Here's my original post from the other thread:

Obamacare Plans Will Be Sold In Every U.S. County Next Year

--Move means no U.S. counties will be without coverage for 2018

“Our decision to offer coverage in the bare counties speaks to our mission and commitment to the marketplace and serving those who are in need of health care coverage,” said CareSource Chief Executive Officer Pamela Morris, in a statement with the state announcing the expansion.

Ohio’s insurance regulators have found insurers to cover about 20 counties that could have been left without Obamacare coverage. Without new plans, about 11,000 people who bought Obamacare coverage in the counties would have been unable to in 2018, according to the state. Regulators in states including Nevada, Indiana and Missouri have also persuaded insurers to enter new counties to ensure counties wouldn’t stand empty.



Huh. I heard it was imploding. In a death spiral.

If you wish to discuss the facts presented in the linked Bloomberg article respectfully, please do so.

If you instead want to change the subject into a indefensibly constantly moving goalpost on other tangentially related topics, I respectfully request you do that elsewhere.

it really does not matter between the high cost and high deductibles people are screwed anyway

From your quote of my quote in the Stream of Consciousness thread.

Droshki said:

Dont you get your insurance through your employer?

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Exactly, the shit has gone up so much with Obamacare the employer can no longer afford to pay the majority of it like they used to. Not to mention they now have to offer plans with high deductibles just to keep the costs reasonable meaning if you have anything other than routine checkups, god help you if you have a surgery, you're now going to be paying thousands. This shit didn't happen until Obamacare was implemented, it's a piece of crap healthcare plan and needs to be flushed down the shitter.

The federal health care law was supposed to offer a range of affordable health care plans through competition among private insurers. But that competition has dramatically declined in some states as a result of pullbacks by national insurers and failed co-op plans. Decline in competition means fewer choices and, often, higher prices for consumers. Nearly 1 in 5 potential Obamacare customers may have just one insurer selling plans in their communities*

The referenced BloombergPolitics article does not paint a rosey picture. It just documents another patch on a worn out tire. Same thing happened to Pinal, AZ and they didn't have a Plan for part of 2017, Feds cut a deal with BCBS to provide coverage. Does this sound like the opening line in the first paragraph? A patch here and a patch there only delays the inevitable failure as its unsustainable. Unsustainable burden on those who actuall buy policies with extreme rate increases every year while enduring less payment coverage and higher deductibles and the unsustainable cost of funded subsidies that increase the National Debt and taxpayer burden. The cost to individuals varies but every single person has a financial limit and will reach a point when enough is enough if the parasitic obamacare continues.

I will try to respond to these posts this afternoon (I'm at work right now). Before I do though, I'd like to take a moment to ask posters to keep this respectful and no name calling, etc. My goal here is the friendly exchange of information and opinions, so that we can all learn from each other. It is not my goal to prove anybody "wrong". If we don't keep it at that level, the moderators will have to shut it down, which I know they do try to avoid having to do.

I asked my girlfriend about her health care plan this morning and got some interesting numbers there to share. In the end though, I suspect that Obamacare is much like the blind guys touching the elephant. What it appears to be like, probably very much depends on what part of it one is touching.

Have a good Friday.

OK.
So the way I understand it (and I’m certainly open to correction) when we talk about healthcare insurance in America, we’re largely talking about 3 different groups of people here.
For convenience, we’ll call the first one “Group A”. These are your employer sponsored folks. They get insurance through work. Its how most non-elderly Americans get their insurance, and has been forever. Typically, premium cost is split 75/25 percent.

I was looking at a Kaiser Family Foundation graph at lunch. Employer sponsored insurance dropped from 71% to 66 % off all working Americans from 1999 to 2014. Interestingly enough, higher income people are more likely to be offered insurance through work then lower paid workers. This jives with reality as we experience it. Low wage earners are usually low skill, and employers don’t have to offer this incentive. Lots of graphs at this link, I think it’s worth a look:
I think it’s worth a look.

Trends in Employer-Sponsored Insurance Offer and Coverage Rates, 1999-2014

Here’s the main one though.

Now, that groundwork laid, I think we can stipulate that this is a free market based thing where companies set their own pricing and deductibles, and caps. Typically, an employer will sift through the carriers, select one, and offer a couple different versions of plans though that one carrier (my girlfriend falls into this category, more on her details later). but a large employer like the US Government, may have a whole menu. It’s not unheard of in small companies for employees to get a letter from HR in October saying “XYZ will be handling our benefits this year. Here’s your new plans and doctors. Pick one.” It happened to me when I worked private sector between government gigs.

The second group, we’ll call Group B. These will be our Obamacare folks. In many ways it seems to operate not unlike the employee sponsored, where the “Exchange” acts as the employer to group people together. You pick an insurer and a plan. Some cost more and have better features, some cost less. These people may pay 100% of their premium or less, with the government subsidies available to lower wage earners. Granted the rates here have been going up, but subsidies have kept pace, so as I said before, this should be included the estimation of the actual burden.

Now, the subsidies for the premiums have never been questioned. However, the subsidies the government applies to copays and deductibles have been challenged repeatedly, and this is the thing you hear Donald trump threating to cut off. Understandably, this makes insurance companies nervous and drives up prices. There is no guarantee the government will continue to pay these—they pay them on a month-to-month basis, while its battled in court. Insurance companies are forced to hedge their bets, while they plead with the government to come out with a policy statement saying that they are going to pay them for the foreseeable future, and provide some market security.

Image for a moment what your car insurance would look like if your insurance company didn’t know what your actual collision deductible was going to be in any given month?

