Healthy, non-smoking 57 YO male, single, Maryland resident. As a real estate salesperson and independent contractor I am fully responsible for all my medical bills. My bill increases $ 80 dollars per month to 550 per month or 6600 per year for the low tier $ 5000 deductible Bronze plan on 1.1.17.
In the past the last resort option existed to roll the dice and go bare, but no more. At $550 a month we’re starting to talk serious money now. Money that will have to be taken from mission life critical expenses to avoid tax and legal penalties. Honestly it seems (to me) to be a ferocious bill for what I am receiving relative to the actuarial risk involved.
Staring this potential bill in the face (to be perfectly honest) I’m not as much of an Obamacare fanboy as I was when it was $350-$400. This new payment is going to be a serious strain and will impact what I can do to help my kids.
For what it’s worth, my insurance that I have always paid for via my 2-person business has always gone up like that every year for the past 10 years or so that I’ve had to buy it. It went down about $200/mo when we stopped buying in to group plans and each of us employees got our own ACA plans. Mine is going up $13/mo this January for a $4000 HSA plan.
From where I sit, insurance has always been rediculous and has always gone up a ton each year. Not sure how everyone else in America has avoided this problem all this time but the fees going up this year do not have me shocked one bit.
At a certain point, even with the insanely high cost of US healthcare, it would make more sense to take a calculated risk on going un-insured. Not saying that’s what people should do, of course. But if someone is only going to be in the US for one year, for instance, and is healthy and young, and insurance would cost $6,000 a year, there’s a reasonable case to be made that for **some **people that it would make sense to go un-insured.
This is what healthcare has done for/to us…
Before Obamacare when me and Mr. Athena were both self-employed, we paid $750/month with a $4K deductible. The premium had reliably gone up at least $100/month every year we had it and I had no reason to think it wouldn’t continue in that direction.
This isn’t an Obamacare issue; it was a general issue with individual insurance forever. Nowadays everyone blames it on Obamacare, but that’s just wrong. Obamacare fixed a lot of things, but not the existing cost issues. It’s a real issue, and one that has to be addressed, but to blame it on Obamacare is flat-out wrong.
Have you shopped around on the exchange for next year? Anything cheaper with roughly comparable coverage?
(You may not have a lot of options depending on your state of residence. And obviously switching insurance providers is somewhere between really annoying and awful.)
Yes, rates are going up drastically, coverages are shrinking, and specialists are quitting.
The standard left wing response to these complaints is pretty much to hand wave it all away with the claim that millions of people have insurance now who didn’t have it before.
The truth is that millions of people now have insurance that they’re being forced to pay for but can’t use because they can’t afford the deductibles and co-pays, while those who can afford it are being gouged ridiculously for ever shrinking coverage and having harder times finding specialists still in business to treat them. And it’s only going to get worse.
The problem is that Obama, in his zeal to get something/anything passed, essentially abdicated his role as president on the issue and rather than forming a team to craft health care legislation to present to Congress as he should have, he basically said to them, “You guys come up with something, and whatever it is, I’ll sign it.”
So what we’ve had foist upon us is a bill crafted by 535 disparate individuals, all with their own constituencies and donor obligations and disparate corporate loyalties, bargaining with each other and trading off with each other as necessary to get what they want out of the deal. So as anyone would expect, it’s a huge mess and is leading to all sorts of unintended negative and harmful consequences.
The ACA is an utterly ridiculous and in my opinion ultimately unworkable piece of legislation that needs to be drastically overhauled by a president willing to do his own homework and assemble a team of experts in the medical, financial and insurance fields in order to craft a plan that does what Obama promised us it would do rather than what it actually wound up doing.
Took early retirement this year at 62 years old. Only income is SS. Its enough for my situation. However, my income is now so low that the Government is giving me a $650 subsidy. I can get a decent silver plan for as little as $36 a month (my cost). I thought it would be nice to thank all you people out there who are working and paying your taxes so that I, and others like me, could retire and get cheap (even free if I wanted a bronze plan) insurance. So once again, thanks, and keep up the good work.
We haven’t, or at least our employers haven’t. Every year my premiums (my employer only pays a portion) get higher or our coverage gets more limited, and the employer deductible re-imbursement plan that we’ve started out with has been reduced three times.
