Health Insurance is NOT Health care. They are private business in existence to make a profit. They determine the premiums based on risk of the population. If there is a large group of high risk people the premium for the lower risk people goes up. ACA puts an unfair burden on young/healthy people. Family of 4 making around 100K pays $900 a month with a 10K deductible. Seriously? So you have to pay over 20K before your benefits kick in? Why would anyone choose to do this? People make all sorts of choices about where they work. Yes, some people work for benefits alone. Insurance companies aren’t dictating your care, just what they will pay for.
Trouble with the idea about continuous coverage is that low income people with chronic diseases are just the people with difficult lives who might not be able to have maintained continuous coverage. We don’t want to inspire insurers into mischief. “Oh, sorry, I lost your payment, Mr. Diabetes.”
Thats nice, but what you are calling BS on is not what was claimed in the text you quoted. The quote stated “about 50 percent more Americans think the ACA has hurt them rather than helped them.”
If you had bothered to follow the link, you would have seen that the most recent Gallup poll concluded:
51 percent of Americans said ACA had no effect
29 percent of Americans said ACA hurts
18 percent of Americans said ACA helps
Dividing 29 percent by 18 percent indicates that 61 percent more Americans think that ACA has hurt them rather than helped them. As the faults in ACA become more apparent over time, expect that gap to widen.
Here is the link again.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/195383/americans-negative-positive-aca.aspx
You are right about that. It was designed to blow up the cost of health care, and it succeeded marvelously. Here is a chart that shows that average premiums increased 74.8 percent since the law took effect in 2013.
http://www.heritage.org/~/media/infographics/2016/04/bg3109/bg-obamacare-in-six-years-chart-1.ashx
However, if you go back and look at the propaganda used to promote ACA, it was largely advertised as saving money for the average taxpayer. I believe average savings of $2,500 per family were promised. Instead, total costs skyrocketed.
One issue with ACA that has not been discussed on this thread is the impact on employment. The rule stating that employers with more than 50 employees had to provide health care to employees who worked 30 hours or more lead to massive shifts in employment. People who were employed in hourly work saw their hours reduced to 29 hours per week or less. For these people, ACA provided an effective 20+ percent reduction in their earnings.
We have a friend that was directly impacted by this. She had insurance through her husband, but worked an hourly position to pay for private treatments for a handicapped child. When her hours were cut to accommodate the ACA, she could not longer afford the private treatments. Because of ACA, the parent was out of the workforce, the child no longer received treatments they believed were valuable, and a vendor lost a customer.
When I lived in Germany twenty-some years ago, I had a certain percentage (I think 10%) of my pay withheld for health insurance and was covered for medical, dental, vision.
When I moved to the US, at first I did not have employer coverage. My husband did neither so we took out a policy that covered emergency and hospital care only.
Then after a few months when we both got full-time jobs, we were covered under employer paid coverage.
Over time deductibles increased, and after my husband changed jobs, only he was covered by employer paid plan. I took out an individual policy for me which cost $200 a month. The kids were covered under CHIP.
The old employer offered COBRA coverage but it cost $800 a month.
I went two months without insurance and it was scary.
The provision about pre-existing conditions at that time (2010) was that you had to have had continuous coverage, with no break in coverage more than 3 months. I met that.
After my H switched jobs again, the family premium for group plan was about equal to what we paid for CHIP and my coverage, so it was easier to all be on the same plan.
It is about 10% of our gross pay what we pay for premiums, added to that we have out-of-pocket cost for labwork and xrays due to a high deductible, but routine care is covered, and prescriptions and doctor copays are affordable. And we have hospital coverage if we need it.
I like the fact that our kids are covered until 26, when they will hopefully have their own career and coverage.
@JustGraduate wrote
And after ACA is passed the insurance companies continue to raise premiums.
So, why don’t we have any law to stop the insurance companies from having open check books?
Insurance premiums continue to rise because most people cannot understand the link between expensive services and high premiums. Want to get rid of lifetime caps? The money spent beyond the cap (and for certain diseases, it can be a great deal) has to come from somewhere, meaning it gets spread around and premiums go up for everyone.
Want the commendable goal of bringing uninsured people into the system? Well these people were often uninsured because they were too sick to afford a higher cost of insurance. Bring those people into the system, and again spread the costs around, and premiums go up for everyone.
There is no free lunch.
Also, consider this. We know a number of people who had NOT had any health insurance for years. So…they didn’t go to the doctor for years. None knew that they had pre existing conditions…if they did…but some later found out that they did.
^ No. Insurance companies have too much power to influence our Congress. That’s why single payer system proposal was killed at the beginning of ACA debate.
I guess it would have been politically impossible, but I wish the penalty for not getting insurance was the insurance premium plus $200.
Follow the money. That always answers your question.
