How do you figure that? Sounds like an admission that Obamacare is superior in every way to employer paid insurance. Otherwise, employers would still offer paid insurance to attract and keep valued employees. If you mean employers just can’t compete with Obamacare, just say so.
It’s “superior” in one sense: it’s cheaper for the employers to have other people pay for things than to pay for them themselves.
What kept employers in line was the fact that the individual market was very tough and couldn’t compete with the group market. Obamacare is an attempt to create a superior individual market, which if successful might be close enough to the group market so as to give employers the option of chucking their plans.
The employees themselves might be worse off, but not as much worse off as they would have been without Obamacare, such that the cost/benefit balance for an employer of offering a plan might change for a lot of employers. Which is why many are doing the sort of analysis we’re discussing.
[Of note: a lot depends on whether the employer has a lot of lower income employees who would get subsidized coverage, and employers of this sort are more likely to end their plans than employers with higher paid employees. All this is part of the analysis.]
So if cost is the most important factor, why did employers offer health insurance to their employees? Even pre-Obamacare, they could save a lot of money by not paying for insurance at all.
This cite, from the New York Health Exchange itself, discusses how to treat in-force plans:
From here: http://www.dfs.ny.gov/insurance/health/exchanges/EOE_chklst_SHOP.pdf (redundant warning, PDF), page 4 (document page 4, PDF page 9)
Since the original complaint was that in-force plans that are better than 92% will be illegal, I think that, at least in NY, that’s not the case.
With that, I’m leaving this ridiculous thread. The idea that new plans offered by insurance companies will be better than the range required to be considered a silver/gold/whatever policy (that is, it will have an 85% AV, still be a gold plan, and the insurance company is giving you more because they are generous) is silly anyway. Further, if an insurance company does decide to give consumers more out of the goodness of its heart, the idea that the regulators will disallow the plan because of that is further ridiculous.
In any case, at least in NY, if an in-force plan falls outside of the +/-2% range, it’s just fine. I’m not going to track down the other states.
The decades of out of control rising health care costs has reversed the past few years. That coincides with the passage if the ACA. The law directs insurers to limit their expenses for adminstration and salaries, so after this first year of transition to the law there will be fewer complaints about lost plans etc.
Health insurance will get less costly for just about everyone even Obama Care haters in general.
That was my original thought, too, but I can’t find any evidence that either Congress or HHS intended such. There’s no reference to standardization for comparison purposes in any of the CMS memoranda.
Because employees had no real alternative, so not having employer coverage was a huge deal in terms of attracting and retaining employees. If the impact of Obamacare is that there is a sort-of-tolerable alternative, then not having employer coverage might become something less than a huge deal, maybe a big deal or a medium sized deal.
The amount that employers will pay for something that’s a big deal or medium sized deal is less than the amount they’ll pay for a huge deal. So a lot of employers are thinking of terminating coverage.
This is not really a difficult concept.
You’ve possibly misunderstood your cite, being charitable
Your link states clearly, on page 3 that:
After the part that you quote giving the broader ranges, conveniently left out of your quote for some reason, the following is stated:
In sum, your own cite contradicts you.
Sorry, but the OP was talking about in force policies that were cancelled because they fell outside of those narrow ranges, specifically that they were better than 92% AV. Those would be grandfathered policies, and the table I provided would apply. This is not really a difficult concept. You’ve possibly misunderstood my cite, being charitable.
ETA: I can’t believe I’m back in this ridiculous thread. Bye!
I certainly agree that it’s not a difficult concept, for anyone following these issues even slightly.
Not all in-force policies are grandfathered. The vast majority of in-force policies are not grandfathered.
But that’s for anyone following these issues even slightly. Someone like that would not have missed - for example - the enormous political furor which erupted over millions of in-force non-grandfathered policies which had to be canceled due to not qualifying under ACA rules.
It would appear that you’re not one of those people. Being charitable.
Yeah, most of the howling was because people wanted to keep plans that basically didn’t cover shit, and didn’t want to pay for actual insurance.
Of course, if they’d have allowed people to keep the shitty ‘pay-n-pray’ plans (as I call them), they’d be just as angry when something bad happened, probably blaming [del]the boogyman[/del] Obama because “I thought Obamacare was supposed to be better than this! He lied to me!”
I don’t know about the platinum plans but I always thought of the health care metallic bands as weight classes in boxing. You don’t get very many boxers in the middle of a weight class. If you have a bunch of people comparing your product to other products that all cover basically the same group of benefits and the only difference is generally the reimbursement rate then it doesn’t really make sense to reimburse at much higher than the minimum level. The platinum plans would be like the unlimited weight class but frankly, if you want better than 90% coverage, you probably aren’t buying off the exchange anyway.
AFAICT, the only reason you really have to buy off the exchange is because of the subsidy and perhaps some price competition but the most competition goes on below platinum class.
That’s fine but not at all relevant here.
You could think those cancellations were the best thing ever, but nonetheless they demonstrated to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention that “existing plans” is not remotely synonymous with “grandfathered plans”, as RitterSport was attempting to claim.
And that therefore, the cite linked by RitterSport is yet another indication - if any was needed - that the rules of the exchanges require plans to be within 2% of the target AVs, and not anything above those limits as RitterSport and Richard Parker and possibly others are attempting to claim.
Yes, we all know that that’s what defenders of the ACA are saying: that the plans that got cancelled were “shabby”, or in your words “didn’t cover shit”. (Personally I don’t want my insurance to cover poop.) But as I clearly stated in my OP, none of the people making this sort of claim can back it up with a citation. Why not?
Because you haven’t shown in the past to be capable of acknowledging a citation that refutes your beliefs and admit you’re wrong?
