Yer 2017 ObamaCare Enrollment Period Update
The 2017 premiums for that Pathetically Puerile Abominable Collection of Asininity
“wonderful” law called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – AKA “ObamaCare” – have been released.
The numbers for next year? Well, as they might have said where I was raised: “Them numbers ain’t lookin’ so good.”
Nationwide, for the 39 states using the Federal healthcare exchange the average premium increase is about 25%. But if your premium “only” goes up 25% next year when you purchase healthcare through the Federal insurance exchange – count your blessings. In many states premiums increase by far more than that.
In 10 states, a “Silver” plan (2nd lowest before tax credit) purchased through an insurance exchange has a premium increase of 40% or more. And in Arizona, that Silver plan rate increase puts the emphasis on “more” – as in, next year it will cost a whopping 145% more.
Hey, they’ve got the proverbial “captive audience” – coverage is legally mandatory, remember? So yeah, they can do that and get away with it.
Choices are much more limited next year as well. In 11 states, only one or two insurers are offering insurance through an insurance exchange. So much for “robust competition” happening simply because “the government said so”, eh?
Seriously: anyone with common sense could have seen this coming. Insurers don’t exist as public services; they exist to make money – and they can’t do that at anything approaching a reasonable cost to consumers under the conditions mandated by ObamaCare. (Not being able to exclude preexisting conditions essentially guarantees that.) The result was predictable: many insurers opted to leave the marketplace, and those which remained raised prices through the roof.
Result: few or no choices, and they’re all expensive as hell. Ain’t legalized monopoly grand?
Oh, and since all this utter idiocy is subsidized by the US taxpayer . . . wanna guess who’s paying a sh!tload of the cost? Yeah, you’re right: US taxpayers. You and me.
But never fear, fellow citizens! The current phalanx of fools fecklessly fornicating things up by-the-numbers in DC Administration still predicts an increase in ObamaCare enrollment of 9% this coming year! All is simply wonderful, right?
Yeah, right. Just like I’m the Emperor of Japan.
Oh, and remember that “Medicaid expansion” that was thrown in as a “sweetener” to drum up support for this imbecilic squandering of Federal tax money soup-sandwich of a Federal program? Well, it looks like that “sweetener” means Medicaid is going to cost the Federal government somewhere around $550+ billion annually 7 years from now – with states ponying up another $160 billion on top of that.
Doesn’t exactly sound so sweet when the bills finally come due, eh?
Here are a couple of graphics from the 2nd article linked above. They’re quite illustrative of the very predicable problems we’re seeing with Obama’s Abomination. They are linked here for your convenience. The first shows the premium increases by state for a “Silver” plan; the second, the drop-off in participation by insurers in the Federal exchange in various states.
The second link above explains the death spiral in which ObamaCare finds itself today in detail. Yeah, that’s a death-rattle cough you’re hearing.
Whether that death-rattle cough is from ObamaCare or the US economy remains to be seen. Remember: it’s the latter which ultimately is funding this Socialist travesty. And it’s being funded with money forcibly confiscated by the Federal government that would otherwise be put to productive use in the private sector.
Socialism works great until you run out of other people’s money.
Category: "Teh Stoopid", "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Health Care debate
Okay, somebody’s gotta ask: Why are premiums going down in some states?
Three states, actually: RI (-14%), IN (-4%) and OH (-2%).
I find it far more interesting (and significant) that 2 1/2 times as many states had 40+% premium increases (10) than had premium increases roughly the same as inflation. Current projection for inflation this year is 1.5%, only 4 states (RI, IN, OH, and AR) had a premium increase that small or smaller. That means that ObamaCare insurance thus will cost more in real terms next year than it did last year in at least 44 states (no data was available for 2017 ObamaCare premiums in WA or MA). And in many if not most states, it will cost far more in real terms.
Oh, inflation is going to be 1.5%, but the COLA is only going to be a GENEROUS 0.3%?????
Well, if that don’t beat the steak flat as a pancake, I don’t know what does.
If it’s beaten that thin, at least it should be tender. (smile)
I was thinking it had to do with large populations of poor people but the chart puts Kalifornia in the same basket as NH and VT so I guess I got nothing.
Lady Margaret Thatcher was right yet again! If you want to fuck anything all the way to FUBAR, just add Government bureaucracy.
