Do you support keeping people on existing health plans that were to be canceled; didn't meet min standards, i.e. refusal for pre-existing conditions?

I find it ironic that the complainers are demanding to keep inferior policies ie. cheap up front, next to worthless when needed. Non-compliant policies should be canceled as planned.

I’m one of the 5% ers who must purchase an individual policy, and I’m tired of being fucked over by the health insurance companies. I’m in a state that has started its own exchange. We’re in the preliminary process of signing an ACA policy, and we’re ecstatic. Our rates should drop 65%, with a tremendous increase in benefits. I think that knowledge, support, and appreciation of the ACA will soon begin to snowball as more and more people become familiar with it.

I think this says it pretty well:

“Since it’s been estimated that about 3% of the US population will end up ‘losers’ under Obamacare, I thought I’d write in and give you my perspective as a 3-percenter. However, I suspect that I belong to a smaller subset of the 3%, that being people who find it appallingly self-indulgent and shamefully self-pitying to think of ourselves as losers.

Having insurance, even crappy insurance, in the individual market means we are almost by definition, healthy and relatively young. If we were not, we wouldn’t be able to get coverage of any kind in the non-group market. If our ACA-compliant replacement policy costs us more, it’s likely because we’re too affluent to qualify for subsidies.

It takes a remarkable degree of self-absorption and sense of self-entitlement to be healthy, young(ish) and affluent—and yet consider oneself a ‘loser.’ It’s a label I reject out of shame (no matter how much the lazy, superficial MSM want to fixate on me and my ‘plight’) NOT because there’s anything shameful about being a loser; the shame is in thinking oneself a loser when one is actually fortunate.”

Another thing to keep in mind is that the plans being canceled are not the one’s President Obama promised would be grandfathered into the new system.

@bossob I am so with you.

I live in a state that has a huge number of uninsured and a high number of people who need social services, but has blocked AHC, has done nothing to update Medicaid. There is no state run site to help take the pressure off the Federal site as it’s being fixed.

My husband has had no health insurance for a long time – and on and off before that and he’s in desperate need. He’s been working with people on the federal site since day one.
He was layed off after being referred to a pain clinic multiple times for treatment – his employer was watching who used their health insurance and had told people to try and hold off the doctor’s visits. He wanted so much to be rid of any pain medications at all. It’s a catch 22.

He’s so hopeful and since his insurance would not start until January 1st anyway, he’s willing to cooperate but it sure would be nice to have had some in-state support to make life easier.

Our state government is 100% Tea Party.

Family in California are rejoicing. Friends in Vermont are thrilled.

@bossob & @SavoirFaire have nailed it. The ACA can’t work at all if all young, healthy people opt out and go for crappy, cheap insurance that will likely leave them financially unable to pay, and a burden on the rest of us, if they do have a catastrophic injury or disease.

I can’t believe that even after Obama has admitted that his promise was wrong some of you are still trying to spin it. Obama picked the worst possible way to try and solve this problem and lied to do it. Just for the hell of it, if someone has a catastrophic injury or disease, Where do you suppose they’ll show up. My guess is the emergency room. So instead of burdening the rest of us with that cost we burden the rest of us with insurance cost.

We already had Medicaid and emergency rooms were chartered to accept anyone regardless of ability to pay. Hell even with our car insurance we have what is called assigned risk so if you can’t get regular insurance, you can always get assigned risk. That would seem to be a much easier way to get insurance available for everyone without destroying the individual market and forcing everyone to take insurance they don’t need. I guarantee, I’ll never need maternity care and if I don’t have it, that does not make my insurance sub-standard. We are in the process of destroying the insurance market and raising the cost of medical care for everyone. All you guys seem to want to do is defend Obama for the incredibly ignorant and partisan position he has taken.

What’s really funny is that this is not even the health care bill most of you wanted. You wanted single payer but this at least puts government in the middle of our health care so you’re trying to defend it. God save us from the liberals.

Emergency rooms are for the destitute. If you have anything as all, they bill you a fortune for services and collection companies can come after your last dime – your home.

And an emergency room is not equipped to treat people for long term problems. They refer you to specialists and if you don’t have insurance, you just don’t go.

Ultimately in a society without subsidized health insurance where everyone chips in, you ended up paying for my emergency room visit which is insanely expensive. Nobody is really paying more for anything if we can stop those with insurance from going to emergency rooms.

@Jaxk wrote, ”...God save us from the liberals.”

Not necessary. Over the course of generations, conservatives will save us from liberals, just as liberals will save us from conservatives. It’s how our system is supposed to work.

If you really want divine intervention, ask to be saved from the collusion between politicians (of both parties) and corporations. That’s the reason the ACA is so convoluted.

I support the ACA because it’s a big first step in the right direction, not because it’s perfect or the ultimate solution.

@MadMadMax

I admit, I’m probably part of the problem because if I have a heart attack or I’m run over by a bread truck, I want to go to the Emergency Room. Whether I’m destitute or not, whether I’m insured or not. Call me crazy.

And you should buy you need health insurance to cover the costs. Emergency room visits and ambulances aren’t free.

Emergency rooms are for emergencies.

