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Yeah, and??? Single payer is what most people want. Always has been. This just gets the ball rolling so to speak.
Think very carefully about whether that is really what you want. The countries that have single-payer health care PAY for it through very regressive tax systems.
The real outrage will come in late January as people get signed up, pay their premium and get their no cost physical exam. Referrals will be made to specialists and then the deductibles/coinsurance hit. Many people picked the bronze plan for a low monthly premium not realizing they are responsible for 50% of the cost of the visits. Even the silver plan comes with a 2K individual deductible.
I predict there will be much screaming from the newly insured that they can't afford even the subsidized deductibles. They won't get follow up care, and basically they got an expensive physical exam.
I agree with you that the ACA is not the best plan. It's far from perfect and needs a LOT of work in order to be usable. My point, however, is that until this bill was passed everyone was sweeping the health care issue under the rug and pretending that everything was ok.
I thought this was simply passing the GOP's earlier plan?
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If you didn't have company sponsored insurance or no insurance at all would you still be able to handle an average hospital stay out of pocket? I don't know of any average American that could without bankrupting themselves. THAT is the real problem.
And Obamacare still leaves millions and millions with that problem. Part of the problem is also the the costs of services which have greatly surpassed inflation and what people are making and none of that was addressed. This is a two prong problem and neither was addressed or in any way properly addressed with Obamacare. As I said, doing something about the problem was never the goal. Simply passing something was.
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I see various conservative posters on here complaining that the high cost of health care is directly attributed to government interference, Hospital Association, etc. That may or may not be the case but the fact is if these institutions really are responsible for the cost, how are you going to change that? Answer is you can't. They are far too entrenched in our health care system to ever be removed from it. I'm not saying it shouldn't happen but I'm a realist. I know the score, it won't happen. So what do we do? Nothing? That's not an option. I support the ACA because I believe it will be the catalyst for real change.
In one breath you say that real change can't happen but then you say that Obamacare is the way to address real change. We seem to get a lot of doublespeak where it comes to this.
So what are the cost-control elements of the ACA? First, some reforms aim to eliminate unnecessary costs to the system; these include measures against fraud and abuse in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which the Department of Health and Human Services predicts will return approximately $17 in reduced spending for every dollar invested2 ($7 billion over 10 years, according to the CBO).3 Administrative simplification under the ACA will reduce unnecessary paperwork and create uniform electronic standards and operating rules to be used by all private insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid — saving the federal government an estimated $20 billion over 10 years2 and saving insurers, physicians, hospitals, and other providers tens of billions of dollars a year (according to the U.S. Healthcare Efficiency Index). And the ACA ensures a pathway for approval of generic biologic agents that is expected to save the government more than $7 billion, and citizens and insurers additional billions, over 10 years. An estimated $1.1 billion will be saved in Medicare by calculating payment for complex imaging studies under the assumption that the machines will operate not just 50%, but 75%, of the time. And about $135 billion will be saved in the first decade by eliminating unjustified subsidies to Medicare Advantage plans.
These savings are oriented toward reducing the level of health care costs rather than the growth rate of such costs. If that were all the legislation did, it would technically pay for health care reform but would miss an opportunity to put downward pressure on the growth of health care costs — an essential step in reducing our long-term fiscal imbalances.
One prominent component of the ACA that will help to bend the long-term cost curve is an excise tax on “Cadillac†insurance plans — plans that, in 2018, will charge more than $27,500 for families and $10,200 for individuals, excluding vision and dental benefits. Beginning in 2018, the ACA will impose a 40% tax on the portion of health insurance that is over these amounts. After 2020, the premium threshold for the tax will increase at the rate of overall inflation in the economy, the Consumer Price Index. Thus, the tax will create incentives for employers and health insurers to devise more cost-effective health plans with lower premiums, and because the premium threshold will increase with overall inflation rather than growth of health care costs, it will help to bend the cost curve. The majority of tax revenue will come not from the direct taxation of high-cost plans but from increased workers' wages, as companies shift compensation out of benefits and toward take-home pay.
Yet “bending the curve†of health care inflation also requires a more direct change in the way health care is delivered. Health care costs are unevenly distributed: 10% of patients account for 64% of costs. Many of these are patients with chronic conditions, such as congestive heart failure, diabetes, and hypertension. Sustained cost control will occur only with more coordinated care that prevents avoidable complications for patients with chronic illness. As Stanford's Victor Fuchs has noted, coordinated care requires three “Iâ€s: information, infrastructure, and incentives.
Please......you don't lower the costs by taxing people with good health care plans.
What you posted is most likely just the surface of this obamanation. It's sad really because I don't know of one person liberal or conservative that doesn't believe folks should have access to affordable care. Unfortunately, the lying sack of chit in the white house and his cronies Reid, Pelosi etc.. rammed this down everyone's throats under a false premise. It will collapse due to its design or lack there of..
The way 0bama and his admin are running the ACA, it's like a corrupt banana republic. He orders his administrative agencies to ignore entire sections of the law for one group of citizens, while telling them to enforce it on another group of citizens. It's not a law if the government can simply chose to ignore it, and give out waivers and special carve outs in the law to their political and corporate cronies.
I'm just curious to know that if 90% of peoples rates increase, and only 10% decrease... there's going to be a ton of mad people both left and right in a few months. With these facts coming to light, and if the numbers will actually be this bad; who should/will take responsibility for what appears to be impending failure?
Why do you even have to ask? Bush or the Tea Party. They may, depending on how far in the horizon the 2014 election is, extend that to the entire GOP. It certainly won't be Obama's fault, that's for sure.
I thought this was simply passing the GOP's earlier plan?
When he was president GW Bush was trying to get the ball rolling for health care reform, and social security reform, with some suggested plans of his own, but he was vilified by the left. They refused to even talk about ways to control costs, I'm guessing it was because they were already on page 2,000 of the ACA.
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Originally Posted by pknopp
And Obamacare still leaves millions and millions with that problem. Part of the problem is also the the costs of services which have greatly surpassed inflation and what people are making and none of that was addressed. This is a two prong problem and neither was addressed or in any way properly addressed with Obamacare. As I said, doing something about the problem was never the goal. Simply passing something was.
We have something like 30-40 million uninsured in this country, and the 0bama supporters think they can all get signed up in ten weeks time, to meet the Jan 1st deadline. That's about 3-4 million a each and every week, told to sign up or be punished. But the dems and 0bama refused to delay that personal mandate.
How much you want to bet, when the sheer magnitude of uninsured who are still struggling to sign up in January are finally acknowledged, that the dems and 0bama will not pretend to come riding to the recuse with a freaking delay to the personal mandate. and the ignorant masses will swoon "oh, he cares for us." Forgetting that Cruz and the Tea Party were trying to get that same freaking delay passed in October 2013.
In one breath you say that real change can't happen but then you say that Obamacare is the way to address real change. We seem to get a lot of doublespeak where it comes to this.
I think I was pretty clear is saying that the ACA would be a catalyst for change. Where's the doublespeak?
I think I was pretty clear is saying that the ACA would be a catalyst for change. Where's the doublespeak?
I see various conservative posters on here complaining that the high cost of health care is directly attributed to government interference, Hospital Association, etc. That may or may not be the case but the fact is if these institutions really are responsible for the cost, how are you going to change that? Answer is you can't. They are far too entrenched in our health care system to ever be removed from it.
They are either too entrenched or they aren't.
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