bbauska wrote:Danivon,
Great questions.

No, we did not choose to be poor, or even make choices that led my mom and her 3 kids to be in that situation.

As for alternatives... My grandparents helped some, and friends helped mom as well. I am not saying that the government assistance was not beneficial. I am saying that we did not stay on for too long.

Do you agree that the acceptance of regulations of the gov't assistance programs need to be part of the acceptance of the benefit? Does the entire society need to be subject to the requirements of a gov't program, if it is not being paid for by the government? That is my point (and I am sure you realized that). The requirements of the ACA are just that. A requirement of a government program. If you want to be on a gov't subsidized insurance program, then accept the requirements. If not, then the gov't should not be restricting what is covered and what a deductible is set at.

bbauska wrote:I agree, Danivon. My family did do what some do not.

I also agree that insurance not be w/o regulation. I would put that regulation at fiduciary responsibility and payments of benefits, not what services are provided, and what is an acceptable policy or not.

That is a responsibility of the consumer. If not one person buys a policy for $5000/mo with a deductible of $1 million per year, and all it provides is a free pair of glasses, and 1 check-up a year; it certainly won't be on the market for long.

There also will be fewer choices in the new health order. Blue Shield is restricting access to close to half of its doctors and a quarter of its hospitals in the individual market -- and Blue Shield spokesman Steve Shivinsky told The Orange County Register these providers "had to agree to cut their rates" to get into the network.

In Southern California, the Los Angeles Times reported, Health Net individual policyholders will have access to less than a third of the doctors on employer plans.

Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, told the San Francisco Chronicle that all but three of the 12 state exchange providers limit doctors and hospitals.

Lee rightly points out that for years -- even before Obamacare -- the market has narrowed choices to cut costs. He is absolutely right. The New York Times reports that the University of California, Berkeley is about to exclude two nearby Sutter hospitals because UC could not reach a price agreement with California's highest net-income nonprofit hospital.

Critics of today's delivery system rejoice in such moves because they want a single-payer system. But the UC faculty union warned that the move will lead to "significant degradation in the quality of insurance" and "significant increases in costs" for members seeking "the same quality of care."

When employers cut off providers, the market can respond. When states and the federal government restrict access, they begin to make every health plan into a health maintenance organization.

Johnston believes that most consumers can find a plan with quality local providers. As for those doctors who no longer will be providers in the post-Covered California system, he noted, "Some doctors don't want to take a lower rate than they used to take."

Obama should have said: If your doctor likes a pay cut, you can keep your doctor.

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... z2meEQENhu

Unresolved technical problems on HealthCare.gov could lead to a rude surprise at the doctor's office next month for patients who think they successfully used the website to sign up for health insurance. They may find they're not insured after all.

HealthCare.gov, the federal online portal for health-insurance shopping in more than 30 states, has improved after more than a month of intense fixes, and enrollment is accelerating. But insurance companies are still getting information on their would-be customers that is garbled and incomplete, and in some cases they are getting no information at all. President Barack Obama's administration is scrambling to repair the faulty system, but scant time remains until the Dec. 23 deadline for consumers to choose a health plan that will be in place Jan. 1.

The result could be an untold number of consumers remaining uninsured despite completing the enrollment process -- another embarrassing chapter in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, Obama's signature health care reform law.

The Obama administration insists the enrollment glitches will be fixed in time to prevent any troubles next month, but won't disclose the extent of the problem. Nor will it guarantee that any patients who fall victim to these problems won't be exposed to medical bills if they get sick or injured.

freeman3 wrote:Not every Republican is on board with the mantra of getting rid of the ACA...http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/0 ... 14277.html
"How do you repeal?" he asked. "Yeah, you can get rid of the law, but what do you do with what’s already there?"
"Am I opposed to state-based exchanges? No," he said. "It may be that they can be usable."
There is hope for the Republican Party, yet!

There’s bad news hidden behind the White House’s latest optimistic Obamacare report.