Thirdly we have what well call group C. Therese are people that are buying insurance on the open market, or not. Full freight insurance is expensive. Always has been. (I remember my mother getting laid off in the 80’s and trying to afford COBRA. She couldn’t.) That’s why employers offer it as a benefit.

Obamacare, to my understanding, was formed to bridge the gap from Group A to Group C. To give people that didn’t get it through work and couldn’t afford the full priced insurance on their own.

Now to Viking’s statement, I don’t understand how the group B ecosystem is affecting the pricing in the Group A. They’re both closed ecosystems that have not much to do with each other except sharing parent companies. If the exchange based policies are losing money, the companies would increase the premium, as everyone says they are. There’s no reason for them to affect the group A premiums.

Now my girlfriend’s experience seems to support this thinking. She pays $90/month for a relatively high deductible plan through her employer. It rose in price from last year when it was $80/month. Her deductible is $1500, but her employer puts $500 in a HSA for her, and her catastrophic cap is only $3000. So that seems a very manageable level of exposure for less than $100/month. (Prior to that, she carried a plan through the same insurer that was $210 a month. It had lower deductibles, but I dont have those numbers handy.) This seems like a reasonable cost to me. Hazard insurance on my Panama City Beach house with a bare bones policy runs about $150 a month, and only covers about $150,000- - a small fraction of what a kidney transplant, or brain tumor surgery would cost a health insurance carrier.


I would certainly look forward to other’s first hand experiences.

Now I should stipulate that I in no way think Obamacare is anywhere near "perfect", and in fact, I pretty much dont even have a dog in this fight. Like Frank (who may correct me if I'm wrong on his status), I'm already on a single payer government healthcare system, and I dont see that changing anytime soon.

Do I think it needs help? Hell yea. But threatening to cut off the subsidies for the poor people and all, well, that just doesnt seem helpful to me.

OP, just like you were wrong about Hillary winning, I'm afraid you're wrong about this one. And no, I don't care about Bloomberg's stats. They are irrelevant to the many Americans like my self, who now pay more for less coverage.
Obamacare sucks and needs to be repealed.


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Dan1612 said:

OP, just like you were wrong about Hillary winning, I'm afraid you're wrong about this one. And no, I don't care about Bloomberg's stats. They are irrelevant to the many Americans like my self, who now pay more for less coverage.
Obamacare sucks and needs to be repealed.


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If you cannot stay on topic, I respectfully asked that you not post in the thread. Now move on, son. You tried to start trouble in SAWMAN's thread, and now you're trying it here.

I call bull when I see it. Have fun baiting. Over and out...


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Ok, on topic.
My insurance went from $270 per month to $650, to $785, to$850. Canceled my policy, Walgreens quit excepting BCBS for a year, all the while it pays for nothing. Not sure what you want to discuss, just the Bloomberg article?
If it's working out for some that's great, but for myself and many others it's not.


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And the problem with subsidies, it's a guesstimate of your future earnings. Well I'm self employed with business and rental income, problem is it's also hard to predict future earnings, good years, bad years, etc. and when I'm wrong I get a penalty, great I try to do the right thing and bam, I'm penalized.


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I havent seen any increase in my insurance, I have Florida Blue, still pay 25 or 35 co pays and 5-10-15 for medications.

3 men & a boat said:

Ok, on topic.
My insurance went from $270 per month to $650, to $785, to$850. Canceled my policy, Walgreens quit excepting BCBS for a year, all the while it pays for nothing. Not sure what you want to discuss, just the Bloomberg article?
If it's working out for some that's great, but for myself and many others it's not.


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It was never my intention to put myself in a position to defend the entire program. I dont feel that strongly about it (as noted above), it would be impossible to do so, and I have no intention of doing so. I've never said it didn't have issues. I merely pointed out in the SoC thread that every single county would be covered by the exchanges this year, and so that it was not collapsing as was reported. This then went the same way its going here, ceartin people thinking I was a champion for the program, and whatnot. So to save the SoC thread, I moved the discussion to over here. Personal attacks against me wont solve anyone's problems. I stated in the beginning, the thread was to be a mature discussion of experiences and ideas.

3 men & a boat said:

Ok, on topic.
My insurance went from $270 per month to $650, to $785, to$850. Canceled my policy, Walgreens quit excepting BCBS for a year, all the while it pays for nothing. Not sure what you want to discuss, just the Bloomberg article?
If it's working out for some that's great, but for myself and many others it's not.


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I see actually, that BCBS changed thier whole network up, and that you still have many places to fill prescriptions with this insurance?

We want to make sure our members understand their health plans and get the most out of their pharmacy benefits. The new network of pharmacies includes CVS, Costco, Kmart, Long’s Drugs, Target, Walmart — as well as grocer pharmacies such as Bi-Lo, Food Lion, Harris Teeter, Ingles, Kroger, Winn-Dixie and Publix — and many others.

It is important to note, however, that Walgreens and Rite-Aid are not in the Advanced Choice Pharmacy Network. We will not cover prescription drugs purchased out of network.

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3 men & a boat said:

Ok, on topic.
My insurance went from $270 per month to $650, to $785, to$850. Canceled my policy, Walgreens quit excepting BCBS for a year, all the while it pays for nothing. Not sure what you want to discuss, just the Bloomberg article?
If it's working out for some that's great, but for myself and many others it's not.


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You say that your insurance covers "nothing" ? That doesn't seem quite right, either.

Could you be more specific?

Is yours a business plan ? Or just a regular consumer plan? Was it purchased on the exchange? Could you get a business plan, since you own a business?

DSPLCD1 said:

I havent seen any increase in my insurance, I have Florida Blue, still pay 25 or 35 co pays and 5-10-15 for medications.

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Sounds pretty reasonable. Is yours employer sponsored?