The other day, the White House propaganda front man suggested that one of the factors contributing to less-than-stellar participation is that the penalties for failing to obtain health insurance are not sufficient. In other words, some people–younger, healthy people–are saying, “Screw that. I’ll pay the penalty, It’s cheaper.” So, a remedy is to make noncompliance severe. Nice, huh? F’n government. F’n idiots in Congress who passed this monster. F’n idiots who thought they were getting Free Cheese. F’n John Roberts who decided it was a tax.
My kids were notified ( Blue Shield ) that they will no longer have coverage here in Minnesota.
Their options are dismal, with the average premiums being hiked 57% ( some as high as 67% ) after the 49% increase Minnesota had to swallow last year.
Both work for companies with fewer than 15 employees and are not offered insurance……leading to Obamacare choices only.
What struck me as especially insulting was Obama’s statement that many would be pleasantly surprised by health care costs.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/obama-most-will-be-%e2%80%98pleasantly-surprised%e2%80%99-by-health-plan-costs/ar-AAjuh3u
I’m not sure how he defines “pleasant”, but its beginning to feel a bit like the “surprise” new convicts get in the shower from Bubba….
What do you expect from someone who has never had to pay for anything in his entire life? He probably doesn’t even pay for his own underwear, Doc, never mind choose it.
Doc, did you hear what that loon eyed governor of ours is proposing to help your kids out? A “one time” subsidy of up to 331 MILLION (which happens to be the total of the rainy day fund).
Do you remember when the MN sale tax was a “temporary” tax?
A “one time” subsidy my ass!
Unlike other personal issues around which which government has wrapped its filthy tentacles, health insurance and health care affects everyone at one time or another. Gov’t will now purport to save us all from the problem it created. Would that I could kick the living shit out of some people in each branch of gov’t responsible for this horror.
The sheer lack of understanding about how the insurance industry works is mind-boggling.
To put it plainly, all insurers are required to have a pool of cash to pay claims. They aren’t operating on premiums paid in, claims paid out. The premiums paid in are invested in dividend/interest paying entities, generating a cash pool to pay claims. And since they are ‘for profit’ corporations, if they lose money paying for
exorbitant medical charges – which they do – they go out of business, and boom! No insurance available at all.
That’s how that works.
Here’s another little item you should understand that the hippies in the government do not: medical care is not free. Hospitals make profits, whether they promote themselves as non-profit or otherwise. If they don’t make profits, they don’t have the wherewithal to buy that marvelously engineered new analytical equipment or medical chemistry or whatever to provide the best health care possible. And long-term care is the most expensive there is, which is why cancer treatments cost a fortune and the cost of caring for a comatose patient is nearly as expensive and sometimes worse.
Obamacare, aka howbadismycare, is nothing but a path to bankruptcy for insurers and they know it, which is why they are dropping out of that program. Yes, this was designed entirely to get the entire US population on a single plan managed by the US government. But we already have that: it’s called Medicare/Medicaid/VA/Tricare, in case no one was paying attention. And you and you and you are paying for it, because a bunch of stankass hippies from the 1960s think medical care should be free.
Well, it ain’t. It costs money. Medicines cost money. Supplies cost money. Facilities cost money. But this all flies over the heads of the morons who come up with this shit, because they don’t have to deal with it like we do.
And when the money gets tight, then care start getting scarce. That’s why many places in Canada have a 6+ month waiting list for many surgical procedures – including some cancer surgeries.
There is no such thing as “free cheese”. Someone, somewhere, pays for it.
See my idea below. Hey, if I have to live on 1960s income, then prices for everything should go down, right?
I’ve got a great idea. Thought I’d just pass it along. See, back in them there Days of Yore in the 1900s, up to about 1965, if you got sick a doctor came to your house and gave you whatever treatment you needed, like a shot of penicillin (the wonder drug) or something like that. Now, we kids got all our vaccinations at school in the start of the fall semester, so we didn’t have to worry about a whole lot, and it didn’t cost much at the time. We also got the Schick test for TB, which occasionally turned up positive on a few kids. Yeah, we had the polio shots, too, because the Salk vaccine had just been released.
If you had something worse, like the time I took a tumble off a horse and got a broken arm for it, you drove in to the city to the hospital and got it taken care of.
Stuff like that. It was simple and straightforward, and most of the time, people didn’t die unless they had a bad accident.
Before that, it was a lot more primitive. The flu could kill you if you didn’t fight it with mustard plasters and goose grease syrup, because if you caught pneumonia, you might not last. I think they were still bleeding people in some parts, not too long before the end of the 19th century.
