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I had the opposite experience. Quoted by a big hospital $137K if I were insured, $37K if not insured.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-dru...uged-hospitalsYep. I want to add one more point to this that doesn't get as much attention as it deserves: Hospitals routinely charge uninsured patients rates that are 3-4x higher than those paid by insured patients. A heart attack that gets billed—profitably!—to Blue Cross at $50,000, can end up costing you $200,000 if you're unlucky enough to suffer that heart attack while you're uninsured. Think about that: for decades, the health care industry has deliberately taken ruthless advantage of the very people who are the weakest and most vulnerable—those who are poor or unemployed—and seems to think that this is a perfectly decent and moral way to conduct business.
It's not. It's shameless and obscene. It's like kicking a beggar and stealing his coat just because you know the cops will never do anything about it.
This is something that Obamacare goes a long way toward fixing. If you're covered by private insurance through an exchange, you're not just protected against catastrophic illness. You're also protected against being charged outrageous rates for non-catastrophic problems—broken legs, asthma attacks, etc.—just because hospitals have the brute power to do so.
Because of Obamacare, you no longer have to fear being shut out of the insurance market. But that's not all. You no longer have to fear being gouged and possibly bankrupted because you've been shut out of the insurance market. Access to reasonable rates2 is one of the key benefits that Obamacare delivers to millions, and it deserves more attention.
I had the opposite experience. Quoted by a big hospital $137K if I were insured, $37K if not insured.
how crafty. insurance can game you either way.
Health Care Exchange Is Vastly Improved, Users Say
After two months of false starts, error messages and pleas for patience from the once-hobbled federal online health care exchange, Karen Egozi, the chief executive of the Epilepsy Foundation of Florida, watched on Monday as counselors navigated the website’s pages with relative ease.
Click. Next page. Click. Next page. The website, HealthCare.gov, was working so well that Ms. Egozi, who oversees the 45 navigators in eight locations who help consumers enroll in health plans, said her team gave the system an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10, meaning that most people got as far as selecting a plan or taking home information to select a plan. It felt like a champagne moment.
“I’m 80 percent satisfied,” Ms. Egozi said. “I think it will be great when it’s 100 percent.”
A little over a week after the deadline that President Obama gave for fixing the federal health care exchange, the system is definitely working better, according to consumers and navigators interviewed in several states. The technical errors that had bedeviled visitors to the site for weeks seemed to have been tamed by the patchwork of hardware and software fixes ordered by the administration, and applicants were finally selecting health care plans under the president’s new law, the Affordable Care Act. By last week, the number of applicants who dropped a plan into their virtual grocery carts was climbing at a rapid clip.
Still, the interviews indicated, some technical obstacles persist. After shoppers clicked all the way to the plans, for example, the system was not letting some people actually choose one. In other cases, people were asked to try again later.
Improved entry into the online marketplace has also exposed a new layer of problems and confusion for applicants who are suddenly finding their efforts to buy insurance delayed by requirements that they provide proof of iden y or citizenship or that they wait for determinations on Medicaid eligibility.
For the most part, though, the news for the beleaguered online exchange, which serves 36 states, is improving. Since early December, the federal exchange website has run without crashing, officials said. In the first week of December, about 112,000 people selected plans — compared with about 100,000 in all of November and only 27,000 in October. Last week, more than half a million people created accounts on the federal website, according to people familiar with the health care project.
Technical experts involved with the exchange said they are now preparing for a surge of applications before Dec. 23, the enrollment deadline to receive coverage by the first of the year. Although those preparations will require some significant changes to the system, the work will be easier now that the site seems stable during heavy use, the experts said.
In offices spread across the country, from Florida and Pennsylvania to Wyoming and Wisconsin, all of them states that rely on the federal government’s insurance exchange, navigators and applicants reported far fewer problems.
“I was hearing so much about the glitches in the system that I was worried that it wouldn’t work,” said Caroline Moseley, 54, who lost her job as a housing program analyst for the City of Philadelphia. After asking a navigator from the nonprofit Resources for Human Development for help in finding a plan, Ms. Moseley chose one that costs $27 a month with a $6,000 deductible. “It was a great experience,” she said. “The site was running very smoothly. It took about 30 minutes tops.”
