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Heeeeeeere's Obamacare!

Fast Eddie B said:
At any cost?

And a net decrease in the number of insured would really "mean little" to you?

I'm still hoping for the best, but we all need to stay apprised of the overall effect of the plan - for good or ill.
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How did you get that from what he wrote? Where does he say "at any cost"? Where does he say that a net decrease wouldn't matter, when he says "As long as people get signed up in the long run"? Isn't he saying exactly the opposite of what you said he did?
 
Here is a notice I recieved today at work. I will not get to keep my insurance. I doubt if I will be alone.
I have a good comprehensive plan and somehow to meet the law it will become worse. Maybe at my company they will try to ease the "pain" because it is not easy to fill positions in our industry. But that will not neccesarily apply to other people

As you know, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and the impact of its mandates, is having a major effect throughout the health care industry. With our current health insurance plan with Oxford expiring on February 28, 2014, we are also faced with the effects of this legislation. While our current plan is quite comprehensive, Oxford states that it does not meet all the requirements of these new mandates, and is therefore not available for renewal in its current form. In researching an affordable alternative plan with minimum disruption, it was determined that the best solution is an alternative Oxford plan that requires a deductible for outpatient and hospital benefits. (Deductibles have now become the rule rather than the exception for affordable plans.) In order to ease the pain of this option, please note the following:
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Unabogie said:
How did you get that from what he wrote? Where does he say "at any cost"? Where does he say that a net decrease wouldn't matter, when he says "As long as people get signed up in the long run"? Isn't he saying exactly the opposite of what you said he did?
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He seemed to be implying that more people signing up would be a net good thing, and that stats don't matter.

Maybe I'm selfish, but I'm somewhat concerned as to how my standard of living will be affected if my monthly family health insurance premium goes from around $360 to $1,100+, which is what the Obamacare site says would be my minimum if I'm forced to go with them. I'm currently not, but living on a fixed income if our Aetna plan becomes unavailable or goes up significantly, those premiums will have to come out of very finite resources.

But That's Just Me™, and we'll have to wait and see the net numbers when all is said and done. If typical families do, in fact, save $2,500 a year in premiums, AND more people get covered, AND most people get to keep plans and doctors they like, then color me surprised - but glad.
 
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eeyore1954 said:
Here is a notice I recieved today at work. I will not get to keep my insurance. I doubt if I will be alone.
I have a good comprehensive plan and somehow to meet the law it will become worse. Maybe at my company they will try to ease the "pain" because it is not easy to fill positions in our industry. But that will not neccesarily apply to other people
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Sounds like your insurance company is trying to find a way to make more money off the ACA confusion and hoopla.
 
Trakar said:
Sounds like your insurance company is trying to find a way to make more money off the ACA confusion and hoopla.
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Or his employer is (they're looking to cut their health insurance bill by picking a plan with a deductible, but just blame it on the ACA).

Or both may be playing it straight. But I can't think of any ACA-related employer mandates that would take a current plan and make it all of a sudden unaffordable.
 
New CBO analysis released:

Health Law Seen Hitting Labor Force

The new health law is projected to reduce the total number of hours Americans work by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time jobs in 2021, a bigger impact on the workforce than previously expected, according to a nonpartisan congressional report.

The analysis, by the Congressional Budget Office, says a key factor is people scaling back how much they work and instead getting health coverage through the Affordable Care Act. The agency had earlier forecast the labor-force impact would be the equivalent of 800,000 workers in 2021.

Because the CBO estimated that the changes would be a result of workers' choices, it said the law, President Barack Obama's signature initiative, wouldn't lead to a rise in the unemployment rate. But the labor-force impact could slow growth in future years, though the precise impact is uncertain.

The agency also said the rough launch of the health law's online insurance portals shrunk its estimates of the number of people who will get coverage in 2014. It said six million people would obtain private coverage through the exchanges and eight million people would sign up for Medicaid, compared with its earlier estimates of seven million and nine million, respectively.
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Sort of a bad headline for the Administration, but I don't actually see this as a bad thing. In fact it means that people have more options. They don't necessarily have to work full-time jobs to obtain health insurance.

Here's the White House response.
Since the Affordable Care Act passed into law in March 2010 the private sector has added 8.1 million jobs. That is the strongest 45 month job growth since the late 1990s and contrasts with the 3.8 million private sector jobs lost in the decade before the Affordable Care Act passed.

