you are not listening cardinalFang…not now (not in 2015) …medicare style care for 100% of the population down the road will end hospitals as you know them. I have never seen so many people unable to grasp what is said with out putting it threw some alice in wonderland filter. so your mom going to a private hospital in 2015 has what to do with say the year 2040? please explain what you did not comprehend. FYI…doctors already lose money on many medicaid patients …see how long before even more stop taking medicaid patients.
I did not say that Americans go to Canada for HC. I said more Americans seek treatment outside the US than Canadians seek treatment in the US- by a large magnitude.
Actually, you said this:
This is a canard which will not die, and I’m sure evidence to the contrary won’t convince some. However, for those who are interested in actual facts:
[Phantoms In The Snow: Canadians’ Use Of Health Care Services In The United States](http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/21/3/19.full)
The ACA has helped many people in New York State. There is no doubt about that. There is also no doubt that it has hurt thousands and thousands of people. People have lost plans, been forced in to HMO’s when they had PPO’ and EPO’s previously. Premiums contine to increase, plans continue to be terminated.
The only people that coverage has become more “affordable” for are people who are being subsidized, everyone else has gotten hammered.
The pre existing condition exclusion has not existed in New York for decades.
I fully support people of less means having more affordable and guaranteed access to coverage but I do not believe it to be at all fair that so many others have been so adversely effected!
Not true. We have no subsidy, and have saved about $4,500 per year on premiums under the ACA. Don’t forget that prior to the ACA you could be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, insurance companies could (and did) canel coverage when you got sick and needed it the most, and there were no minimum coverages required by a plan – so patients often found out the hard way that their plan didn’t include something they needed when they became ill.
Because these protections did not exist (particularly the cancellation risk), it was truly a last resort to purchase an individual plan. I’d have kept shelling out the much higher COBRA cost for my kid rather than risk that. It isn’t really “insurance” if they can cancel it when you get sick.
It’s pretty darn obvious ACA has hurt the health care companies. After all look at their stocks…OH, WAIT…they are making money. In this crappy market who is benefiting? Well, those guys that own health care and pharmaceutical stocks are doing just fine.
The health care giants are feeding us a bunch of crap so they can have double digit increases and blame them on ACA while robbing us blind.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/21/investing/unitedhealth-earnings-obamacare/
Smoke and mirrors. It is so tiring to try to get the real picture from anyone. Everyone has an angle
Well, I thought that’s exactly what ACA was going to prevent. By increasing competition and what not. Not happening, is it? ACA is making fat cats fatter.
Let’s have a national system and if the fat cats get fatter selling insurance as a secondary or gap product who cares.
I also would like to know if people who saw significant increases from policies they had prior to ACA could tell us what the lifetime or yearly cap on coverage was for those policies.
I read on another site about a retailer that provided HC coverage for employees but the person posting said when she reviewed the policy for her kid the limit on coverage was $1000 per year.
Do you think a national healthcare system would place more of a burden on the individual for maintaining a healthier lifestyle? There definitely appears to be less of an obesity problem in Europe…however, there was/is a good deal of smoking…hmmm…just wondering.
I ask the question, because I believe the escalating cost of healthcare would be occurring regardless of the ACA. Americans, in general, have adopted questionable lifestyles (sedentary, eating highly processed ‘fast’ foods, etc).
Recently I’ve observed 2 settings where my concern about personal choice has been piqued.
– One was a high quality physical rehab place. There were people of many different ages. Some were there for a trauma, like a car accident. Others were there, after a hospital stay…perhaps hip surgery or to regain strength after prolonged bedrest. Anyway, what I observed was the physical toll on the providers to deal with the “out of shape” patients. Unfortunately, there were far too many who looked obese. I questioned how much mobility they would be able to regain. (Note: the person I was visiting daily weighs 135lbs and I saw firsthand how the staff struggled to do transfers with him. A male nurse I spoke to said he was most concerned about the physical toll on his own back.)
– The other setting is a senior living facility that provides 3 levels of care. (independent, assisted and skilled nursing)
Here, I’ve observed the elderly for the last 3 yrs. Although there are varying degrees of physical and mental decline, I am struck by the observation that many of the “older” residents (high 80s and into the 100s) are not overweight. I can’t imagine what happens to ‘the system’ as high BMI, aging baby boomers start aging up. Hygiene care for people of a certain weight will be very difficult.
