<p>Really, Calmom? I’m not sure how you define “profit.” Is this considered an adminstrative cost? I mean, I suppose it is, but I’m not sure taxpayer subsidies and taxes should be paying for something like this. It bugs me.</p>
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<p>Medicare costs 1.4% to administer. Also, I would agree with you if they had actually coordinated it, but they didn’t did they?</p>
<p>What happens to all of those people who couldn’t get insurance because of pre-existing conditions? Do they have to wait another year, and go without? Or are the insurance companies mandated to sell to them, without being able to offset costs with premiums collected from healthy people?</p>
<p>Interesting news down here in South Carolina. Only 572 have signed up for insurance. I get it. Y’all know how I have talked plenty about our lack of choice and poor plans. Hopefully, we’ll see some movement by everyone involved (insurance companies, gov’t, etc) to fix the issues. </p>
<p>We’re such a huge BCBS state and they are being difficult, I think. The plans they’re offering for 2014 in our state are subpar at best. Super expensive with very, very small EPO networks. Will be interesting to see what they decide to do. Even most of our employer based plans in our state have BCBS. At some point, they’ll need to offer better options or we’re going to have a LOT of people in our state who are quite angry.</p>
<p>As to me, I’m literally going to wait until the last minute because there’s so much up in the air right now as to fixes, etc. Right now, my option which meets my criteria is one plan and it’s not that good. I want to see how this all pans out first. Wonder if other people are doing the same?</p>
<p>Calmom, you took my post out of the context. Within that context the sick people can buy policies from exchange, but that exchange will most consist of sick people, hence the price of that insurance skyrocket even more than it is right now - probably to the level when people cannot afford it. The result is still the same.</p>
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<p>Also, out of context. I was talking about of exchange grandfathered policies.</p>
I’m still trying to figure out how this works, absent additional people. Does a pound of cure costs less than sixteen ounces of prevention (if you get my drift?) Ever since the law which required county hospitals to provide pretty much unlimited medical care to people who had no insurance or other means to pay was passed 30 years ago, we’ve had “universal” health care. All the ACA does is change how it’s financed. How does that make costs increase? I don’t view this as a partisan question but a factual one. Why does making medical coverage for routine care more available (at a cost) raise the overall total of health care expenditures? </p>
<p>Health care (other than things like non-medically required cosmetic surgery, which isn’t covered under most medical insurance policies and I assume not under the ACA as well) isn’t like cell phones. I would think that the demand is pretty inelastic. Or am I missing something?</p>
<p>The real number of interest is who is buying new policies, period. It’s all the same risk pool. The people who get subsidies will start coming to the exchanges when the exchanges work, because free.</p>
<p>We have proposals to delay ACA for a year and to change the date of grandfathered plans to dec 2013 from march 2010. </p>
<p>These plans that are cancelled are not grandfathered plans.
The first proposal, the delay… Buries those that are poor, have preconditions or are sick and ininsured. </p>
<p>The second proposal, changing the date, requires higher premiums for those uninsured or the insurance companies are going to be in big trouble. I am not a big fan of insurance
companies but I am not excited to bury the insurance companies. </p>
<p>Both proposals do not take care of the poor, the sick who dont have insurance or those with preconditions.</p>
<p>I was reading on another forum about a woman who is desperate to get her cancer surgery before Jan 1. Her oncologist and her hospital are not on the exchanges. Didn’t anyone foresee how cruel canceling cancer patients policies would be? And because the policies did not cover BC pills or maternity care for a post menopausal woman?</p>
<p>Maybe they were thinking about how cruel it was to delay cancer patients’ surgeries forever because they couldn’t get an insurance policy at any price.</p>
<p>That’s the issue - there’s winners and losers in ACA and seemingly some extremes for both of those. If the grandfathered plans options change (e.g. later date than 2010), then that might be good for many involved. IF the insurance companies agree to grandfather in some of these cancelled plans, then people who want can keep their old policies. However, that doesn’t stop the ACA from proceeding forward.</p>
<p>Really, if they can change the grandfather piece of ACA, doesn’t that just mean more people are able to keep their existing policies, assuming the insurance companies go along? Seems like a decent stopgap measure at least.</p>
But that’s assuming that the plan was always to cancel a bunch of policies. The financing shouldn’t fall apart if the uninsured is a mix of healthy and sick. They would be the ones utilizing ACA since they did not have insurance which seems to follow the original intent of the plan.</p>
<p>At these sign up rates, likely made up of the sicker people, the financing is falling apart anyway.</p>
<p>There was no need to add requirements that would void people’s existing policies. What effect did that have on covering people with pre-existing conditions? Does the person with cancer care that they can get free BC pills?</p>
<p>I thought the healthy cancelled people added to the risk pool with the pre-existing condition people and a bunch of new cost controls was supposed to comprise a better package for everyone. Wasn’t that the plan? Along with some 8-thousand pages of complicating factors, of course.</p>
<p>Count me as a supporter of changing the grandfather date to Dec 31, 2013, and, to preempt some of the posters here, that does not make me a miserable scrooge because I support this change. If I had my druthers I would do something else, but this is not the place to discuss it.</p>
<p>According to HHS reporting in the Federal Register (when HHS released it regulations), that was exactly the feds predicted would happen. (Whether or not it was a ‘plan’ is more semantics.)</p>
I feel the same way as you. While there are things I would have preferred to do as well, I am just trying to deal with the current reality and this seems the most viable plan of dealing with the current issue of all these cancelled plans.</p>