Initial attempts to sign up for ObamaCare go about as well as expected

[boutons_deux]

I don't think the Repug/VRWC SCOTUS5 will kill ACA by killing the Fed exchange subsidies, but like Roberts did last time, they'll try to figure out some way to screw it up as much as as they can.

By unusually reaching to lower level to bring Burwell into their court, they certainly have some evil intentions, which is what they were appointed to deliver.

[RandomGuy]

The only hospital within 90 miles of Prescott, and the county’s biggest employer, is the not-for-profit Yavapai Regional Medical Center West. Its Republican CEO, John Amos, is a buff former physical therapist who worked his way up the hospital’s ranks to his top position. Like the other hospital chiefs represented by the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, Amos lobbied for the passage of Medicaid expansion. Amos told Pierce, in convincing him of the importance of the expansion, that in the two years after childless adults were disqualified from Arizona’s Medicaid program in July 2011, uncompensated care at the hospital—the all-important rate of bills that aren’t getting paid—had rocketed from 3.5 percent to 8.5 percent. Without enough patients on private health care plans and revenue plummeting, the hospital had to cut more than 100 fulltime positions. Pierce says Amos was concerned that he might have to close the maternity ward and the cardiac unit.

Lack of funding for health care has had an increasing effect like this. As more and more Americans became uninsured in the last decade or so, this has happened more and more.

Those hospitals either cut care, or charged the paying customers, i.e. insurers, more. Those insurers had to get their money from somewhere...

Costs... benefits... cost shifting. It happens all the time in the free market, you just generally don't see it.

[boutons_deux]

health care in USA is one ed up disaster for-profit.

And there's nothing Human-Americans can do to fix it.

[Capt Bringdown]

Note to Obots:
Health care is not the same thing as Health Insurance.
Obamacare is Health Insurance, not health care.

[boutons_deux]

Note to Obots:
Health care is not the same thing as Health Insurance.
Obamacare is Health Insurance, not health care.

yep, and Obamacare doesn't set any prices on health care or health insurance, so both keep rising FOR-PROFIT

Health insurance For-Profit is the gate keeper to health care for-profit.

[boutons_deux]

Breaking: Obamacare Subsidies Upheld By Supreme Court Ruling

http://www.nationalmemo.com/obamacar...-%202015-06-25

[boutons_deux]

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the dissent, joined by Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Scalia:

The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says “Exchange established by the State” it means “Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government.” That is of course quite absurd, and the Court’s 21 pages of explanation make it no less so."

... ignoring the context and overall intent, which Scalia ruled earlier is how vague, ambiguous, poorly written laws should be judged

[boutons_deux]

Obamacare Ruling May Have Just Killed State-Based Exchanges

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that health insurance consumers can receive federal subsidies regardless of their state’s role in running their insurance market, fewer states may stay in the game.

When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, most people expected that each state would want to run its own health insurance marketplace. That never really happened, as many states opted to let the federal system, HealthCare.gov, do the work for them. Many of those states that did try running their own marketplaces are starting to think twice.

Now, with the Supreme Court ensuring that every state’s consumers will have equal access to federal subsidies, it is becoming clear that more of those states will revert to a federal system for enrolling people in health insurance.

“There may be a little bit of buyers’ remorse going on in some state capitals right now,” said Sabrina Corlette, the director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.

She said states underestimated the difficulty and expense of building and maintaining state marketplaces. Now, she said, many officials are asking: “What did we get ourselves into?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/26/up...abt=0002&abg=1

[boutons_deux]

Read the 7 Most Ridiculous Lines from Justice Antonin Scalia's Obamacare Dissent

Just how absurd is it, in Scalia's mind, that the court upheld the subsidies? Here are his other prime quotes of indignation at the majority's opinion:

• "Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is 'established by the State.'"
• "[The decision] rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare".
• "The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says 'Exchange established by the State' it means 'Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government.' That is of course quite absurd, and the Court's 21 pages of explanation make it no less so."
• "You would think the answer would be obvious—so obvious there would hardly be a need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it."
• "Impossible possibility, thy name is an opinion on the Affordable Care Act!"
• "Today's interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of."
• "[T]he cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...scalia-dissent

Thanks, Repugs, for this judicial cretin

[boutons_deux]

Chief Justice Roberts trolled the Supreme Court’s conservatives in his Obamacare ruling

The challenge to Obamacare in King v. Burwell always seemed rather strange to health policy wonks. The plantiffs focused on just four words in the law to argue that Obamacare's drafters didn't want subsidies to be provided in states using federal insurance exchanges, even though when combined with other provisions of the law, this would wreak havoc on those states' insurance markets.

