(bolding mine)
I’m not convinced of that at all.
Disagreeing is okay.
Except that “I disagree” is not a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition, just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
No it isn’t.
Yes it is.
More completely then… i took iiandyiiii’s comment as something he/she felt should be self evident. I think that is far from true. There is no obvious reason to believe that there is a continuum from bad to good.
I do not think that the current law (PPACA) is a preferable state to either a single payer or the staus quo prior to the implementation of the PPACA. There is the potential for great harm (to individuals and to insurers) in the PPACA. Even the proponents of the law recognized such risks existed and that measures to ameliorate at least some of those risks would be needed.
For example, an insurer forced to accept customers with significant pre-existing conditions has the risk of incurring potentially unlimited liabilities for claims. The PPACA mandates insurers accept such customers, but attempts to ameliorate the risk by providing for an individual mandate in an effort to be sure the insurer can obtain a financial viable cross section of customers so as to afford the increased claims.
Pre-PPACA persons were free to choose to have no health insurance. The PPACA mandates that they now obtain insurance. Fundamentally, the majority of those persons would come out ahead by not insuring. And some would prefer to continue in that manner feeling they cannot afford the premiums. To help ameliorate that risk of financial loss the PPACA has all sorts of subsidies for lower income persons, including outright Medicaid expansion in those states which allow it.
And so on…
Time will tell if the measures within the PPACA meant to limit potential harms will be sufficient. I am by no means sure they will succeed, but neither am I certain of failure.
Harm to insurers? Oh no, not that.
It is certainly not a preferable state to national single-payer, that much is agreed. Your concerns about the difficulties in defining liability for catastrophic conditions are valid, but that’s what large risk pools are for. The pools are now larger, with more ability to spread high costs, and the means to do so are now more efficient than the previous fuck-'em system.
You mention the “freedom” to not purchase health insurance that is now gone - but wasn’t that really the freedom to make everyone else pay instead of you when you got hit by a bus or got leukemia or something?
Now, what value do the insurance companies add to the system, or did before PPACA? What makes them better than parasites, or ever did?
Or the freedom to lose everything and be broke and screwed.
If the reform we choose to pursue is to include health insurers then it behooves us not to mandate a system in which those insurers are doomed to financial failure. The PPACA has some risk corridors to help limit that risk but those only are slated to last to 2016.
I see three broad possibilities* in that respect as it pertains to any given insurer.
- An insurer has a profitable book of business justifying continuing to accept the risks involved,
- An insurer has an unprofitable book of business and withdraws from the market.
- An insurer has an unprofitable book of business and goes begging for a bailout.
The worst of those possibilities, IMHO, is the third. And though I do not think it is as likely as the first, if we see the risk corridors utilized next year (and Congress has budgeted some $5.5 billion for that in 2015) we better look real hard at 2016.
- (I do not think these three are in any way equally likely. There are many other permutations, I know, but I’m trying to think in broad terms. )
But for reasons that have already been explained and explained and explained, they’re not doomed to financial failure.
I really do think that the Dems need to be doing a big fucking victory lap right about now, but of course they won’t in any case. Still, watching the GOP’s response to the outstanding enrollment numbers today has been absolutely amazing. It’s nice to see the idiots in that party on THEIR heels for a change when it comes to the ACA.
No, their marketing has been a total failure. We’ll see if they have the brains to do better.
As I understand it, enrollment numbers are about 7 million. Of course last minute sign ups haven’t gotten a bill yet.
As someone up thread mentioned, about 85-90% of earlier enrollees paid their first month’s premium.
So… 7 million x 90% (let’s err on the generous side) = 6.3 million. about 90% of the original goal. I wouldn’t be running victory laps, but I wouldn’t be crying about those numbers either.
I do hope no one is seriously going to argue that the administration only hoped people would choose a plan but not pay and were basing their 7 million projection on that.
The roll-out provided great lessons and pointed out some administrative areas that need serious work still. The back end needs to be built out in an efficient manner so insurers are reliably getting the information they need and subsidies for eligible insureds. Still a lot of work to do.
The forecast was that 7 million people would sign up, so yes, that target was met and exceeded by a little bit (with a few people still signing up). We can discuss the law’s positive and negative aspects without playing games with the numbers.
It can take six to eight weeks after you enroll to just get an invoice from the insurance company. I enrolled on November 5th, and my insurance company didn’t even get the file from the federal website until Dec. 16th. They couldn’t accept my payment until a week later, and the payment didn’t clear my account until early January.
So a lot of the unpaid accounts could still be in process.
BTW, for Airbeck, Quinnipiac just released it’s latest poll on the law: 41-55. Outliers are not your friend.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/obama_and_democrats_health_care_plan-1130.html
Of course, the usual crowd will just say this poll means the public supports the law.
Frankly, I wish I could sign up for ‘Obamacare.’
I pay about $00 a month for insurance for my family of four. But, my insurer pays the rest. My insurance actually costs $17,000 a year. And, for that price I still have to pay co-pays and deductibles.
I price shopped on the exchange and could get a comparable plan for $10,000 a year. Now all of that would come out of my pocket, so it would cost me more on a personal basis. But I would them have portable insurance and would not have to go uninsured for 3 months while I change job and I would not be ‘trapped’ at the job I have now. Plus, it does make one wonder where that other $7,000 went. I presume it goes right into some well-deserving CEO’s pocket.
$400 a month, not $00.
More likely it just gets you more coverage. The exchange plans have narrower networks and leave out the best hospitals.