The Obamacare hell that awaits you

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obamacare hell 1

 

Obamacare was sold to America on a set of false premises. The most famous of them?

 “no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”

And the fools believed him.

And he repeated that promise at least 36 times.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/qpa-5JdCnmo[/youtube]

That promise was worth as much as any Obama assurance- absolutely nothing.

Here’s another:

“If you’ve got health insurance through your employer, you can keep your health insurance, keep your choice of doctor, keep your plan,” Mr. Obama said in his Oct. 15, 2008 debate against McCain. “The only thing we’re going to try to do is lower costs so that those cost savings are passed onto you. And we estimate we can cut the average family’s premium by about $2,500 per year.”

He spit that promise out a lot.

Watch:

[youtube]https://youtu.be/66bgpRRSDD4[/youtube]

And then Obama took the stupid pill. The BIG one.

“…your employer, it’s estimated, would see premiums fall by as much as 3000% which means they could give you a raise.”

And the fools believed him.

Now Obamacare hell awaits all of us. Firstly, the rate increases.

Health Insurers Seek Hefty Rate Boosts

Major insurers in some states are proposing hefty rate boosts for plans sold under the federal health law, setting the stage for an intense debate this summer over the law’s impact.

In New Mexico, market leader Health Care Service Corp. is asking for an average jump of 51.6% in premiums for 2016. The biggest insurer in Tennessee, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, has requested an average 36.3% increase. In Maryland, market leader CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield wants to raise rates 30.4% across its products. Moda Health, the largest insurer on the Oregon health exchange, seeks an average boost of around 25%.

All of them cite high medical costs incurred by people newly enrolled under the Affordable Care Act.

Under that law, insurers file proposed rates to their local regulator and, in most cases, to the federal government. Some states have begun making the filings public, as they prepare to review the requests in coming weeks. The federal government is due to release its rate filings in early June.

Insurance regulators in many states can force carriers to scale back requests they can’t justify. The Obama administration can ask insurers seeking increases of 10% or more to explain themselves, but cannot force them to cut rates. Rates will become final by the fall.

 
Experts see big price hikes for Obamacare

The cost of Obamacare could rise for millions of Americans next year, with one insurer proposing a 50 percent hike in premiums, fueling the controversy about just how “affordable” the Affordable Care Act really is.

The eye-popping 50 percent hike by New Mexico insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield is an outlier, and state officials may not allow it to go through. But health insurance experts are predicting that premiums will rise more significantly in 2016 than in the first two years of Obamacare exchange coverage. In 2015, for example, premiums increased by an average of 5.4 percent, according to PwC’s Health Research Institute.

The premium increases come at a tenuous time for Obamacare, which remains under fire from a Republican Congress that wants to repeal the law, while a Supreme Court ruling on federal subsidies for the health insurance looms in June as well.

“Insurers seem to be reporting higher trend, which means they are seeing bigger increases in health care costs,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “But really what’s going on here is they now have data showing what the risk pool looks like. Initially in 2014 they were completely guessing about who was going to enroll and how much health care they were going to use.”

Many plans haven’t yet made public their proposed rates; Monday is the deadline for publishing and providing an explanation for rate hikes of at least 10 percent. None announced so far is as dramatic as the New Mexico plan, although a few others are also quite sharp.

We here predicted this a long time ago. There is simply no way you’re going to eliminate pre-existing conditions, add illegals to the rolls of free health care, add millions of new Medicare patients and lower health care costs.

Impossible.

And still the fools believed.

The left continues to produce meaningless polls showing how satisfied people are with their Obamacare. That succeeds because people still do not understand the difference between care and coverage. They may be covered but when they need care and those deductibles kick in, they’re not going to be “satisfied” for long.

I wrote about that back in 2013:

For many, rates might come down, but the deductibles are the rest of the story and they are onerous. Obama supporters do not understand the difference between coverage and care. Getting coverage is easy. They are going to find out that getting care is expensive.

And getting sick will kill you.

And it comes to pass:

Democrats see skimpy insurance as the next health care issue

—A Commonwealth Fund study found that 31 million adults were underinsured last year. Half of them had problems with medical bills or medical debt. Seven million were underinsured due to high deductibles alone. “The steady growth in the proliferation and size of deductibles threatens to increase underinsurance in the years ahead,” the study concluded.

—A study by the advocacy group Families USA found that one-quarter of the people with individual health insurance policies went without care in 2014 because they could not afford the out-of-pocket costs. The study singled out high deductibles.

—The Center for American Progress, a think tank often aligned with the White House, found that employers have been shifting a disproportionate burden of health care costs onto workers. As a result, the report said, employees and their families have not shared in the benefits of a prolonged lull in medical inflation. The group recommended several policy changes, including rebates for workers under certain conditions.

democrat Jim McDermott admits to the deceit:

“We’ve got some 17 million more people covered … but they can’t access the care they seem to be entitled to,” McDermott said. “It costs too much to use the care. That’s the deceptive part about it.”

Deceptive? Sure. McDermott and his execrable brethren wrote this thing and passed this thing. If it is “deceptive” it is because Obama and his party are deceptive. Curiously, democrats see this as a campaign issue, despite their having created and nurtured the monster.

The full deceit of the left now is coming into focus. Obamacare isn’t an end unto itself. It is the beginning of the end. It is foundation upon which the new socialist utopian state will be built following the dismantling of the United States.

Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, one of the Senate’s most liberal Democrats and a veteran of many legislative battles, urged his colleagues on the Left to go ahead and pass the bill. “The key to this is that this modest home, we can put additions onto it in the future,” Harkin told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in December 2009. “But if we don’t have the starter home, we’re never going to be able to put those additions on.”

