Obamacare cost...

[Jacob]

Well, I just got a renewal letter from my individual high-deductible plan.
Premium is indeed increasing. From $284 to $311 a month for my family of five. That is a nearly 10% increase.

Where did you find that plan? I'm very interested.

[Color Me Badd Fan]

Some 34 year old single guy in California wrote a column in the El Lay Times, it's linked on realclearpolitics. His insurance was cancelled and the cheapest Obamacare plan is over $200 more ... and his deductible is now about $2,000 more and his co-pays have increased. It's bullshit that the coverage is better and cheaper. This guy was also a supporter of Obama.

[Color Me Badd Fan]

Where did you find that plan? I'm very interested.

it's a humana plan, I probably have the same one. It has a huge deductible and it's going to be cancelled in a year. I read the other night that some of the states were able to avoid the cancellations of some individual plans for one more year. I believe it had something to do with the states that did not set up their own exchanges and then somehow opted out of something else.

[LA Ute]

What Everyone Knew About Obamacare and Wouldn't Say

As I noted the other day, when Obamacare "czar” Jeffrey Zients announced that the health-insurance exchanges would be working by Nov. 30, he bought the administration some time. Unfortunately for them, most of that time has so far been spent discussing “rate shock” and policy cancellations: the folks in the individual market whose policies were canceled thanks to new regulations and will now have to replace them with something more expensive or that carries a higher deductible.

We don’t actually know how bad a problem this is. Mathematically, two things must be true: There are some people in this country who are losing their current insurance and gaining better insurance at a lower cost, and there are some people in this country who are losing their current insurance and getting worse insurance at a higher cost. And there are some who are now getting insurance they couldn’t afford at all before.

We don’t know how many people are in each group. Nor do we know how big a problem rate shock will be for the folks who experience it. But that doesn’t matter for the news story, which, in the absence of data, will be a war of anecdotes. Not ideal, but frankly, most of the folks now complaining about the “rate shock” anecdata were often the same folks who eagerly showcased every anecdotal story about a poor single mom who was excited to be getting insurance for the first time. So I find it hard to take their distress too seriously....

But the most interesting line of defense is, essentially, that “we always knew this was coming.” The Official Blog Spouse chronicled the emergence of this meme last summer, and it hasn’t changed much since. It’s interesting because it’s both completely true and completely false -- depending on who you think “we” is.

It’s absolutely true that every policy wonk who was writing or speaking about the law in 2009 and 2010 understood that it would mean premiums going up for at least some people, many of whom would lose insurance that they would have preferred to keep. Who it would be depended a bit on how the law unfolded, of course, but at a minimum, young, healthy people who made more than $46,000 a year could expect to pay higher premiums for the same level of coverage. They had to; mathematically, it was not possible for coverage to expand and everyone’s premiums to go down -- not unless you spent more in premium subsidies than the government could afford.

But I think it’s also clearly true that the majority of the public did not understand this. In 2008, the Barack Obama campaign told them that their premiums would go down under the new health-care law. And the law’s supporters believed it.

Q. Obama says his plan will save $2,500 annually for my family. How?

A. Through a combination of developing efficiencies in the system, expanding coverage to all Americans, and picking up the cost of some high-cost cases. Specifically:

-- Health IT investment, which will reduce unnecessary and wasteful spending in the health care system. Examples include extra hospital stays because of preventable medical errors and duplicative diagnostic tests;

-- Improving prevention and management of chronic conditions;

-- Increasing insurance industry competition and reining in the abusive practices of monopoly insurance and drug companies;

-- Providing reinsurance for catastrophic cases, which will reduce insurance premiums; and

-- Ensuring every American has health coverage, which will reduce spending on the “uncompensated” care of uninsured people who end up in emergency rooms and whose care is picked up by institutions and then passed through higher charges to insured individuals.

The part about reinsurance was always nonsense; unless it’s subsidized, reinsurance doesn’t save money for the system, though it may reduce the risk that an individual company will go broke. But the rest of it all sounded entirely plausible; I heard many smart wonks make most of these arguments in 2008 and 2009. However, it’s fair to say that by the time the law passed, the debate had pretty well established that few to none of them were true. “We all knew” that preventive care doesn’t save money, electronic medical records don’t save money, reducing uncompensated care saves very little money, and “reining in the abusive practices” of insurance companies was likely to raise premiums, not lower them, because those “abuses” mostly consist of refusing to cover very sick people.