Few people are actually paying for the healthcare plans that they’ve picked on the partially-fixed Obamacare website, say industry insiders.

Also, too few young people are joining the plans offered by companies using the Obamacare website, said Robert Laszewski, a plugged-in insurance consultant.

Older clients, aged above 40, comprise 60 percent of the new Obamacare customers at one of his client health-care companies, Laszewski told The Daily Caller.

The skew is “very, very bad,” said Laszewski, who is president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, Inc.

The insurance companies need many young and healthy clients to offset the cost of providing benefits to older and sicker patients, he said. Any lack of young and healthy patients will drive up costs for older and sicker patients in 2014.

. . .

Executives in the business says the lack of payment checks is a bad sign, Laszewski said.

“I’ve been hearing the same concerns…. that a very small percentage of [Obamacare] clients have paid their plans,” he said.

“There is a growing concern” among executives, he said.

The worries are getting media exposure.

“So far I’m hearing from health plans that around 5% and 10% of consumers who have made it through the data transfer gauntlet have paid first month’s premium and therefore truly enrolled,” consultant Kip Piper told a reporter for ProPublica in New York.

“Payments are trickling in and while we expect an uptick over the next week, members have until January 6 to make this payment,” Mia Campitelli, a spokeswoman for Blue Shield of California told ProPublica.

The low payment rate is problematic, Laszewski said.

If people don’t pay their checks, “there is no work-around.. the enrollment they originally did is toast,” he said.

Obama’s disapproval rating climbed to 53 percent – the worst in 29 polls since he took office in January 2009 – while 43 percent approved of his job performance. The disapproval number was up sharply from the 47 percent reading in September and tops the previous high of 52 percent in September 2011…Obama’s personal ratings were also down. By 52 percent to 46 percent, people had an unfavorable impression of him, the first time since November 2011 the negative number was higher. The unfavorable number was also the worst he’s endured.

This means people who might otherwise buy insurance — say, middle-aged people with potentially looming health problems — can go without it, and if a serious health-care problem comes up, they can just enroll in the exchanges. Not everyone will take advantage of this, but at the margins, it allows people who might otherwise worry about catastrophic health-care bills to stay out of the exchanges, and ensures some flow of very sick, expensive people into them. Health insurance companies can’t change their rates to take account of that, and that information disconnect is what economists call “adverse selection.” On the margins, it will raise premiums for healthy people on the exchanges, and make insurers more wary of participating.

Now, they’ll see an influx of people who had their plans canceled, a group that insurers don’t actually know much about — and for whom they haven’t set their premiums.

5. Even more adverse selection: The catastrophic-insurance markets and the rest of the exchanges are separate risk pools. Within a given state, individual insurers don’t really have to worry about enrolling too many unhealthy or old people, because of something implemented by Obamacare called “risk adjustment.” Insurers with sicker groups get compensated, basically, by insurers that enrolled healthier groups. In all, the insurers want healthier and bigger pools, because they can take on more financial risk safely and make more money, but risk adjustment means it’s lot less useful for them to try to attract healthy enrollees.

The Obama administration is now going to alter the parameters for the catastrophic pool and the normal exchange pool in every state. If their claim that just half a million people who are getting hardship exemptions is accurate, this will also just be a marginal adjustment — but still one the insurance industry wasn’t expecting.

The exchanges have been open for three months now, and plenty of Americans have committed to buy plans that were either more expensive than they want or that they didn’t want in the first place. If people whose individual-market plans have been canceled knew this was going to happen, they could have waited to buy a catastrophic plan, or bought one on the non-exchange market, or gone without insurance entirely. Marco Rubio put it reasonably on Thursday: “This is a slap in the face to the thousands of Americans who have already purchased expensive insurance through the Obamacare exchanges.”

The latest such confession comes from The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber, who bluntly conceded yesterday that “Obamacare actually paves the way toward single payer.” . . . Obamacare, he claimed, is in fact “a deceptively sneaky way to get the health care system both of us really want” — that is, single payer. And “Republicans are in some sense playing into the trap Obamacare laid for them.”

bbauska wrote:What is everyone's viewpoint of the ACA, if the ACA needs a 1 trillion bailout? Is it still a good idea?