Harkin’s view prevailed, and many Democrats came to view Obamacare as a starter home. Now, even though the Affordable Care Act still faces an uncertain future in the courts, they want to start building the additions.

And it means more taxes and more flesh from those who produce to be eaten by those who do not:

Republicans have long predicted the increase in deductibles. But most analyses from liberal groups pay scant notice to the effect that Obamacare’s edicts are having on deductibles. Instead, groups on the left like the Center for American Progress are coming up with proposals for new mandates, like more free preventive services and a “shared savings rebate,” in which employers would be forced to turn over some healthcare payments to employees, as solutions to the problem.

There is even more hell to come. Doctors are going to quit the profession at an accelerating pace, in large part because of the Obamacare EHR mandate:

As one of them wrote, “My colleagues who have already left practice all say they still love patient care, being a doctor. They just couldn’t stand everything else.” By which he meant “a never-ending attack on the profession from government, insurance companies, and lawyers … progressively intrusive and usually unproductive rules and regulations,” topped by an electronic health records (EHR) mandate that produces nothing more than “billing and legal documents” — and degraded medicine.

I hear this everywhere. Virtually every doctor and doctors’ group I speak to cites the same litany, with particular bitterness about the EHR mandate. As another classmate wrote, “The introduction of the electronic medical record into our office has created so much more need for documentation that I can only see about three-quarters of the patients I could before, and has prompted me to seriously consider leaving for the first time.”

It achieves absolutely nothing but the costs are onerous:

The newly elected Barack Obama told the nation in 2009 that “it just won’t save billions of dollars” — $77 billion a year, promised the administration — “and thousands of jobs, it will save lives.” He then threw a cool $27 billion at going paperless by 2015.

It’s 2015 and what have we achieved? The $27 billion is gone, of course. The $77 billion in savings became a joke. Indeed, reported the Health and Human Services inspector general in 2014, “EHR technology can make it easier to commit fraud,” as in Medicare fraud, the copy-and-paste function allowing the instant filling of vast data fields, facilitating billing inflation.

That’s just the beginning of the losses. Consider the myriad small practices that, facing ruinous transition costs in equipment, software, training and time, have closed shop, gone bankrupt or been swallowed by some larger entity.

And if doctors refuse, they are punished with reduced fees.

We’re not done yet.

Eventually the left will push for a single payer system and then to reduce costs further a liberal government would turn to the Disney model: eliminate the Americans and replace them with cheap imported H1B foreign labor.

Cheap imported medical labor will be imported to cut costs. Your child’s brain surgery will be done by an H1B immigrant with a degree from somewhere you’ve never heard of. The best and brightest will have no interest in investing gargantuan sums of money and incurring galactic amounts of debt to work for what doctors in India are paid. The doctor doing your daughter’s pelvic exam might have been picking lettuce a year before.

You Obama voters- want to know what you’re destroying? Go here. See where the highest cancer survival rates in the world are. You have voted to disincentivize the provision of the highest quality of care. Congratulations.

We’re still not done.

Having those medical records online means one thing. They’re going to be hacked. As doctors we are subject to HIPAA laws that are supposed to guard your privacy.

You can kiss that goodbye.

Having your records hacked means the world will know about your penile implant, your daughter’s genital warts, your son’s drug addiction and your wife’s treatment for alcohol addition and for depression. Right now there are cretins who post the personal information of others and demand payment for its removal from their site. Imagine the same thing happening with your medical records.

It IS going to happen and when it happens to you, thank Barack Insane Obama and the democrat party.

And to think that the risk corridors haven’t expired yet and the big business mandate hasn’t taken effect. They occur after Obama is out of office. As I said, Obama is leaving a huge pile of sh*t for his successor.

Welcome to Hell.

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Gee, when will the mega genius Greg show up to discredit you Dr. J because we all know he’s the source of all knowledge.

We can only hope that the GOP get’s off the stick and helps to kill this monster Obamacaresless.

Cheap imported medical labor will be imported to cut costs. Your child’s brain surgery will be done by an H1B immigrant with a degree from somewhere you’ve never heard of. The best and brightest will have no interest in investing gargantuan sums of money and incurring galactic amounts of debt to work for what doctors in India are paid.

Interesting that ObamaCare led to this.
I read many years ago (when the UK was having a medical worker shortage) that someday, if we in the USA didn’t do all we could to make our doctors happy to be doctors, we would be in a worldwide competition for scarce medically trained doctors, nurses and technicians.
Since a foreign degree is what we will settle for who’s to say the student getting that degree didn’t just bribe a foreign college employee for it, or fake it.
And just why would a foreign doctor necessarily have your best interests at heart?
He might, or, he might be happy to see you (the Ugly American) dead.

Perhaps there were a few unspoken cavaets that people should have been smart enough to figure out for themselves. For example:

Nobody could guarantee that your doctor would keep you.

Nobody could guarantee that your employer would keep your preferred insurance plan.

Regarding the estimated $2,500 family savings, anyone should know that an estimate is not a promise. That’s why it’s wasn’t called a promise.

Obama’s Health Law: Who Was Helped Most

Not to worry. Republicans may still manage to wreck Obamacare. Then you will find out specifically what they will do—or more likely em>won’t do. They do have majorities in both houses of Congress at this point. Thus far, after 5 months, they haven’t actually done anything. They’ve spent their time blowing hot air and posturing, while avoiding any risks that would be involve in putting words into legislative action. If they won’t take any meaningful action now, they sure as hell won’t do so as we get closer to the 2016 elections.

Do you want serious uncertainty? Total chaos? Just tear down Obamacare with no clear plan concerning what follows or how it will work. That’s what you’ll get.

@Greg:

So you admit that Obama was lying when he said you could keep your doctor and your insurance plan….