Stephanie Lincoln, 60, of Lansdowne, Pa., also had quick success with the exchange — after a frustrating experience trying to submit an application online in October and November. With the help of a navigator, Caroline Picher, working at the local library, Ms. Lincoln signed up in just one hour on Friday for a policy that will cost $113 a month, with no deductible.
“I am one of the people whose plans were canceled,” Ms. Lincoln said. “It was just the easiest thing in the world.”
But the smoother functioning of the website has also brought to light new kinds of delays that are creating anxieties for some of the people rushing to buy insurance by the December 23 deadline.
At Wyoming Senior Citizens in Riverton, Wyo., four people walked in on Thursday and Friday and completed their applications with the help of counselors. After they successfully entered their personal information, the system displayed a message saying they needed to check if they qualified for Medicaid, said Karla Borders, a navigator at the center.
Ms. Borders said the clients already knew that they did not qualify because they had applied before and been denied. But the website would not allow them to proceed with their enrollment, informing them that they would be notified if they were indeed eligible for Medicaid, which can take a week. “Now they’re basically being put back in the system,” Ms. Borders said. “It just kind of puts them in limbo until they get another denial letter.”
In general, health policy experts said, people must be checked for eligibility for Medicaid before they can get tax credits to help pay premiums for health insurance purchased on an exchange. Under the 2010 health care law, people generally cannot receive tax credits if they are eligible for “minimum essential coverage” from other sources like Medicaid and Medicare.
Asked about the problems reported by consumers and insurance counselors, Aaron Albright, a spokesman at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said:
“HealthCare.gov is working smoothly for the vast majority of users. We’ve acknowledged that there are some consumers who may be better served through in-person assistance or call centers. There will be some people who have technical difficulties or complicated family or tax situations that will be better served through other pathways.”
In West Palm Beach, Fla., John Foley, a lawyer and certified counselor for the Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County, said now that applicants are moving beyond the initial application stages, he and others in Florida have hit upon another problem that could delay enrollment for some: Naturalized citizens are being asked by the system for a citizenship number that appears on their naturalization do ents.
United States passports, which require proof of citizenship, are not allowed as subs utes. Mr. Foley said some of his clients, particularly those who were naturalized long ago, have misplaced that do ent or don’t know where it is. A copy costs more than $300, a prohibitive amount for some people.
“Some people go home and they hunt and it takes them a week to find the do ent,” Mr. Foley said. Despite such problems, many enrollment counselors said, they have been deluged with phone calls and walk-ins.
Linda Lott at the Jessie Trice Community Health Center in Miami said her office was feeling more confident that appointments with clients might actually yield enrollment these days. And while some people remain puzzled about the process, wondering why, for instance, they must wait to be billed by insurers instead of being able to pay for their insurance online à la Amazon, things were significantly better.
“I’m feeling very good about it,” Ms. Lott said. “We’re enrolling people.”
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/10...?from=homepage
Repugs planning to run against Dems in 2014 by trashing ACA, are going to get trashed by Dems, esp in red states, for blocking people's access to insurance and medical care.
TX Repugs, with high bureaucratic obstacles like all red states, won't even let the navigators work until 1 Jan, too late to for 2014 coverage.
Repug blond Confederate bimbo!
“If you want to talk about a ‘war on women,’ look no further than this healthcare law,” Ellmers countered in the weekly address.
“After all, it’s often women who make the healthcare decisions for our families.
We put a lot of time and thought into these choices and how they’ll affect our budgets. So by canceling your insurance—despite a promise to let you keep your plan—the Obama administration is essentially saying it knows what’s best for you and your family.”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/1...r?detail=email
Last edited by boutons_deux; 12-10-2013 at 01:19 PM.
Obamacare Enrollments Surpass 1 Million
More than two months after Obamacare's ugly debut, the number of Americans using the system is starting to grow: Nearly 1.2 million people are on track to have health coverage in place next year from the law's health insurance exchanges, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday.
From Oct. 1 through Nov. 30, almost 365,000 people enrolled into private health insurance via the federal and state marketplaces and more than 803,000 were deemed eligible for Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program, according to the department.
