<p>Over eight million people signed up on the exchanges. Boom.</p>
<p>So, two incompetent entities joined together will make one efficient entity? Hmmm. Anthem is Medicaid in my state so I expect they are quite busy these days sending out cards to people who then can’t find doctors. What a mess. </p>
<p>“My doctor’s office has instituted a policy of having people pay their co-pay at the time of their appointment.”</p>
<p>Some of my doctors have always made me pay my co-pay at time of appointment and others have always billed me for the co-pay. I have had both thing happen since Jan. 1st of this year. Nothing changed at all since ACA. </p>
<p>Only my dentist requires payment in full but they also submit the bill directly to my insurer and then I get a check for the amount the insurance covers. </p>
<p>Fang, is that legal? Refusing to provide medical care to someone unless they have a credit card? If that happened to me, I might be tempted to call my state department of insurance. </p>
<p>If government were trying to be as “efficient” as private industry, the post office would charge a substantial additional fee for mailing on April 15th, just as gas prices go up in summer and airline tickets cost more around Christmas and heavy travel times. </p>
<p>So how much are you willing to pay just so you can send your tax payment in on 4/15?</p>
<p>CF: no that’s now, to protect against that very thing. </p>
<p>Flossy, nice try, but you avoided answering my question (not surprisingly). You said government is inefficient, implying that the private sector is less so. So your point seems to be incorrect. </p>
<p>Hayden, it does not cost more to buy a sweater at Macy’s on Christmas Eve. They staff up for the rush. It’s a planned event and they actually most of their money for the year because of that extra business.</p>
<p>LasMa - I wasn’t implying anything but the individual insurance market right now is a hybrid. They are not operating as private insurers when they are handed lists by a malfunctioning government website and every move they make is regulated and then changed on a whim to coincide with election cycles or new events.</p>
<p>Flossy, open enrollment was a planned event. Why didn’t Anthem staff up? </p>
<p>Wait, I’ll save you the trouble. Anthem didn’t staff up for open enrollment because A) they didn’t want to pay for the extra staff and didn’t mind leaving their customers in the phone queue for hours on end, or B) Obamacare was wildly more popular than anyone thought it would be. Maybe both. </p>
<p>Flossy, your analogy is flawed. Macy’s is trying to sell as much as they can before a certain specific date. They staff up because the more they sell the more they make. They start selling for that specific date in October. They therefore have 3 months to try to sell product. </p>
<p>What Goldenpooch is looking for is to use a service on one specific day. And the post office doesn’t sell more product. After all, if we bought out stamps over time, or if we bought them on one specific day, each taxpayer would still need one stamp to send in one tax return. Therefore, you’re expecting the post office to exponentially increase their payroll costs to make it easier for you to buy the same amount of product you would buy anyway. That’s why date-sensitive analogies such as plane travel are the only analogies that work. And private industry charges for that privilege. </p>
<p>Someone at Anthem is going to have to explain their behind the scenes issues in detail. </p>
<p>TatinG, let’s recap: Before the ACA was in place, your doctor friends had problems with some deadbeats not paying. Your doctor friends have now instituted a policy that patients must pay in full at the time of service. And this has to do with the ACA because why, exactly?</p>
<p>Your doctor friends have no evidence whatsoever whether under the ACA, the percentage of deadbeats has gone up, gone down or remained the same. Maybe the percent of deadbeats has gone down because more people can afford to pay their bills. Maybe it has gone up because now poorer people are in the insurance pool and they are (perhaps) more likely not to pay their bills. Maybe it has remained the same because deadbeats are always with us.</p>
<p>So they, and you, have no reason to blame this change on the ACA, and it’s disingenous to claim otherwise.</p>
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<p>This has been the policy in my doctor’s offices for as long as I can remember. </p>
<p>Well Flossy, I see you can’t answer that question either. Is there a third option I didn’t think of? One that would support your theory about the private sector? </p>
<p>I didn’t audit his books, CF. Don’t kill the messenger. Ask your doctors about their deadbeat accounts and whether they have changed since ACA. This is one anecdote but with that reg about the two month window which screws doctors, it’s a logical outcome.</p>
<p>LasMa - I would be happy to answer your question if I understood it. I think you’re asking if I think private business generally does things better and cheaper than government. Generally, yes. Or they close.</p>
<p>You don’t have to audit his books to know that he can’t have information about patient payment behavior under the ACA. The information is unavailable, so he can’t possibly have it. Before March 31,no patient can possibly have presented a 2014 insurance card to this doctor, and have had the insurer say the patient wasn’t insured, because, as you point out, the insurers aren’t allowed to say the patient is no longer insured until they haven’t paid for three months.</p>
<p>You’re not even giving us an anecdote; you’re supplying some random doctor’s guess. Come back when you have even a sliver of data.</p>
<p>I think of coveredca insurance companies as semi monopolies, which means they don’t care about customer service. </p>
<p>There are so few of them.</p>
<p>Wrong. The patient could have paid for January and then not paid Feb or March. Services in March would no longer be the insurers responsibility. He’s not the only one as Susan Estrichs column mentions. Cash may be required more and more. Or credit cards. Particularly given the confusion at the insurance companies with who is or is not covered and the phone hassles as some pointed out.</p>