Healthcare... America and the rest

[Brian Peacock]

It's an assessment of public spending on health, thas' all.

[Scot Dutchy]

http://www.healthpowerhouse.com/files/E ... report.pdf

A far broader assessment.

[Brian Peacock]

I what regard?

[Tero]

Huff Post:
The worst-case scenario is that insurers continue to flee and premiums continue to rise. The law’s subsidies would probably prevent a true insurance “death spiral,” since they guarantee that lower-income people will continue to find coverage attractive, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where significant swaths of the country have just one insurance option, with premiums so high that most people ineligible for financial assistance decide it’s not worth the money.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_57c9c ... 2de095f2cd

[Brian Peacock]

The problem with the insurance sector is that they only want to cover you up until the point you make a claim.

[JimC]

Think of the poor shareholders and company directors!

[Tyrannical]

Obama care has been a nightmare, it has also fucked up every health insurance through work program too because of regulation changes. I had better insurance 20 years ago working part time at a grocery store. Before obama care I'd pay a $20 co pay for a doctors visit. Now insurance doesn't even kick in unless I pay $3000 out of pocket first, and I pay almost $3000 a year for health insurance. So I get virtually nothing unless I already shell out almost $6k.
But if you want cheap healthcare, make all medical research public or charity funded and disallow medical and drug patents. Except then no one but rich western nations would do any medical research.

[Tero]

In my state, healthcare goes up 30%. The wrangling with state and insurance companies came up with those numbers. After hearing the number, Aetna threatened to pull out but Blue Cross actually did:

For carriers offering coverage in the state/fed exchange, the approved rate increases for 2017 (which were modified during the rate review process) are as follows:

Medica: 38.99 percent (the carrier had proposed an average rate increase of 37.5 percent)
Aetna: 30.54 percent
For Blue Cross Blue Shield of state, regulators approved an average rate increase of 34.75 percent (the carrier had proposed an average rate increase of 42.3 percent).But that no longer applies in the exchange, since BCBS is exiting the exchange at the end of 2016.

Nearly 90 percent of state exchange enrollees are receiving premium subsidies in 2016, and subsidies will rise in 2017 to keep pace with the increase in the cost of the second-lowest-cost silver plan in each area. But for people who aren’t eligible for subsidies (including everyone who buys coverage outside the exchange), there’s no getting around the fact that rates will be sharply higher in 2017 than they are in 2016.

I don't even have silver, I have bronze. Silver is for the poorest people who get HIGH subsidy.

Source: https://www.healthinsurance.org/

Looking at our insurers, there just is no interest to run a separate system (benefits, claims, calculating rates, collecting the government subsidy) for some tens of thousands of independents, when their corporate clients bring them 750 000 fairly healthy patients.

[Tero]

I had better insurance 20 years ago working part time at a grocery store.

Not likely, but hey, you had something. Many part time workers then had nothing.

[Tero]

Also the corporate plans are out of control, workers paying a third of 18 000 each year

The spread of high-deductible plans belies the relatively modest growth in costs seen in Kaiser’s latest survey of workplace health benefits, released last week. It showed that annual family premiums for employer-sponsored health plans are up an average 3% to $18,142.

Family premiums have increased 20% over the last five years, which is a lot but a darn sight better than the 31% hike over the previous five years, and a huge improvement over the staggering 63% growth in the five years before that.

http://kff.org/health-costs/report/2016 ... ts-survey/

[Tero]

The Obamacare Exchanges Are a Mess and It’s Not Really Obama’s Fault (Politicians at federal and state level refuse to fix it)

There’s also a problem known as the “family glitch.” When an employer offers coverage to workers who are insured on the exchange, the employee gets the health care but the rest of her family can no longer get subsidies. As many as 4 million people have been hurt by this. Congress could easily solve this with a simple language change, but hasn’t.

Of course the mother of all self-inflicted wounds is the refusal of Republican lawmakers in 19 states to expand Medicaid despite the feds picking up almost the entire tab. About 19 million people – mostly the working poor, not the extreme poor – have been affected. Almost half live in Texas or Florida.


It has become clear recently that some of the health care exchanges are seriously struggling because not enough healthy people have signed up. Some big insurers are threatening to leave as a result. In this case, the solutions are politically difficult. The Republican response (in theory, not in legislation) is to allow for no-frills policies. The progressive response is to allow for a public-option. If Congress refuses to make even easy improvements, it won’t surprise you to hear that GOP leaders have not allowed even consideration of either conservative or liberal improvements.

In the business world, it’s a truism that you put a product out and then continuously improve it. A complex law should be no different. “The Affordable Care Act needs to be implemented in a spirit of bipartisanship which of course is the opposite of what we’ve had,” says Harold Pollack, a leading health care policy scholar who has proposed a wide range of ACA improvements.
Notably, when George W. Bush’s Medicare Part D plan had a disastrous rollout, Democrats in DC and the states bailed it out.
Democrats have a small degree of blame on Obamacare. While they appropriately hail the program’s successes – the dramatic drop in the number of uninsured, for instance — they are often reluctant to talk about Obamacare’s problems lest they give ammunition to the foes. But in this case the main obstacle is Republicans.

http://fortune.com/2016/10/04/obamacare-exchanges/

[Tero]

In the old days insurance companies could refuse to take sick patients. T hese days, they are doing the same thing by pulling out of Obamacare markets. They cannot pull out of corporate deals and dump sick patients. But any company of say 5000 employees is self insuring, so not a risk. The insurance company is just a watch dog making sure they are not overbilled.

[laklak]

Aetna is pulling out of the exchanges in 2018, and just announced they're pulling out of Medicare supplemental in Florida as of Jan 1. That's BIG, as Aetna is one of the largest Medsup insurers and Florida is the largest market.

[Tero]

Yeah, I get Aetna for 2017 only.

Most likely Hillary will put me in Medicare in 2018.

[laklak]

I'll try to stay with Aetna for 2017, after that it's a crap shoot.