The federally run exchanges in more than 30 states accounted for 137,000 of the enrollments in private coverage, and the remaining states signed up 227,000. About 1.9 million more people had been determined eligible for coverage through the marketplaces, but hadn't yet chosen a health plan. The new data don't include an apparent flurry of enrollments in the early days of December.
HealthCare.gov, the federal portal to health coverage in more than 30 states, still has problems, but appears to doing what it's supposed to do: enabling consumers to do shop and sign up for health benefits for next year.
Eric Rawlings, 42, of Decatur, Ga., breezed through HealthCare.gov in about 10 minutes to enroll in a private health plan for himself and his infant daughter in late November, he told The Huffington Post.
"Everybody talks about how horrible this website is and all the glitches and stuff, but I tell you, it was the best experience I ever had shopping for insurance," said Rawlings, who owns an architectural design firm. Rawlings chose the highest level of coverage, a Platinum plan that includes dental benefits, for $550 a month, or about $50 more than he pays for a medical-only policy for just himself this year. He earns too much to qualify for tax credits to reduce his premiums.
Rawlings has been buying his own health insurance since starting his own business more than a decade ago and didn't miss having to disclose his medical history and wait weeks for an approval -- or rejection. Nor did he yearn for paying higher rates because of a pre-existing condition he has, he said. "I have just been waiting for the Affordable Care Act to kick in," he said.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1..._content= le
Even with the screwed up healthcare.gov, the enrollment numbers are looking great, esp if the enrollment curve for Romneycare is followed:
and the surge expected in the next two weeks should help a lot.
Regugs and tea baggers will be ed if they make a hugely successful Obamacare the core of their attacks in 2014 and 2016.
All of these articles you are posting about Obamacare's success are pointless until we see how many Millenials are signing up. Without them this whole thing fails miserably.
you're pointless.
ACA will succeed in so many ways for so many millions of people, except where you red state assholes and your Repug politicians are blocking red state signups.
Without the Millenials, it will not succeed, at least not in the sense of being affordable. Explain to me how it will succeed without the enrollment of the young and healthy.
If young and healthy don't sign up (and they pay less than older people, just older people less for auto insurance than car-accident prone drunk young people), I say raise the obviously too-low penalty by a 3x or 4x.
And young people at home are covered to age 26 under their parents plan, and due to the your Banksters Great Depression, more and more young people are stuck at home.
btw, young people with jobs and employer insurance pay the same insurance rate and get the same covereage as older people.
What's the backup plan if the young and healthy don't sign up as planned?
I don't know, but I appreciate you're unbridled desire to see ACA to fail.
I don't have the specifics at hand, but there are safeguards built into the law that guarantee insurance provider margins even if the sacred young don't sign up. Obviously that cost burden gets shifted to the taxpayer but timately negates the so called death spiral. So instead of rooting for the law's failure, like you do, we really should all be doing our best to ensure the law works, and actively fixing problems as they're identified.
And with that it becomes less and less affordable. I'm not rooting for it to fail, I just think it's a piece of and poorly designed. And what should "we" be doing to ensure the law works?
In the infinite scam kludgeocracy of for-profit US healthcare swamp that ACA must work in, there will be numerous adjustments, rule changes, etc to ACA in the coming years.
Only a naive jerk of a right winger, ALWAYS in bad faith, would trash ACA for not being perfect, for having problems, at rollout.
USA, true to its self-proclaimed, chauvinistic EXCEPTIONALISM, is decades behind adult social democracies with universal health care.
27,000 Will Die Because Republican States Refuse To Expand Medicaid
The 25 GOP-led states that are refusing to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act are not just turning down an estimated $42.6 billion in 2014 alone, they’re also missing a chance to save 27,000 lives — according to a new study from the pro-expansion group Health Care for America Now (HCAN).
HCAN’s projection is based on a Harvard School of Public Health study published in 2012 in the New England Journal of Medicine that compared states that had expanded Medicaid to childless adults to those who hadn’t:
The mortality rate in expansion states was 6.1 percent lower than in the neighboring expansion states. For every 500,000 adults gaining Medicaid benefits, 2,840 deaths would be prevented each year, the researchers found. Put another way, for every 176 people added to the Medicaid rolls, one life would be saved.
