Well we'll see about the employers--that is impossible to assume in advance because an employer could in a survey say they are going to cut health insurance but find it difficult to do in reality (and the opposite could be true, too)
And I assumed that those people who had sub-standard plans who wound up getting better coverage but had to pay a lot more would be unhappy (even though I argued before that it was not intrinsically unfair); I just concluded that the political effect would be somewhat small because many of them would have already been against the ACA (and of course not all of the individual plans were substandard) By the way, I got the numbers from, well, Fox News of all places...

Archduke Russell John wrote:The problem here is that the Kaiser Foundation studies found something like up to 30% of employers will stop offering health benefits opting to pay the cheaper penalty instead.

That number seems way, way too high. Why would they wait to drop coverage when they have to pay a penalty? Why don't they drop coverage right now, when they don't have to pay a penalty?

freeman

That number seems way, way too high. Why would they wait to drop coverage when they have to pay a penalty? Why don't they drop coverage right now, when they don't have to pay a penalty?

Business may decide to pay the penalty because its cheaper than providing the benefits... including the administration costs of providing benefits. And there's nothing wrong with that. One of the dumb things about forcing companies to provide their employees health care is that its not their core business...
As long as the penalties are a reasonable amount, to help fund the insurance, whats wrong with the idea?

Archduke

The problem with Health Insurance is that people are not going to connect the higher price to better coverage

In the same way that they didn't connect the lousy insurance coverage with the low cost they were paying before...

People seem to forget that

In 2009, millions of Americans lacked any health insurance whatsoever and millions more had private health insurance metaphorically designed to explode at the hint of any serious illness or preexisting conditions or exorbitant medical costs. So, in 2009, 14,000 Americans were losing their health insurance every single day. And medical bills were prompting more than 60 percent of all bankruptcies in our nation. In other words, many health insurance policies were patently dangerous and unsafe.

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/01/the_rig ... e_lie_yet/

At one time, the mortgage market was deregulated to the point where anybody could get a mortgage. And those lousy mortgages were packaged and sold as "financial instruments" ... but eventually the mortgage holders defaulted and the financial system nigh collapsed as a result.
If it was okay to sell consumers crappy insurance policies that had annual and life time caps that essentially left them uninsured in the case of major problems ... (I'll bet that's why Toms insurance is suddenly so expensive.) . But that still lead to bankruptcies and hospitals holding a lot of bad debt

nice guess, try again
My increase fits with the averages. Keep trying to dispute it, my plan stinks but is considered just fine, not even bottom tier kind of stuff according to ACA standards. No subsidies, No limits, just insurance getting more expensive while covering less, exactly opposite of what Obama had promised. You have trouble wrapping your mind around that fact, I am not alone and many if not most are facing this exact situation. Read the hundreds of examples out there, why oh why must you assume Obama was telling the truth, the FACTS simply point to something else.

Argue it was not what was promised and needs to be tweaked....fine, but to stick up for it is simply blind partisan politics.

The one causal explanation for why Tom's premiums have gone up without his policy being substandard is that insurance companies have to cover those with pre-existing conditions. Thus, they have to raise premiums to cover for the fact that the pool of insureds carries a higher risk than before.

...yet the promise made was to lower our costs now wasn't it? and to give us better care, I got neither! A lot of us (looking like MOST of us) got neither, the idea right from the start was to cover those with pre-existing conditions AND lower costs, this is no sudden shock, it's not like this was an added idea, this was a campaign PROMISE.
you expect us to be happy with that broken promise? or maybe, just maybe the president should step back and say this is not what he promised and fix the obvious problem instead of ramming it through, ready or not!?

freeman

The one causal explanation for why Tom's premiums have gone up without his policy being substandard is that insurance companies have to cover those with pre-existing conditions. Thus, they have to raise premiums to cover for the fact that the pool of insureds carries a higher risk than before.

Yes.
Obviously something changed that increased the risk and expected pay out for he insurance companies. A widened pool would be part of that,
However, the capping of annual and lifetime benefits was a way that insurance companies could limit risks. If you eliminate those caps, and people get unlimited coverage versus coverage up to a set amount ....then that is likely the largest increase in risk. (I have a crappy Blue Shield Dental and drug plan that is exactly like that. I hit $14,000 and its all all me, Normally not a problem, but if my wife or I get some rare disease treated only by very expensive drugs, we could be out of luck.)

