Obamacare cost...

[Goatnapper'96]

Openly encouraging anti-selective behavior is financially sticking the double barrel in your mouth and pulling the trigger.

The only way this bill will be successful, or fail, depends upon how the people view it. It was never designed to make fiscal sense as it is driven by social goals.

[SCcoug]

Won't those new rates have to be published by October of 2014 - a month before the mid-term elections?

I'm sure the administration will grant themselves an extension to get the data out.

[Paperback Writer]

I saw a healthcare.gov commercial last night during Sunday Night Football. The gist of the ad was "you know that bad knee you've been looking at fixing up? Well now you can at healthcare.gov." So basically, the idea they're promoting is that all the sick and injured people need to stream onto the health insurance exchanges and buy insurance so they can do things like getting their joints operated on. Somewhere along the way peoples' ideas of INSURANCE and what health insurance companies need to do to turn a profit have become badly skewed. If all the people signing up for health insurance on the exchanges are in bad need of healthcare then this thing is going to go into a death spiral.

I've heard the same ad on the radio. Think of how this would work with car insurance. So you have decided to drive without auto insurance and wreck your car. So now you've been driving around with no rear fender, a big dent, and a car not in alignment. No worries; now you can sign up for car insurance and get your car fixed.

The ad the gov needs to run is: you trip going down the stairs and mess up your knee. Without insurance your cost will be $20K (or whatever); with insurance your cost will be $3K.

[Indy Coug]

I've heard the same ad on the radio. Think of how this would work with car insurance. So you have decided to drive without auto insurance and wreck your car. So now you've been driving around with no rear fender, a big dent, and a car not in alignment. No worries; now you can sign up for car insurance and get your car fixed.

The ad the gov needs to run is: you trip going down the stairs and mess up your knee. Without insurance your cost will be $20K (or whatever); with insurance your cost will be $3K.

Think about it from this perspective: you run an ad on the radio telling people if they come to the car dealership now, they can buy an unlimited number of cars for $500 each, no matter if the car is a Yugo or a Maserati, and they can purchase an unlimited number of cars and the offer isn't for a limited time only.

[Color Me Badd Fan]

lol:

http://rexharrisonshat.com/healthcare/

[statman]

I saw a healthcare.gov commercial last night during Sunday Night Football. The gist of the ad was "you know that bad knee you've been looking at fixing up? Well now you can at healthcare.gov." So basically, the idea they're promoting is that all the sick and injured people need to stream onto the health insurance exchanges and buy insurance so they can do things like getting their joints operated on. Somewhere along the way peoples' ideas of INSURANCE and what health insurance companies need to do to turn a profit have become badly skewed. If all the people signing up for health insurance on the exchanges are in bad need of healthcare then this thing is going to go into a death spiral.

Adverse selection in spades...

[Color Me Badd Fan]

http://www.enrollmaven.com/

At this rate we'll have around 200,000 people signed up by the enrollment deadline. That's 3% of the administration's goal. About 99% of those that have enrolled did so in the 14 states that have their own exchange websites. Of those states, Kentucky and Washington account for around 13,000 of the 21,000 people that have signed up. Connecticut and Rhode Island also seem to have things up and running. California has about 16k applications completed but the people aren't enrolled yet.

It appears as if Kentucky is the one and only state that really hit the ground running. They have 8,218 enrolled and 11.5% of the enrollment period has passed. At that pace, they'll have around 80,000 people enrolled. Kentucky has about 1.4% of the US population. If you extrapolate the numbers, they're supposed to have about 99,000 people enrolled at the end of the enrollment period. There's a couple of ways to look at this. On one hand, this thing just started so maybe there are some applications still in process in Kentucky. On the other hand, with all of the fanfare about the introduction of Obamacare, this is probably a time with a significant number of applications. Simply put, I don't think 80,000 is going to be low in Kentucky and in fact it might be high. But for the sake of argument, if that 80,000 plays out nationwide, then that's 80% of the administration's goal.

80% probably wouldn't be considered a failure. But with the total clusterf*** that's going on with the federal exchange and about half of the state exchanges, there's no effing way they're going to hit that 80% mark nationwide. Which means, to me, that the people that do end up getting signed up are the ones that are really motivated -- e.g. sick and injured people. These insurance companies that provide these policies on the exchanges are going to get massacred as a result. I won't be surprised if more of them start dropping out of the individual market altogether if this thing isn't fixed really quickly. But given the fact the administration had 3 and a half years to get this thing ready, I don't think they're going to fix this in a month.

[Jacob]

Now that folks have had a chance to "find out what is in [the health care law]"...

