the docs are resistant to this change- some docs are not computer users at all, others just don’t like the burden of the actual act of writing orders reverting back to them when they are used to verbally dictating orders to the nurses- but administration is not sympathetic as Medicare reimbursements are, or are going to be, tied to the doc writing their own orders.
Finally, hospital Medicare reimbursements will be tied to outcomes. This is a big deal. If grandma gets released a bit too soon and has a relapse, the hospital could be found at fault for discharging her too soon, affecting their financial bottom line. Hospital and other ‘accountable care organizations’ can get bonuses for doing a good job in the first place and financial punishment if they don’t. This will benefit patients.
An op-ed writer said in regards to the medical records issue that if you went to a bank in 2010 and wanted your account info and they pulled out a folder and started rummaging through sheets of paper, you’d leave that bank in a hurry. It’s a mystery to me why consumers put up with doctors’ offices keeping paper files on every patient in this day and age. It was like walking into 1970.
What they actually pay for maternity care, though, is based on what the actuaries determine is what the company has historically paid out for maternity care of 55-year-olds. Since that figure is likely quite low, the actual cost of maternity coverage (the amount the maternity coverage adds to the bill) is likewise miniscule. They’re not paying the same amount 22-year-olds pay for maternity coverage.
This is somewhat misleading. One feature of the ACA is that it significantly limited the ability of insurers to base premiums on what actuaries determine.
Most notably it mandated gender-neutral rates, so that single men pay for maternity coverage. (In general, women spend more on health care than men until about 50 or so, for reasons including but not limited to things like maternity care.) And it also squeezed the aging factor tables, mandating that the ratio of highest to lowest cost by age cannot be more than 3:1 (some states have opted for even lower ratios) when the actuaries would tell you it’s more like 5:1.
This is why you had all the focus on whether enough young people would sign up for these plans - because these are the people susidizing the others.
The group being hit the hardest would be young men. The group benefiting the most would be old men.
Presumably everyone benefits from maternity care at the start of their lives. It is pretty universal that you get born - and in the U.S. that usually involves health care professionals and not squatting in a field.
It’s been more succesful in states that have fully implemented that in states that haven’t, either by refusing to set up a state exchange, by refusing to expand Medicaid, or both. Prices on insurance in Alabama haven’t come down much and more of those who were previously uninsured are still uninsured. This is exacerbated by the fact that the state also handed a virtual monopoly to Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Alabama.
By the way, we became self employed this year and while we don’t qualify for a subsidy - the exchange is great - we can still shop for insurance using a standardized comparison method. Much more transparent. There were private services before that tried to aggregate that sort of information, but it was difficult to compare apples to apples when coverage could be so variable.