Tom has never volunteered what his annual or lifetime limits were last year and are now.

The fundamental and underlying cause of high insurance costs, is high costs from hospitals, doctors and other areas of the health care system.
Until there is downward pressure on the suppliers, nothing fundamental will happen.
The current system in the US, allowed insurers to keep their profits and keep costs low by reducing their own risk with annual caps and by exclusions of both certain conditions and many people. However, those uninsured people often found themselves in emergency wards, receiving care subsidized by taxation (and by the high costs levied on other paying customers).
What seems to be happening is that hiding the actual cost, and risk, has been done away with in the standardization of insurance plans.
That's not a whole lot different then the mortgage crisis, except if has taken 35 years to reach a crisis point. Whereas the mortgage products were so flawed, and there was no backstop for unpaid debt the same way the medical industry and states soaked up unpaid obligations ... that the crisis was achieved in half a dozen years ...
If the ACA is introducing more of a market situation, then perhaps there will be downward pressure on costs. One thing Fate noted earlier is that some hospitals weren't accepting payment levels offered by ACA approved plans. The question will be, at what point do they start to have open beds? A hospital is like a hotel or airplane, and they won't tolerate unused capacity for too long.... At which point some will accept the lower fee schedules... At which point stressed insurance companies will start to gravitate towards lower schedules ....The power of the market at work.
On the other hand if there is no unused space ....maybe this won't work.
I think there probably is unused space, simply because Canadian provincial insurance plans can find space in US hospitals for excess patients every now and then with great ease. And they negotiate lower than normal process when they do so ... (For a handful of procedures where the capacity hasn't been expanded quickly enough in the province.) And because there is rarely a wait period for elective procedures in the US...

I have never had any lifetime limit, never had, never would take part in such a plan either! I seriously doubt that would be allowed in any ACA qualified program nor am I aware of ANYONE who had any such plan at any time! That's simply a non-issue.

You guys keep coming up with guesses, bottom line is Obama knew the score, he knew all these issues and went on to make promises to reduce our medical costs while giving us better care, that simply has not happened! And even if you WERE right about one of these guesses...so what? My costs went up, my coverage got worse. Most Americans are in the same boat and we were promised exactly the opposite so it doesn't really matter WHY they went up, it was nothing more than a lie. In fact, Obama has said several times that this is simply a step towards universal coverage. These problems were almost certainly expected and even wanted, the next step is another towards that end goal! "Obamacare" was never meant to work, it was meant to fail and get us towards universal care, why else chug along this path of disaster?

freeman3 wrote:My sense of human nature is that the majority of Americans are willing to do a little bit to help their fellow Americans, but yeah they are not willing to take a big financial hit, I agree with you.

There are two essential, nearly existential, problems for this argument:

1. This is NOT how the President sold it. If he had said, "You know what, if we all kick in just a little more, we can cover everyone." That would have not been as politically popular as promising something for nothing, which is what he did. In fact, the whole "If you like your coverage . . ." meme was part of the "no pain" campaign for the ACA.

2. It's going to be more than you might imagine. It's not just the rates. It's also the displacement (losing coverage, having to shop, losing your doctor, etc.) and the increase in deductibles, etc.

More anecdotal info: I received two emails yesterday. One was from a very conservative man who told me his brother is going to experience a doubling of his rate--so that he can have maternity care. The other was from a mushy moderate (an old Diplomacy friend) who says that he has many single male friends who are experiencing similar rate hikes.

So, Danivon can insult me all he likes about how I don't understand insurance, blah, blah, blah, BUT, the proof is in the rate hikes. It may be true that this is a way of spreading the cost around (if that is what Danivon meant, I was not disputing that). However, people (rationally, imnsho) don't like being forced to pay for what they don't need.

Does it make sense from a big government point of view? Sure. However, if the proponents of the ACA had been honest about this intent, support would never have been above 35%.

tom

I seriously doubt that would be allowed in any ACA qualified program

This is a good thing right?

Annual limits are the total benefits an insurance company will pay in a year while an individual is enrolled in a particular health insurance plan.
Starting in 2014, the Affordable Care Act bans annual dollar limits. Until then, annual limits are restricted under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regulations published in June 2010.

http://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Programs-and-I ... imits.html

Tom

I have never had any lifetime limit, never had, never would take part in such a plan either!

