The PDF eligibility document where I have been stuck is completely boilerplate other than filling in my name.
So on to enrollment!
Showing me a quote based on 50 year as an inducement to continue was fraudulent as I expected. The actual plans offered do not include the catastrophic plan and the plans offered are more expensive than if I go right to the insurance company since the expectation is people using healthcare.gov are not price sensitive since the bulk of the premium is paid by OPM
As a frame of reference, I’m currently paying in Illinois for a very expensive high risk HIPAA policy with a $5000 deductible HSA plan – the cost is about $660 a month. Here are my “affordable” firm quotes.
Welcome to the deep end of the pool – we are all high risk now!
Well, it is actually cheaper to pay the doctors directly, if it were legal to do so. The insurance companies don’t work for free… in fact, they cost (employees, facilities, and profit to share holders) about 20% of the medical cost itself. Obamacare requires everyone to play that 20% whereas before you could legally bypass it.
So far, it is still legal and some doctors have headed in that direction – offering fixed price annual services for primary care. Doctors waste a lot of their time filling out insurance paperwork and paying clerical people to shuffle insurance forms.
To me, it’s the hospitals that got out of control. If I were King of health care, my reform would be to require publishing the prices of services and not allowing patients paying their own bills to be charged more than 150% of what the hospital charges Medicaid. We also need to turn around this idea that the uninsured will just walk away from the bills – stopping the cost shifting might help. Sending a few hospital administrators in front of the TV cameras for billing fraud might also help.
There is a whole lot of fraud in the system. The best way to stifle fraud is to put the patient in charge of paying the bill. The medical bill must be highly detailed and the scope of the procedure should be disclosed prior to the medical procedure. In other words, introduce some real competition and let people shop around for voluntary procedures.
Art, I seem to remember, about a year ago, you blogged about the huge difference in prices charged for similar medical procedures depending on the healthcare provider.
Doesn’t sound like something I wrote.
The difference is generally between providers that are contacted for specific rates per procedure (in network) and those that are not and can bill what ever they want to bill.
Generally the insurance companies cut a check for the “customary” rate for the procedure (significantly higher than in network rates) and if the provider wants more than that, it will require require lot of documentation and probably a court date.
Billing fraud is illegal. Problem is that the bills normally go the a third party and there is no reward for the patient to report the crime to either the payer or the police, so it continues.
My local hospital send me a request for a donation, and I replied that they will see no money from me until they press charges against the employees that sent me fraudulent inflated bills. I never heard from them again.
With health insurance becoming a cost+20% business, there isn’t even an incentive to stop fraud, in fact it increases their 20% profit. Then force everyone to pay for your product, you’re in pork heaven!
Those Platinum level monthly insurance premiums look like mortgage payments on a nice house that includes hazard insurance and taxes in many areas of the country.
This can’t work. I refuse to believe that tens of millions of people are going to willingly sign up and pay these prices. Insanity.
In theory, if those rates are too high and at the end of the year they paid out less than 80% of what they took in for medical care, they would have to rebate the excess charges.
What they’re worried about is that the prices will scare people away and the only people who will buy the policy are the really sick and the prices get more and more unaffordable.
Toward the end of the year, they will have already spend their 20%, so to keep it, they will send out flyers reminding you to get your physical, have certain tests, etc… so that they can keep the full 20%.
Year end 2 for one colonoscopy special!
If everyone signs up, next years’s 20% will be from a larger pool of premiums- since last year’s rate was too low.
In theory, since the underwriting process almost completely goes away, it would seem that keeping overhead down will be easier. It might increase the unemployment level in Connecticut, however.
The remaining costs are negotiating with providers, facilities and pharmaceutical firms to get low prices and promise volume once they join the network.
Ironically, the thing health plans did well – negotiate low prices with providers, facilities and pharmaceutical firms will no longer be rewarded under Obamacare- it will be punished. You reward reward something, you get more of it, you punish it, you get less of it.
This reminds me of the time with NCarolina Dept of Rev, I provided 1) a receipt from them, 2) a canceled check, and 3) a notarized copy of a bank statement and they refused to believe I had made payment. They needed some code on the back of the check to verify payment.
Shoving small business and high information voters so far beyond common sense could have catastrophic results. But what the hell, I’ve been saying that since the Patriot Act and the sheeple just keep grazing and chewing their cud.
HPaws, some high profile folks have also spoken out against the insanity but they are denounced, shouted down, ridiculed and vilified by the BlameStream Media and their minions. Then they also spread innuendo and false campaigns, such as the so-called “War Against Women”. To me it looks like the war is being successful waged, and it is called ObamaCare.
The incessant “War Against American Patriots” led to a very poor turn-out in the 2012 election, and now we find ourselves deeper in the quagmire. Same thing will happen in the 2014 elections unless more sheeple wake-up.
It’s hard to stay calm when I think about the “patriots” who helped hand over the country to Obama for another four years because Mitt Romney wasn’t conservative enough for them.
Also on that list are the idiot GOP Senate candidates in Missouri and Indiana who paved the way for Democrats to win by making unbelievably stupid statements.
And then there’s someone I generally like, Mark Levin, who supported those two idiot candidates and begrudgingly “endorsed” Romney by saying he’d vote for a can of orange juice over Obama.
I am lifelong Republican and proud to have voted against Romney and for former Republican Govenor Gary Johnson in 2012. It had nothing to do with conservationism, but with corruption:
http://jaretglenn.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/how-the-republican-party-stole-the-nomination-from-ron-paul/
Let’s add Gary Johnson voters to the list of those who gave us four more years of Obama.
It is the people that voted for Mitt in the primary that are the cause for the Republican loss… just as in 2008 it was the people that voted for McCain in the primary.
The Republican Party has been nominating people that alienate and divide rather than unite the way Reagan did, or that Clinton did for the Democrats.
Most Americans were so disgusted that they stayed home on election day.
Let’s add those disgusted Americans who stayed home on election day to the list of those who helped give us four more years of Obama.
CBS News reads this blog for its leads:
“October 23, 2013 7:56 AM
HealthCare.gov pricing feature can be off the mark”
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57608843/healthcare.gov-pricing-feature-can-be-off-the-mark/
I would say you’re making that up – except for they chose Charlotte, NC for their hypothetical. What are the chances of that?
Moving day is about a week and a half away, if all stays on track
I was connecting the dots. SRG is the center of the “evil eye” that CBS uses. 😉