But since it was pretty basic, and people either survived or didn’t, well why not just go back to that kind of medicine? Go back to house calls and recommending cigarettes to prevent asthma attacks. Not a joke, I saw an ad for that. Go back to not overusing antibiotics to kill infections, but build healthy immune systems with good food and running around like mad things outdoors.
All this extreme medical care is just too expensive, so let’s bring back the old country doc and the visiting nurse and maybe an occasional horse doctor if the other doc can’t make it, and boil it down to that old-fashioned stuff.
of course, you realize that the ol’ country doc was mostly incompetent? Read somewhere where until about 1920, your odds of surviving serious illness DECREASED by seeing a doctor. I sympathize with the sentiment… I see no reason why doctors should be one of the highest paid vocations, and many of the costs in medicine are absolutely insane (can you say EpiPen? I knew that you could!) but the ultimate cure is probably unacceptable to most: legally limit the amount of profit any medical provider can make, whether pharma or doctor, so that medicine becomes a utility like a power company. Put doctors in charge of medical insurance, not accountants – in what reasonable world does someone with no medical training say whether you get a potentially life-saving diagnosis based on its cost?) The system is rotten from top to bottom, but the cure is worse than the problem for most.
Gee, that’s a great idea. Put someone who neither knows and in general doesn’t gives a damn what something costs in charge of making decisions on where money is spent. And to make it even better, let’s include a built-in incentive for them to order marginally-necessary or unnecessary tests “just to make sure”!
Medical practitioners in general don’t give a crap what tests, procedures, etc . . . , cost. To many if not most doctors, cost isn’t an issue – quality of care and keeping themselves out of court are their primary concerns. Besides, someone else pays for all of that, so it’s not their problem.
Doctors also have no clue about the financial side of the insurance business. As Ex-PH2 above notes, it’s a bit on the complex side – as is medicine. And it’s at least as regulated as is medicine.
The problem with ObamaCare is twofold. First, it mandates crap that makes ZERO economic sense. Two examples: no exclusions for preexisting condtions and the Medicaid “sweetener” (which had the effect of shuffling a huge number of low-income folks from the ObamaCare insurance market to Medicare – many of whom were indeed young an healthy, just working poor). Second, it assumes that the Federal government has an unlimited supply of money to pay for crap. It doesn’t. Hell, Social Security will run short in about 20 years. And Federal medical-care-related spending is rising even faster than Social Security.
Bottom line: ObamaCare as it exists today is based on economic wishful thinking and fantasy. It is not sustainable. That fact is apparent to anyone without ideological blinders.
Fixing it is simple: either scrap it entirely or scale it back hugely. I’d favor the former.
Medical care is not and never has been a “right”. It’s a service one purchases – just like air travel or a magazine subscription.
Okay, some of this increase in expense comes as a direct result of doctors becoming terrified of letting someone die on them. The malpractice coverage they have to carry is astronomical, but they have to carry it, as do hospitals and treatment centers.
Unless you have a DNR or ‘no extreme measures’ document in writing, e.g., in your will, that your family can refer to, they will keep you on life support for a century if they have to.
This is not a joke. The lack of acceptance of death by people now is a large part of the problem.
Oh, where to begin, before I turned 65, my retirement medical insurance from AT&T cost me a whopping $95 dollars a month. That covered everything, no cost for my many cancer treatments, no charge for my many cancer surgeries, I only had to pay a $5 copay for my many medications. Now that I have been forced to Medicare, my monthly costs have risen to $600 a month. Don’t even get me started on prescription costs! Just one of my pain meds that used to cost $35 a month, has now skyrocketed to $335 a month, and after a wonderful 4 months on this bullshit, I have now gotten fucked by the “Doughnut Hole”, I didn’t even get a fucking donut! Now that same pill, costs me $950 a month!! That is some real great coverage they have going for them now! And Cankles wants to fuck it up even worse. You all had better pray and get out to vote for Trump, or we will all be headed for the grave. Don’t forget about the death panels. You will not be covered for any treatment if you are not paying into the system, i.e. Taxes. Forget about getting any cancer treatments if you are retired and not contributing to the pyramid scheme!
If your private insurance had a provision that terminated eligibility for coverage when you became Medicare eligible, I think I know why it was so reasonably priced.
Doing that allowed them to avoid covering (and paying claims) for the demographic group that is highest cost of all.
The only reason I might enroll in Obamacare is if was cheaper than the fine.