But that information did not get communicated very well to the public. The administration reiterated that, in Obama’s words, “We will keep this promise to the American people. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.” They also promised that the average family would save $2,500 a year on premiums. There was no fine print about how some folks would lose their insurance, be forced into narrower doctor networks, and see premiums rise, even though they seem to have known what was going to happen.

And the wonk community did not exactly hasten to disabuse them. The risks of higher premiums for some were acknowledged in an aside, but they were not headlined. Unless you were reading volumes of writing about health care very carefully indeed, it wasn’t hard to miss that little detail -- at least one former Democratic staffer whose boss voted for the law seems to have been unaware that this was a possibility until her rates increased.

For that matter, I still see regular commenters on the liberal wonk blogs that I read repeating the canards about cost savings from uncompensated care, preventive medicine and so forth. I know that many of them were reading those blogs when they pointed out that these things aren’t true, but it doesn’t seem to have sunk in, perhaps because these pronouncements did not get quite as much airtime as analysis of the benefits of the law.

In other words, the wonks were living in what I think of as “Expertopia.” It’s a shiny, happy place where everyone knows all the salient facts that the experts have agreed on. The problem is, everyone else was living in the real world, where what “everyone knows” is some compendium of anecdotes from friends, the political speeches they watched, and what they managed to read on the Internet or hear on the news in five-minute bursts snatched from their workaday lives.

[Moliere]

The cost of my plan went up 13% this year, which probably would have happened with or with out Obamacare.

[imanihonjin]

What didi i do to you and Ted to have you ignore me? I posted this video yesterday and you guys repost it out of spite towards me, not once buttwice in order to really dig it in.

Haha....sorry...I didn't even watch the video and didn't realize they were the same. I only read the article.

[Katy Lied]

The cost of my plan went up 13% this year, which probably would have happened with or with out Obamacare.

I'm curious.
A. Did the coverage broaden? If so,
B. Did the coverage broaden in ways that benefit your family?
C. Did costs (not premiums, but deductibles and copays) go down?

TIA

[BGRTHNUMEGO]

Some 34 year old single guy in California wrote a column in the El Lay Times, it's linked on realclearpolitics. His insurance was cancelled and the cheapest Obamacare plan is over $200 more ... and his deductible is now about $2,000 more and his co-pays have increased. It's bullshit that the coverage is better and cheaper. This guy was also a supporter of Obama.

But I bet his out of pocket max went down a few thousand. So clearly he is saving money. (That is the explanation I've been given again and again on how these plans are keeping consumer costs down)

[imanihonjin]

But I bet his out of pocket max went down a few thousand. So clearly he is saving money. (That is the explanation I've been given again and again on how these plans are keeping consumer costs down)

What a crock of crap. Some consumers' direct costs may go down due to the subsidy, but guess who is paying the rest of the direct costs of that coverage.

[ERCougar]

Where did you find that plan? I'm very interested.

Through my agent. Humana. Preventive care visits are free, everything else I pay for up to 11700. After that, 100% covered by insurance.


Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

[Color Me Badd Fan]

But I bet his out of pocket max went down a few thousand. So clearly he is saving money. (That is the explanation I've been given again and again on how these plans are keeping consumer costs down)

His deductible is higher, I don't think he wrote about the out of pocket max. But the point is people like this are going to be pissed because it was highly unlikely they were going to use the health insurance beyond just a routine physical, and they know they're funding older and sick people regardless of the old/sick person's financial circumstances.

One thing I think about now is the how the rate of increase of medical spending had declined pretty dramatically over the past decade. Some of that may have been due to HSAs, but I think it was also because in the aggregate employers started dropping insurance and forcing people to either go uninsured or go get their own insurance. They were dropping it because it became too expensive and rates were increasing too much year over year. I have to go over a lot of people's household finances and a big majority of people who don't have health insurance through their jobs simply don't go out and but it themselves. My dad got rid of his business's insurance probably ten years ago and he told me almost no one used the raise he gave the after he dropped coverage to actually go out and buy insurance. The people that do get their own insurance mostly get higher deductible plans.

So, things started shifting around ten years ago because more people were paying cash either because they were uninsured or because they had higher deductible plans. On top of that, a lot of employers that did keep coverage started going with higher deductible group plans themselves. Before ten years ago, there was a relative bonanza for hospitals because they could just milk that insurance cow and the costs were just being spread out to employers nationwide -- concentrated benefit to one group and the costs of said benefit being spread out to all the other groups. This bonanza was still largely in place after 2003 but things were changing. The boom times of the 80s and 90s allowed this to happen because businesses could more easily afford it and the labor market was significantly tighter so there was competition for employees.

