‘Obamacare premiums will raise a staggering 76 percent on average for Oklahoma residents, and the state's top insurance regulator says the state's insurance exchange set up by the law is on "life support."
Oklahoma's Insurance Department said on Tuesday that increases in individual marketplace plans will range from 58 percent to 96 percent.
"These jaw-dropping increases make it clear that Oklahoma's exchange is on life support," said Insurance Commissioner John Doak, in a statement. "Health insurers are losing massive amounts of money. If they don't raise rates they'll go out of business. This system has been doomed from the beginning."’ - Oklahoma Obamacare plans face 76 percent hike, Washington Examiner, 10/04/2016
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/oklahoma-obamacare-plans-face-76-percent-hike/article/2603629#!
“It has not been a good week for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare.
A slew of news, from insurers dropping out to possible fraud among healthcare providers, has all accumulated in a deluge of negative headlines for one of President Obama's signature laws.
In fact, it's gotten so bad that it appears that the whole program itself may be in doubt.
While there are issues, and this past week highlighted many of them, it does appear that there is a long road ahead before we have a definitive understanding of Obamacare's survival, and there's a good chance that it makes it.
Obamacare's terrible, no good, very bad week
On Monday night, Aetna announced that it would be dropping around 80% of their policies offered through the ACA's public-health exchanges after sustaining large losses on the Obamacare business.
This makes Aetna the third of the "big five" insurance firms (which includes Humana, United Health Care, Cigna, and Anthem) to announce a serious cut to their Obamacare business.
Whether Aetna did this due to business losses, as the company claims, or because of the Department of Justice's lawsuit blocked their merger with Humana is still up for debate, but regardless, the firm will be out of nearly all of the exchanges by 2017.
In addition to the Aetna news, the New York Federal Reserve put out a study Tuesday that showed one out of every five businesses in the bank's district — which includes parts of New Jersey and Connecticut — said they were reducing hiring due to Obamacare.
On top of all of that, the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) asked for public comment on instances in which healthcare providers directed patients to Obamacare over Medicare or Medicaid in order to make higher profits.
All in all, not a great week.” - Obamacare has gone from the president’s greatest achievement to a ‘slow-motion death spiral’, business insider.com, 08/21/2016
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.businessinsider.com/obamacare-is-in-slow-motion-death-spiral-2016-8
Related article: Aetna Warned U.S. Before Exiting Health Exchanges, WSJ.com, 08/17/2016:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/aetna-warned-it-would-withdraw-from-exchanges-if-humana-deal-was-blocked-1471436663
“Insurers have asked for double-digit rate increases for nearly 1 out of every 3 Obamacare plans that will be sold on HealthCare.gov for 2016 coverage, according to a new analysis.
And in three states—Delaware, South Dakota and West Virginia—every plan sold on HealthCare.gov is asking for 10 percent or more hikes in the prices of their premiums for next year, AgileHealthInsurance.com said in its report.”
“Existing Obamacare customers in six other states on that federally run marketplace, which serves two-thirds of the United States, could also be in for a rude awakening come November when open enrollment resumes.
In those other six states, a majority of plans are requesting double-digit hikes, ranging from Montana, where 86 percent of the plans have asked for such increases, down to North Dakota, where 67 percent of the plans are doing so.
"The natural reaction [for those customers] is: They're going to be surprised," said Sam Gibbs, executive director of AgileHealthInsurance.com.
"In some of these states, there's going to be a strong reaction to it," said Gibbs.
AgileHealthInsurance's analysis found that 7 percent of the Obamacare plans sold on HealthCare.gov are asking for rate hikes of at least 30 percent, while 14 percent of such plans are asking for increases of at least 20 percent. “ - Obamacare's many double-digit price hikes for next year, CNBC, 09/05/2015
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/04/obamacares-many-double-digit-price-hikes-for-next-year.html
‘“What makes Obamacare so unique, and therefore so politically toxic for those who passed it, is that they did it on a straight party line. That has never occurred in American history – something of this social importance, something so sweeping to be done on a purely party-line basis,” Krauthammer said.’
‘That ACA lacked bipartisan support from the start has made it a “terrible liability” for Democrats, Krauthammer said. Liberals will be “tagged as the cause of everything that goes wrong,” he said, whether or not the legislation caused the issue.
He added that he thinks the law oversteps its bounds, and that issues of the uninsured and insufficient plans should have been dealt with “as a discrete issue.” Instead, the ACA has attempted to entirely reform the health care system, leading to what Krauthammer contended are unnecessary additions to the law with “ripple effects” that may negatively affect millions.
“As a result, politically I think it’s quite likely that the Republicans will win the Senate, and I think it gives them a leg up, probably a slight advantage if you had to put down a bet today for the 2016 election,” Krauthammer said.’
He said the reform will be short-lived to due to its overambitious nature: “The likelihood that Obamacare will survive [to be] anything like what it looks like now or what it was intended to [look like] I think is rather small. I do think Obamacare is such a clumsy beast that it will simply expire … and then the country’s going to have a true choice between a single-payer system … [and] a free-market system.”
Krauthammer said ACA supporters used the issue of the uninsured “as an excuse for, or as leverage to, revolutionize everything in the health care system. He said Democrats have used a “combination of hype and partisanship” to make Republicans seem “hard-hearted,” particularly on stem cell research early in the George W. Bush presidency.
“The hype was that stem cell research, or what was known as regenerative medicine, was just a step away from relieving the suffering of millions. And the partisanship was the notion that with Republicans in office, conservatives … [who were] attached to the past and anti-science … were holding this back.”
