The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

[SJHovey]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

Is there such a thing as an individual policy? Far as I know insurance doesn't work unless you're in a pool of some sort. It's kind of like Communism without being Communism. Get my drift? You want an individual policy then get rid of insurance altogether cause it doesn't work that way.

Oh, and if you think you're not "subsidizing" a big payout from a motorcyle policy when it happens with the other insurance you have from that company you're kidding yourself.

It may not be individual in terms of 300 million different policies for 300 million different people. But you had some coverage options, things you may or may not need.

Again, compare to auto coverage. I have to buy liability coverage. Maybe I choose comprehensive or collision, maybe not. Depends upon my risk tolerance.

Same with health insurance. Before, maybe I had prescription coverage, maybe I covered preventative care, maybe I covered care outside of my provider network. You had some choices, based upon your situation, lifestyle, etc...

I don't think Obamacare seeks to make everyone's health insurance identical. But what it seems to do is say the basic level of coverage, and the things you have to pay for, are a lot higher than many people want, need, or are willing and able to pay for.

I think they'll find they could have done a better job if they had started with requiring just a very basic, minimal level of coverage to hit catastrophic events, and let people pick and choose plans with "add ons" that they find important or necessary.

[Rover]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

I'm trying to recall the number of "arguments" in your quiver. Three? Four? Whatever. It's a very small number. And you keep repeating them like "Rainman," usually when they don't apply to the subject at hand. You're obviously intoxicated with your own "brilliance." Most of the rest of us would rather have a drink.

If this is your idea of an acceptance speech, its a pretty sh! tty one. Of course I wouldn't expect any less from you! Looks like my tax break idea for you hit a little too close to home.

SJHovey, you ARE paying for the bad drivers already with your car insurance. So with your car you are sharing the responsibility already. Why should healthcare operate any differently.

[joecct]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

If this is your idea of an acceptance speech, its a pretty sh! tty one. Of course I wouldn't expect any less from you! Looks like my tax break idea for you hit a little too close to home.

SJHovey, you ARE paying for the bad drivers already with your car insurance. So with your car you are sharing the responsibility already. Why should healthcare operate any differently.

But unmarried males under 25 don't have to pay for health coverage!

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

It may not be individual in terms of 300 million different policies for 300 million different people. But you had some coverage options, things you may or may not need.

Again, compare to auto coverage. I have to buy liability coverage. Maybe I choose comprehensive or collision, maybe not. Depends upon my risk tolerance.

Same with health insurance. Before, maybe I had prescription coverage, maybe I covered preventative care, maybe I covered care outside of my provider network. You had some choices, based upon your situation, lifestyle, etc...

I don't think Obamacare seeks to make everyone's health insurance identical. But what it seems to do is say the basic level of coverage, and the things you have to pay for, are a lot higher than many people want, need, or are willing and able to pay for.

I think they'll find they could have done a better job if they had started with requiring just a very basic, minimal level of coverage to hit catastrophic events, and let people pick and choose plans with "add ons" that they find important or necessary.

Maybe, but probably not. Here's one major reason things are different.

The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurers cover maternity care is a major manifestation of its broader prohibition against gender rating. Before Obamacare, it made sense actuarially for insurers to charge women more than men for coverage on the individual market. The fact that women, rather than men, incur maternity costs was a big part of their justification, though women were also generally charged more for equivalent coverage. By prohibiting the practice, Obamacare doesn’t just strike a blow for moral reasoning. It effectuates a billion-dollar transfer of wealth from men to women.

By undertaking to foist the costs of maternity care back onto women alone, Ellmers was proposing, perhaps unwittingly, to transfer all of that wealth from women back to men.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-s...delivered-baby

[FreshFish]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

There's no way to explain away or rationalize away this woman's story:

My health-care policy was cancelled, and the Obama administration's explanation that policies are being cancelled because they were "substandard" and issued by "bad apple" insurers is absolutely not true.

I had a very comprehensive policy, with a large and solid national health insurer, and the reasons my policy was not "ACA compliant" is because I now have to pay for maternity coverage, general pediatric coverage and pediatric dental coverage, as prescribed by ObamaCare. I'm 55 years old, have no children and don't plan to have children. Clearly, I am beyond childbearing age, and without children. Why would I have to purchase pediatric dental insurance? Or general pediatric care?