I’m not sure how accurate this was since I haven’t taken the time to look into it, but I heard on the radio that there had been a part in the original ACA bill that was meant to stop this from happening. Apparently insurance companies were concerned with the fact they were suddenly taking on huge amounts of people who were sicker than normal due to not having had insurance and were going to lose money. So to avoid the companies offsetting those losses on the other customers, the bill had a provision that basically gave the insurance companies a subsidy to help offset that for a few years? But it was removed by either Cruz or Rubio if I recall?
I dunno, I love it just because I wouldn’t have insurance without it but at the same time I understand how it’s hard for people who are seeing their premiums raise.
I’m happy to subsidize you, knowing I’m younger, maybe healthier, and if the Feds say you’re entitled to SS who am I to argue that? It’s my pleasure.
Be well!
I’m sorry that is happening, however I wouldn’t lay all the blame on Obamacare. Health care and health insurance rates have been skyrocketing for years.
We need to reduce health care costs. However doing that requires passing reform that the pharma industry, AMA, hospital industry, medical device industry, etc. do not like so nothing is done about it.
Obamacare just expanded coverage and changed some consumer protections without doing much of anything to reduce costs.
What do conservatives think would be happening if the ACA hadn’t been passed? What would health care costs and health insurance costs be in 2016 if there had never been an ACA?
With or without ACA, health care costs and insurance costs are unsustainable and growing. I fail to see how you can blame this on the ACA.
This is like if there was a ghetto full of crime and drugs, and then a democrat gets elected mayor and two years later it is still full of crime and drugs. Then critics of the mayor would say ‘see, he created all these crime and drugs issues’. No he did, those were there before.
In some ways the ACA increased premiums by increasing certain consumer protections. Eliminating the annual and lifetime cap. Eliminating pre-existing conditions. Ending recissisions. Expanding coverage to people under 26. etc. However I think the costs of those reforms were mostly absorbed by now. The ACA also had a handful of ways to reduce premiums. Making insurers justify large premium spikes. Changing how medicare rewards care. Reducing unpaid hospital bills that are spread out to insured people.
If the ACA hadn’t been passed, we would still be where we are now where health insurance is unaffordable. it isn’t like you could buy a high quality family policy for $300 in 2016 if the ACA never happened.
Well, I for one, would be better able to afford going to see a doctor. I’m one of those people in the position of not being able to afford both the premiums and the deductables and out-of-pocket costs required by any health insurance.
My job offers shitty heath insurance and will pay only my premium, leaving me to pay for my wife and child and eliminating any possibility for me to get subsidies for a marketplace plan which might actually be more affordable for me, maybe.
ACA offers no benefits at all to me and penalizes me for not participating. Yet not participating is still the economically wiser choice.
Part of the problems a lot of people have with the ACA is the way it was passed into law, the fact that it is forcing people to participate in something that is neither affordable nor healthcare, penalizes those who refuse to participate and benefits nobody but the health insurance companies, while giving those companies an excuse to waive around while raising rates. The excuse being that not enough healthy people are participating by giving the health insurance companies money to cover the less healthy people.
what did you mean by ending recissions? I’m not familiar with that term.
Rescission is where the insurance company could decide to demand a refund on bills it paid for your medical care b/c it decided it shouldn’t have paid them in the first place. What was happening is they’d see how much $$ they lost on a patient and then go back through the patients records to find a place where they could make it seem a patient lied about having a pre-existing condition, then use that to yoink their money back from the provider. This left the patients w/ hundred of thousands in unexpected bills suddenly and sometimes years later. But it was sure great for the company’s bottom line! Now that is illegal.
But couldn’t you have almost the exact same problems w/ car insurance? I mean, you can opt out by not having a car and you can’t opt out of being corporeal, but aside from that these were the reasons people didn’t want to have to insure their cars. Now we realize how much better things are when everyone who has a car has insurance; when they don’t the consequences are grave and NO ONE wants to be in an accident w/ a person who doesn’t have car insurance.
My daughter is one of those millions. From the time she was 22 (when she couldn’t be covered under our family plan anymore) untill the ACA, no insurance company would cover her because of a pre-existing condition.
Since getting her health insurance she’s been to the doctor exactly once.