And as a side note, my children have friends who want to be physical therapists. Wow, that looks like a tough job/career. I think many of their age group (college-aged) picture rehab for athletes, like they experienced through their sports, like soccer. I think the bigger demand and therefore the more likely scenario is trying to help the aging stay mobile…not an easy endeavor.
Lastly, as an early retiree my husband and I receive no subsidy and are very happy with our ACA plan. It does take time and effort to research plans, but we do have the time and ability to do so. We also live a relatively, healthy lifestyle.
I have used PT quite a bit – a couple of sports injuries, frozen shoulder, and a herniated disk in my back. They are pretty much miracle workers in my opinion. So that job isn’t just with elderly people. And I think it really helped my recovery – although one does have to be compliant with the exercises they assign to get the benefit.
Any way we can get back to the discussion about changes this upcoming year as opposed to political dialogue about the ACA in general? The OP has me thinking about my two kids…and their individual plans, one subsidized and one not. I’m wondering what the impact of what is posted in Post #1 will have for them.
I am grateful both are able to get health insurance at all. Neither has employee sponsored insurance…and both have pre existing conditions. Thank goodness they can still get coverage.
For those of you who think $600/mo is affordable – good for you. For me, it’s a lot of money for coverage with a $5,000 deductible and $60 copays. That was the source of my frustration with the ACA: for a lot of Americans, to call it “affordable” is a stretch. That’s not to say that I’m an ACA critic: I welcome the changes it brought. I just think it’s a misnomer.
Of course I will probably be longing for these $600/mo policies, since my insurance company – the largest nonprofit in the state – just went belly up, and I along with some 80,000 people will be forced to change to something more expensive.
Insurance companies going under have happened in a handful of states including New York.
http://www.9news.com/story/news/health/2015/10/16/health-insurer-insolvency/74050296/
Inparent, I am not wrong. I was specifically referring to New York State. I am most definitely not wrong. This is tied to my profession and I know these things like I know my name.
As I have said there has been no Pre existing exclusion in NYS for decades.
Well, %$#@. HIMom, I saw your comment about your pharmacy coverage changing, and I went to check the new plan document it (we have the same plan). My specialty drugs are tripling in cost, since they will no longer dispense specialty drugs in 90 day allotments. The new max per monthly fill will equal what I’ve been paying for the 90 day. And because my drug is so expensive, I will hit the max every month. Another concern is that they won’t fill til you’ve used 75% of the med, but it takes 14 days to get a refill. Not going to work on a 30 day cycle!!
Annoyed by the increase, but have been expecting this day to arrive since pharmacy providers started designating drugs in various tiers. More annoyed that I will be dealing with medication orders even more frequently than I already do.
OTOH, all my cardiac stuff is generic, so that won’t be bad, and many of them are cheaper at Costco than through Caremark.
Do you think fat cats will give up their cash cow easily when you decide it’s time for a single payer? The reason you have to care when fat cats get fatter is because when they get fat they also get powerful enabling them to steer public policy to their advantage.
Iglooo never thought about that. You are probably right
“As I have said there has been no Pre existing exclusion in NYS for decades.”
Regarding health insurance in NYS pre ACA. It had many of the benefits of ACA plans, including covering pre existing conditions and community rating, except it wasn’t subsidized nor was it mandatory to have insurance. Individual plans became so expensive I believe the number of New Yorkers who had individual plans was only about 10k in all of NYS.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/health/health-plan-cost-for-new-yorkers-set-to-fall-50.html?_r=0
"For years, New York has represented much that can go wrong with insurance markets. The state required insurers to cover everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions, but did not require everyone to purchase insurance — a feature of the new health care law — and did not offer generous subsidies so people could afford coverage.
With no ability to persuade the young and the healthy to buy policies, the state’s premiums have long been among the highest in the nation. “If there was any state that the A.C.A. could bring rates down, it was New York,” said Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University who closely follows the federal law."
Costs of individual plans in NYS have dropped approx 50% and numbers of insured rose dramatically.
In HI, we’ve long had insurance required by employers if employees worked at least 20 hours/week for at least 3 weeks in a row, so much of our population has been insured even prior to ACA. Our premiums as a state have not increased much since ACA and we have one of the highest insured % in the US. About 20% use HMO Kaiser and about 75% use BCBS (often a PPO), and the other 5% use one of the other insurers.