Obama Tells Insurers New Enterprises Have Growing Pains

New studies released this week show Virginians are experiencing slower growth in health care premiums, increased access to coverage, and higher quality of care under the Affordable Care Act. If you want to pay a price to cover all your doctor visits, that would be yet another possibility. That seems disgusting until you look at what’s happening in nearby states like Alabama with a projected increase of 40 percent, or Texas and Oklahoma, both projecting near 50 percent increases! They’re very tough. And, we’ve never been that tough. As a result, customers in almost a third of USA counties will have only one insurer to choose from on their respective exchanges in 2017, according to estimates by the Kaiser Family Foundation. In March of this year, CBO increased its estimate by more than half, to 68 million people. More importantly, it’s a nudge to younger, healthier adults who may be reluctant to purchase health insurance.

“The big hikes come after two years in which California officials had boasted that the program helped insure hundreds of thousands people in the state while keeping costs moderately in check”, the Los Angeles Times reported last month. If after three months the uninsured still doesn’t pick a plan, the authorities choose one for them, and allow insurers to sue for unpaid premiums.

It seems to work. This is a historic and a dramatic improvement over where we were as a nation before the ACA. Jeff Merkley, Oregon’s junior US senator (and the only senator who backed Sanders’ insurgent presidential campaign), is one of the effort’s leaders.

“Going out of the gate the idea was not to be punitive but to promote [the law] and make it as affordable as possible for people”, she says. They haven’t much noticed the law’s new protections, such as preexisting-condition safeguards and bans on lifetime-coverage limits.

What ObamaCare has done is shift millions of Americans from the medical benefits they previously earned on the job to medical benefits they now receive through government welfare programs, primarily Medicaid. Health insurance companies are dropping out of the exchanges in droves, which means countless consumers around the country are facing the loss of their health plan. “That’s why [the gap insurance] market is heating up a little bit more”. “Even if you can afford the premium you get stuck with the cost sharing”.

In percentage terms, 9.1 percent of the population did not have insurance, down from 10.4 percent the year before.

I’m sure Surowiecki is not ignorant of these problems; he simply thinks they’re easier to overcome than I do.

According to the Tax Policy Center’s ACA Tax Calculator, someone earning $100,000 this year would pay about $2,400 in penalties for being uninsured. Bronze plans are dropping from 14 to six.

He has counted the plans, and the numbers are: Silver plans are dropping from 21 to nine.

A state can’t just say no and pass a law rejecting free ER care on demand.

It’s nearly as frustrating to witness the coverage of Aetna’s (and UnitedHealthcare’s) exits focus on effects and only slightly on causes, as if the impending “failure” of the Affordable Care Act in this state is the result of natural market churn that the law’s architects failed to foresee. The change also resulted in fiscal savings for state residents, he said, with New Jersey’s share of the Medicaid bill dropping from 45 percent to 39 percent as a result of a better federal match on program dollars. According to eHealth, on top of annual premiums for individuals averaging about $3,900, average annual deductibles are more than $4,300. It’s not that we disagree that European systems that look kind of like Obamacare work better than ours. These were positive and much-needed reforms.

“We know that this progress has not been without challenges”.

So popular are these policies that some health insurers are encouraging their clients to secure gap plans to go with their health plans.

Julie Saxton, director of managed care at the Northeast Georgia Health System, said patients need to check with their physicians to see if they will be included in the provider network to continue having access to in-network care at NGHS hospitals.