That is the sound of Obamacare imploding, at least in North Carolina.
http://www.sunherald.com/2015/08/06/6354810/blue-cross-raises-rate-hike-sought.html
Surprisingly, healthy low risk people in North Carolina don’t want to pay $300 a month for health insurance with a $5,500 deductible before Blue Cross pays anything.
I dipped my toe into the waters a couple weeks ago, visiting a primary care doctor to get “established”. The second visit, to go over my test results was a 15 minute appointment, which today means 5 minutes, which means about 2 minutes of conversation. After Blue Cross adjusted down the charge, my cost for arguing with him that 112 is not a “high” blood glucose reading, and a sonogram he ordered showed nothing troubling at all was $165.
So Blue Cross needs a 26% increase, another $1000 on the deductible – and the new detail is they want to drop the more expensive plans that allow seeing a wide range of doctors and only offer the “Value” plan I currently have – which is a very narrow list of providers – probably about the same list of doctors that accept Medicaid.
If I want to spend $200 a month, I can enroll in a private concierge plan where the primary care doctor will do an actual physical exam for an hour and accommodate same day or next day appointments as issues come up during the year. Where my niece is expected to take care of 2,500 patients, a concierge doctor will stop at 250 to 300 patients. Do the math – $2400 x 300. While that covers the office visits, there is other ancillary income from taking X-Rays, etc that are billed to the insurance company.
It had been 5 years since I’ve seen a doctor, and probably close to 10 years without seeing a doctor prior to my 2009 incident. I am a high risk patient, of course and a mentally ill hypochondriac, obviously.
Blue Cross needs the revenue to prevent the remaining plans from falling apart. The monthly increase + increased deductible will push my cost up to around $14,000 a year for the privilege of having an overworked GP grunt at me and roll his eyes when I ask about vitamin D deficiency. I apologize to y’all for being such a freeloader.
Facing retirement is a bit ominous for all of the points you covered here. I worry about the cost as much as the care. Heck, I will be way up in the mountains. Maybe I can set up a barter system. Obamacare – what a shining example of stupidity – what a way to destroy the medical profession.
The concierge options I looked at seem to expect you’ll consume about 4 hours of the doctor’s time during the year (4 x 300 = 1200 hrs/year – plenty of time for golf)… At $2400 for 4 hours, that works out to $600 an hour.
While I understand Rush’s point that he would prefer to just pay the doctor and not have insurance, that is not an option for the 310 million Americans who don’t have $50 million a year radio contracts. The caller long, long ago from Nacogdoches Texas had Rush completely pegged. While Rush has his story about surviving on potato chips in Kansas City, he is not “one of us”. “Rusty”always had his influential father and grandfather and network of family friends to back him up if he really got in trouble.
“We” don’t hang out on weekends in owner’s stadium skyboxes at NFL games, play golf with Roger Ailes and Karl Rove, order $50 a pound steaks from Kansas City, or have a mansion on the ocean with authentic French glass chandeliers, and take private jets to avoid interacting with other people.
Rush worked hard for what he has and I would not have it any other way – but telling America that the way we can evade Obamacare is to hop on a plane and go to Costa Rica if we get sick is not anything close to an answer.
Is illegal health care in our future?
http://qz.com/473818/with-greeces-healthcare-system-in-ruins-people-are-turning-to-illegal-free-clinics/
I wouldn’t hang out with Karl rove, even if I could.
Like Donald said” he is a proven loser’ LOL
Thanks for nothing ‘Obo’ ! ( you big dum F er!)
parrott
The wealthy aren’t the only ones paying cash and traveling for medical care. The Amish living near me pay cash for medical services, and when one required cancer surgery, they took Amtrak from Minnesota to Mexico to get the treatment for one third or less of the cost here. There really is no market in medical care, since you don’t see the costs until a month after they are incurred. My employer pays over $18k per year to cover me and my family with a $9k deductible. A couple months ago I took my son into the emergency room of a top-rated hospital in the area for a mental/medication problem. They provided no help for the three hours we were there. I had to detain my son, and my wife had to call other hospitals to try to find a bed. They fed my son lunch after a couple hours. A few weeks later we got the bills for about $2000, which will be picked up by Blue Cross because we long ago met our deductible. My company explored dropping insurance entirely and just paying employees directly and letting them buy their own coverage. With the tax penalty, it just didn’t make sense. Blue Cross requested an increase in rates of over 40% in Minnesota for individual plans, and I’m sure group plans will be going up too, so I’m not sure how long my company will be able to afford it.
The delay in forcing employers into the ACA is why the individual market is in the death spiral. It bought time for the employers to organize self insurance pools – paying only the actual expenses of their employees (with a catastrophic policy if one employee gets really sick) – rather than allowing Blue Cross to “cost shift” the collective masses into their private risk pool.
Employers with more that 50 or 100 employees have never purchased insurance.. they pay the medical costs directly and leverage the “payers” in the industry to handle the transactions and contracts with the “providers”. Each dollar you spend at the doctor in a quarter is a dollar less for them in their quarterly earnings call.
True that the really small employers had an opportunity to organize.
The system is set up so that unhealthy people are discouraged from being hired, or kept on employer’s payrolls.