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Think about those percentages for a minute. And IMO, they will surely go up from here. I was doing a lot of research on all this last night trying to decide what to do as an individual and as a business owner. As an individual, why would I pay 1,300 or more per month to get insurance that I will probably not need. We're not having any more kids, so unless we get really unlucky, our medical expenses will be low compared to the $18,720 annual price tag. ($1,300 *12 plus 20% co-insurance.) Any rational actor, who is healthy, under the new law with guaranteed rates and coverage would have to consider going without insurance and paying the tax penalty (as Justice Roberts has deemed it). Should I put $,1000 per month in a savings account that I can use for medical needs and pay my fine? The fine is only the greater of $95 or 1% of your AGI. My penalty should be less that 1 month's insurance premium. So, I'm financially better off unless someone in my family has some catastrophic sickness in the first month. Why will people sign up for this?

As a business owner, the law doesn't require me to provide anyone with insurance, and even for larger businesses, Obama has waived the penalty. So, should I offer insurance to my employees, thereby eliminating their eligibility for federal subsidies and the opportunity to shop for a plan that they choose? Especially when I may be able to simply give them a specified dollar amount they can choose to put towards insurance, if they want, while saving the business a bundle of money?

The only way this bill will be successful, or fail, depends upon how the people view it. It was never designed to make fiscal sense as it is driven by social goals.

Not quite right. As I understand it, the pricing by the insurance companies is based on certain actuarial rules. The Gold plans, for example must cost such that the average purchaser will end up paying for 20% of the total medical expenses. So, if a lot of people do as I've described above, or if the older and less healthy end up being those enrolled on the exchanges, then next year, rates go way up. This is what some have been referring to as a death spiral. If they can't sign up people in the first year, then rates are going up, under the law. It seems like the entire law needs to be delayed for a year, but wouldn't that take an act of congress? Legally, it does.

But I've never understood the eagerness by some in the GOP to delay the individual mandate. If there is no mandate, the the whole thing becomes a worse cluster. No good can come from making temporary modifications around the edges of the law.

Unrelatedly: Couldn't the federal government have just hired ehealthinsurance.com to do the website for them? Their website functions perfectly, and the cost of federal health plan is less complex.

[snowcat]

[Pelado]

From WaPo:

President Obama’s biggest problem when it comes to selling the American public on the so-far rocky rollout of his health-care law isn’t John Boehner or Mitch McConnell or even Ted Cruz. It’s Jon Stewart.

Stewart, the host of the wildly popular “Daily Show” on Comedy Central, has emerged as a harsh critic of healthcare.gov and the Obama Administration’s inability to fix it.

Stewart dedicated the entire first 10 minutes of his show — three full segments — on Monday to slashing hits on the Web site and the president’s handling of the problems. He compared Obama to “Gil”, the hapless salesman from “The Simpsons”, showed “Daily Show” correspondent John Oliver stuck in a computer after trying to sign up for Obamacare and expressed amazement that even the calculator on the healthcare.gov Web site doesn’t work. (And, remember, Stewart was heavily critical of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius during an appearance on his show earlier this month.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...ggest-problem/

[Uncle Ted]

Vaporcare: Obama delivers an infomercial when an accounting is due.

"The Affordable Care Act is not just a website," President Obama said at the Rose Garden today. "It's much more." It's like a chamois, it's like a towel, it's like a sponge.


Another way of putting it is that ObamaCare isn't just a technical failure. And it isn't just an economically unsustainable scheme. Now it's a rhetorical disaster too. Even by the standards of Obama speeches it was terrible. It was so bad, it was the ObamaCare website of political oratory.

[...]

One final rhetorical note: Obama seems to have retired the word "glitches" in favor of a synonym: "We're working out the kinks in the system," he said this morning, adding later: "Once the kinks in the website have been ironed out, it will be even smoother and even easier."


Which brings us to another war allusion, this one arrived at through free association and thus certainly unintentional. The Kinks had an early song, and later a best-of album, titled "Waterloo Sunset." In 2009 then-Sen. Jim DeMint said of the not-yet-enacted ObamaCare effort: "If we're able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo." Maybe even if they're not.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...DDLETopOpinion

Our president has turned into an insurance salesman.

[Uncle Ted]

So big business get a year delay and congress and the president are exempt... Sounds fair to me.

[Uncle Ted]

Time to bring in the Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens to sell Obamacare...

Despite a decision by the NFL to ignore the administration's pleas to promote Obamacare, the Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens have decided to go all in -- in exchange for a $130,000 contract, according to documents unearthed by a public watchdog group.


Judicial Watch told Secrets that the team was recruited by Maryland state officials to help it sell Obamacare, the new health care insurance program that has run into mammoth computer and bureaucratic troubles in its first three weeks.
[...]

http://washingtonexaminer.com/super-...rticle/2537602

[SCcoug]

Seems like the Prez is always the last to know.

In an exclusive interview with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked when the President first learned about the considerable issues with the Obamacare website. Sebelius responded that it was in "the first couple of days" after the site went live October 1.

"But not before that?" Gupta followed up.

To which Sebelius replied, "No, sir."

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/22/politi...iew/index.html

[Realtall]

Seems like the Prez is always the last to know.



http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/22/politi...iew/index.html

1. A little shaky attesting to what someone else knew.
2. Sebelius wouldn't lie about something like that.