An estimated five million residents of states that haven’t expanded the program will find themselves in a “coverage gap,” where they will neither qualify for Medicaid nor be able to afford a policy in the insurance exchanges. Applying that 1-in-176 formula to five million uninsured, HCAN comes up with the 27,000 lives that may be lost.
The report also estimates how many jobs would be created by the expansion, which is entirely funded by the federal government for three years, tapering down to 90 percent by the end of the decade. In Texas, where 1 in 4 residents are uninsured, not only could nearly 6,000 lives be saved by expansion, but 300,000 jobs could be created by adding $67.9 billion a year in economic activity.
Instead of accepting new economic growth, states are putting their most vulnerable hospitals at risk of closing.
Expansion was designed to make up for the reduced fees for care mandated by the Affordable Care Act, which was written with the assumption that states would only be able to opt out of expansion if they rejected Medicaid funding entirely. The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that states could reject the expansion without any consequence. They can also opt in and out of the program as they choose to.
The federal government has been lenient with Republican states that decide to expand Medicaid. Arkansas is implementing a “private option” for the program that may be duplicated by Iowa.
“In Florida, [Latinos] make up 27 percent, and in Texas they make up 47 percent. Texas has the highest rate of uninsured in the country. The majority of people there who are going to miss out on care – over 60 percent – are black and Latino,” The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote.
Noting the disproportionate effect on minorities, the report finishes with a rhetorical explosion that conjures memories of the battle to end segregation and connects it to the widespread right-wing lie that the Affordable Care Act includes “death panels.”
“Now in 2013, it turns out that the only real death panels consist of governors and lawmakers standing in the doorway of state Medicaid expansion, blocking access to health care for nearly 5 million Americans.”
Click ahead to see how many lives could be saved in each state.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/report-2...pand-medicaid/
Kentucky Doctor Reason For Closing -- Because Of Bush Initiative, NOT Obamacare. The Real Story
Yesterday the right wing social media was buzzing about the story of the Kentucky doctor who put an ad in his local paper declaring that due to Obamacare, he was closing his office. I claimed that nothing in the ACA could in any way force a doctor to close his office, or create so much regulation that it would be too expensive to continue.
But the real fun fact in this whole story is this, the push toward universal Electronic Health Records, is NOT part of Obamacare, and was not an initiative of President Obama.
The goal of near universal use of Electronic Health Records was championed and made official by Executive Orders signed by George W. Bush in 2004.
At the time President Bush said, “Within ten years, every American must have a personal electronic medical record...”(1) So the push toward electronic records was made not by Obamacare, not by President Obama, but by the Bush administration. President Bush even touted his efforts on Electronic Medical Records in his 2004 State of the Union speech.
Let’s see if the good Dr. Kiteck will try a bit of honesty and admit this fact.
President Obama only continued the Bush initiative, and did more to provide support and funding to make the conversion smooth and less costly to medical providers as part of the stimulus bill.
So the idea that this doctor’s office was in any way forced to close due to “Obamacare policies,” is, as I stated yesterday, wholly dishonest.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/1...y?detail=email
Hey, we all know that its those damn states who hate obama and want him to fail that are the reason Obamacare is having so much trouble.
Except when it isn't, like in Maryland.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...6b2_story.html
Fourteen states and the District of Columbia told the federal government they could run their own health insurance exchanges, but three people leading their states’ exchanges have now left following problem-plagued rollouts of the online marketplaces.
The executive director of Maryland’s exchange, Rebecca Pearce, was the latest to go, resigning late Friday. The head of Hawaii’s health insurance marketplace announced her resignation in November after delays in getting the exchange running and low signups in the first month. And the head of Oregon’s health exchange took a medical leave earlier in December as state officials were reviewing his job performance. The state’s online enrollment system wasn’t ready to launch on schedule and has had technical problems.
Bob Laszewski, a health care industry consultant, said Americans may be more familiar with the problems of the federal health insurance website, HealthCare.gov, but state exchanges are “startlingly short of their expectations” for enrolling people and “no one is doing really well.”
Laszewski said he and others believed that Maryland was going to be an example of a well-run exchange because it had a supportive state government that started early. The state was also transparent about the setup process and was reporting doing testing during the summer, he said.