Most people don't read their entire insurance plan, and they bury these clauses ....
So if you are only guessing at something thats a major part of the ACA, did you really go through your plan with a fine tooth comb ?
Somewhere theres a difference between the risks that your insurer covered, and what they currently cover.... There has to be. The ACA also limits the profit that they are allowed to make from premiums...so they aren't increasing their profit.
Freeman and I are guessing because we haven't got your policies in front of us ... But here's why i think you were limited ...

A small number of workers and individuals only have access to limited benefit, or “mini-med,” plans with lower annual limits than are generally permitted by law and which can provide very limited protection from high health care costs. Employers and insurers estimated that requiring mini-med plans to comply with the new rules could cause mini-med premiums to increase significantly, forcing employers to drop coverage and leaving some workers without even the minimal insurance coverage they have today.

In order to protect coverage for workers in mini-med plans until more affordable and more valuable coverage is available in 2014, the law and regulations issued on annual limits allow the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to grant temporary waivers from this one provision of the law that phases out annual limits if compliance would result in a significant decrease in access to benefits or a significant increase in premiums. Plans that receive waivers must comply with all other provisions of the law and must alert consumers that the plan has restrictive coverage and includes low annual limits. Additionally, these waivers are temporary and after 2014, no waivers of the annual limit provision are allowed.

Fate

1. This is NOT how the President sold it. If he had said, "You know what, if we all kick in just a little more, we can cover everyone." That would have not been as politically popular as promising something for nothing, which is what he did. In fact, the whole "If you like your coverage . . ." meme was part of the "no pain" campaign for the ACA.

I agree with you Fate. The president did a lousy sales job.Its as if he couldn't forsee all the potential outcomes.

2. It's going to be more than you might imagine. It's not just the rates. It's also the displacement (losing coverage, having to shop, losing your doctor, etc.) and the increase in deductibles, etc

.

You know this was going on prior to the ACA right? Every aspect you are mentioning was going on for an increasing number of people....because health care costs were escalating enormously.

So, in 2009, 14,000 Americans were losing their health insurance every single day. And medical bills were prompting more than 60 percent of all bankruptcies in our nation. In other words, many health insurance policies were patently dangerous and unsafe.

The ACA is entirely imperfect. But it was movement to ensure people had insurance and could get treated by doctors or at clinics in a normal fashion and not go to emergency wards. That will help drive the cost of medicine down because emergent care was the most expensive way to treat them ....
It also stops the hiding of the costs of their care in state subsidies to hospitals, and increased costs for the non-indigent, In effect, it creates transparency in the costs that weren't there before.
The challenge for conservatives is to offer an alternative that:
- covers everyone
- costs less
- is less complicated and works....

So far Governors in states that have turned down the ACA are offering nothing that competes. Which is why there will still be millions of uninsured people in places like Texas.... Right now, that' the competitor to the ACA.... And its a losing proposition even against something as crappy as the ACA.

Ricky:

Tom


I have never had any lifetime limit, never had, never would take part in such a plan either!

Most people don't read their entire insurance plan, and they bury these clauses ....
So if you are only guessing at something thats a major part of the ACA, did you really go through your plan with a fine tooth comb ?

Somewhere in there is the definition of arrogance.

rickyp wrote:Fate

1. This is NOT how the President sold it. If he had said, "You know what, if we all kick in just a little more, we can cover everyone." That would have not been as politically popular as promising something for nothing, which is what he did. In fact, the whole "If you like your coverage . . ." meme was part of the "no pain" campaign for the ACA.

I agree with you Fate. The president did a lousy sales job.Its as if he couldn't forsee all the potential outcomes.

That's just not true. They knew this and yet lied to the American people.

None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered.

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

They even considered removing the lies from his speeches:

According to the Wall Street Journal, President Obama’s aides debated whether Obama should lie to Americans about keeping their health insurance plans as he pushed for Obamacare. “[A]t times,” reports the Journal, “there was second-guessing. At one point, aides discussed whether Mr. Obama might use more in-depth discussions, such as media interviews, to explain the nuances of the succinct line in his stump speeches, a former aide said. Officials worried, though, that delving into details such as the small number of people who might lose insurance could be confusing and would clutter the president’s message.”

