*"We aren’t exactly out of “the fog of controversy” that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi said we’d have to be out of before we could see the benefits of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but we’re about to see just how right she was. … to the tune of $1.3 billion that will go back into healthcare consumers’ pockets because of the 80/20 rule written into the law. That’s $1.3 billion that can be used to save people’s homes. $1.3 billion that can help put food on empty tables. $1.3 billion that can put gas in people’s cars so they can get to job interviews, that can buy clothes for kids who’ve outgrown them, that can purchase much-needed school supplies, that can be set aside for retirement.
That’s $1.3 billion that will be going back into our economy, helping lift us further out of the recession we’ve barely been scraping our way out of—because Republicans in Congress blocked every effort by President Obama to put people back to work. It’s $1.3 billion that was supposed to be used on patient health care … and wasn’t!"*
If you don’t want yours, I’ll be happy to take it. I mean, just to save you the hassle of dealing with it. Offer stands for anyone else reading this as well! I’m just trying to be helpful here.
Unless you have individual insurance you don’t get a dime. If you are under an employers plan your employer gets the money back, not you personally. That’s why the $1.3bn is going back to only around 16m Americans, if you aren’t a corporation or a small business owner or someone with an individual plan, you are not getting a rebate. But for those that do get rebates–congratulations, you made an interest free loan to the multibillion dollar insurance company that you buy health insurance from! You can also expect that as the years go on health insurance companies will get better and better at making sure fewer and fewer dollars fall under this requirement.
Now that I think about it, a lot of the people getting rebates are probably Republicans, since this money will disproportionately be going to people like small business owners, or corporations (which aren’t human people at all.)
The point is that insurance companies will get better at classifying non-medical expenses as medical expenses? I doubt that. Unless you think we’ve got our first fraud and abuse proof government program in history, of course.
While it’s been alluded to above that $1.5bn is basically no money at all (even the shittiest Federal government agencies have budgets multiple times that amount), to put it in perspective the health insurance industry in the United States in an $850 billion industry.
This is such a piddling amount I wonder why it justified any sort of post here at all, the DOD saves more money in a given year by switching toilet paper vendors.
Was obviously facetious. But the DOD has been reducing its expenses, in 2013 we’ll spend some $32bn less on defense than we spend in 2012, for example.
That’s on a base budget of like $525bn, though. Even private companies like JP Morgan (if you’ve been reading the news) can blow more than this $1.3bn in a matter of weeks. I guess I’m just confused why someone felt the need to capitalize BILLION, this isn’t 1925, a billion dollars is not very much when talking about the entire United States.
Bzzzzt. The law requires businesses to return it to the employees.
[QUOTE=Mark Halperin]
The rebates will average around $127 for the over 3 million individuals who receive them directly. Small employers covering almost 5 million people will receive around $377 million (an average break of $76), while larger employers covering about 7.5 million people will get approximately $541 million (an average of $72). According to administration officials, employers are obligated to pass those savings onto their employees.
Read more: http://thepage.time.com/2012/05/11/halperins-take-why-aca-rebates-are-a-big-deal/#ixzz1ucfNp5Nr
[/quote]
It’s stunning to me that we can’t even get agreement that $1.3 billion freaking dollars being returned to people who didn’t have it appropriately applied to their healthcare is a good thing. What happened to the usual Republican chant of “it’s my money, you can’t take it from me, give it back”? I’ll bet you $10,000 that if this was a government administered program returning $1.3 billion dollars to taxpayers that it overcharged, you rightwingers would be SCREAMING bloody murder about inefficient “big” government. It’s getting to be absurd.
Obviously I’m pretending to have personal knowledge of loopholes, since I never spoke about any specific ones. But I guess you believe we’ve produced the first government program with no loopholes or susceptibility to fraud? Is that your contention, yes or no?
I recently read (and maybe you did too), that a huge amount of money laundering was flowing through banks into the United States. There are mandatory reporting requirements in the United States for suspicious transactions, so all of these should have been caught. But it ends up the actual people responsible for doing the front line investigation are bank employees, and the banks were putting their most worthless, slack ass employees in these roles. So criminals were doing massive money laundering not through shady dealers but major banks like HSBC and etc.
Of course, way back in 2003 the U.S. government said HSBC wad doing a really shitty job of handling this, so obviously with the government involved a major bank like HSBC stopped being used by criminals to launder money. But wait, no, that’s not wait happened at all, this shit kept going on up until basically right now.
But hey, there was tons of laws and regulations and auditors and government enforcement, so it’s unreasonable to have thought any of this might have happened.
But yeah, on the expense reporting thing, we all know that’s something corporations never fudge numbers on, so I’m sure we’re all good.
Maybe we can use the $1.3bn to replace some of the $14bn cost to us taxpayers to bail out lazy union auto workers in Michigan, that gets us close to breaking even…right?
So huge companies are going to commit fraud as a matter of course? Interesting.
I’m not sure how they’re going to say that the corporate retreat counts as radiology services, but I guess you could just assume that they’ll ignore the law, since it makes you feel better.
Also, like a creationist, you’re gish-galloping now.
You are aware that the auto-bailout saved perhaps an awful lot of jobs, right? In any case, try to stay on topic, by deflecting and dancing you’re only detracting from your central argument, that saving 1.3 billion in a year is bad.
Who is saving $1.3bn a year? Not the government. Giving $1.3bn back from private insurance to the consumers isn’t government savings. Who exactly is saving the $1.3bn again?
The people who paid for the insurance silly. But you’re ignoring that the point of this is to force the insurers into spending an appropriate ratio of their premiums on care.
You really seem to not have a solid hold on this issue. Why does it piss you off so much?