The sequester is not causing any implementation delays. If they don’t increase the debt ceiling, of course that’s their fault, unless of course they pass a debt ceiling increase and the Senate also passes it. Then it’s on the President. But that’s unlikely.
The Boston Globe reinforces two points I’ve made in this thread:
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That the law is not actually being fully enacted next year. All sorts of provisions, major and minor, are being delayed.
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The President is not taking an active role in fixing the problems with implementation, rather he’s making excuses while pushing back deadlines and handing out waivers.
From the editorial:
Bureaucratic hurdles are inevitable when attempting to reconcile local rules and practices to new federal standards. But even people who strongly support Obamacare, as many people in Massachusetts do, shouldn’t hesitate to call attention to areas where the law is unnecessarily complicated, or where local practices accomplish the same purposes in simpler ways.
So far, when it comes to Massachusetts, the federal response has been to grant grace or transition periods. But those periods don’t solve the problems, they merely delay their onset. The Obama administration’s aim should be fixing, rather than finessing, those problems.
Now three large insurers won’t be participating in California’s exchanges:
Not really too surprising that these three large insurers opted out, nor is it an indictment of the ACA. From your link:
Obamacare premiums announced in California exchanges are much lower than projected:
Beat me to it. I’ve been meaning to come back with a similar response to adaher for the past couple of days.
Guess what? The principles of free-market capitalism and competition are actually working in CA to drive down the cost of premiums, exactly what the Obama administration has been arguing would happen the entire time. FTR, the CA exchange board has estimated that policies next year will range from a 2% increase to a 29% decrease in costs as opposed to comparable plans that are currently being sold. That entire fact kind of belies the perennial Republican argument that the ACA is going to cause premiums to skyrocket, doesn’t it?
It’s kind of funny that there is no coherent counterargument from the GOP as to how the news out of CA is actually terrible. And of course adaher won’t respond.
Lower than projected. True. But think about what lower than projected means, and think about why supporters of the ACA are using that term.
Or, just listen to the California insurance commissioner, who is urging citizens to not compare the prices released with what they pay now.
I’ll make it easy for you: lower than projected, but much higher than what people pay now.
Wrong. According to the calculator on that page, my premium for silver class health insurance (mid range, neither the cheapest nor the most expensive) would be $285 per month. The last quote I got from Anthem/Blue Cross for their cheapest “catastrophic” insurance was over $700 per month. So a better policy under Obamacare will be less than half what I would pay for the worst insurance in the individual market today.
In some case, it will be lower. We’re looking at the average, since it tells us whether most people will pay more or less.
This says that Californians pay a lot less than $285 per month now.
To get quoted $700, you’re either talking about a family plan, or you have conditions that make you a poor risk. If it’s the latter, then congratulations, the ACA was written with you in mind.
Oh look…
More than 100 insurers have elected to participate in ACA insurance marketplaces.
Guess we’ll have even more competition, huh? But the ACA is still apparently government-run socialized medicine. :dubious:
Hint: Don’t tell the GOP.
That I at least agree with. The marketplaces create an easy way for Americans to compare and choose insurance plans, and the lack of a public option prevents socialism from taking over.
Those figures are for HDHPs with a higher average deductible than the Silver Plan.
So the AVERAGE buyer has something closer to the Bronze plan?
Considering the fact that the ACA dictates a certain amount of coverage/type of coverage/prices, how does this constitute competition? :smack:
Because it’s a projection, and as with all positive projections out of California (“Hey, look! We’ve got a budget surplus this year!”), it’s generally untrue.
**With less than a year until it’s fully enacted, what is your opinion of the Affordable Care Act?
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It’s a bad idea and it’s bad legislation. It will pretty much destroy the healthcare industry as a whole, and it will crater the economy worse than all of Obama’s other screw-ups have.
Rate Shock: In California, Obamacare To Increase Individual Health Insurance Premiums By 64-146%
Avik Roy is doing some strange math in that article, because when I put the info into the website he touts (eHealthInsurance.com) I’m getting much higher monthly rates than what he includes in the article.
I think it may be the fact that he’s comparing the median across all zones for a Bronze plan in the exchange to the average of the 5 cheapest plans on the website. He doesn’t even attempt to account for differences in deductible for those 5 cheapest plans compared to the coverages in the Bronze plans.
Now I see that later in the article Roy concedes that its more like 35% for comparable levels of coverage in the SF area (to pick one). That sounds about right considering these plans have to cover pre-existing conditions.