In other words, the White House knew that they were lying, but decided that the lie was necessary to push through Obama’s signature legislation. Jim Margolis, who advised Obama on media in 2008 and 2012, said, “With 20/20 hindsight, maybe this should have been parsed more carefully,” before quickly stating, “The president’s statement seems fair.” Speechwriter Jon Favreau said, “Simplification and ease of explanation were a premium, and thatw as true throughout the process.”

So, it's much worse than the President not being a fortune-teller. He is, demonstrably, a liar.

2. It's going to be more than you might imagine. It's not just the rates. It's also the displacement (losing coverage, having to shop, losing your doctor, etc.) and the increase in deductibles, etc

.

You know this was going on prior to the ACA right? Every aspect you are mentioning was going on for an increasing number of people....because health care costs were escalating enormously.

Will you stop the obfuscation? Please?

Yes, it was going on, BUT now there's more of it AND it's government-mandated. The latest lie out of the White House is the "law doesn't demand this; it's the insurance companies making a decision."

Deception after deception. The companies are making a decision . . . forced by the law!

The ACA is entirely imperfect. But it was movement to ensure people had insurance and could get treated by doctors or at clinics in a normal fashion and not go to emergency wards. That will help drive the cost of medicine down because emergent care was the most expensive way to treat them ....

Stop being dishonest. The CBO says the bill will eventually leave 31billion without insurance.

It also stops the hiding of the costs of their care in state subsidies to hospitals, and increased costs for the non-indigent, In effect, it creates transparency in the costs that weren't there before.
The challenge for conservatives is to offer an alternative that:
- covers everyone
- costs less
- is less complicated and works....

We know it doesn't cover everyone, so why is that the challenge for conservatives? We know the ACA isn't working. We know it's not costing consumers less.

So far Governors in states that have turned down the ACA are offering nothing that competes. Which is why there will still be millions of uninsured people in places like Texas.... Right now, that' the competitor to the ACA.... And its a losing proposition even against something as crappy as the ACA.

What we know is that the President's lies are catching up to him, thus his declining poll numbers.

Do try to stop misrepresenting the truth. Being a liberal, I know it will be difficult for you.

Ron Fournier of the National Journal is no conservative, but he can see the problems the President has:

Insularity, incompetence, and deception doomed the launch of the Affordable Care Act, according to postmortems on President Obama's health insurance law. The president now has two choices: A) Accept the verdict and learn from it, or B) stick with insularity, incompetence, and deception.

Early signs point to Obama compounding rather than correcting his team's errors.

Staying the course is a losing option for Obamacare and the more than 40 million Americans who need health insurance. The trouble is far deeper than a "glitchy" website, according to numerous media reports, including an in-depth investigation by The Washington Post. Among other things, The Post uncovered a 2010 memo from a trusted outside health adviser warning that no one in the administration was "up to the task" of constructing an insurance exchange and other complexities of the 2,000-page law.

Brutal and 100% more honest than anything the liberals here have contributed.

fate

Yes, it was going on, BUT now there's more of it AND it's government-mandated.

So standards that ensure that policies actually offer real value..... are a mistake?
Because its those standards that are causing people to have their policies cancelled right?

Wait awhile, and as people carefully consider their alternatives, versus just reacting to sticker shock .... or percieved sticker shock, you might end up more like Dianne Barrette.

But as she’s become more aware of her options, she said, she’s no longer aghast at losing her plan—and curious to see what alternatives are available. "Maybe," she told me, "it’s a blessing in disguise."

This is the same woman who was the centre piece of the story you quoted. Here's more from the New Republic..

If you’ve followed the stories of insurance cancellations related to Obamacare, you may have heard about Dianne Barrette. She’s the 57-year-old Florida realtor who was paying $54 a month for a Blue Cross insurance plan. The plan won’t be available after December. And while FloridaBlue offered her a new plan, the company told her the premium would be $591 a month. Barrette, who makes $30,000 a year and could not pay for such a plan, was flabbergasted. Jan Crawford of CBS News made her the key source for a story about plan cancellations. An appearance on Fox News followed, as did multiple cameos in press releases from Obamacare critics. For at least a few days, she was the poster child for the Obamacare cancellation story.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/1154 ... l-coverage