It was unclear why anyone would have wanted the law to do such a thing — particularly when everyone involved with the drafting of the law said they had no such intention.

Indeed, even the most conservative justices on the Supreme Court once acknowledged that the federal exchanges couldn't function as intended without the subsidies — as Chief Justice John Roberts decided to cheekily point out in his opinion ruling for the administration:



https://twitter.com/irin/status/614078327939272705/photo/1

Yup, that's John Roberts quoting the four conservatives who dissented from the first big Supreme Court health care case back in 2012. "Without the federal subsidies ... the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended and may not operate at all," they wrote at the time.

Regardless of the fog thrown up around this since, Roberts seems to be saying, at one point Congress's intent was well understood.

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/25/8845527...-court-roberts

[boutons_deux]

The White House’s Obamacare defense hinged on two key legal theories

The government's defense hinged on two key pieces of precedent:

1. An old principle of common law (deriving ultimately from Heydon's Case in the 16th century), which says that particular provisions of a law must be read in light of the overall purpose of the legislation
2. The 1984 principle of Chevron deference, according to which the Supreme Court has said that the legal system should defer to executive agencies' interpretations of statutes unless they are plainly unreasonable

Both of these legal doctrines, the White House argues, set the bar low. The Obama administration doesn't need to show that their preferred interpretation of the disputed sentence is the most natural rendering of the English-language phrase in question. They merely need to show that it is one possible reasonable interpretation of the sentence in light of the overall purpose of the law.

So the White House argues that the overall purpose of the law is, pretty clearly, to give lots of people subsidized health insurance and that the IRS interpretation is a reasonable effort to fulfill that purpose.

From the government's viewpoint, the plaintiffs are positive there's a massive — and extremely strange — conspiracy in which a Democratic Congress and a Democratic administration designed a scheme whose purpose was to punish recalcitrant states.

Then, once the bill was signed into law, its architects and supporters all changed their minds so quietly and so decisively that when the IRS promulgated an interpretation that was contrary to their initial purpose the only person who raised any objections was a longtime anti-Obamacare fanatic working at a libertarian think tank.

The government's more straightforward interpretation of events is that things proceeded exactly as they seem to have proceeded — one legislative provision was drafted unclearly, the IRS used its discretion to bring practice in line with the overall intention of the bill, and conservative litigators are objecting because they simply disagree with the idea of using taxes, spending, and regulation to provide millions of people with subsidized health insurance.

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/25/8845527...-court-roberts

[boutons_deux]

BigCorp is unstoppable in screwing over America.

Health Insurance Companies Seek Big Rate Increases for 2016

Health insurance companies around the country are seeking rate increases of 20 percent to 40 percent or more, saying their new customers under the Affordable Care Act turned out to be sicker than expected. Federal officials say they are determined to see that the requests are scaled back.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans — market leaders in many states — are seeking rate increases that average 23 percent in Illinois, 25 percent in North Carolina, 31 percent in Oklahoma, 36 percent in Tennessee and 54 percent in Minnesota, according to do ents posted online by the federal government and state insurance commissioners and interviews with insurance executives.

The Oregon insurance commissioner, Laura N. Cali, has just approved 2016 rate increases for companies that cover more than 220,000 people. Moda Health Plan, which has the largest enrollment in the state, received a 25 percent increase, and the second-largest plan, LifeWise, received a 33 percent increase.

Jesse Ellis O’Brien, a health advocate at the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group, said: “Rate increases will be bigger in 2016 than they have been for years and years and will have a profound effect on consumers here. Some may start wondering if insurance is affordable or if it’s worth the money.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/04...-for-2016.html

Here's VRWC stoolie, shill, John Roberts:

"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them,"

... note, for Roberts, ACA was about (big insurance Corporate-Americans) markets, not about providing insurance for Human-Americans.

[boutons_deux]

IRS: More Taxpayers Paid Obamacare Fine Than Expected

They paid their Obamacare fine, even though many of them apparently didn't have to.

About 7.5 million taxpayers so far have paid a penalty on their taxes for failing to have health insurance last year, as required for the first time by the Affordable Care Act. That number is well in excess of original expectations, officials said Monday.

The average penalty paid was about $200 a person, and in all $1.5 billion was collected by the Internal Revenue Service in these fines.

The Treasury Department said about 300,000 people who paid the penalty likely qualified for an exemption from having to have health coverage. There are a slew of exemptions from the Obamacare mandate based on income status or certainhardships.