@Greg:
Obama also said premiums would cost about the same as a cell phone bill. But that doesn’t matter you will be an apologist for this liar until your last breath.

“…your employer, it’s estimated, would see premiums fall by as much as 3000% which means they could give you a raise.”

This, of course, has been converted into the happy-dance, “Premiums are not going up as fast as they WOULD have!! Yay!!” This is a certain as the millions of jobs “saved” by the “stimulus”.

“We’ve got some 17 million more people covered … but they can’t access the care they seem to be entitled to,” McDermott said. “It costs too much to use the care. That’s the deceptive part about it.”

If one refused to read the damned thing, one cannot blame “deception” as the reason one voted for it.

He then threw a cool $27 billion at going paperless by 2015.

Back in the 90’s when we “went paperless”, the use of paper and printing skyrocketed because everyone felt they needed to keep a record of certain documents or status’ to CYA in case of questions and not being able to find the information readily. Now, everything gets printed, kept a while, then discarded. Paperless, my ass.

@Greg:

Nobody could guarantee that your doctor would keep you.

Plenty of people predicted they wouldn’t as details of this abysmal care act leaked out, but they were shouted down as racists who hated Obama because he is black and who hate the poor, want them to die and want to push Granny over a cliff. Remember any of that?

If you are going to cut the payments to a doctor by 50 -75%, you can damned sure bet he is going to get out of that line of work. Only an idiot would not be able to see that coming and only a liar would claim NOT to.

Nobody could guarantee that your employer would keep your preferred insurance plan.

Same tune, different verse. There were those who guaranteed they would NOT because of the rising taxes on “Cadillac plans” (i.e, plans that actually provided coverage). We now know that eliminating employer provided plans was the purpose of the taxes and mandates so as to dip into the $250 billion per year the IRS misses out on due to before-taxes benefits.

Regarding the estimated $2,500 family savings, anyone should know that an estimate is not a promise. That’s why it’s wasn’t called a promise.

A campaign promise is not a promise either, is it, Greg? That’s usually called a “lie”. One who makes them, knowing otherwise is usually referred to as a “liar”. Obama is a pathological liar. Those who repeat and defend his lies are as well.

Do you want serious uncertainty? Total chaos? Just tear down Obamacare with no clear plan concerning what follows or how it will work. That’s what you’ll get.

Indeed. And it will all be Obama’s fault because he created this mess knowing full well that he was lying and constructing a failure.

And you voted for it.

I notice Greg has not touched this:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/d4eef9cd0a8a4156806e210bda02a172/democrats-see-skimpy-insurance-next-health-care-issue
Democrats see skimpy insurance as the next health care issue

—A Commonwealth Fund study found that 31 million adults were underinsured last year.
Half of them had problems with medical bills or medical debt.
Seven million were underinsured due to high deductibles alone.
The steady growth in the proliferation and size of deductibles threatens to increase underinsurance in the years ahead,” the study concluded.

—A study by the advocacy group Families USA found that one-quarter of the people with individual health insurance policies went without care in 2014 because they could not afford the out-of-pocket costs.
The study singled out high deductibles.

This is what DrJohn (and I and others) have been saying for a long time.
Coverage ≠ Care.
How often have Liberals realized this only too late?

“Obamacare is making underinsurance the new normal,” said Woolhandler. “It will reduce the number of uninsured from 50 million to 30 million, but the new coverage is full of holes.” http://www.pnhp.org/news/2013/april/insured-but-unable-to-afford-health-care
Thanks to the ACA, there are a couple of preventative screenings included in these huge costs, but overall, what we have going on here is a huge shifting of costs onto the backs of the insured.
As we all know, there is zero price transparency in the US healthcare system, so God help you if you plan on calling around to get the best price for a bypass before signing up. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/05/1228977/–I-m-very-lucky-I-m-about-to-pay-8665-a-year-for-crappy-high-deductible-insurance-in-NYS
Yeah, that a Daily Kos ”diarist.”
She’s such a big liberal Obama supporter she actually was trying to help people sign up for ObamaCare!
Now she concludes, ”What was I thinking?”

@Pete, #4:

Reality can’t accurately be reduced to a handful of statements that are from two to six words in length, but political propagandists don’t much care about reality. What they’re interested in is creating attitudes and controlling minds. Obama lied is one of the right’s most simple-minded propaganda memes.

Clinton lied. Bush lied. Obama lied. Of course when Clinton lied and Obama lied, nobody died. Rhymes are helpful.

@DrJohn, #6:

In which clip does Obama say “this is only an estimate. It may not happen.”?

A degree of uncertainty is part of the meaning of the word estimate.

Why does the GOP need to be responsible for democrats writing an unconstitutional law?

What they would be responsible for would be replacing what they have worked so industriously to destroy with something different that works as well or better. They wouldn’t be able to get away with looking innocent, blaming the courts, and pointing fingers at Obama. Unless they’ve got a better replacement in mind, they could very well be paving the road to a single payer system an election or two down the road.

Republicans keep asserting that Obamacare has had dire consequences. The truth of the matter is that most people aren’t seeing them, and that millions of Americans are now in better situations with regard to access to health care.

Upward redistribution of income and wealth in America has been going on for a couple of decades. If that can’t be moderated, the erosive effects on the average person will eventually erase whatever remains of the American dream. I favor rational, predictable, moderate mechanisms to even things out. Marxism is one of the results you can get when that doesn’t happen.

@Greg: Unless they’ve got a better replacement in mind

There is a main canard of the Left.
Republicans could merely repeal a bad law, they don’t need to ”replace” it.
We could default to the way it was before.
OR, as many Republicans had put forward when the short time for debate (what 1 minute?) existed…….
Allowing coverage to follow the person rather than be tied to a job or a state.
Reduction of malpractice amounts.
Allowing those with pre-existing conditions to gain coverage by creating supported high-risk pools.
Real tax breaks for getting and keeping low-cost coverage.
Allow people who want to to open medical savings accounts for those times when they go over their per-year limits of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Also Republicans wanted to allow small businesses and even trade associations to pool together to buy insurance as a group.