“And then they launched and fell flat on their face,” he said of the website’s October rollout.
...
http://dailycaller.com/2013/12/09/so...are-in-state/#!
A bill set for fast-track passage in the South Carolina Senate in January aims to eliminate Obamacare in the state. The law could become a model for other states fed up with the federal health-care law.
House Bill 3101, led the “South Carolina Freedom of Health Care Protection Act,” passed the state House of Representatives last April by a 65-34 vote. The bill now heads to the GOP-controlled Senate with special-order priority, setting up the likelihood that South Carolina will become the first state to exempt citizens and businesses from all participation in the Affordable Care Act.
State Sen. Tom Davis, the bill’s sponsor who recently wrapped up study committee hearings for H3101 in Columbia, Charleston and other cities, says that the proposed legislation renders the Affordable Care Act void or inoperable through a handful of provisions.
“It will essentially have five components to it, all of which in my judgment are legal, effective, and within the state’s power to do,” Davis, a Republican from Beaufort, said in an interview.
The bill’s main component prohibits agencies, officers and employees of the state of South Carolina from implementing any provisions of the Affordable Care Act, leaving implementation of the national health-care law entirely in the hands of a federal government that lacks the resources or personnel to carry out the programs it mandates.
This provision, according to Davis, comes from the anti-commandeering doctrine established in case law that says feds can’t compel states to enforce federal laws.
“What the Supreme Court said in Printz v. United States is that states are not merely political subdivisions of the federal government to carry out what the federal government does; they are sovereign en ies,” Davis said. “Congress can pass laws, but it cannot compel the states to utilize either their treasury or personnel to implement those federal laws.”
Additional provisions of H3101 further neuter the Affordable Care Act by outlawing state exchanges, issuing tax deductions to individuals equal to the tax penalties levied by the federal government, and directing the state attorney general to sue over whimsical enforcement of the law. Taken together, the provisions effectively repeal the federal law for the people of South Carolina.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/12/09/so...#ixzz2nIyvl6v3
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/12/09/so...#ixzz2nIyqbiVt
Valium for Obamacare Worriers
Suppose that healthcare.gov isn’t fixed by the end of next month. How bad is it for Obamacare? Would the program be doomed?
No, says Jonathan Cohn, because there are two layers of protection against poor signup. First, there is a system of cross-subsidies to insurance companies that was intended to prevent companies from surrep iously gaining an advantage by only signing up healthy people (hey, our policy is available to anyone — but you have to sign up in our sixth-floor walkup office.) As it turns out, this system would end up compensating insurance companies in general if the risk pool is worse than expected. Second, the subsidies to individuals are designed to hold health costs down to 8 percent of income, which means that they will rise if costs are higher than expected.
Neither of these would be a good thing, since they would increase the budget cost, but they do mean that Obamacare’s survival probably isn’t on the line.
Actually, the biggest reason Obama and co. should be anxious to fix these things now, I’d argue, isn’t the fate of the program itself, which can survive even large early wobbles, but the midterm elections. If Obamacare is fixed, Republicans will be in the position of attacking a program that is benefiting millions of Americans; if it isn’t, they can still run against the legend, not the fact.
So a lot is riding on fixing the technological botch — but not in quite the way people imagine.
Seeing that SCOTUS has ruled on the ACA specifically, I don't think it is going to be tough to get an immediate injunction, ruling on uncons utionality, and refusal of review by the appellate court. You do realize it was the states that brought suit against the law last year?
What's annoying is that most politicians have a law background. Go figure. They know this but their stupid minions will eat this type of up.
Interesting.
"Section 12-6-3579. A South Carolina resident taxpayer who is subjected to a tax by the Internal Revenue Code under 26 U.S.C. Section 5000A of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act shall receive a tax deduction in the exact amount of the taxes or penalty paid the federal government pursuant to 26 U.S.C. Section 5000A. The tax deduction allowed by this section must be used in the year the federal tax or penalty is paid."
InterestingYou morons just keep clinging to any straw of hope you can find. The law is with us. You had your opportunity in 2012 to elect a republican president and republican majority in the senate to repeal the law You failed. Miserably. It's time to deal with reality and try to make the best of a relatively ty law. Join us in reality TSA.
lol, make the best of a ty law
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