Claims that the Affordable Care Act hurts jobs are simply belied by the facts in the CBO report. CBO’s findings are not driven by an assumption that ACA will lead employers to eliminate jobs or reduce hours, in fact, the report itself says that there is “no compelling evidence that part-time employment has increased as a result of the ACA.”

While many factors affect job growth, the actual performance of businesses refutes those who predicted that the Affordable Care Act would dramatically hurt the economy.

What the CBO report does find is one key immediate effect of the Affordable Care Act is to “induce some employers to hire more workers or to increase the hours of current employees” during the 2014-16 period. Over the longer run, CBO finds that because of this law, individuals will be empowered to make choices about their own lives and livelihoods, like retiring on time rather than working into their elderly years or choosing to spend more time with their families. At the beginning of this year, we noted that as part of this new day in health care, Americans would no longer be trapped in a job just to provide coverage for their families, and would have the opportunity to pursue their dreams. This CBO report bears that out, and the Republican plan to repeal the ACA would strip those hard-working Americans of that opportunity.
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Puppycow said:
Health Law Seen Hitting Labor Force
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Just one more quote from the WSJ article:
The report indicates that, in effect, some workers will either leave the workforce entirely or cut back on hours because the law gives lets them get coverage on their own without regard to their medical history, in some cases with a subsidy.

The report also said that in the next few years, some of the hours that were given up would be picked up by the many Americans seeking jobs.
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If we care about the unemployed who want to work, this is really a good thing. If some people elect to work less or retire early, that's a job opportunity for someone else who doesn't have a job but wants one.
 
Puppycow said:
If we care about the unemployed who want to work, this is really a good thing. If some people elect to work less or retire early, that's a job opportunity for someone else who doesn't have a job but wants one.
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Or, translated for the reality-impaired:

ObamaCare could lead to loss of nearly 2.3 million US jobs, report says

Behold the logic at work:
The long-term effect of ObamaCare on the U.S. economy was rewritten Tuesday with the Congressional Budget Office issuing a revised projection that nearly 2.5 million workers could opt out of full-time jobs over the next 10 years -- allowing employers to wipe 2.3 million full-time jobs off the books.
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boooeee said:
Or his employer is (they're looking to cut their health insurance bill by picking a plan with a deductible, but just blame it on the ACA).

Or both may be playing it straight. But I can't think of any ACA-related employer mandates that would take a current plan and make it all of a sudden unaffordable.
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And to be truthful, younger(<40), management/executive individuals generally are healthier and often take a lot more pre-emptive personal health management measures (eating healthy, active lifestyle etc.,) that generally lower their healthcare costs. Large deductibles are a reasonable tradeoff, providing catastrophic coverage (bolt from the blue) but with a minimal periodic payment.

The idea behind ACA is to get everyone paying a roughly equivalent rate for a selected level of personal health insurance as a percentage of earnings with a cap and a floor(w/subsidies). That system fails if you allow low risk demographics to pay a lower rate until they until they become higher risk. Under ACA some people will subsidize services that they don't need or take advantage of, but their payments not only fund the services they use, they also help fund (along with low-income government subsidies) those who have been priced out of healthcare insurance in the modern insurance market.

Universal single-payer is cheaper, more transparent, and potentially much more effectively implemented.
 
eeyore1954 said:
I don't doubt that the insurance company is taking advantage.
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One metric will be if in a year or two or three insurance companies start listing increased profits, as a result of them "taking advantage".

Or, if they are losing money, and have to take the government bailouts that I believe are woven into the ACA, and some on the right are predicting.

Typically, insurance companies do not have huge profit margins to begin with*, so if they have to start issuing policies with no caps and with no ability to screen preexisting conditions, either these policies will have to charge increased premiums to offset the increased payouts, or something else will have to give.

We'll just have to see.


*Here's Aetna's, per quarter: https://ycharts.com/companies/AET/profit_margin
For comparison, Apple's: http://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/profit_margin
Point is, if already meager profit margins get squeezed, smart money may just move to another sector.
 
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Emily Cat said:
Eventually it might become a useless statistic... but since ACA was introduced on the argument that we've got a bunch of uninsured, and this is a problem that needs to be addressed, and ACA is the solution to that problem... it really seems like that's something they ought to be tracking, wouldn't you think?
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Considering cost is based on the increase in the insured pool. It's something they must know. :confused:
 
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