ObamaCare is forcing people to purchase a product that they don't want and can't ever use. I do not need maternity or pediatric services but have to purchase them. The new policy that would have been "comparable" to my current policy is more expensive with higher deductibles.

It is really sad. Typically, when an honorable person makes a mistake, the honest thing to say is "oops, I goofed. This isn't turning out the way I planned." Yet the sycophants here are so deeply invested that they cannot even acknowledge the obvious!

I have to give a big-time shout out to ericredaxe for being honorable even though we may disagree on substance. He supports the law's intentions and has enough character to acknowledge that there is something wrong with its execution.

I said at the outset of the predecessor thread that there are plenty of good intentions behind the impetus to do something. This situation now is beyond horrible. It's fraudulent. If any business tried this we'd all be howling for a criminal prosecution.

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

She'd purchase that for the same reason I pay for Medicare. Same thing.

I guess the bottom line is people look at taxes and insurance in two completely different ways. The real world, and fantasy land. That 55 year old woman lives in fantasy land.

[Priceless]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

There's no way to explain away or rationalize away this woman's story:




It is really sad. Typically, when an honorable person makes a mistake, the honest thing to say is "oops, I goofed. This isn't turning out the way I planned." Yet the sycophants here are so deeply invested that they cannot even acknowledge the obvious!

I have to give a big-time shout out to ericredaxe for being honorable even though we may disagree on substance. He supports the law's intentions and has enough character to acknowledge that there is something wrong with its execution.

I said at the outset of the predecessor thread that there are plenty of good intentions behind the impetus to do something. This situation now is beyond horrible. It's fraudulent. If any business tried this we'd all be howling for a criminal prosecution.

Let's give her a bill that just says she's paying for A, B, C and D even though it also covers E, F and G because she will feel better about her policy if it doesn't list the things she doesn't "need". Sure, she will still be paying the same amount, but she'll feel so much better about it.

[Old Pio]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

She'd purchase that for the same reason I pay for Medicare. Same thing.

I guess the bottom line is people look at taxes and insurance in two completely different ways. The real world, and fantasy land. That 55 year old woman lives in fantasy land.

I'll agree with you there, Tinkerbell.

[SteveP]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

Does that qualify as oxymoronic?

How 'bout just moronic?

And there's your sign

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...69711152265686

First, it's not only men who are forced to buy maternity coverage they are physically incapable of using. So are women in the stage of life between childbearing age and Medicare eligibility.

Second, under-30s are exempt. That's right, the geniuses who wrote ObamaCare are forcing everyone to buy maternity care except the age cohort that includes women at peak fertility.

[Priceless]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

And there's your sign

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...69711152265686

The policies will include those services whether it is on the bill or not. If it makes people feel better, just ignore it.

It's like when I go to a hotel with a pool and a gym. I'm not going to use the pool and the gym, but I don't demand a lower price for my room or get angry with the people at the front desk for offering it.

[pirate]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

The policies will include those services whether it is on the bill or not. If it makes people feel better, just ignore it.

It's like when I go to a hotel with a pool and a gym. I'm not going to use the pool and the gym, but I don't demand a lower price for my room or get angry with the people at the front desk for offering it.

rationalize much?

[joecct]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

OK, this is from Newt, which will mean most of you will discount this as the rantings of a deranged man.

Obamacare’s Marriage Penalty and Divorce Incentive

President Obama’s reelection campaign raised the hackles of conservatives last year when it released an interactive web graphic called the Life of Julia. The graphic depicted “Julia’s” cradle-to-grave reliance on government, and many viewers felt it offered a disturbing glimpse of the President’s ideology.

It was particularly striking that Julia seemed to lack any family or friends. At one point she “decides” to have a baby, but she never marries. And now perhaps we know why: under Obamacare, being married would likely have cost Julia thousands of dollars a year.

Many couples buying insurance through the Obamacare exchanges will face huge premium increases if they choose to get married, according to a tool created by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s because jointly they’ll lose substantial tax credits or subsidies they were eligible for individually.

