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Obamacare to increase premiums by 304 percent???

I was talking to my Mom the other day and her insurance costs went up...she is retired.
 
ElRoach0 said:
I guess this is about as close as I'm going to get to an answer. I believe your argument negatively characterizing the ACA starts with the concept of healthcare, and whose hands are in the pie. Going way, way, way before the ACA was even thought of. And to that point, you're right.

But if we go back in time to before there was health insurance, supply/demand ended up killing millions of Americans because they couldn't afford it. Which turned the beloved free market into a killing force much more deadly than communism and Nazi's.

The government didn't do anything about it, as fighting the free market is socialism.. F*** that. That's political suicide.

And so in came your snake oil salesmen, insurance companies. They offered protection from the predator that was the healthcare "free market". They decided who would get what, and how much money they pocketed. For a "low" monthly cost, you could live in a house made of brick instead of twigs or straw.

But now, it's the insurance companies that are controlling care. They were the ones who were deciding what care you were getting, what doctors you could see, what procedures you could get, and when.

More and more health insurance companies were popping up all over the place. And so, a new market was created that coincided with the healthcare market - the health insurance market.

Americans embraced the idea of health insurance. I don't like it, as it's just a bandaid on the real problem - the absurd price of health care. But because America has embraced health insurance in the first place, I have to ground my argument and line of thinking there. And that's where the ACA starts; long after we've embraced insurance as a part of our lives. We are stuck with insurance companies until we as a country accept health insurance as a duct tape, and not fixed pipe.

The ACA regulates insurance companies. Regulating those insurance companies, too, is just another piece of duct tape, another band-aid, another strip of bailing wire. And at that level someone's gotta own the company that produces that duct tape, those bandaids, those strips of bailing wire, and will make money off of it.

But until we can adequately address the cost of healthcare and do something about it, it's all we've got.
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For some folks, this is actually true. But for a lot more, the ACA will degrade their family finances and increase their healthcare costs. Somebody has to pay for all the institutional personnel required by the system, who don't actually give "care". At my wife's place of work, a hospital, the "care providers" have more recordkeeping to do, without more personnel. Medical charges to the patients or their insurers or the government are going up, and the quality of care is being adversely affected.

Seeing this first hand is more "data", my information base, and my justification for saying the ACA is not affordable and will result in less care, overall, for the majority of people. Even most of the poor.
 
babe said:
For some folks, this is actually true. But for a lot more, the ACA will degrade their family finances and increase their healthcare costs. Somebody has to pay for all the institutional personnel required by the system, who don't actually give "care". At my wife's place of work, a hospital, the "care providers" have more recordkeeping to do, without more personnel. Medical charges to the patients or their insurers or the government are going up, and the quality of care is being adversely affected.

Seeing this first hand is more "data", my information base, and my justification for saying the ACA is not affordable and will result in less care, overall, for the majority of people. Even most of the poor.
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Since before the birth of Health Insurance, we've had people that needed to be around for administrative duties. Billing, cleaning, safety, building maintenance, cafeteria workers, Health Information officials, and more recently IT professionals... the list goes on and on. The ACA doesn't change any of that. Nor was it designed to. All of this goes into the cost of healthcare, which is the problem in the first place. At my place of work, a large healthcare organization consisting of clinics, hospitals, ED's, and many specialty centers, I often feel like there's more people NOT helping patients than people helping patients.

Moreso, I'm not a care provider. I'm an IT Analyst... physicians, care staff, quality analysts, pharmacists, medicare specialists come to me asking me how we can build something, or to pull data on something they care about. I'm that extra margin that isn't direct healthcare. I sleep well at night because I can show you exactly how I help bring back income to the hospital, how I help physicians make the right choice in your treatment.

From my point of view, it's far more affordable to pay $4700 a year out of pocket(and get a $2188 tax credit[based on 30k/year income]) to get yourself preventative medicine than it is for an uninsured ED visit resulting in a hospital stay of a week because you let a respiratory infection go so long you now have heavy pneumonia.
 
babe said:
At my wife's place of work, a hospital, the "care providers" have more recordkeeping to do, without more personnel. Medical charges to the patients or their insurers or the government are going up, and the quality of care is being adversely affected.

