Perhaps, but that’s only speculation. I’m not calling for repeal of Medicaid, so much as pointing out that in the short term, private health insurance is superior to Medicaid, and those who were pushed out of their plans and into Medicaid are not very happy with ACA right now.
The moves from the health insurers show that a lot of that private health insurance was virtually useless. But the main point remains, having Medicaid is better than having no health care, and I can speak from personal experience as well as from studies.
I’ll accept that, I know I’d rather have Medicaid than nothing. But I’d rather have private insurance than Medicaid, and if I had private insurance and it got cancelled, and I got pushed to Medicaid, I’d be really pissed.
If you had private insurance that was cancelled and forced you on Medicaid due to ACA, you probably had a policy that wasn’t worth a damn anyway. Anyone who is eligible for Medicaid is probably better off with Medicaid than that kind of policy.
But we’d have to look at an example of the private policy in a real-life situation to be sure.
That’s an absurd and unsupported statement. I’m sure there are many people who would be much sicker without insurance than on Medicaid.
Of course it’s health insurance, or at least a health insurance benefit. Do you even know what you’re talking about?
Does that include the people who never get surgery because they can’t pay for it, and just die? :rolleyes:
All it takes for private insurance to be inadequate is to charge a co-pay for preventive services. By that standard, some continental European UHC systems are “inadequate” by our government’s standards.
Under ACA, you mean?
In that case, most insurers would simply alter the plan, or cancel it and replace it with one that doesn’t.
I really doubt you can find many people who lost a private plan whose only flaw was copays for preventive services who were then unable to find a comparable policy and only had Medicaid as a last resort.
Preventive services are routinely used services by all, and thus will increase the cost of a health plan dramatically.
Community rating also increases the cost of the plans for most customers without adding any value to the individual.
Not all policies were cancelled for being inadequate, and that’s a talking point that will be harder to hold on to as employer-sponsored plans get cancelled in the coming two years. Professional guilds have already found out the hard way:
Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan. But now, to their surprise, thousands of writers, opera singers, music teachers, photographers, doctors, lawyers and others are learning that their health insurance plans are being canceled and they may have to pay more to get comparable coverage, if they can find it.
…
But while those policies, by and large, had been canceled because they did not meet the law’s requirements for minimum coverage, many of the New York policies being canceled meet and often exceed the standards, brokers say. The rationale for disqualifying those policies, said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, was to prevent associations from selling insurance to healthy members who are needed to keep the new health exchanges financially viable.
Siphoning those people, Mr. Levitt said, would leave the pool of health exchange customers “smaller and disproportionately sicker,” and would drive up rates.
So plans were also being cancelled because the ACA needs healthy people in the exchanges.
Then there’s the smaller networks created to keep the cost of the plans down. And now we find out that ALL the insurers might need a bailout because they set their rates too low!
“We are the Obama people,” said Camille Sweeney, a New York writer and member of the Authors Guild. Her insurance is being canceled, and she is dismayed that neither her pediatrician nor her general practitioner appears to be on the exchange plans. What to do has become a hot topic on Facebook and at dinner parties frequented by her fellow writers and artists.
“I’m for it,” she said. “But what is the reality of it?”
We’re hearing that a lot, no?
Depends. How many is a lot?
Well, it’s not a stat, it’s an anecdote, but we’re hearing a lot more than one. That’s three by my count, all different people from different mainstream news sources. Basically saying, “I supported ACA, but I’m being hurt by it.” Then there are a lot more stories of people who haven’t said they supported it but were hurt by it, like that cancer patient who lost access to her doctor.
Plus, the fact that tertiary care facilities aren’t part of most bronze and silver plans is well established. I’d say that’s kinda necessary for a health insurance plan to be adequate, but apparently the lawyers in DC didn’t agree.
False. Screenings and early treatment are much, much cheaper than late treatment, and save the cost of more expensive treatments later.
Compare the cost of a flu shot to just one day’s worth of hospitalization. I paid $45 for my flu shot this year, and that was full retail. One ER visit would easily cost a grand. A week in the hospital with flu complications? I figure several grand a day. Flu can get serious and require hospitalization in the elderly (and don’t we all hope to be elderly some day), infants, and asthmatics (like my wife and kids), among other groups.
I had a bad mole removed nine years ago. The doc did another excision to get clear borders. That turned out OK, and I’ve seen him for screenings twice a year since. Two office visits a year, plus lab work on 6 or 10 moles a year for the rest of my life - total would be a few thou. Left untreated I would have had chemo and interferon treatments for the last year of my life, and that would have been several years ago. One chemo treatment would have been more than all of my dermatologist visits and associated lab work, and with worse outcome.
I could go on, but let’s ask why insurers did not already fully cover preventative care? Because they had no guarantee that I would still be their customer in the future when the savings are recouped. They pay for my colonoscopy now, but when would I save them money in the future by not needing expensive colon cancer treatments, I’m no longer their customer and some other dweeb who skipped his 'oscpy and has cancer now is their customer.
By covering preventative care for everyone, insurers have more confidence that anyone who comes into their plan in the future will not suddenly need expensive but avoidable care. They can cover my wife’s mammograms now, even though she may not be their customer in 10 years, because the other person who takes her place as their customer has kept up on her mammograms also.
By covering everyone, and by covering preventative care for everyone, everyone saves money and gets better health outcomes. This is just one of the stupid logjams that PPACA broke, to everyone’s benefit. Including the insurers.
Yes. Which is why there’s a push to make them cheap or free in the first place. Many private insurers have done that to encourage prevention long before ACA was passed.
Let’s say the early screening cost is $150. Let’s say that it prevents later, more expensive treatment, in 1 out of 10,000 screenings. Let’s say late treatment costs $1M. In that case, do early screenings save money?
Really? Is that an absolute statement? What if the case is as I described above?
Yes. Let’s say your hypothetical is not reality based.
Do expand on that. Is $150 too much for a screening? Is 1 in 10,000 too low a rate for a screening? Is $1M too little to spend in “later treatment”?
Anyone can just make up numbers.
You have to use real-world data.
For instance, the first hit:
Prevention Saves Lives as Well as Money, New Research Confirms
And remember, preventive care also provides better results, whatever the cost. It’s better to avoid cancer than get it and undergo painful or disrupting or disfiguring treatment and survive it, for instance.
P.S. as this document explains, preventive care can be considered cost-effective even if it costs more, because of the even greater results.
https://www.statereforum.org/system/files/preventive_care_brief_final.pdf
Let’s take a “real life” case. It takes 217 high-risk people taking annual CT to save one life from lung cancer. A CT scan at a cheap place is something like $500. Let’s say those high-risk people continue those CT scans for 20 years (reasonable, right?). The cost: $2M. That is WAY more than treating lung cancer costs for one person, by order of magnitude at least.
Is that “reality based”?