This MotherJones article has basically everything you want. It gives you examples of shabby plans, examples of a few class action lawsuits that these greedy insurance companies have lost for their thousands of shit policies, and statements from hypocritical Republicans that, just a few years ago, railed against the exact same kind of shabby plans they are fighting for people to keep right now. The article also talks about how it was the insurance companies, knowing the provisions of the ACA, who canceled the plans, not Obama, who merely left out the fact that shabby plans that’s milking people out of their money will be gone under the health care law.
Every plan canceled due to the ACA is bad because it didn’t meet a minimum standard. That’s what the law does, it was designed that way, and both Democrats and Republicans knew it. What the Democrats erred in was to underestimate the greedy partisan attacks by the GOP and insurance companies who wanted to keep selling their shit to an ignorant populace, and spin propaganda (and have people believe them) that the shit plans were some great thing that people deserved to keep. Once again, a good law by Democrats is attacked by fear, ignorance, and greed from the Republicans. That is the only indefensible mistake the Democrats made
Okay, so you’re starting off with a personal attack. Usually that’s not a good sign.
Uh, no. It does not. In the OP I linked to a New Yorker plan which said that all the cancelled plans were shabby. Chimera just repeated the same idea, saying that the cancelled plans “don’t cover shit”. Neither the New Yorker nor Chimera offered any cite, nor even a clear definition of “shabby” and “don’t cover shit” that would allow anyone else to check their claims against reality. You also seem immensely proud of your ability to use the word “shit” over and over again, but you don’t tell us what qualifies as a “shit policy”, thus your statements don’t really mean anything.
But aside from the fact that all these defenses of the PPACA deliberately use words without clear meaning, the Mother Jones article that you linked to flatly doesn’t address the central question. The pro-ACA side says that all the cancelled plans were shabby; the Mother Jones article does not assert that all the cancelled plans were shabby, nor give any information on how many were shabby; it merely seeks to establish that shabby plans existed. Even a child should be able to understand that one example of a shabby plan does not prove the shabbiness of all plans. Instead the Mother Jones article says things like this: “Blue Cross is now canceling 300,000 plans in Florida, and, no doubt, a lot of them are such ‘Go Blue’ plans.” Note the use of the ambiguous phrase “a lot of them”. How many is a lot? No answer is forthcoming. And note also the phrase “no doubt”; I’m naturally inclined to doubt anything that Mother Jones says, particularly when they’re trying a trick like that.
Now recall that in the OP, I linked to this and this and this: examples of people who were happy with their policies until they were cancelled. Do you think that it’s a good thing that all these people were deprived of policies that they liked? If so, why?
You are failing to distinguish between the PPACA and its implementing regulation, where the +/-2% variation comes from.
I have in other threads, but as with others, I grow weary of repeating the same refutations of the same bullshit right wing lies to people who blissfully ignore every citation that doesn’t agree with the propaganda they insist on swallowing and repeating at every opportunity.
Since the OP is based on a blatant lie and has been refuted, I’ll step out of this thread since it is redundant and won’t change the beliefs of those who would rather believe the worst about their nation and their President.
Eh? This isn’t really a matter of believing the worst about anyone. At most, it’s a matter of whether the Department of Health and Human Services made a drafting error.
Your interpretation is not.consistent with even the title of the thread, let alone the agenda driven content.
It is if you deserve it. Oh, you mean not a good sign for your argument? Got it
I’m sure some plans were canceled by insurance companies to trick people into buying more expensive plans in this time of transition. People like you don’t understand that all these companies care about is their bottom line and they know that the chances of some guy taking his cancellation on a national PR nightmare is worth the risk of canceling thousands of plans and making millions of dollars. The risk assessment does not favor the man who has his plan canceled.
Question: how many examples do you need to consider it a general truth that shabby plans were canceled? Does a journalist need to investigate every single one of the canceled plans before you are satisfied? What MJ is doing there is giving you a sample, one that is quite convincing in that its not 1 person’s plan but 300,000 plans. You can quibble with their methodology but when all you have is “I don’t believe them” without support, then you’re the one that needs to provide some evidence.
Your example articles show the same kind of weakness you objected to in the Mother Jones article. Without a list of exactly what was covered and what wasn’t, nobody knows why the plans were canceled.
You claim its all Obama’s fault, but in the 2nd article, it clearly says “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.” That tells me that there are people who want to see this law fail and have the power to affect policy in that direction. Note that there wasn’t anything wrong with the plans themselves, they were canceled only because it would dry up some of the money to keep the other sicker people from getting cheap health care. If you were honest, you’d look at that and recoil in disgust at how insurance companies are trying to manipulate the law to maximize their profits and not be upset at Obama who set a minimum standard that plans must adhere to (similar to the regulation that all cars need to have things like brakes and seat belts).
Also, we knew going into it that a small percentage of people were going to see their plans go up in cost. Out of the tens of millions of plans, this was bound to happen. Its unfortunately, but hardly a valid criticism of the overall law in general.
So to answer your question, most of the health plans were canceled because they failed to make minimal standards. That’s a good thing because then these people can get actual good plans, like the MJ article stated, that will cover real things like hospitalization and lower deductibles. However, if the plans were simply canceled by greedy insurance companies out to make a buck, then it is not a good thing.
Of course, we all knew this going in. The MJ article which you ignored listed all of these reasons. You chose to pretend it doesn’t exist, which is why your whole premise was false to begin with and why not a ton of people are engaging you on this subject. They know that Obamacare has its holes, but more often than not it is the GOP that is putting those holes in there and pretending they are Obama’s fault. I’m glad we have health care, I’m glad you and I are being forced to pay for it or pay a penalty, and I’m glad poorer people will live longer and be healthier and that rich people might have to share this earth with them for a little while longer. The only thing sad and misleading here is the severity of conservative criticism for this law