Unfortunately we’ve got a gov’t employee filled behemouth instead.
How many billions of your tax dollars has gone to partying gov’t employees who should have been building web sites, manning phones and learning how to answer questions from a confused public?

@Nanny G, #13:

Unfortunately we’ve got a gov’t employee filled behemouth instead.
How many billions of your tax dollars has gone to partying gov’t employees who should have been building web sites, manning phones and learning how to answer questions from a confused public?

I don’t consider that to be an accurate characterization. As should have been expected, there were problems with rolling out such a complex system over so a short a period of time. Those problems have been for the most part resolved.

When is the last time anyone saw a factual news story covering any realized aspect of the predicted Obamacare disaster? There’s a reason we’re not seeing such stories: Nothing of the sort happened.

If you want to see better examples of billion upon billions of taxpayer dollars flushed down the toilet, take a close look at private contractor cost overrun totals relating to various Department of Defense development projects. In some cases, you can even take a look at what we ultimately got for the money. Or take a close look at the result of no-bid contracts for providing the military with goods and services during wartime.

@Greg: Greg, is that you way of saying Obama lied to America go get elected?? If nobody could predict what you say then why int he hell did he say it?? America is proving smarter than most wacko liberals who think Obolacare is a success. The House was taken back in historic numbers and then the Senate in the last election cycle!! NOT voting is no excuse it is a statement by Dumbocrats that they are not happy either. The most corrupt, fraudulent, and inept methods of healthcare distribution is Medicare and Medical and now Obolacre!! All government healthcare plans are poorly managed!! Private administration of healthcare is by far the most beneficial and least corrupt!! What is amazing is that Obolacare to date has NOT been fully implemented!! Democrats know that when the group plans are raped by this turd the real chaos and cost will begin!!

@Greg: As should have been expected, there were problems with rolling out such a complex system over so a short a period of time. Those problems have been for the most part resolved.

They had FIVE YEARS Greg.
Five years to create a simple web site and phone support system.
It has been rightly pointed out that, sans the partying, we managed to win WWI and WWII in less than five years.
We developed, tested and used uranium-based atom bombs.
We managed to send up an unmanned spacecraft in response to the Soviets doing so in less than four MONTHS.
We also responded to the Soviet manned space flight with out own in just THREE WEEKS!
Saying the ObamaCare rollout was too complex is a cop-out, plain and simple.
Everybody was partying on the taxpayers’ dime and thinking soneone else would do their work for them.
That’s not the old way Americans got things done.
That is top-down following their leader, Obama, who partied, too and still does.

Perhaps it could have been done more quickly and efficiently by government system designers, rather than by private sector contractors.

@Greg:

As should have been expected, there were problems with rolling out such a complex system over so a short a period of time. Those problems have been for the most part resolved.

As Nan told you; it took the federal government 5 years to create a website that did not work. Compare that to how long it took, from concept idea to implementation, to get Amazon or Ebay on line; ONE YEAR. So while the government had available to it the finest computer minds in the world, it could not create a website that was even remotely workable. What a better example of how the federal government is incapable of doing any thing right I don’t know of.

If you want to see better examples of billion upon billions of taxpayer dollars flushed down the toilet, take a close look at private contractor cost overrun totals relating to various Department of Defense development projects.

Only mental midgets justify one wrong by pointing to another wrong. And you wonder why I call you an idiot?

@Greg:

Clinton lied. Bush lied. Obama lied. Of course when Clinton lied and Obama lied, nobody died. Rhymes are helpful.

Well, here’s the problem. Where you leftists always claim Bush “lied and people died” it is, in fact, those claiming he actually lied that are doing the lying. Bush never lied about WMD’s, never cherry-picked information, never hid the truth. The intelligence was simply faulty. However, when it came to his numerous affairs and abuses, Bill Clinton LIED. When it comes to how much she knew before hand, how little she prepared and the story about a video causing the Benghazi attack, Hillary LIED. When it comes to promises that anyone that wanted to could keep their doctor and insurance, Obama, as has been shown and proven definitely, LIED.

A degree of uncertainty is part of the meaning of the word estimate.

Gee, I don’t recall Obama ever saying, “Vote for me and you will either save $2700 a year on insurance, or it might just cost you more than you are paying now, you will have less coverage and your deductible will make you retch. It’s all just an estimation.” Can you show me where he laid THAT out?

As should have been expected, there were problems with rolling out such a complex system over so a short a period of time.

Three years, Greg. Three years to roll this out. Three years to build a functioning website. No, as the government usually does, there was no oversight, no deadlines, no responsibilities, no penalties, no pain and suffering for failure. Just, “oh, well, that went badly. Here, here’s another $600 million to do it better.” That is EXACTLY why the government should be kept as far away from health care as is possible. See the VA for more examples.

If you want to see better examples of billion upon billions of taxpayer dollars flushed down the toilet, take a close look at private contractor cost overrun totals relating to various Department of Defense development projects.

And what do we have in common here, Greg? OH! That’s right!! Government bureaucracy oversight!! The oversight by people who are not held accountable for overruns, not held accountable for failures, not held accountable for delays and rarely held accountable for corruption and theft, unless a Republican can be linked to it.

Perhaps it could have been done more quickly and efficiently by government system designers, rather than by private sector contractors.

Based on WHAT exactly do you make that assumption?

I am too damned old. Really miss the days when smart, thoughtful, moral people let people be free to work stuff out.

