Please provide specific details if you can. A pointer to the specific plan itself will help.
I’m guessing this is because of one of two things:
Your sister doesn’t understand that the deductible does not apply to doctor copay amounts. If her plan says the doctor’s copay is $20, then she’ll pay $20 to see the doctor for most routine things. The deductible is for things like specialist visits and medical equipment. But we really don’t know unless we know her specific plan.
Your sister picked a plan without doctor copay. In this case, you sister would be on the hook for $3000 before the insurance kicked in. That’s not necessarily a bad thing since these plans typically cost less. If she doesn’t need frequent medical care, it may be a good option. But it sounds like that’s not the case for her. If she picked one of these plans, it’s her fault for picking it instead of one with low copays.
Wolfpup, I won’t ding you for such right now. We’ve just completed a discussion on altering text in quotes. While you’re coloring inside the lines in snipping some of ITR’s original post, your use of ‘blah blah’ to indicate that something was removed contains emotional weight and could be seen as quoting while denigrating the original quote. That would violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the quoting rules.
In the future, stick to something neutral, please.
It’s fun to pretend as if all old people are wealthy enough to afford healthcare, isn’t it? Like they’ve all done nothing but work and save their entire lives without economic downturns. Like they have worked at nothing but high paying white collar jobs and retired as executives with stock shares and huge retirement funds. Like they’ve not raised families of their own at great personal expense in the hopes that their children would help take care of them in their old and vulnerable age as they have taken care of their children at their young and vulnerable age.
You know what invariably happens to the healthy and the young? They get old and sick. And the new healthy and young help to fund the health care plan so that the old and sick don’t need to be euthanized when they become a liability to their children.
This paragraph is the stupidest, most ill-informed, poorly conceived, moronic mischaracterization of medical care in the US prior to the PPACA that I’ve yet seen you write.
Chemistry tells you that if you combine certain substance under certain conditions, you get crystal meth. If a law is passed that forbids the creation of crystal meth, that law isn’t anti-science. Rather, it recognizes the findings of science and specifically says that a procedure verified by science to have a specific outcome may not be followed.
Actuarial science tells you that if you aggregate health care consumers (i.e., people) by sex and base premiums off an analysis of this aggregation, women will may more for their premiums than men. If a law is passed that forbids unequal premiums for men and women, that law isn’t anti-science. Rather, it recognizes the findings of science and specifically says that a procedure verified by science to have a specific outcome may not be followed.
The study looked at direct coststo companiesfrom the ACA’s requirements, over and above projected employer health care cost trends without the ACA. The study breaks out these costsfrom a number of perspectives: on a per employee basis; to individual companies; and to the corporate sector in general. In summary, the study found that over the next decade:
• The cost of the ACA to large U.S. employers (10,000 or more employees) is estimated to be between $4,800 to $5,900 per employee.
• These large employers will see overall ACA-related cost hikes of between $163 million and $200 million per employer, or an increase of 4.3 percent in 2016 and 8.4 percent in 2023 over and above what they would otherwise be spending. (See Appendix One for cost estimates for specific ACA provisions)
• The total cost of the ACA to all large U.S. employers over the next ten years is estimated to be from $151 billion to $186 billion.
These data demonstrate that the added mandates, fees and regulatory burdens associated with the ACA are increasing the cost of employer-sponsored health care plans, with implications for both employers and employees.
If the CBO said their predictions were plausible, AND if you dispute the idea that Obama is a supernatural entity with perfect knowledge of the future, then it absolutely changes that “fact” to a “non-fact,” even if we stipulate that their claims turned out to be incorrect.
This non-peer-reviewed research funded by a consortium of corporations and co-written by a Bush appointee and a Heritage Foundation flunkie is bound to be both impartial and enlightening, especially given that the sum total of their methodology was to ask a bunch of corporations to answer some survey questions and then to tabulate the results of the ones who bothered to respond. Thanks so much, ITR!
That’s fair enough. However, the piece ITR linked to was pretty clearly a hatchet job from folks with, well, an axe to grind; it in no way represents a genuine desire to find the truth of the situation, but is rather a bit of propaganda created to support one side of the argument, and should be read as such.
I absolutely expect cites from ITR to be hatchet jobs from right-wing think-tanks, propaganda pieces dressed up as sober research. That’s why I spent the time I did tracking down the authors and the methodology.
A study produced by economists who work at business schools? A study produced by hospital administrators? A study produced by the Council of Governors or whatever? Sure, that kind of thing can be interesting.
But ITR often finds his studies with the conclusions already set before the study begins, and it’s worth pointing that out whenever he cites them.
There is a big difference between denying science and passing legislation that promotes a policy that science shouldn’t be used for some specific purpose. Nobody denies that women cost more to cover. It’s simply a policy decision that women should be protected from this bias. (I’m not using “bias” pejoratively.)
[quibble] Actually, the reason for this is not what you said, and it’s very simple: women are willing to pay more, and there’s no law prohibiting sex-based discrimination.
Yeah, it would be nice if politicians told the truth. I believe Obama believed what he said. I believe Bush believed what HE said, even when he was telling some real knee-slappers that anyone with half a brain should have realized were bullshit. And I wish both Reps and Dems would be truthful in advertising, but they are not, not nearly, not nohow. Oh sigh.
[note: I’m arguing the opposite side of the fence here, in pursuit of good arguments, rather than in service of a particular conclusion.] Is it really different? Why is stereotyped behavioral assumptions OK when stereotyped health assumptions are not? What’s the difference? In either case, I’m being judged based on the qualities of a group rather than of me as an individual. It’s not like I can do anything to fix the behavior of most men, or like a woman could do anything to fix the health issues of most women.
The analogy is apt.
The main difference between auto insurance and health insurance is that the US auto maintenance system is working fine, but the health care system is not. It’s forcing us to keep jobs we don’t want because of pre-existing conditions, and a host of other ills (mostly caused by the ER system and the fact that employers are buying insurance for us rather than us buying it for ourselves: a twisted system where we get the problems of capitalism with few of the benefits.)
Neither Pelosi nor Obama phrased what they said as predictions; they phrased what they said as simple, factual statements. If I meet with an insurance company representative who promises that the price for a certain plan I’m signing up for will drop by $2,500, and it instead rises by a huge amount, that company would be in danger of prosecution for fraud. Politicians, of course, are not held to the same standard.
And if you want to criticize my cites and dispute that health care costs are shooting upwards, you’re welcome to provide cites of your own. But based on previous debates I’ve had with you, I don’t expect that you’ll do so.