I don't want to re-hash the validity of the law (boring!). How much in cost overruns makes this legislation not worth supporting?

But, the polls sure are . . . terrible.

Which comes closest to your view about the 2010 health care law?
The law is working well and should be kept in place as is: 6
There are some good things in the law, but some changes are needed to make it work better: 56
The law has so much wrong with it that it needs to be repealed entirely: 34

While few (6 percent) say the law is working well and should be kept as it is, the percentage that calls for repealing it has dropped since last November, from 43 percent to 34 percent now.

And the percentage of Americans who say signup on the health care exchanges is going well has steadily increased since last October, when the web site was launched. Still, just 22 percent say it is going well, and more than twice as many (53 percent) say it is not going well. In November, a month after it launched, only 11 percent said signup was going well.

About a third says signup is improving.

Meanwhile, the GOP Senate candidate in West Virginia, Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, now has this to say about the Medicaid expansion: “coverage is great and having more people covered is excellent.” In West Virginia, some 75,000 people have enrolled. Even in red states, gung-ho repeal advocates such as Capito feel the need to reconcile themselves to expanded coverage as a positive development.
(In Kentucky, another red state where coverage is expanding, Mitch McConnell has struggled to respond when asked directly about people benefitting, and he’s rolled out new ads touting work bringing more health care to sick people — implicitly ceding some ground to the moral argument for health reform.)

rickyp wrote:df

But, the polls sure are . . . terrible.

not really

Which comes closest to your view about the 2010 health care law?
The law is working well and should be kept in place as is: 6
There are some good things in the law, but some changes are needed to make it work better: 56
The law has so much wrong with it that it needs to be repealed entirely: 34

One of the goals of the ACA was to eliminate the uninsured. In States that have participated that's being accomplished. And more of the hold out states are joining. Utah for instance..
So as imperfect as the law is .... the positives are being felt and changing attitudes.
The morality of opposing the ACA expansion of Medicair on the backs of the poor isn't working and won't work to win over Independents. Which the Republican party needs to do.

Meanwhile, the GOP Senate candidate in West Virginia, Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, now has this to say about the Medicaid expansion: “coverage is great and having more people covered is excellent.” In West Virginia, some 75,000 people have enrolled. Even in red states, gung-ho repeal advocates such as Capito feel the need to reconcile themselves to expanded coverage as a positive development.
(In Kentucky, another red state where coverage is expanding, Mitch McConnell has struggled to respond when asked directly about people benefitting, and he’s rolled out new ads touting work bringing more health care to sick people — implicitly ceding some ground to the moral argument for health reform.)

Moody’s announced Thursday it was downgrading its outlook for health insurers from stable to negative based on uncertainty related to ObamaCare.

The credit rating agency cited an unstable environment because of the healthcare law’s difficult rollout, and projected that insurers would earn 2 percent less than forecast in 2014.

“While we’ve had industry risks from regulatory changes on our radar for a while, the ongoing unstable and evolving environment is a key factor for our outlook change,” Moody’s Senior Vice President Stephen Zaharuk said in a statement. “The past few months have seen new regulations and announcements that impose operational changes well after product and pricing decisions were finalized.”
The Moody’s report also cites the slow enrollment of young people into ObamaCare as a reason for the downgrade.

“Uncertainty over the demographics of those enrolling in individual products through the exchanges is a key factor in Moody’s outlook change,” the ratings agency said.

Citing statistics released by the administration, it noted that so far about 24 percent of enrollees are between the ages of 18 and 34, while a target of 40 percent may be necessary to keep premiums from rising in the future.

It said the 24 percent of young people enrolled so far is “well short” of the 40 percent target.

Moody’s also said it was worried that insurers’ premium calculations might not be enough to cover the industry assessment tax that begins in 2014.