I did not even mind so much when the stupid and connected got placed into power.

Just that whole descent into madness and cannibilism.
That really sucks.

@Greg: Greggie Greggie Greggie, one small problem and that is Bush did NOT lie!!I have asked you to prove this and you have NOT. Easy to prove Obama and Clinton lied!! Once again proof is something you and other wacko liberals are challenged to provide. If you can prove to me Bush lied I will believe you, until then you are the liar!!

@Greg:

Or take a close look at the result of no-bid contracts for providing the military with goods and services during wartime.

Ummmm, interesting that you are selective in what services you object to being provided by no-bid contracts. I don’t seem to remember you complaining that the contract to build the Obamacare website was given to CGI Federal, a subsidiary of a Canadian company on a no-bid basis. So CGI Federal, who couldn’t build a website that wasn’t even as complicated as Amazon or Ebay, or any other health insurance website, was paid a tony $500 MILLION for a total failure and then we had to pay CGI even more to clean up their own mess.

You’re such a pathetic hack, Gullible Greggie.

@retire05, #23:

You’re such a pathetic hack, Gullible Greggie.

Actually, a person would have to be pretty damn gullible to swallow the story that there’s nothing particularly complicated about a national website designed to present the entire nation with information on all available health insurance options on a county-by-county basis, and to calculate costs and then process applications on an individual basis. Of course, you want to believe such a story. That always makes the pitch easier to sell.

Ummmm, interesting that you are selective in what services you object to being provided by no-bid contracts.

I seem to recall Halliburton and it’s subsidiaries blatantly ripping off taxpayers to the tune a billion or so. Remember the details? $45 per case for soft drinks; $100 per bag for laundry services…

A top US Army procurement official said today Halliburton’s deals in Iraq were the worst example of contract abuse she had seen as Pentagon auditors flagged more than $US1 billion ($A1.3 billion) of potential overcharges by the Texas-based firm.

How quickly and completely we forgive and forget. Of course, economically delivering Diet Cokes and providing laundry services is an infinitely more complex proposition than designing and rolling out a national online health insurance clearing house.

@Greg:

Listen, you pathetic hack, I NEVER said that creating the Obamacare website was not difficult. So stop trying to insinuate I did. But it was no more difficult that any other website that has to use people’s personal information, including zip code, to determine costs and benefits. What the government, for $500 MILLION, paid for by taxpayers, could not do in a timely manner, other insurance companies do every day.

And then, you excuse bad behavior by pointing out other bad behavior. It’s like, for you, two wrongs make one right.

BTW, you did know that the KBR contract was granted under Clinton, right?

@retire05: Next time you watch this scene……….

@Greg:

$45 per case for soft drinks; $100 per bag for laundry services…

How much SHOULD a case of sodi pop cost when it is shipped overseas, has to have security to protect it as it is off-loaded, shipped and distributed? How much would you charge to do laundry in an area where bullets fly and bombs go off, plus the cost of shipping equipment that is going to be cheaper to leave behind?

You people with no idea of how coats multiply when dealing with the government (much less in a hot-zone) are a joke. I work in the aviation industry and, I’ll tell you, whenever you have to deal with federal regulations and federal authorities, something like the proverbial “$1500 toilet seat” is actually a bargain.

Give anyone $600 million and 3 years and you will have your website. Give that to a Michelle crony and make clear there are no penalties for being late or complete failure and you get what we got. Is there any ongoing investigation into what happened to all that money?

Uh…… no. There isn’t. Waste, corruption and lack of interest.

@retire05:

Listen, you pathetic hack, I NEVER said that creating the Obamacare website was not difficult. So stop trying to insinuate I did.

What you said was this:

So CGI Federal, who couldn’t build a website that wasn’t even as complicated as Amazon or Ebay, or any other health insurance website, was paid a tony $500 MILLION for a total failure and then we had to pay CGI even more to clean up their own mess.

Why would you think retail and auction websites like Amazon and eBay are technically more complex than healthcare.gov? Larger size doesn’t necessarily imply greater complexity. They’ve also been evolving for a couple of decades. Do you imagine their networks ran like Swiss watches from day 1? I don’t know what their total investments in hardware and software might be, but I’m sure it’s way over $500 million. Amazon recently committed to investing $2 billion just to expand their online retail operation in India.

Healthcare.gov isn’t just a website. The website is only the interface that the public sees.

Is there any ongoing investigation into what happened to all that money?

I understand there’s something called the Government Accounting Office that routinely monitors such things. Even so, perhaps the republican Congressional majorities can arrange to burn through few more million taxpayer dollars to get soundbites they can put on FOX News. As we’ve all seen, there’s no need to actually prove anything. It’s all about getting a spotlight to stand in while you make allegations.

@Greg:

Your deliberate obtuseness doesn’t fool anyone with 2 functioning neurons, Greg.

You are saying – as is typical of the leftist -that leftists are not responsible for making ridiculous claims that cannot possibly ever produce the results they propagandize, and in fact always produce the deleterious effects conservatives warn against should the leftist policy being debated be enacted.

You are so dishonest that in spite of video evidence of Obama clearly stating his marxist health program would not take away your doctor or private insurance plan…or that insurance plan costs would decrease and result in more jobs…you insist that believing the words of Obama and his ilk, which were repeated more than 36 times (that’s the number of videos we can find of Obama making these lies, but he surely said it off camera as well) you reveal the depth of malfeasance inherent in the leftist by saying, “Nobody should have believed him….”

Why did Obama make those claims over and over and over, Greg, if we weren’t supposed to believe them? Either Obama and the Obamacare architects, along with all the democrats who voted for this marxist fail, were too stupid to see the debacle that would result…OR THEY KNEW AND DIDN’T CARE because the underlying goal was never to get health care to the uninsured.

