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I got the news today, and it was a good thing I was sitting down when I opened the envelope.
The premium for the "budget" plan I have (otherwise known as the bronze plan) will be $977 a month. That's nearly $1,000 a month for the cheapest plan available, which carries a deductible of nearly $7,000. That means that I, with a straight middle-class income, will be on the hook for almost $20,000 in medical costs (if my year is bad). Boy, do I long for the pre-Obamacare days just a few years ago when I paid a few hundred a month at most for a real plan that covered medical expenses!
Basically, as has been discussed before, Obama "arranged" for middle earners to pay exorbitant premiums for what is essentially a catastrophic plan in order to have insurance companies provide the costs for every sneeze and cough for low(er) earners.
So, has anyone else received their envelope?
What we have now can no longer be called "obamacare". Trump proudly and tranparently (to his credit, I guess) made changes to the ACA with the specific intent of making it screw Americans so they will reject the plan and vote it out. He was very open about this, one of the few truths the man has ever told.
I guess for those who didn't like ACA from the get-go, this is a good thing, but it sure would have been better if he had some kind of plan in place. ACA had done a moderate (better than before, not good enough) job of controlling or throttling rising healthcare costs. Trump, to his defense, had to kill that if he wanted to stroke his fragile ego and remove another symbol of Obama's success. I get it, Trump is a small-small man, and really can't have one of his opponents outshining him. Rather than rise up to the occasion, he went to his go-to move, and tore everything around him down.
Good job Trump. You have changed things enough that they now live up to your "America is a disaster" campaign strategy.
The purpose of insurance is to mitigate risk. It's not to mitigate cost at the expense of others. That's called welfare. So if you want welfare, call it what it really is, not "insurance".
The purposes of any insurance is to transfer all or some risk to a third party in exchange for a premium.
Insurance goes back to ancient times.
All insurance, not just healthcare, mutualizes ( socializes) risk.
As it relates to insurance acquired via an exchange, the insurer gets paid the same premium, no matter who pays.
Hardly. Just because a bunch of blinders-on politicians twisted and warped normal insurance and then claimed they had succeeded in "mitigating costs", doesn't mean they have mitigated costs (or anything else). In the case of health insurance, they have merely lied, and ruined a formerly-good system.
"Lack of transparency is a huge advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever. But basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass."
-- Johnathan Gruber (Democrat)
- If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
- If you like the plan you have, you can keep it.
Who said:
“ going to repeal and replace Obamacare with something that will take care of everybody and the government is going to pay for it”
Trump and the GOP have been working assiduously to destroy the ACA from the moment it passed. They have done a very good job of making sure it failed. And right on cue, all the Trump sycophants jump up and down and say, "See? See? It's failing!" without ever acknowledging why it's failing.
And they will continue to pretend it failed all by itself, and not from seven years of the GOP working hard to make it so.
But no one expects any honesty from Republicans on this or any other thing, so no surprise there.
Ted Kennedy's HMO Act of 1973 set this inflationary use-health-care-for-just-everything idea into motion. The employers would pay for it, effectively hiding most of its real costs from the users.
Trendy, monumental hospital architecture, generous salaries, candlelit hospital corporation functions, service union thugs, prescription pills on TV, privatization of former charity systems, consolidation, you're faithfully, dutifully paying increases for it all.
Nixon was 150% behind requiring employers who offered insurance benefits to include an HMO.
To compete, non HMO insurers expanded hospitalization to include everything else.
I completed the post discharge survey for my husband. It read more like a resort survey than a hospital.
This.
We don't have Obamacare, but we have Private insurance, every year the price seems to sky rocket up, and has
every year for the last decade or so. OP Have you looked into private insurance outside of Obamacare?
What is Obamacare thing?
Do you mean insurance acquired on an exchange? No reason to limit oneself who the exchange if one does not qualify for a subsidy.
All insurance sold on/ off an exchange is private insurance.
The people getting Obamacare subsidies will never acknowledge that in order for them to get cheaper healthcare insurance that someone else has to pay more. What do they care? They don't. That's why they refuse to learn there is no such thing as a free lunch.
I am on expanded Medicaid that I was only able to get because of the ACA. It costs taxpayers several thousands a month for my medical care. If I don't get some of the medical care, I will die. Since I don't want to die then I will continue to accept expanded Medicaid.
What do you mean "don't have these issues of inefficient, and the quality of service suffers greatly"? The whole point of Trump allowing Veteran's Choice is BECAUSE the VA can be very inefficient and low quality. It can take months to get a fricken appointment, and God forbid they decide to cancel the appointment, NOT tell you until you show up with the claim that they "sent you a letter" (total BS), and you have to reschedule and wait another month or 2. Yes, I've used the VA 2 times in my entire life. I've experienced exactly what I just said. That's not efficient. The care - it varies depending on where you go. In some places, it's alright, in other places, it sucks.
I don't know about Medicaid, but I do know that a lot of people on Medicare go to something called "Western Dental" in CA. I called them up because I thought they might be cheap - it's also a long wait. I walked into one to see if I could get an earlier appointment - it was like a cattle car with people crammed all over the place. And the prices they quoted me were insane.
The people on Medicare, the VA, (I'm going to assume Medicaid people as well) most certainly do have issues with too expensive, inefficient, and lackluster quality of care.
Have any of the liberals on here ever thought that the best decision would be to have the government OUT of our health insurance and health care? Any time you include the government in something, it becomes bloated with inefficiency, becomes way too expensive, and the care sucks, just like Bob said up there.
Make it competitive. Before that cash grab Obamacare came along, only a handful of plans actually competed with each other despite there being about 1500 different plans that people could get. Now? It's even less competitive.
Competition makes prices go down, not up.
Get the government out of it.
Why do people continually look to the government to take care of them? How many times must the government screw everything up before people realize: 'Gee, every time the government gets involved, the costs skyrocket - I'm sensing a pattern here...'
FREE MARKET will bring the prices way down. No more "state plans" - allow people to buy insurance anywhere and be usable anywhere. Instead of just a few plans competing with each other, you would have all of them competing with each other, and you could buy the one you wanted no matter where the hell you lived, and you could use that very plan anywhere you wanted to use it in the country.
We don't need to go back to what we had, we need a truly free market in health care.
It's like small children afraid of going to camp for the first time ever, leaving their parents behind.
The government is not your parent, baby sistter, nanny, or care giver. Stop asking them to be - it only causes more problems, not less.
If only.....
No such thing as free market healthcare anywhere in the world.
You might be referring to a relatively primitive time when people died of a simple assessed tooth.
The projected life expectancy of someone born in 1900 was age 33-47, dependent upon race.
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