The Kaiser calculator reveals that a married couple of 64-year-olds earning a combined $62,081 a year (each earning the same salary) would pay a premium of $15,211 for a “silver” plan under Obamacare. That amounts to more than a quarter of their income (and an even larger portion after taxes). If they chose not to marry (or to get divorced if they were already married), however, they’d pay only $5,360 combined for the same coverage. That’s a marriage penalty (or divorce incentive) of nearly $10,000 a year.

The story isn’t much better for a couple of 40-year-olds, one earning $70,000 a year and the other earning $23,000 a year. If married with two children, they would pay a premium of $9,700. If they chose not to marry (or to get divorced), however, they’d pay only $3,700 combined for the same coverage. That’s a marriage penalty (or divorce incentive) of $6,000 a year. By the time their children were 18, that would add up to well over $100,000 they could have saved to send them to college. (Tom Blumer at PJ Media highlighted similarly troubling scenarios before Kaiser adjusted its calculator.)

It was Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation who first pointed out the “wedding tax” in Obamacare. That was back in January 2010 before the bill became law. Rector warned that “the bill’s anti-marriage penalties occur because of the income counting and benefit structure rules of the bill. If a two-earner couple is married, the bill counts their income jointly; since the joint income will be higher, a married couple’s health care subsidies would be lower.”

Nearly four years later as Americans log on to the exchange websites to sign up for Obamacare, many couples are discovering this unpleasant consequence for the first time. This week Al Jazeera talked to an Obamacare “navigator” in Colorado who said so far “no one” she’d talked to had signed up for coverage. “Thus far everybody has taken a look at the rates and they've walked out the door,” she said. “There's sticker shock. They just can't afford it.”

It’s a perverse law that would take such a sticker-shocked couple and tell them they could save $5,000, $7,000, even upward of $10,000 a year if they simply got divorced. At a time when nearly two in five children nationwide are born to parents who are not married to each other, this is no small problem.

This anti-marriage, pro-divorce provision needs to be changed before January 1. It should never go into effect.

The law creates a destructive incentive for the poor and their children, especially. As I relate in Chapter 10 of my new book Breakout, we know that children who grow up in single-parent households are far more likely to live in poverty. The poverty rate in 2010 for married couples with children was just 8.8 percent, compared to 40.7 percent for unmarried mothers. Children who grow up in single parent households are seven times more likely to become welfare recipients as adults, according to my friend Peter Ferrara at the Heartland Institute. So in some ways the Obamacare marriage penalty actually feeds the poverty problem.

We already have dozens of welfare programs that create terrible disincentives to marry. Obamacare’s marriage penalty makes this problem even worse, and extends it to many middle class Americans as well. Unfortunately, there are sure to be many more unpleasant surprises like this one ahead.

Your Friend,
Newt

[Old Priocless]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

The policies will include those services whether it is on the bill or not. If it makes people feel better, just ignore it.

It's like when I go to a hotel with a pool and a gym. I'm not going to use the pool and the gym, but I don't demand a lower price for my room or get angry with the people at the front desk for offering it.

Here here. The bill has been passed, and we're finding out what is in it. "If you like your plan, you can keep it" is hardly a lie. The plan just has to be a real plan, unlike the ridiculously threadbare plans out there that don't cover sh*t. We all know that's what Obama meant in his speeches, despite the protestations of the whiny conservaginas screaming "T3H socialism!1!!1!".

[St. Clown]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

The policies will include those services whether it is on the bill or not. If it makes people feel better, just ignore it.

It's like when I go to a hotel with a pool and a gym. I'm not going to use the pool and the gym, but I don't demand a lower price for my room or get angry with the people at the front desk for offering it.

You choose whether or not to make use of a hotel at all. We're now mandated to purchase insurance. In the Land of the Free we're compelled to make a purchase regardless of whether or not we want the product.

[jerphisch]

Re: The PPACA - Implementation Phase I

You choose whether or not to make use of a hotel at all. We're now mandated to purchase insurance. In the Land of the Free we're compelled to make a purchase regardless of whether or not we want the product.

Of course if you don't pay for the hotel room you can't stay there, but if you don't pay for health insurance you still get healthcare provided on the backs of everyone who does pay.