Stupid or evil. The definition of the left in all things.

Well done, DrJ. Even people on the lower end of the income scale are furious with both their increasing costs and their degrading coverage. This disaster should remain in the headlines and at the top of the debate list for the next year and half.

The real intention was never to have health care guaranteed for all — this bill was intended to implement what O/J have intended throughout all of their Constitution Stompings, . . . inject Government deeply into the lives of everyone in America, paying taxes or not, illegal or not. All their actions have been consistent with this, from the IRS, to Obamacare, to the insane international trade deal they are ramming into the Nation.

In some states and counties exchange health insurance premiums are up in 2015; in others, they’re down. Overall, the national average is up. Here’s an interactive map.

For most people with insurance, individual monthly premiums were steadily increasing for many years before Obamacare was passed. Family coverage premiums were going up even faster. The problem isn’t really Obamacare. It’s the rapid escalation of medical service provider charges and prescription drug costs.

@Greg: When premiums go down, deductibles go up. WAAAAAAAYYYYYYY up.

You leftists seem to want people to believe that someone of moderate means getting an insurance policy for $200 a month is set for life, even though to use their “coverage”, they would have to come up with $5000 out of their pocket. This reveals the delusion of the left. Not everyone has a foundation through which they receive an avalanche of money around the clock so they can go buy and do whatever they want. Not everyone can spend money they don’t have (or print more of it) so they can just keep spending regardless of income. Some people work for a living and can barely afford the daily essentials, much less being forced to purchase an insurance policy they could never afford to use.

@DrJohn:

Gullible Greggie is one of those “progressives” that believes he has a right to the labor of others. Never mind that you paid for the years of education that it took to get that M.D. behind your name; never mind that you worked long, hard hours for slave labor wages while doing your internship/residency; never mind that you had to go massively into debt to open your practice long before you treated that first patient in that private practice; your skills belong to him, not you.

You see, you didn’t build that, someone else did it for you. They built the college you attended, the hospital you interned in, the building you opened your practice in, etc. In Gullible Greggie’s mind, that means that without others, you could have never achieved your goal of being a physician. So you owe him, and all the other irresponsible, useless wastes of space that permeate our society. And God forbid you should benefit from your intellect and years of training, what a greedy person you are.

The left will tell you that health care (a service by others) is their right because it is needed for them to continue to live and if they can’t pay for it, or think the cost too high, well, you should just buck up and provide it for them. That mentality is rampant in the left wing as we see in Detroit where residents there refuse to pay their water bills, a service provided for by others that is also needed to continue to live, thinking that the city owes it to them.

Gullible Greggie is the problem with this country today. He, and so many others, think that the benefit of the hard work and intellect of others should be given freely to them.
He said:

It’s the rapid escalation of medical service provider charges and prescription drug costs.

Ummm. Let me see: my doctor charges $65.00 for an office visit with him, not a PA or some nurse. When he bills Medicare for that visit, Medicare pays 80% what they consider “reasonable and customary” which is $48.00. So my doctor gets $38.40 toward a $65.00 office visit (his rates have been the same for 9 years). I wonder how Gullible Greggie would like getting just 59% of his paycheck because the government decided he was not worth was he was charging for his labor?

He also seems to ignore that drug costs, with the advent of generic drugs, has gone down. Perhaps he should take his drug list to Wal-Mart to see if they are on Wal-Mart’s list of cheap Rxs. But I think he would rather gritch and moan about how unfair it is that doctors actually want a return on their investments in not only themselves, but their offices.

A person does NOT have the right to medical care any more than a person has a right to water, unless they want to pay for having a water well drilled, at which point that water is still not free, or scoop it out of some muddy river, but they do have a right to get off their butts, stop expecting others to take care of them and be productive citizens, not leeches.

Now I’m convinced that Greg is the village idiot.

I can’t help but notice that the federal government has not stepped in to cut the cost of an abortion, since we the taxpayer subsidizes Planned Parenthood. Gee, it would be a shame if the reimbursement rate for abortions, especially those race-against-the-clock late-term, partial-birth abortions was cut drastically. Perhaps we would see how much actual altruism these “doctors” actually possess.

Haven’t we all seen stories like this one lately?
Premera seeks 38.7% rate hike for individual health insurance in Alaska
http://www.adn.com/article/20150601/premera-seeks-387-rate-hike-individual-health-insurance-alaska
This after doing it last year at 35%, too:
http://www.adn.com/article/20140905/state-announces-hefty-individual-insurance-rate-increases-2015
The WHY is fascinating:
1 percent of its customers accounted for about 39 percent of the $10.6 million in claims generated by the entire group of 8,484.
In the first six months of 2014, Premera said, it had 33 members whose medical claims topped $7 million!
The economics aren’t working, the company said.
“The lack of a large enough pool to spread the cost of care for those individuals is the overwhelming key driver of this rate increase,” Premera told regulators in its justification for the increase.

Premera’s average monthly premium is $713 but they paid out an average of $919 per customer in claims!
Times this problem by the whole nation.

ObamaCare was GOING TO have ”high-risk pools” for folks with chronic, high-priced needs.
But what happened?
The pools were flooded by too many people wanting in.
So, how did Obama deal with that?
Obama closed all of these too small pools last year.
(Too small, you ask. Yes, at its height Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) only covered less than 120,000 sick Americans.)
Many of the PCIP patients had been undergoing treatment for cancer, diabetes and heart disease, and advocates worried that vulnerable patients could experience a coverage gap if the program shut down too early.
Some died while trying to keep their doctor or treatment plan that worked well.

@Bill:

You leftists seem to want people to believe that someone of moderate means getting an insurance policy for $200 a month is set for life, even though to use their “coverage”, they would have to come up with $5000 out of their pocket.

