How was it? were you able to sign up painlessly?
I have looked online and haven't found any real assistance of exactly what information you have to have access to when you go online to enlist. Has anyone seen a worksheet?
It's a serious question.
I want to run the numbers on my employees and see if it works for them and me.
Has anyone seen signs in their doctors office that they won't be participating in it? My wife has. I haven't been to any doctors since it went into effect.
Trolls, please stay the out of this thread. It's a serious question.
I thought Obamacare meant you pick an insurance company from the marketplace.
How will the doctor know if the patient is participating in it? Are there more stringent laws on doctors accepting Obamacare patients?
I got through half of page 1 of the first 140 pages before i gave up.
As I understand it, the marketplace plans are tied to reimbursing doctors at medicaid rates which are massively discounted form regular insurance rates and the paperwork is onerous for them to even get that. If anyone knows differently please feel free to correct me.
I started the registration process back in October(?) since I wanted to see what plans were offered, but the website was too broken and couldn't finish. Later on I found out you could access some of that data without registering, and never went back.
We work with doctors, and have not heard they won't be accepting any of those plans. Insurance claims also go through the normal claim process. No new paperwork required.
Um no. You sign up for Aetna, BCBS, etc and their regular plans. How on ing Earth did you get this notion that there were forcefed medicaid plans?
The insurance companies are given directives in terms of how much of the premium goes to cost and coverage mandates but the consumer deals with BCBS and not the feds. That goes for all insurance plans regardless of source. What the marketplace does do --when it works-- is automatically apply any subsidies you are eligible for. That as opposed to going through the insurers themselves and having to obtain the subsidies independently.
They use the same plans though. You can call AETNA or BCBS and get the same plans that you find on the marketplace. You would then just have to go back to the feds to get your subsidies.
Now healthcare.gov does still hang at various points but the medicaid fearmongering has got a hold of you.
Go yourself asshole.
I'm not fear mongering and you are the one that has his facts wrong. Asshole.
Maybe you should get off Boutons RSS feeds and read some legitimate news.
The doctors on ACA plans supposedly DO have lower reimbursement rates than regular plans.
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stor...nce-plans.aspx
I asked a serious question waiting to hear personal experience with sign up and plan costs and specifically asked to keep it non-political, so take your partisan ill informed fuzzy rhetoric and shove it up you ass.
Do you mind me asking where you found that information? Was it on your state website or the big fed website that we have to use in Texas?...
I'll look into it.
How soon do you need an answer?
Probably by the end of the month at the latest. I'm looking at a March 1 renewal on my current insurance.
Off the top of my head:
Fair place to start is your local Insurance Department, although I am not sure how much help the Governor has told them to be. Part of the problem is that the state government has been pretty openly hostile to the ACA, so they [read: governors office] are essentially trying to make it difficult in an attempt to sabotage it.
[edit: that sounds political, but it is more in the line of a dry observation; it is what it is, and whether one agrees with it or not, it is what I think is a reasonable interpretation, politics aside-RG]
http://www.tdi.texas.gov/
I haven't toodled around very much on the website to find specifics, but I would guess they have at least some information. All insurance regulation is carried out at the state level, so that is where the rubber will meet the road.
That has been reported, and I would be fairly certain that some medical professionals will certainly be opting out.
Providers are having some pressure put on them to lower rates, and that has made some that were sitting on the fence to reject the plans outright.
That said, it isn't much different than signing up to any given HMO and limiting yourself 80% of the time to contracted providers for that plan. Not all doctors in any given geographical area, will be on all companies' provider lists.
