Obamacare to increase premiums by 304 percent???

[Stoked]

Babe, I count on all politicians, regardless of race, party or creed, to pretend to be concerned about us. All that changes Is who is attempting to control us. Or in many cases how they try to rebrand the same control.

 

[♪alt13]

You know if we "got rid of" everyone over 65 we wouldn't have this healthcare problem.





p.s. By "got rid of" I mean "they wouldn't be around any more" if you catch my drift





P.s.s. By "they wouldn't be around any more" I mean "Extermination" if you get where I'm going with this.




P.s.s.s. BY "extermination" I mean .... oh hi grandma. Oh you know just doing some important work on my devil box as you so adorably refer to it.

 

[Revolution 9]

Companies are dropping insurance, reducing hours and taking other actions as a result of the ACA. Such as Home Depot, Sea World, Walmart, Regal Entertainment (larget movie theater chain in America) and UPS.

But the president said:

""They said this would be a disaster in terms of jobs. There's no widespread evidence that the Affordable Care Act is hurting jobs"

Got to love it.

Got to love Walmart cutting benefits, and hours? WTF? There have been people bragging to me over the years about how fair, and good Wallmart treats it's employees. Sad to see them fold so quickly. This kind of company action would be laughed at in Germany.

BTW I disagree with the President when he said it won't affect jobs. This will certainly require some adjustment, and years to even get this
nation on the right track.

My last thought of the day is why are you hearing people complain and moan about people getting something for free. I read it everyday.
Now we are required to step up and get insured and not one conservative is saying anything about that. Mind blowing.

 

[Stoked]

Got to love Walmart cutting benefits, and hours? WTF? There have been people bragging to me over the years about how fair, and good Wallmart treats it's employees. Sad to see them fold so quickly. This kind of company action would be laughed at in Germany.

BTW I disagree with the President when he said it won't affect jobs. This will certainly require some adjustment, and years to even get this
nation on the right track.

My last thought of the day is why are you hearing people complain and moan about people getting something for free. I read it everyday.
Now we are required to step up and get insured and not one conservative is saying anything about that. Mind blowing.

Unfortunately this goes way beyond Walmart.

Nice to see that no one has any interest in this thread for anything but the blame game. So I'm done with it. Carry on.

 

[candrew]

Nice to see that no one has any interest in this thread for anything but the blame game. So I'm done with it. Carry on.

It's all your fault.

 

[Harambe]

Unfortunately this goes way beyond Walmart.

Nice to see that no one has any interest in this thread for anything but the blame game. So I'm done with it. Carry on.

I could have told you that the second you resurrected the thread.

 

[Harambe]

The problem that does link the two ideas in your reply is a fact of human nature. If we let government or even private cartels. . . insurance giants or hospital chains. . . . take responsibility for our decisions and control our financial options, they will assume the absolute power to do so.

humans don't do well with power or money when it comes to doing what is best for others. We do better when we take care of ourselves.

The specific link is the law that specifies bureaucratic decision-makers charged with cutting costs and allocating resources, which in effect means if we let government run our car pool, they will tell us what car to buy and how to drive it. But even worse, they will look for the car manufacturer that will wine them and dine them until the bureaucrats give them the contract to make all the pool cars for the whole country, at a higher price for the manufacturer, and that manufacturer won't need to keep quality up to make the sales, and will then cut his costs and give us cars we can't drive, little cheap piles of crap that will stall out every day, freeze us in the winter and cook us in the summer, and break our backs on the commute.
.

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.

 

[Gameface]

Good article. While I'm not in favor of the ACA I am in favor of intellectual honesty.

https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/29/opinion/kohn-affordable-care-act/index.html?hpt=hp_t4

Also, with a few exceptions, no one is really noting that this point isn't quite news. In 2010, the fact that certain insurance plans would not be grandfathered into Obamacare because of their inadequate coverage was widely covered by the press. It was a given, after all that, if standards for health insurance were going to be raised in America -- a good thing -- then some plans that don't meet the bar would no longer be available. One could blame this on the Affordable Care Act, or alternatively, one could blame this on insurance companies for providing such substandard care in the first place.

 

[VINYLONE]

I was talking to my Mom the other day and her insurance costs went up...she is retired.

 

[babe]

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.

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.

 

[Harambe]

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.

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.

 

[One Brow]

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.

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.