That would be a combination of medical and/or hospital annual deductibles. You don’t have to pay it up front before you receive care, it’s the total that covered charges must add up to before the insurance company begins paying for your care.

If someone’s health insurance costs $200 per month, that’s probably a fair deal. It’s probably comparable to some of the inexpensive policies that were available before Obamacare, except for the fact that the policy holder now don’t have to worry about pre-existing conditions to sign up, nor about getting cut off if the expenses of a serious illness exceed arbitrary annual or lifetime limits.

I doubt if reasonably good health insurance can come much cheaper than that, without premium costs being substantially subsidized. Unions once did that, but they’ve been driven toward extinction. Only around 11 percent of all U.S. workers now have unions and the number is falling. The campaign to drive those that still remain out of the workplace continues. Those few that remain for the most part don’t have the sort of health insurance options they did previously.

Employer-based coverage isn’t as generous as it once was, either. Walmart is often cited as a good deal for employees. Consider what they say about their employee health insurance:

We don’t make these decisions lightly, and the fact remains that our plans exceed those of our peers in the retail industry. Our premiums remain well below the industry average compiled by expert Aon Hewitt. We also continue to pay the majority of health care costs for associates covered under our medical plans. For example, on average we cover more than 60% of our associates’ total health care costs and more than 75% of their premium costs. In contrast, the retail industry pays, on average, about 54% of total health care costs and 68% of employee premiums.

Where does that leave a relatively low paid worker who is suddenly facing $100,000 in medical bills after a serious injury or illness? And—as they say—what they pay is considerably better than the retail industry average.

@Nanny G, #37:

Times this problem by the whole nation.

Alaska is hardly typical of the whole nation. The state has a relatively low population and a very low population density. Medical service costs are considerably higher—as are most things—while the size of any pool of covered persons is smaller. Such special situations often require special solutions. It’s unlikely that totally deregulating the health insurance industry in Alaska and allowing the free market to sort things out could result in cheap insurance, widespread coverage, and reasonable profits all at the same time.

I absolutely am amazed this is happening in Chicago.
A man who was the ”poster child for a $15 minimum wage,” will have to cut back his hours so his pay isn’t so high it cuts him off from his medical subsidies!
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-chicago-20150601-story.html

Douglas Hunter is a diabetic with multiple medical conditions whose care is covered by Cook County’s program for the uninsured and poor.
His mandated raise to $9.25 will be wiped out by the price of his medications and supplies, including two kinds of insulin at $403 a month and drugs to control high cholesterol and blood pressure that add an extra $330 a month.

OOPS!
Later down the road when the mandated raise to $15 kicks in, he figures he’d need to reduce his total work hours to ensure his new income didn’t disqualify him from his current benefits.

“That’s going to be a problem,” Hunter acknowledged. “A raise will kick me out of CountyCare. Then the medicines are going to cost so much I won’t be able to afford my apartment.”

How awful and un-thought-out ObamaCare is.
How often will we read about one or another of its unintended consequences?
And this one story adds in the stupidity of trying to fix ”income inequality,” via mandates.

@Trosp:

Now I’m convinced that Greg is the village idiot.

It reallt didn’t take you this long did it??

@Greg:

That would be a combination of medical and/or hospital annual deductibles. You don’t have to pay it up front before you receive care, it’s the total that covered charges must add up to before the insurance company begins paying for your care.

I’m so sorry, Greg… has it been a while since you’ve been out in reality? You MIGHT have to pay it, not up front, but when you are discharged. OR, you will begin getting bills; not installments, but for the TOTAL AMOUNT. Then comes stronger measures, should you not pay up. You think someone is going to face that for an ache or pain that MIGHT be something more serious?

It’s smoke and mirrors. Oh, and if you have the “means”? I was just speaking with my boss who was planning on retiring in a couple of years but must now wait until Medicare kicks in because his premiums would be $1400 a month with a $6000 deductible. With a policy like that, one would be praying for lymphoma just to make it worth while. What a joke.

Where does that leave a relatively low paid worker who is suddenly facing $100,000 in medical bills after a serious injury or illness? And—as they say—what they pay is considerably better than the retail industry average.

Whether they had insurance or not, they are pretty much in the same boat; with coverage that they cannot access for lack of ready funds for the deductible. Only, under Obamacare, they are forced to pay premiums for a worthless policy.

@Nanny G: That’s that wonderful benefit of providing workers more free time to enjoy life!! Only, they cannot afford to live.

The truly bizarre aspect of all this is that despite all the clear evidence of failure of Obamacare to do anything its deluded proponents claimed it would do, the leftist answer is to double down on this failure with a complete takeover of the medical system by the same government bureaucratic incompetents that designed this feculent sandwich.

@Greg: @Nanny G, #37:

Times this problem by the whole nation.

Alaska is hardly typical of the whole nation.

OK.
In the State of Hawaii, the largest BCBS insurer, HMSA has submitted an increase of 49.1% for Obamacare covered lives.

When IBD’s Jed Graham looked at the limited number of filings two weeks ago, he noted that insurers were asking for hikes that averaged 18.6%.
http://news.investors.com/politics-obamacare/051815-753015-obamacare-insurers-propose-big-2016-premium-hikes.htm
And as more rate filings became public, that picture hasn’t changed.
https://ratereview.healthcare.gov/

In Virginia, for example, just one plan came in with a proposed rate increase below 10%. Three are above 25%.
In Texas, Scott & White wants a 32% boost and Humana 30%.
Alliance Health Plans in Georgia says that it needs a 37.85% increase.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, which enrolled more than 329,000 people in the state, wants a 29% hike.
CareFirst in Maryland said that its per-enrollee claims shot up 49% in the first year of ObamaCare.
WPS Health Plan also cited “the impact of numerous additional taxes and fees imposed upon our plan” as part of the reason why it wants a 19% boost.