Seeing this first hand is more "data", my information base, and my justification for saying the ACA is not affordable and will result in less care, overall, for the majority of people. Even most of the poor.
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At our hospital, this is true because 1) we chose to sign up for the various programs such as Meaningful Use to get the money involved, and 2) we spent that money on new software, which came not only with most of the Meaningful Use provisions bundled in, but also with generally better electronic interchange capabilities. The increase in record keeping has been offset by the ease of that record keeping. We are leveraging that into improving not only care for patients that shop up at our hospital, but also for those same patients when they show up at one of the other area hospitals.

So far, there hasn't been any major groundswell in Massachusetts to repeal RomneyCare. So far, RamneyCare has not meaningfully degraded the finances of a "lot more" people than it helped. I doubt ObamaCare will wind up doing worse.
 
My reasoning has an ideological basis rooting some of my arguments. I don't care to deny the truth others can share on specifics. The comments above by One Brow and ElRoacho appear to have some extensive personal experience and observation behind them. I certainly hope that by incorporating better technology and even more efficient recordkeeping we can do a lot better. The ideologist in me says a private organization could to the same, but my experience with private enterprise compels the admission that many "private" decision-makers would not do so. The ideologist in me comes up once again saying "fine. . . . let them perish for their obstinate pigheadedness".

My whole argument goes to the point that I fear the obstinate pigheads will be running the ACA. Anyone in the system that can rise above that is a credit to humanity, and the hope of the world.
 
VINYLONE said:
Are babe and one brow the same person?
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I hope OB doesn't consider that too much of an insult to merit some proofs in denial. OB and I have done a lot of jousting and he's been told by some of his friends that's he'sj picked up a troll in JazzFanzz.

I tend to view OB as a dedicated ideologue on the side of the merit of reason and fact, if not an asset of some internet progressive dominance program. He insists that he is a part-time school teacher and otherwise employed in the IT sectory, possibly as he states above, with some experience in the health care industry. I can vouch for his positions on Quantum Mechanics being different from mine, as well as his political proclivities. I watch Dr. Who episodes on Netflix with my kids, and we all hoot at the hokey sci-fi and the very idea of time travel, which I insist is a modern mysticism with false scientific professions. OB also believes in professionalism in the medical care industry and the authority of government to accredit caregivers. I think the government is incompetent in everything it does for precisely the reasons that we haven't done a good job in our national finances or education, or environment, or any number of other things the government has undertaken to do for us. I still insist that the only thing progressive governance can effectively do for us better than actual caring humans in our neighborhoods is slaughter us in useless foreign wars.

I tolerate and even enjoy the effort it is to try to reason with people who are actually different from me. It makes for a better me.
 
ElRoach0 said:
Certain parts of Metro St. Louis can very much be considered ghetto.
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The ghetto I lived in for years has been somewhat gentrified in the past twenty years. Back then, on my street in SLC, there were wh******s doing business two houses away, and druggies next door. We made the news with some killings on the street as well, and some folks went missing under questionable circumstances. There are a lot of ghetto streets in SLC, with a few old houses remaining enmeshed in industrial or small business enterprises. . . . .

My family. . . . should I say my "former family" which consists of executives in corporate Military-Industrial Complex interests, research scientists, and college and university professors, and a lawyer and tax accountant, and a researcher for the Naval Weopons Laboratory interested in cold fusion, and a nuclear physicist employed in Washington state. . .. as well as three devout mormon sisters who are too crazy with their piety to be involved in my life beyond calling me the black sheep of the family. . . . . well, they just don't come around much because the neighborhood scares them.

I don't have pitbulls, but I do have dogs that would defend me to the death. At least, the wh******s and drugpushers thought so.

I love my liberty. And my independence.

And then I do have a ranch, as well. . . . a literal refugem for the outcasts of Metroplitia, where I find more interesting people than I do in the city.
 