The poor and indigent often have no other resource for a kid with the flu than to take him to an emergency room – they can’t be refused treatment. When they can’t pay the bill, somebody has to and that falls on all Americans.

We pay no matter what. We might as well all be insured. And that kid with the flu could see his GP.

“And that kid with the flu could see his GP.”

That certainly is the plan, unfortunately the plan doesn’t always work out. In Mass. emergency room visits actually went up by 5% after passing Romneycare. Sometimes we need to look at what actually happens rather than just what we want to happen.

That kid with the flu has no GP. Doctor’s ask before treatment for your medical insurance, if you don’t have any, you have pay for services on the spot.

You are ignoring the poor who would now be insured.

Obamacare is BASED on Romneycare which came out a Republican think tank.

You’re ignoring the fact that even after they got insurance, they still went to the emergency room. The poor had Medicaid available even without Obamacare or Romneycare. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the cost of health care per capita went up. It’s good to know you think the Republican think tanks are the gold standard for ideas but sometimes even they don’t work. This is one of those cases.

If they have insurance and go to an emergency room, it’s covered. And it’s up to the doctors et al in the emergency room to educate them or their parents regarding what an emergency room is for and refer them to a GP or specialist.

The Shame of American Health Care
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/opinion/the-shame-of-american-health-care.html?hp&rref=opinion

… an international survey released last week by the Commonwealth Fund, a research organization, shows why change is so necessary.

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Publications/In-the-Literature/2013/Nov/Access-Affordability-and-Insurance.aspx

The survey covered 20,000 adults in the United States and 10 other industrial nations — Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain, all of which put in place universal or near-universal health coverage decades ago. The United States spends far more than any of these countries on a per capita basis and as a percent of the national economy.

For that, it gets meager results. Some 37 percent of American adults went without recommended care, did not see a doctor when sick or failed to fill prescriptions in the past year because of costs, compared with 4 percent in Britain and 6 percent in Sweden. Nearly a quarter of American adults could not pay medical bills or had serious problems paying them compared with less than 13 percent in France and 7 percent or less in five other countries. Even Americans who were insured for the entire year were more likely than adults abroad to forgo care because of costs, an indication of how skimpy some insurance policies are.

When Americans got sick, they had to wait longer than people in most of the other countries to get help. Fewer than half were able to get same-day or next-day appointments with a doctor or nurse; one in four had to wait six days or longer. (Only Canada fared worse on both counts.) But Americans got quicker access to specialists than adults in all but two other countries.

The complexity of the American insurance system is also an issue. Some 32 percent of consumers spent a lot of time on insurance paperwork or in disputes with their insurer over denials of payment for services they thought were covered.

The Affordable Care Act was created to address these problems by covering tens of millions of uninsured people and providing subsidies to help many of them pay for policies; by setting limits on the out-of-pocket costs that patients must bear; and by requiring that all policies cover specified benefits. read more

@Jaxk That certainly is the plan, unfortunately the plan doesn’t always work out. In Mass. emergency room visits actually went up by 5% after passing Romneycare.

As always, you find the tree that hides the forest, bury your face in it, then claim that because all you can see is the bark of the one tree that confirms your bias, there is no forest.

From CNBC’s ‘Want a Glimpse of Obamacare? Look at Massachusetts’ “The Massachusetts Medical Society reported that 19 percent of residents said they waited longer than usual to see a doctor in 2012, down from 25 percent in 2008. Emergency room visits remained high until 2010, when they dropped nearly four percent, according to a report by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation.”

@ETpro

I see you’re on this forest/trees binge. Unfortunately, if you want to determine the health of the forest, you must examine the trees. And so far, not a single tree has grown as promised. Fewer people are insured than there were last year. Health care costs are rising. Emergency room visits did not decline as advertised. In a state that has the highest doctor to patient ration waiting times have increased. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of us.

Frankly the trees look a bit gnarled and sickly to me.

@Jaxk That is utter nonsense. Massachusetts has more of its population insured than any other state in the nation. Our health care spending per capita, meanwhile, is among the lowest in the nation, while healthcare outcomes here are tops. We’re spending way less per capita than numerous red states with abysmal healthcare outcomes.

You can deny current statistics about the Romneycare all you want, and keep claiming that the ones from the beginning of the program are not only valid measures of what happened then, but are still in force today even though measuring the actual evidence proves otherwise. I understand right-wing propaganda. It’s not a new phenomena, you know. But you still insist on looking right at one tree that fits your confirmation bias and ignoring the surrounding forest that doesn’t, insisting it doesn’t exist because you can’t see it from where you have your eyes focused. Sorry if it’s a repetitive metaphor, but it just fits so perfectly.

Oh, and if you are going to try to claim this was about Obamacare, it doesn’t really go into effect until next year, so it’s pretty disingenuous to claim you have statistics about how a law that’s not working yet is working. But knock yourself out. Obfuscation baffles some.

@ETpro

I know you’re spending much of your time coming up with creative ways to call me names. While you’re doing that you really should look at your own numbers. The cost per capita for Massachusetts is the highest, of any state in the country. Only Washington DC is higher. You can sort the list with the little arrow on the side. If you do that Mass. spends the most ($9,278 per person), and Utah spends the least ($5,031 per person). In other words, Mass. Doesn’t spend less than any red state (or blue state for that matter) regardless of outcomes.