This notion, Krauthammer noted, fits with caricatures of conservatism, such as “people who love to throw orphans into the snow. Especially in winter.”’ - Krauthammer: Obamacare is a 'clumsy beast', Cornell Chronicle, 04/17/2014
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/04/krauthammer-obamacare-clumsy-beast
“Advocates marketed the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known colloquially as "Obamacare," to the American public as a way to "bend the cost curve" of soaring health care costs downward. But despite its supporters' hopes, the 2010 legislation was fiscally reckless, markedly increasing the government's already-unsustainable health spending commitments at a time of record deficits. Three years later, the fiscal harm stemming from the ACA is as bad as-and even worse than-many experts predicted. The problem lies with the nature of the law itself, promising trillions in new government benefits while relying on dubious financing mechanisms. These problems were not only foreseeable, they were indeed widely foreseen.
Even before the president signed the ACA into law, non-partisan analysts demonstrated that the belief it would reduce federal deficits was based on a misunderstanding of government accounting. The ACA's projected savings from Medicare payment reductions were in effect being doubly committed: once to extend Medicare solvency and a second time to fund a massive coverage expansion. Both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Medicare Chief Actuary alerted Congress to the problem at the time. By counting projected savings only once, my own subsequent study demonstrated that the ACA would add roughly $340 billion to federal deficits in its first decade.
The reality was always likely to be worse than that estimate. The positive case for the ACA's financial integrity hung on two improbable outcomes: that all of its cost-savings provisions would work exactly as hoped, while none of its spending provisions would cost more than envisioned. Yet CBO warned at the time that many of the law's cost-saving provisions "might be difficult to sustain," while the Medicare Chief Actuary also warned that projected savings "may be unrealistic." My own conclusion after the law's passage was that, "the proceeds of such cost-savings cannot safely be spent until they have verifiably accrued."
No sooner was the ink dry on the ACA before these warnings began to prove correct. Many of the law's financing mechanisms started to unravel, while pressure mounted to expand its new spending programs. One of the first provisions to bite the dust was the CLASS long-term care program, suspended in 2011 due to its financial unsoundness. This wiped out a revenue source counted on to produce $70 billion during the first decade to help finance the ACA's coverage expansion.
The 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision further complicated the law's financing. The original idea under the ACA was that states would expand Medicaid while more generous federal subsidies provide for others to buy health coverage from newly established exchanges. But the Court rendered Medicaid expansion optional for states, thus giving them an incentive to let the federal government shoulder the entire cost of subsidizing more generous insurance coverage for those above the poverty line. Many states are now taking advantage of this latitude, likely increasing federal costs for the exchanges.” - Obamacare's Financial Unraveling: Predictable, and Predicted, Real Clear Markets, 10/09/2013
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2013/10/09/obamacares_financial_unraveling_predictable_and_predicted_100656.html
The Obama administration views access to contraceptives as a basic human right.
-OK-
Then why does the same administration prohibit/deny the use of a Health Savings Accounts to purchase over the counter items…..such as condoms?
H/T: Our Dinner Table, Mike M.
A point that seems to be missed by talking heads, pundits, and media-types regarding the Catholic contraceptive issue is: this is one more episode in a series of endless episodes associated with a central planning scheme known as ObamaCare. Further, it is not Obamacare specifically, its any centrally planned scheme that by design continuously exhibits an endless series of negative episodes also known as unintended consequences.
The centrally planned scheme, as with any scheme, comes with endless tangents. Tangents of the unintended, that then interact into cascading unintended consequences.
When the unintended consequences surface one will most certainly note the classic central planning after-the-fact attempt to address unintended consequences by way of back tracking e.g.: ...oh we really meant this or that, ...oh that doesn't apply to YOU after all, ...oh we will waiver that aspect, and on and on and on it goes.
In the main, its not about Catholics, its not about contraceptives, its about a central planning scheme. Yet another scheme in a long parade of schemes based on "the way things ought to be". Scheme based propositions are never able to sort out the endless tangents.
Those gazillion tangents, that the central planners of the centrally planned scheme were suppose to take into account. Those experts with Omni-present knowledge, with grand supposed abilities, with continuous and dynamic real-time knowledge of each and every mundane aspect, that go onto design a socio-economic system…. with knowledge they do not in fact possess. (1)
Those tangents, which are so conveniently assured to never occur when central plans are sold based on a proposition of “the way things ought to be”. Those tangents that have absolutely no chance of being accounted for, but most assuredly were sold as accounted for when “the way things ought to be“ was a warm and fuzzy politico info-mercial. Yes, those many, varied, and consequential tangents go on to tarry at their haunt and re-visit time and time again.
One needs to consider being ahead of the curve regarding the following propositional arguments that surely will surface regarding the endless tangents of the scheme as it unravels and reveals its many and varied errors: (a) if the plan had been different, (b) if the planners had been different, (c) if circumstances had been different, (d) if we would have had more money, (e) if all of the above, a combination thereof, had been different.
Do centrally planned schemes by “experts” through the use of coercive powers, armed at best with non-real time general knowledge….do such schemes historically sort through items resulting in wonderful outcomes? -Or- do free market based, free people, free people basing decisions on real time mundane knowledge, making free decisions at the point of mutual self interest historically result in the best overall outcome?
Notes:
(1) F.A. Hayek, from the essay The Pretense of Knowledge
