Prelude, watch how rickpy starts with one subject and winds up on an almost-unrelated tangent.
rickyp wrote:fate
The embedded taxes affect everyone
Its always interesting when you accept the principles that up till now you've generally ignored or denied.
This idea of "embedded costs" in the health care system is one. Yes the ACA has "embedded costs within it
Yes, but what you fail to note is that they are NEW costs. They did not exist before the ACA.
.Any insurance system, shares this system. And in the US since health care is a right (through emergent care law) ...
The embedded costs of the uninsured effect everyone more...
And yet, the ACA has barely moved the needle with regard to covering the previously uninsured.
If they were serious and wanted to keep the ACA as structured, the fines needed to be draconian--with extensive prison for a second violation. That would have forced the uninsured to get insurance. But, the ACA doesn't--as evidenced by the CBO saying 30M will be uninsured in 2020.
Uninsured people eventually get their health care at emergency wards. The most expensive delivery method for health care....
Thanks for that "new info." In fact, still looking for any substance whatsoever . . .
So in the 23 states that haven't moved to accept Medicaid, the working poor that fall into the coverage gap will continue to cost everyone because they'll be lined up at emergency wards.
Actually, that will be happening in all 50 States. Do you have any evidence that ANY State is at 100% coverage? Please, do tell us.
And yet texas and others states refuse to accept Medicaid, which would provide insurance that would allow the working poor to get their health care more efficiently and expeditiously.
Did you say "expeditiously?" 
Vincent Guerrero applied Dec. 10. Donald Weeks, a diabetic who suffered a heart attack a few years back, submitted his application Dec. 23.
Three months later, neither man has gained coverage under Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program that was expanded Jan. 1 for hundreds of thousands of low-income Illinoisans as part of the Affordable Care Act.
Their applications are among a backlog of more than 200,000, some that date to October. Unprecedented demand for the taxpayer-funded coverage caught the state flat-footed.
Illinois officials initially expected 200,000 people to sign up for Medicaid under the expansion in 2014. But through last week, more than double that number have applied. And amid a marketing blitz, officials expect a surge of additional applications by the end of the year.
Unlike new commercial insurance products, which consumers can purchase through March 31, there's no deadline to sign up for Medicaid. By the end of the year, state officials expect about 350,000 new users to be enrolled in the program.
Let's see . . . it's not Texas . . . it's Illinois. But, government is the answer, right? Hmm, seems like your whole paradigm is . . . bovine excrement.
But, surely it's only one State, right? The backlog that applicants to the state’s expanded Medicaid program have complained about showed up in the latest enrollment numbers released by Obamacare officials.
Expansion of the program to singles and childless couples has been a popular component of the Affordable Care Act in New Jersey. Data released Friday show new applications during January and February alone totaled just over 30,000.
However, only 4,878 of those – or just one out of every six -- made it all the way through the process.
Nationally, Medicaid enrollment is up 8 percent. In New Jersey, it is up by 6 percent. At the end of February, total enrollment was 1,361,513 people.
Some of the people who applied for Medicaid have complained they haven’t received their proof-of-insurance cards and sometimes learn neither the state nor the federal government has a record of their enrollment.
New Jersey’s Medicaid program is called NJ FamilyCare. Officials there said the initial backlog was caused by the unusable data sent to them by the federal government. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius confirmed that in early February, and indicated at the time that the technical problem would be solved in a matter of days.
New Jersey is one of only three states – joining Arizona and North Dakota – that chose to expand Medicaid within their states, yet rely on the federal website to do the enrolling. (The more common approaches were for states to expand Medicaid and set up their own websites, or decide they wanted neither to expand Medicaid nor set up a website.)
Transferring enrollment data from healthcare.gov to New Jersey has been balky at best. NJ FamilyCare’s website assures applicants their enrollment will be retroactive to Jan. 1, but that has been little solace to applicants, who say they can’t risk going to a doctor if it’s not going to be covered.
I keep posting facts. You keep posting . . . well, the same thing you've posted a few hundred other times.
Oh,
maybe I'm cherry-picking (as opposed to you, who prefers to repeat himself, please see a definition of
argumentum ad nauseam)?
No, sadly, I'm not.
Reginald Clarke is someone Obamacare was designed to help.
The 55-year-old, who was homeless for a time, now has an apartment in Gardena and a street-cleaning job that pays him $14,000 a year.
He hadn't visited a doctor in four or five years. Then, last fall, his girlfriend told him he would be eligible for Medi-Cal starting Jan. 1.
"I was excited. I could go get a physical," he said. "There are a few things I need."
But joy turned to exasperation when Clarke's application, filed in December, was mistakenly rejected — and then seemed to disappear from county and state computer systems.
By law, counties have 45 days to process Medi-Cal applications. More than three months after Clarke applied for coverage through the Covered California website, he is still waiting for a permanent insurance card he can use at his doctor's office. He's frustrated by how long the process is taking.
"I just don't understand," he said. "These people knew years ago that this was going to happen."
Clarke isn't alone. After thousands expressed frustration with glitches in signing up for insurance through the state's online Obamacare marketplace, CoveredCa.com, an even larger number of patients now are encountering additional roadblocks with the second prong of the system: the state's healthcare program for the poor.
The bottleneck, officials say, has been traced to a new state computer system that for months didn't communicate properly with county computers trying to confirm the eligibility of new applicants like Clarke.
And while the period to apply for private insurance through the state has ended, enrollment in Medi-Cal remains open. About 800,000 applications for that coverage are pending approval statewide, according to the Department of Health Care Services in Sacramento.
In L.A. County, officials said, more than 200,000 Medi-Cal applications filed between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31 were trapped in the state's computer enrollment system until February. Today, the county's Department of Public Social Services can link up to the state system, but workers still face a daunting backlog of applications — and new software glitches have exacerbated the problem.
Uncertain about their Medi-Cal coverage status, some patients are putting off trips to the doctor and drugstore — or paying full price for care they can't delay.
A software problem upended Benjamin Lazcano's Medi-Cal coverage, according to a lawyer working with the 48-year-old's family to fix a number of healthcare application woes. While waiting for county and state workers to resolve the problem, the South L.A. resident drove to Tijuana, Mexico, to refill his blood pressure medication.
San Gabriel Valley resident Ed Rampell, 59, said that he submitted his application in October but wound up paying full price for his medications in January.
Now, to review: you said all systems have embedded costs. True, but not all systems include taxes on medical devices, raising costs by foisting electronic record requirements on every practice, etc. You ended by blaming the continuing problem of the uninsured on GOP governors who refused Medicaid expansion. Of course, as I've shown, that's not really the whole problem.
it's also a feature of our federal system. So, again, either learn something or enjoy your own system of socialized medicine (with its own restrictions and long lines) and leave us alone.
09 Apr 2014, 1:56 pm 
