Mynkod has ONE on exchange option. He is going to look OFF exchange for a very high deductible policy. I don’t think he will find one.
Regarding gov’t employee health benefits: @oldfort
Exactly. But then we get this sort of response:
Hardly the case.
Choices choices.
If government jobs are so great, why aren’t there more people leaving their high paying jobs and going into it? In my 30 year government career, I kept hearing how great everything was on the outside and that we were stupid for working for Uncle Sam when the economy was great during the dot com bubble and other boom years. When times are bad, everybody then badmouth government employees as leeches and want their jobs and benefits.
^ They’d ther have the money now then guaranteed bennies when they retire.
Government has been cutting jobs since 2008. Job growth has only been in private sector.
I’m bumping this up to update. Thank you to @“Cardinal Fang” for his input. My one kid (the one where there is only ONE individual ACA plan) was very concerned…because in the letter from his provider, the cost of 2017 individual insurance was going to be $175 a month more…almost double. But that assumed the subsidy from 2016.
Well…kid did the exchange today. Subsidy went from $77 to $250 a month. Kids premium cost will go up from $179 per month to $219 per month. Deductible went from $600 a year (that was the subsidized deductible) to $4200 a year. RX deductible is $500, and each RX will be $40 per month instead of $15 per month.
But overall…this is much better than he thought it would be.
You’re welcome, Thumper1. (psst-- I’m female.)
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-trump-may-have-in-store-for-americans-health-care/ discusses public opinion and potential changes.
Of note, Tom Price had proposed a “replace” plan which retains the guaranteed issue, but only for those who maintain continuous coverage with no gaps (which, as noted previously, could be shockingly expensive for those who do not realize how much it costs because they are used to getting it from their employers). Those without continuous coverage but have pre-existing conditions would have to go into high risk pools (presumably even more expensive).
@ucbalumnus Thank you for posting the 538 link.
Bear in mind that continuous coverage currently means no gap longer than 3 months.
And high risk pools are no answer. They’ve failed miserably every time they’ve been tried.
Saw an editorial from Thomas Donlan in *Barron’s/i titled “The Right Approach to Universal Health Care for Americans”. http://www.barrons.com/articles/the-right-approach-to-universal-health-care-for-americans-1480746086 (but may be behind a pay wall).
Donlan mentions that Trump wrote in a book published in 2000 advocating universal health care by extending the national government’s employee benefits to all (replacing all other national government health care programs like Medicare, Medicaid, VA, CHIP, Tricare). Donlan endorses that type of system, but does mention a political hurdle (likely including a three letter word beginning with ‘t’):
For reference, the national government employee medical insurance benefits are described at https://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/ .
Just found out that my local hospital, the closest one, is going to be out of network for ALL individual health insurance plans for 2017.
I suppose the reimbursements are just not cost effective. So if I have a heart attack or a fall, I’ll be taken there for ER treatment. I know ER is covered. But after that I’ll have to be transported to another hospital, in network (I still have to find one) for any subsequent treatment.
So, yeah, thanks ACA.
I wonder why you think that insurers dropping your local hospital from their networks is because of the ACA, TatinG.
Insurers dropped my local hospital from their networks last year. As far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with the ACA, and everything to do with hospital consolidation. All over California, Sutter Health buys up hospitals, then raises their prices. The ACA has nothing to do with monopoly pricing.
ACA shouldn’t be the scapegoat for all the ills of the medical/health insurance landscape. Plenty of this stuff was happening before ACA took place and any repeal of ACA isn’t going to fix it without a substantial overhaul of our national healthcare system, like universal healthcare.
The medical care cost monster, whose causes are diffuse (and have multitudes of interests behind them) and thus hard to fight, grows regardless of ACA or not. Repealing ACA will not stop it, and proposed replacements will not either.
Because this hospital will take employer provided Anthem and Blue Shield but not any of the on or off exchange individual plans. This hospital has not been acquired by anyone. So now I cannot keep my closest hospital and will likely have to change doctors since if I were to be admitted he would be admitting me to that very hospital.
But what does this have to do with the ACA? * Post hoc ergo propter hoc* is a logical fallacy, not a guide to reasoning.
Well, one way that would have to do with ACA is that before ACA, my husband and I counted as a group, so the hospital would have been covered under a group plan. But ACA says we have to get individual coverage, so we couldn’t go to that hospital.
Before ACA, professional groups were able to sell group plans to individuals. No more.
It is well known and can be verified by any number of articles that ACA plans do not reimburse hospitals or doctors as well as employer provided plans. Yet I will pay more for my ACA plan than I was paying through COBRA on an employer plan.
So I guess I’ll buy some form of this crap insurance and hope for more and better choices after January.