One Brow said:
You mean, like the 80th block of State street in East St. Louis, or Bond Avenue in Centreville?
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I've driven through St. Louis twice, without stopping even for gas. There's a nice farm town twenty miles into Illinois with some nice country girls serving the food at the McD's. And a gas station that can get me down the road another 400 miles.

I've never seen a ghetto in the US that could compare with an isolated smuggler port in the Philippines.

If I'm the issue here, lets go to the LTE, okay?
 
babe said:
I've driven through St. Louis twice, without stopping even for gas. There's a nice farm town twenty miles into Illinois with some nice country girls serving the food at the McD's. And a gas station that can get me down the road another 400 miles.

I've never seen a ghetto in the US that could compare with an isolated smuggler port in the Philippines.

If I'm the issue here, lets go to the LTE, okay?
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You're not the issue here dude. You might love the feeling of control a little too much, and have a hard time accepting that American society has embraced less personal control, but I understand exactly where you're coming from. Your opinion is very valuable, and has great merits to it.

I, too, have found myself in the same role. It wasn't but what...4 months ago I was arguing that if we could teach our kids to be happy when they grow up instead of an astronaut or fireman, it would fix the economy. I also argued that, if the whole Christianity thing is real, God and Satan should just talk it out.

You're fine. Keep on keepin on.
 
I checked into the Nevada marketplace for insurance plans. We wanted to see if we could get supplemental insurance to help offset our high-deductible plan, considering my wife recently had a very serious medical issue and my son and daughter have ongoing needs. I found the very cheapest plan for a family our size was $985 per month, with a $4k deductible and 20% coinsurance after meeting the deductible, and that the deductible does not count toward the out of pocket maximum, which was set at $5k.

Interesting thing was, we were considering just such a plan last summer. We found one locally that was a co-pay plan, $1k deductible, out of pocket max was the same as the deductible which counted toward it (so you hit the deductible and would pay nothing more), and there were $20 and $40 copays for office visits. That plan was $750 and we thought it was way too expensive for the coverage. Wow how times have changed.
 
LogGrad98 said:
I checked into the Nevada marketplace for insurance plans. We wanted to see if we could get supplemental insurance to help offset our high-deductible plan, considering my wife recently had a very serious medical issue and my son and daughter have ongoing needs. I found the very cheapest plan for a family our size was $985 per month, with a $4k deductible and 20% coinsurance after meeting the deductible, and that the deductible does not count toward the out of pocket maximum, which was set at $5k.

Interesting thing was, we were considering just such a plan last summer. We found one locally that was a co-pay plan, $1k deductible, out of pocket max was the same as the deductible which counted toward it (so you hit the deductible and would pay nothing more), and there were $20 and $40 copays for office visits. That plan was $750 and we thought it was way too expensive for the coverage. Wow how times have changed.
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You're a stupid liar. That's impossible. I can't believe you would stoop to making up stories blah, blah, blah.

There I've saved everyone some time.
 
heyhey said:
I never said you didn't work hard. I said that some people have worked hard and earn enough not to qualify for subsidies. You seem to think that they are lying to you when they say their premiums have gone up dramatically. You should just admit that you don't give a **** about them and are for the law because it happens to benefit you. Don't get all bent out of shape when people are against it because it isn't good for them.
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I don't think he was getting bent out of shape. He was stating how the law has helped him. You seem defensive. I have heard both good and bad about Obamacare . My personal experience is good and so is my sister. We both live in different states. I always had a issue with some of the things I've read about it but I haven't been like some people who blame everything on Obamacare. Insurance costs were skyrocketing before Obamacare, employers were laying people before Obamacare and people were getting dropped from their insurance before Obamacare.

Opponents make it sound as though the world was just great before Obamacare. Of course the implementation has been a nightmare but instead of bashing it have your representatives change laws that make it better. If your exchanges are working then make your representatives actual work. You know find solutions to problems. I am for people having affordable insurance if Obama care doesn't do it then either fix it or come up with an working alternative. Something the complainers haven't done. Medical accounts do not address the cost of health insurance.
 
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