<p>Of course we have the 3 Rs too. The risk control components. </p>
<p>Also Wellpoint I believe is about 15 percent of the market. So… That is 15 percent we dont have to worry sbout. </p>
<p>And young people sign up…last.</p>
<p>Is there anything in ACA that says there are no hospital day caps? That would be kind of ridiculous in controlling costs.</p>
<p>I would have let my wife stay in hospital for a week or two after child birth if they didn’t forcibly evict us after the 3 days.</p>
<p>Some of that needs to go back to the statistical studies of what’s “ordinarily” deemed necessary, whether anything suggests a longer stay is needed and will have a positive impact. Someone’s going to have a neg anecdote, I’m sure. </p>
<p>“I would have let my wife stay in hospital for a week or two after child birth if they didn’t forcibly evict us after the 3 days”</p>
<p>Three days? That’s sweet. I was evicted after one day, with both kids.</p>
<p>Some junk insurance had a ridiculously low cap on hospitalization. Some of those mini-med plans paid for the first $5000 or something like that. McDonald’s offered a mini-med plan that paid for the first $2000 of hospitalization costs. Seriously-- they’d pay for you to go to the hospital for, like, half an hour, but after that you were on your own.</p>
<p>GP, the junk insurance policies were quite creative at limiting benefits. This article cites a policy that paid only $1000/year for outpatient and $2000/year for hospitalization. The woman thought she had meaningful coverage – until she needed it. <a href=“Cheap Health Insurance Still Inadequate - Consumer Reports”>Cheap Health Insurance Still Inadequate - Consumer Reports;
<p>Here’s a woman who thought she had insurance, but it turns out the plan paid only the first $50 of an office visit, the first $15 of a prescription, etc. The only hospitalization the “insurance” paid for was for pregnancy complications, and even then, it only paid $50. <a href=“That Florida woman's canceled Blue Cross policy? It's junk insurance - Consumer Reports”>That Florida woman's canceled Blue Cross policy? It's junk insurance - Consumer Reports;
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<p>It has to be medically necessary.</p>
<p>LasMa, obviously any plan which capped hospitalization at $2,000 a year is not insurance. Again, can you provide me numbers as to how many people had insurance with these very low caps?</p>
<p>My point is that the huge increases for the unsubsidized were not because these people had insurance with $2,000 or one-day hospitalizations caps.</p>
<p>GP, you say that’s not insurance, and I agree. But the point is, those people BELIEVED they had insurance. Some of them got a nasty surprise when they tried to use it (those people learned the hard way about the need for health insurance reform). Others never had to use it, and continue to believe it was real insurance, and it’s those people who are outraged at the large increases they are experiencing. They think they’re comparing apples to apples, and obviously they aren’t.</p>
<p>The numbers are about 4 million people that we know of, according to Forbes. You would think it’s a lot more because of how loud they’re yelling. But again, that’s because they erroneously think they’re getting the same product but paying more for it.</p>
<p><a href=“Estimate Of 'Junk' Health Insurance Market - Over 1,200 Plans Covering Almost 4 Million People”>http://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2013/11/12/estimate-of-junk-health-insurance-market-over-1200-plans-covering-almost-4-million-people/</a></p>
<p>My wife left the hospital a few hours after the birth of our third kid. No overnight stay. </p>
<p>GP…go to google. Type in Wellpoint. Click on news.
You can choose any story you want. There is even a Forbes story.
My daughter has an iq under 70. She can do this in 10 or 20 seconds. She is a slow typist. </p>
<p>Re the slow start in enrollment, especially among young people, the Massachusetts experience is instructive. Enrollment was a trickle at first, around 200 people the first month. And it shouldn’t come as a surprise to any parent that the young are procrastinators. But they did come on board in Massachusetts at the last minute, and there’s no reason to expect they won’t now.</p>
<p><a href=“Young People and Obamacare: They'll Probably Sign Up Late | The New Republic”>http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116173/young-people-and-obamacare-theyll-probably-sign-late</a></p>
<p>And healthy people came in late, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. This also shouldn’t surprise anyone.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1013067”>http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1013067</a></p>
<p>Four million people were enrolled in mini-med plans, according to the WSJ:</p>
<p><a href=“Firms Drop, Rather Than Upgrade, Cheapest Health Plans - WSJ”>http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304795804579097422592424860</a></p>
<p>There are approximately 260 million insured people in the US. Four million is around 1.5% of the total insured, not what I would consider a huge problem.</p>
<p>I am not disclosing my IQ.</p>
<p>Speaking about postpartum hospital stays, my mom stayed in the hospital for a week after the birth of each of her children. I didn’t realize what a luxury that would have been until the day I took D home.</p>
<p>On the other end of the spectrum, in the late 80s, some insurance companies were allowing only an 8-hour stay for an uncomplicated vaginal delivery, until regulators smacked them down. By the time D was born, they had to allow at least 24 hours. I think it’s 48 hours now.</p>
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<p>It was a heck of a problem for the 4 million who, whether they knew it or not, were extremely vulnerable.</p>
<p>GP and calmom, :).</p>
<p>I like Las Ma’s posts.</p>
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<p>You don’t have to have Dstark’s gift for numbers to figure this out, Flossy.</p>
<p>Did you read the link to the article that showed exchange plans on average (gold and platinum) were 4% less than employer healthcare? 20% less on the basic plans?</p>
<p>So here’s the thing…if employers who hire people to make the best and most economically advantageous decisions about healthcare benefits have been paying on average 4 percent MORE than the higher quality exchange plans, 20 percent more than the lower percentage ones, is it actually possible that people who have had premiums TRIPLE via the exchange were ACTUALLY covered by anything resembling health insurance?</p>
<p>Common sense says NO, they could NOT have had what employers offer at a THIRD of the price. That’s all you really need to know.</p>
<p>“It has to be medically necessary.”</p>
<p>I don’t accept that as being anything different than what was there last year or 20 years ago. Can someone tell me if the normal delivery stay has been increased from the standard one day that busdriver had or standard 3 days for a C-section that my wife had. This whole discussion of junk insurance has gotten really out of hand with no evidence of any changes.</p>
<p>kmcmom - When you calculate cost don’t you have to include the deductibles, co-pays, networks, and additional pharmacy costs? That’s why they are less expensive. </p>
<p>Flossy, you’re missing kmc’s point. If policies on the exchange have higher copays and deductibles than employer policies, AND they nevertheless cost three times more than someone’s old policy, that’s even more reason why we should look with great suspicion on whether the old policy was actually worth anything.</p>