It might help my search and/or recommendations if you could add:
How many employees are you looking to cover/help?
that sounds political, but it is more in the line of a dry observation; it is what it is, and whether one agrees with it or not, it is what I think is a reasonable interpretation, politics aside-RG"
the TX Repugs refusing Medicaid expansion, creating numerous bureaucratic obstacles to ACA (expensive, long training for navigators, including denying them from working before 1 Jan 2014 AFTER the initial signup period) is not "political"? GMAFB
Well, what I meant was it isn't political on my part. I am a Democrat and solidly so at this point, but what I meant was I try to set my politics aside insofar as possible when I offer narratives like that.that sounds political, but it is more in the line of a dry observation; it is what it is, and whether one agrees with it or not, it is what I think is a reasonable interpretation, politics aside-RG"
the TX Repugs refusing Medicaid expansion, creating numerous bureaucratic obstacles to ACA (expensive, long training for navigators, including denying them from working before 1 Jan 2014 AFTER the initial signup period) is not "political"? GMAFB
Republican hostility to the ACA is evident to even the most apolitical, uninterested observer, so I think I can offer that observation without being partisan.
CC, I'm able to go to HealthCare.gov and get basic individual quotes for non-smoker plans, but for the Small Business plans you still have to contact an Agent or Broker (who will likely end up trying to sell you something else anyway, depending on the demographics of your employees).
Personal anecdote: my current group plan for my employees is significantly cheaper than a Small Business plan through the ACA.
For individual plans, I compare against Gold plans, since that's the equivalent of what I offer my employees. The Cheapest ACA Gold plan (who happens to be Humana just like our group plan) is about 50% more for a 34-year old non-smoker (me) that my group plan. Even the ACA Bronze and Silver plans are more than my group plan.
On the other hand, I was looking at ACA for my mom, 59-year old with a pre-existing condition. I can get an ACA-Platinum zero-deductible plan for the same price as what we pay for her COBRA (recent disability retirement) group insurance which is the equivalent of a top Gold plan. She's already met her out-of-pocket maximums for the year (which starts in Sept) so we'll stick with that plan until renewal and then probably switch to that ACA Platinum plan.
This is all anecdotal and your mileage may vary, but hopefully these examples are helpful.
Eleven, currently
This is where the ACA failed greatest. It's not health care reform, it's health insurance reform. There is a huge level of variation for the same procedure in the same hospital, and folks who researched it can't find a consistent rationale for the variances.
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/whats-...-37-2D11936130
The Affordable Care Act should be called out for what it is: Health Insurance reform that doesn't tackle the heart of the problem that is really facing the US: health care costs rising out of control. With that said, the pre-ACA system was equally as broken. We replaced one broken system with another.
Do you do your payroll in house or do you use a service? You may be able to look into a PEO with a company who provides such a service (we use Paychex, though we don't use their PEO, our group plan is actually chaeper). Basically you join a larger group (made of of the PEO company's other clients) to get group savings.
Thanks Scott. I am thinking that at least half of my employees will qualify for some assistance as they are in the 40-60K range with families. The thought was to give them raises that would cover their out of pocket cost for a silver plan plus the additional tax they would pay on the raise.
I tried that once with Administaff. They baited and switched. First year health insurance was cheaper than I could get on my own and the second year was a lot more.
ACA was written by a health insurance industry exec/lobbyist chosen by DINO Baucus who killed any talk of public opiton, so for-profit health insurance reform was never in the cards.
the heart of the problem is NOT the ripoff, gouging middleman of for-profit health insurance, but the ripoff, gouging, for-profit health care providers.
I think the easiest way (though time consuming) would be to go one-by-one on the site and see what it tells you for each one given their ages, keeping in mind that the rates quoted on the site are non-smoker rates. I found the site pretty good for looking up the individual plans, it will give you all the detail you need on the plans themselves.
I like your idea, and it still gives your employees a chance to get a better plan. One caution: I'm not totally sure of how it's going to work, but employers under 50 employees may have some responsibility for providing coverage in 2015, with a lookback period covering 2014. If all your employees are full-time or salary, it will be really easy for you to meet your "Employer Shared Responsibility". Because I have a mix of full and part timers, hourly and salary (and sometimes one employee is FT, then next month they go to PT, then the next month they go back to FT) it's more complicated to keep track of, so Paychex does it for me. That way we can make sure we are offering a compliant plan.
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