All of these big increases are coming before ObamaCare’s temporary industry bailout programs go away.
But they do include the fact that Obama ended his high-risk pool that so many people wanted to join but were not allowed to join.

https://ratereview.healthcare.gov/
(If you put in a state and that’s all you put in, you get all of the insurers for that state. Note that insurers are getting every penny of increase they ask for.)

@Nanny G: Pete, and Bill.

It’s all Econ 101. Increase the demand and/or reduce the supply, which Obamacare does both, and the prices go up. Being neo-Marxists, the left doesn’t understand basic economics just like they don’t understand history, science, or anything else. If the facts don’t support their narrative, they simply change them or continue to repeat their same old disproven argument. Another tenant of Marxism. It’s a waste of time debating them.

@another vet:

Being neo-Marxists, the left doesn’t understand basic economics just like they don’t understand history, science, or anything else.

Actually in the case of these neo-Marxists they do understand these things well enough to use them to destroy the economy – which is being done on purpose. An analogous thing is calling obie a constitutional scholar — he has studied it to find the weak points and how to use it to destroy the system!

@Budvarakbar: The puppetmasters definitely understand Marxism and how to implement it, but I think a lot of the puppets don’t. Whenever you accuse one of the puppets of being Marxist, they get irate and claim it isn’t so even though they openly argue the same points and advocate the same measures Marx did such as redistribution of wealth, a heavily progressive tax system, government take over of industry and factories, and labor armies (unions). It’s all right in the Communist Manifesto. How many times have Obama supporters come here arguing in support of Obamacare or the government takeover of GM? Both fit hand in hand with Marxist ideology. It’s right in his book! Obama seizing control of GM and then putting it under the control of the union was identical to what Lenin did with factories and farms when he took power.

Here is the healthcare.gov website where you can look up the requested rate increases by state:

https://ratereview.healthcare.gov/#search

Of note, it stops working periodically, which makes it laborious to do the search through a state to see what the numbers are for yourself. I managed to get 3 states before the website gave me the “We can’t do your search right now” message.

I looked at Texas (which did NOT expand Medicaid), California and Illinois (both of which DID expend their medicaid rolls.)

Texas – Had 30 exchange (federally run) plans, with an average rate increase request of 27.74%, with a low rate request of 2.94%, and 2 plans that requested 99.99% increases.

California Had 32 Obamacare exchange plans that based on the data available requested an average 136.17% rate increase. Now, this appears skewed due to 4 rate plans listed from the same insurer that each requested a 999% rate increase. This seems like an input error of some sort, so if you take those 4 plans out of the equation, the other 28 plans average a 12.9% rate increase request. But as is usual with California, the questionable reliability of the government presented data leaves us with no way to assess the veracity of this figure. The lowest listed rate increase was 3.38%.

Illinois Had 48 Obamacare plans listed, with an average of 19.29% for the state. The lowest rate request was 7.62%, with the highest of 79%.

Now, CNN put out an Obamacare cheerleader propaganda piece in June of 2014 here: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101731891

In that piece, the leftist rag makes the claim that medical insurance rate increases were high before Obamacare. You have to read the story to find that the report they cite was written by Jonathan Gruber, and focuses on the three years prior to the passage of the obamination when the conjecture and anxious planning to prepare for the pending socialist legislative attack on medicine would occur. Notice the deliberate avoidance of heath insurance rate increases PRIOR to Obama’s election. The Gruber study does list the average national insurance rate increase numbers for the years 2008 (9.9%), 2009 (10.8%) and 2010 (11.7%) with 2010 being the year Obamacare was shoved down our throats by a party-line vote of democrats.

Now CNN is still trying to propagandize for Obamacare, while having to admit the outrageous rate increases for this socialist nightmare: http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/02/news/economy/obamacare-rates/index.html?sr=twmoney0602obamacarestickershock2pVODtop

Many are proposing double-digit premium increases for individual policies, with some companies looking to boost rates more than 60%, according to a list posted Monday by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
In Florida, for instance, United Healthcare (UNH) wants to raise the rates of plans sold on the Obamacare exchange by an average of 18%. Individual policies available outside the exchange through United Healthcare or through a broker would go up by 31%, on average, with hikes as high as 60% for certain plans in certain locations.
In Texas, insurer Scott & White is looking for a 32% increase for exchange-based plans, while Humana (HUM) is asking for an average 30% boost for its exclusive provider organization policies, which generally cover only in-network services.

And please imagine my shocked face that increasing the number of individuals on the Medicaid rolls – where the government pays doctors and hospitals less than the cost to the physician and hospital to provide the care – results in loss of revenue to the hospital despite patients having insurance coverage :

“We did see a significant decrease in” unpaid bills, said Michael Kasser, chief financial officer of Southern Illinois Healthcare, which runs three hospitals southeast of St. Louis. “The bad news is, we saw such a huge increase in Medicaid,” he said, noting that the program pays only about half the hospital’s costs, on average.

He said the hospitals saved about $9 million in unpaid bills, but incurred around $28 million in costs for Medicaid patients, only about half of which was reimbursed by the state-run program. The result: Losses of around $5 million, despite expansion.

This is EXACTLY what those of us who opposed the socialist nightmare of Obamacare warned about. There is no magical way to increase patient load while cutting reimbursement below what the cost to provide care is, and expect anything other than huge financial losses. The only way to cut costs when under the socialist medical system is to decrease hospital and doctor compensation – which can only be done so much – and decrease access to care.

Obamacare is inherently evil, completely deceitful, and must be repealed in toto if there is any hope of maintaining the best medical care system in the world.