"The IRS will be reaching out to these taxpayers to inform them about available exemptions and note that they may benefit from amending their tax return," said Mark Mazur, assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy, in a blog post Monday. "This outreach will also help educate taxpayers about the options they have for future years."

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2015/07/20/irs-more-taxpayers-paid-obamacare-fine-than-expected/

[DarrinS]

Hmm, IRS really helping out there. Any chance the IRS will start reaching out to people to let them know about all the other deductions and exemptions they failed to take advantage of?

[boutons_deux]

$1.5B paid in penalty, and get NOTHING in return.

[Winehole23]

somewhat possible?

attempts to clarify the requirements of the ACA for taxpayers who have proven their good-natured idiocy by attempting to comply in the first place, were very welcome for everyone who has not.

[boutons_deux]

BigCorp screwing you because they can.

Drug Companies Pushed From Far and Wide to Explain High Prices

As complaints grow about exorbitant drug prices, pharmaceutical companies are coming under pressure to disclose the development costs and profits of those medicines and the rationale for charging what they do.

So-called pharmaceutical cost transparency bills have been introduced in at least six state legislatures in the last year, aiming to make drug companies justify their prices, which are often attributed to high research and development costs.

“If a prescription drug demands an outrageous price tag, the public, insurers and federal, state and local governments should have access to the information that supposedly justifies the cost,”

, more than 100 prominent oncologists called for support of a grass-roots movement to stem the rapid increases of prices of cancerdrugs, including by letting Medicare negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies and letting patients import less expensive medicines from Canada.

“There is no relief in sight because drug companies keep challenging the market with even higher prices,”

“This raises the question of whether current pricing of cancerdrugs is based on reasonable expectation of return on investment or whether it is based on what prices the market can bear.”

Gilead Sciences, whose hepa is Cdrugs, which cost $1,000 a pill or more,

$300,000 per year price of Vertex’s cystic fibrosis drug Kalydeco and roughly $150,000 for Celgene’s cancer drug Revlimid.

pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry trade groups say the transparency bills would be costly to comply with and would provide misleading information.

“The past R&D cost is really kind of a red herring,”

“The current revenue doesn’t pay for past R&D; it pays for current R&D.”

Prices for cancer drugs, some of which extend lives by only a couple of months, routinely exceed $100,000 a year, and some new ones exceed $150,000.

the drug companies are shameless, and they charge what they can get away with.”

“We all look at each other and keep pace with each other,” “Honestly, there is no science to it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/bu...s&emc=rss&_r=0

Another article said when a new hyper-expensive drug appears, even the generics in the same category raise their prices to follow the "price leader"

oncologists make most of their money from buying, prescribing cancer drugs, so there is a moral hazard.

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2012/07/oncologists-incentive-prescribe-expensive-treatments.html

BigMed has and will continue to buy enough politicians to block govt health insurance/public option and "VA-for-all" (taxpayer-owned medical facilities + staff).

[Winehole23]

Reich fingers insurance company mergers as a cause of the e in rates:

http://robertreich.org/post/123327070510

[Winehole23]

Mayo clinic protests price-gouging for cancer drugs:

The high prices of cancer drugs are affecting the care of patients with cancer and our health care system.¹ In the United States, the average price of new cancer drugs increased 5- to 10-fold over 15 years, to more than $100,000 per year in 2012. A study by Howard et al² do ented the escalation in cancer drug prices by an average of $8500 a year over the past 15 years. The cost of drugs for each additional year lived (after adjusting for inflation) has increased from $54,000 in 1995 to $207,000 in 2013.² This increase is causing harm to patients with cancer and their families. Here are the facts:

• •Cancer will affect 1 in 3 individuals over their lifetime
  
• •Recent trends in insurance coverage put a heavy financial burden on patients, with their out-of-pocket share increasing to 20% to 30% of the total cost³
  
• •In 2014, all new US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved cancer drugs were priced above $120,000 per year of use⁴
  
• •The average annual household gross income in the United States is about $52,000⁵
  
• •For a patient with cancer who needs one cancer drug that costs $120,000 per year, the out-of-pocket expenses could be as high as $25,000 to $30,000—more than half the average household income and possibly more than the median take-home pay for a year. Patients with cancer then have to make difficult choices between spending their incomes (and liquidating assets) on potentially lifesaving therapies or foregoing treatment to provide for family necessities (food, housing, education). This decision is even more critical for senior citizens who are more frequently affected by cancers and have lower incomes and limited assets.⁶ Because of costs, about 10% to 20% of patients with cancer do not take the prescribed treatment or compromise it.⁷ It is do ented that the greater the out-of-pocket cost for oral cancer therapies, the lower the compliance.⁸ This is a structural disincentive for compliance with some of the most effective and transformative drugs in the history of cancer treatment⁸
  