But around a dozen years ago things became too expensive and the dot com bubble burst. Employers started dropping insurance as a result. Divorcing employers from insurance would have been the single most effective thing at lowering healthcare costs.

[Goatnapper'96]

His deductible is higher, I don't think he wrote about the out of pocket max. But the point is people like this are going to be pissed because it was highly unlikely they were going to use the health insurance beyond just a routine physical, and they know they're funding older and sick people regardless of the old/sick person's financial circumstances.

One thing I think about now is the how the rate of increase of medical spending had declined pretty dramatically over the past decade. Some of that may have been due to HSAs, but I think it was also because in the aggregate employers started dropping insurance and forcing people to either go uninsured or go get their own insurance. They were dropping it because it became too expensive and rates were increasing too much year over year. I have to go over a lot of people's household finances and a big majority of people who don't have health insurance through their jobs simply don't go out and but it themselves. My dad got rid of his business's insurance probably ten years ago and he told me almost no one used the raise he gave the after he dropped coverage to actually go out and buy insurance. The people that do get their own insurance mostly get higher deductible plans.

So, things started shifting around ten years ago because more people were paying cash either because they were uninsured or because they had higher deductible plans. On top of that, a lot of employers that did keep coverage started going with higher deductible group plans themselves. Before ten years ago, there was a relative bonanza for hospitals because they could just milk that insurance cow and the costs were just being spread out to employers nationwide -- concentrated benefit to one group and the costs of said benefit being spread out to all the other groups. This bonanza was still largely in place after 2003 but things were changing. The boom times of the 80s and 90s allowed this to happen because businesses could more easily afford it and the labor market was significantly tighter so there was competition for employees.

But around a dozen years ago things became too expensive and the dot com bubble burst. Employers started dropping insurance as a result. Divorcing employers from insurance would have been the single most effective thing at lowering healthcare costs.

Out of curiosity if the President did not mislead anyone but just failed to speak precise enough, why are so many Democrats moving to support a bill that ensures "you can keep your insurance?"

[Jacob]

What Everyone Knew About Obamacare and Wouldn't Say

I don't understand the title. Of course people who really thought about it knew that rates would go up. But few regular people probably thought much about it. But wouldn't say? There were plenty who did say. Maybe it should have read "What Obamacare supporters knew but wouldn't say."

And as far as people's rates going down, that's mostly a lie. Very few people will find lower rates, only the quite sick, which are a small percentage fo the population. Everybody else's is going up to pay for the sick, to pay for coverages that you don't want (aren't we all happy to pay for substance abuse coverage?), to cover new taxes, etc. And then you look at all the new taxes to cover the subsidies, the medical device tax, to bay for a billion dollar website, to pay for the bew bureaucracy, and on and on.

[Jacob]

Out of curiosity if the President did not mislead anyone but just failed to speak precise enough, why are so many Democrats moving to support a bill that ensures "you can keep your insurance?"

The line is total garbage. Of course Obama was clear. "Let me be clear." "If you like your insurance, you can keep it. Period." Leaving out the fact that you can't keep your insurance if it doesn't include certain coverages that you don't want or doesn't have a deductible you don't want, you can't keep it is not a communications failure, it is intentionally misleading your audience. We call it a lie.

It is interesting to note that he so-called fact checkers of today, who are now rating Obama's claims as a lie (4 Pinocchios; we really shouldn't take these people seriously) only a short time ago rated the same claims as true while rating Romney's claims as false when Romney said, accurately, that people would lose their insurance, would pay more for insurance.

[LA Ute]

I don't understand the title. Of course people who really thought about it knew that rates would go up. But few regular people probably thought much about it. But wouldn't say? There were plenty who did say. Maybe it should have read "What Obamacare supporters knew but wouldn't say."

And as far as people's rates going down, that's mostly a lie. Very few people will find lower rates, only the quite sick, which are a small percentage fo the population. Everybody else's is going up to pay for the sick, to pay for coverages that you don't want (aren't we all happy to pay for substance abuse coverage?), to cover new taxes, etc. And then you look at all the new taxes to cover the subsidies, the medical device tax, to bay for a billion dollar website, to pay for the bew bureaucracy, and on and on.

You need to read the entire piece. I didn't quote enough of it.