“So, why don’t we have any law to stop the insurance companies from having open check books?”
I am sure that will be a part of the replace ACA bill. It will be negotiated and this time the insurance companies will agree so quickly our heads will spin.
^^^^^So, why don’t we have any law to stop the insurance companies from having open check books?
Because we don’t typically pass laws to limit the profit that companies make - unless they’re a monopoly. We let the marketplace dictate profit. I don’t see a Republican Congress deviating from that basic principle, do you?
All I can say is be careful for what you wish for in casting off the provision for covering pre-existing conditions. An out of the blue cancer diagnosis is not as uncommon as you’d think and doesn’t just happen to older people in the high risk category. I think people would be surprised at how many couldn’t get insurance in a fully open marketplace that restricts who can be insured…and again, they wouldn’t just be older Americans.
We’re grateful for getting rid of the pre-existing condition barrier to health insurance. It’s good for the economy, the self-employed, and job shifting, etc. It’s comforting to know that if we were hit by a major illness there is an out of pocket max that will not bankrupt us.
The downside, for our little family, is the high cost of the premiums and co-pays for a family of four, for the lowest cost Bronze plan. And, the increasingly narrow network.
There’s a cost versus quality of practitioners thing that is…unsettling. I don’t have the answers!
Remember also…as pointed out elsewhere…there are many pre-existing conditions that crop up through NO fault of the person who has them.
Like really…is it my kid’s fault he has glaucoma?
As we all know on cc, anecdotes are not data. And, as long as we stick to the benefits of the ACA, this thread will survive. If any counter-arguments ensue, it will be shut down as political.
Also, the individual mandate using a small (relative to the cost of medical insurance) tax penalty was not enough to get healthier people into the insurance pools. So what we have is a slower moving version of adverse selection, where the individual market is moving toward being mostly people with expensive conditions. Now that politicians are talking about keeping the prohibition on medical underwriting of pre-existing conditions (one of the parts of the ACA that people like), eliminating the individual mandate (the part of the ACA that people dislike) will only accelerate the adverse selection and failure of the individual market.
Simple answer - because ACA mandated coverage that made no sense for certain paying groups, and brought in other groups that got those services free or at vastly reduced cost. The result is the consumer said to heck with it and said keep your product.
This is why small business stopped growth and others went to part-time workers resulting on lower wages because the costs to the business was beyond what the business could price into its product. Thus, premiums had to rise of the remaining payers in the pool.
At one conference I attended, it was presented that 75% of attendees said that ACA limited or stopped their growth plans resulting in 1.3 million jobs that would have been created since 2014 that were not - explains the anemic GDP in a nutshell. And that was a number just from attendees - god knows what the real number is of jobs that would have materialized without ACA.
For example, if I had gotten ACA for my family, my DSs and I would have been mandated to pay for coverage for mammograms, pap smears, birth control, and child birth? Huh? For whom? We do not use those products, yet it would be in our policy and automatically triple our premiums and quintupled our deductible even though we never would use those products. Seriously, there is only one female in our house, but we would be paying as if there are four. Pure rip off - imagine if you bought a product and 3/4ths of it was automatically useless to you but you were forced to buy it. I bet that would be especially irritating when the day before you could buy exactly what you wanted/needed for 1/4 to 1/6 the new cost. (Remember the new higher deductibles is a cost and looking at premiums hikes alone is faulty analysis)
Exactly how do you expect the insurance companies to pay for all these services without an open checkbook? Remember please that these are MANDATED services and insurance companies are forced to provide them even to non-payers.
Given that ACA rolls became packed with new people who rode the free gravy train and took advantage of services, the insurance companies found rather quickly the pool of people actually paying for ACA was much smaller than expected, thereby leaving the insurance with higher costs each year as more people who could not pay joined and an ever lower percentage of paying customers remained. Well duh, as people decided to pay for their kids college etc. instead of the huge ACA premiums because the penalty for the first three years was worth it rather than paying the premiums.
The end result of just two years of ACA is it is fiscally impossible to catch up in the cost column without literally raising everyone’s premiums by 400%+. That is the real math of what happens when you give free stuff to people who cannot pay and then expect the payers to be dupes and lower their family lifestyle to pay for others. Hence, the payers figure out they are being ripped off and stop paying.
No negotiation that goes on this time around will benefit the customer. It might include a consideration of reelection impact. But no one needing health care is going to matter this time around.
Why? Just because one person calls something a benefit does not mean it is a benefit to someone else.
Are you saying that if something someone is calling a benefit can be shown to be harmful to someone else, then that is a political argument? Makes no sense, as a fiscal argument is not the same as a political argument. A fiscal argument is factual, not political or ideological.
No has right to call something beneficial and pretend that the benefit is the only effect - that would be equivalent to living in an echo chamber and a bubble. And we know living in bubbles leads to nasty surprises.