• •Given the rising incidence of cancer in our aging population, high cancer drug prices will affect millions of Americans and their immediate families, often repeatedly

In 2006, the US government made a great effort to improve access to approved cancer drugs by requiring Medicare Part D to cover such drugs. Conversely, the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act contains legislation that forbids Medicare from negotiating drug prices.⁹ These policies have created an opportunity for drug companies, rendering them the sole decision makers on the price of cancer drugs.^{10, 11} There is no relief in sight because drug companies keep challenging the market with even higher prices. This raises the question of whether current pricing of cancer drugs is based on reasonable expectation of return on investment or whether it is based on what prices the market can bear.¹²

http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org...430-9/fulltext

[Winehole23]

Journal of the American Medical Association measures the changes in (self-reported) coverage and care:

Among the 507 055 adults in this survey, pre-ACA trends were significantly worsening for all outcomes. Compared with the pre-ACA trends, by the first quarter of 2015, the adjusted proportions who were uninsured decreased by 7.9 percentage points (95% CI, −9.1 to −6.7); who lacked a personal physician, −3.5 percentage points (95% CI, −4.8 to −2.2); who lacked easy access to medicine, −2.4 percentage points (95% CI, −3.3 to −1.5); who were unable to afford care, −5.5 percentage points (95% CI, −6.7 to −4.2); who reported fair/poor health, −3.4 percentage points (95% CI, −4.6 to −2.2); and the percentage of days with activities limited by health, −1.7 percentage points (95% CI, −2.4 to −0.9). Coverage changes were largest among minorities; for example, the decrease in the uninsured rate was larger among Latino adults (−11.9 percentage points [95% CI, −15.3 to −8.5]) than white adults (−6.1 percentage points [95% CI, −7.3 to −4.8]). Medicaid expansion was associated with significant reductions among low-income adults in the uninsured rate (differences-in-differences estimate, −5.2 percentage points [95% CI, −7.9 to −2.6]), lacking a personal physician (−1.8 percentage points [95% CI, −3.4 to −0.3]), and difficulty accessing medicine (−2.2 percentage points [95% CI, −3.8 to −0.7]).

Conclusions and Relevance The ACA’s first 2 open enrollment periods were associated with significantly improved trends in self-reported coverage, access to primary care and medications, affordability, and health. Low-income adults in states that expanded Medicaid reported significant gains in insurance coverage and access compared with adults in states that did not expand Medicaid.

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article....icleid=2411283

[Winehole23]

ACA co-ops struggling:

Obamacare's co-op plans are in trouble. The consumer-operated and -oriented plans — co-ops, for short — launched with Obamacare grant money as nonprofit insurers to sell on the health insurance marketplaces.
The hope was they would push other plans to lower premiums — but a new federal report suggests that the co-ops are not faring well.


Most of them have not hit their enrollment targets. And 19 of them didn't bring in enough in premiums to cover their claims, a difficult way to run an insurance business.


"The low enrollments and net losses might limit the ability of some CO-OPs to repay startup and solvency loans and to remain viable and sustainable," the report, from the Health and Human Service Inspector General's Office, warns.

http://www.vox.com/2015/7/31/9078815...ops-struggling

[boutons_deux]

Number of unpaid hospital bills shrinks under Obamacare

The number of unpaid medical bills is shrinking across the United States thanks to the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act. As more people sign up for private health insurance, and as more states expand Medicaid programs for low-income Americans, hospital companies are reporting lower expenses for charity and uncompensated expenses, a Forbes columnistnoted Sunday.

The latest example comes from Universal Health Services Inc., one of the largest U.S. hospital management companies. The firm's acute care hospitals have seen a "decrease in the aggregate of charity care, uninsured discounts and provision of doubtful accounts as a percentage of gross charges," executives said in their earnings report for the second-quarter and first half of 2015.

Uncompensated care declined in the second quarter "as it has the last six quarters now," Steve Filton, the company's chief financial officer, told analysts on a conference call Thursday.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/numb...e+Raw+Story%29

[TheSanityAnnex]

Gotta clean up the before elections
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/04..._r=0&referrer=

[spurraider21]

^inb4 "more repug/VWRC/1% LIES"

[boutons_deux]

ACA doesn't set prices, your adored BigHealthCare does.

for-profit, rip off health care is major reason American can't get ahead, end up after 40 years of working and still not financially secure.