You appear to have your focus not on the data but rather somewhere where the sun don’t shine.

@Jaxk Mea Culpa. Washington DC is higher. It was late and I was tired. I glanced and the chart thinking it was ordered by cost but it was sorted by location in alphabetical order. Sorry for the blunder. If you use that same site’s Graphing Tool and click Massachusetts in the sidebar to the left, you will see that since 1991 the cost trend in MA has been pretty consistent. The slope of the curve actually decreased after Romneycare was signed into law in 2006. So Massachusetts didn’t suddenly inherit high costs thanks to Governor Romney. In fact, his moved helped curb cost increases.

I did find this today on costs since the ACA was passed.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the Affordable Care Act in the news—but it’s not the real story.

Big insurance companies—the same ones that spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying to stop the Affordable Care Act—are using confusion around the new law to seriously screw over their customers.

For example, Humana, one of the biggest insurance companies in the United States, sent misleading, frightening letters to thousands of customers.1

Other insurance companies canceled old plans and offered new ones at much higher prices—all without telling consumers that there are more affordable plans in the newly created health care exchanges or that customers are probably eligible for subsidies to help pay for these better plans.2

And despite what you might be reading in the paper or seeing on the news, the Affordable Care Act is already saving lives. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, patients like 37-year-old Jeannie Page, rejected by insurance companies for years because of her endometriosis and thyroid disorder, now have a chance to live without going broke.3

All Americans deserve this. Congress needs to stop playing gotcha politics and start standing up to the insurance companies. They need to hear from tens of thousands of us if they’re going to do it.

Congress: “must hold the predatory insurance companies accountable for misleading consumers and jacking up rates. We need to move health care forward, not back.”

Here’s the real story about “canceled” plans:

These canceled plans don’t make the grade.

As the Affordable Care Act kicks in, insurance companies are finally required to cover people with pre-existing conditions, cover basic preventive care like mammograms and pap smears, along with birth control, prescription drugs, mental health care, and more. That means some plans have to be upgraded because they don’t make the grade.4

Insurance companies aren’t telling consumers the whole truth.

Insurance companies are using the confusion around the Affordable Care Act to cancel plans altogether and offer replacements with much higher premiums—all without telling people that they have other options and that most people are eligible for tax credits on top of that.

People with canceled plans have better and more affordable options.

Most people who are getting cancellation notices only know that their insurance company discontinued their plan and replaced it with a much more expensive one, while the insurance company blames the Affordable Care Act in the letter.

The truth is that most of these folks are eligible for much better and much more affordable rates through the health care exchanges—but insurance companies don’t want us to know that because they want to make more money for themselves.

The media loves to air negative reports. But they won’t air stories from folks like Sonia, who has rheumatoid arthritis and was kicked off her parents’ insurance plan at 23. Or the famous “I am Obamacare” woman, Ms. Turner, who could not get surgery for her uterine cancer because insurance companies turned her down.5

Both of them now have the security of affordable health insurance they can depend on, because of the Affordable Care Act’s rules.

These rules will protect all of us throughout our lives, so insurance companies can’t dump us when we get sick or cheat us out of the coverage we need. In the meantime, we need to remember that it’s the insurance companies who drove us to create the Affordable Care Act in the first place, and the ones we need to continue to hold accountable.

Sources:

1. States slap insurers for misleading letters, CNN, November 16, 2013

2. Democratic lawmakers look to hold insurance industry’s feet to the fire, The Hill, November 16, 2013

3. You Might Hate Obamacare, But Its Saved These People’s Lives, The Huffington Post, October 5, 2013

4. Companies Use Obamacare Confusion To Sell ‘Junk Insurance’, Talking Points Memo, November 15, 2013

5. Ibid.”

@ETpro

I did see the graphing tool. If you compare Mass to the US, you will see that Mass has increased faster than the rest of the country.

Areas of the country where there is a very high influx of new immigrants (not illegal immigrants or Mexicans but the whole enchilada) like NYC and Boston will by default see a higher use of health-care and a higher cost of health care in and of itself, although in one area, in one tiny city, a single treatment can vary by thousands of dollars.

There are also very comprehensive high tech hospitals in Boston and NY etc. that draw people from all over the country.

Just one example: The Boston Foundation for Sight draws people from all over the country. They stay in hotels for long periods while undergoing surgeries or being fitted with prosthesis contact lenses to treat complex corneal diseases. After insurance, and not counting medications or any extras, it costs $6,000 for the prosthesis lenses alone.
http://www.bostonsight.org/

It is high tech unique medical specialties like that and much more (Boston Children’s Hosp) that turn up showing medical costs in Boston being high.

@Jaxk & @MadMadMax We also have some of the best healthcare outcomes anywhere in the USA. The infant mortality rate and deaths from preventable cause rates in states that spend little on healthcare are horrible. Of course things are cheaper when they aren’t delivered, or when what’s delivered is of inferior quality. It would be cheaper still to just eliminate healthcare altogether.