StrangeSox

So low-income men might be able to afford individual coverage, but low-income women will be screwed. No thanks.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Apr 16, 2015 -> 02:15 PM) You mean you don't use birth control? And what's with plans women buy covering ball cancer?? Though I'd imagine that a lot of heterosexual married men with family insurance plans utilize birth control and other exclusively-women's-health provisions, anyway.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Apr 16, 2015 -> 02:13 PM) How is the government coming up with money to pay for an extra 30 million people when those people are paying pennies on the dollar for their plans? The money tree behind the capital building? It's not like the funding mechanisms built into the law are some great mystery. Go look them up.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Apr 16, 2015 -> 02:15 PM) I'm in favor of taxing the rich more, but that won't cover the costs. I'm not sure how you can say one way or the other a completely unspecified tax increase wouldn't cover something.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Apr 16, 2015 -> 02:04 PM) Yes, I'm referring to people who had catastrophic plans, which are hardly useless to people who were getting by just fine with them. And yes, the bill they're getting stuck with is getting them increased coverage in return, but for most of them it's coverage they don't want or need. These people are being forced to pay for coverage they don't want or need in order to increase the risk pool for insurance companies. You get by just fine with no insurance at all right until the moment you don't. Then you're largely f***ed and you're probably going to harm the rest of society as well. The people hit the hardest by the individual mandate coupled with the minimum coverage requirements are mostly younger single people who might have had little or no insurance before. Yeah, these people are going to pay more than they otherwise would have before. They hardly constitute the entire "middle class." edit: actually, people under 30 and with a hardship exemption can still get qualifying catastrophic plans. I'd have no problems with a completely revamped alternative that provided Medicare-to-all through a mixture of removing the payroll tax cap and increasing tax rates on the top brackets, though!

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Apr 16, 2015 -> 01:55 PM) They know what you say is true but they choose to ignore it. The ends justify the means. I know that I've yet to see HH cite a single piece of evidence in support of his claims.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Apr 16, 2015 -> 01:54 PM) How is that bolded phrase not exactly what I said a long time ago that the middle class is getting stuck with the bill? Well that goes right back to what I said about needing to compare whether or not they're paying more for comparable plans (e.g. your old plan was cancelled, but your new and essentially identical plan costs you no more than your previous plan), and you also need to consider that the "bill" they're getting stuck with includes getting something in return i.e. health insurance (e.g. they had a useless 'catastophic' plan before that didn't really cover anything but was 'cheap;' now they are "stuck with the bill" of an actual health insurance plan). Most of the middle class gets their insurance through their employers, and most of these plans were already ACA compliant or only required minor changes so it's not an impact on them at all.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Apr 16, 2015 -> 01:46 PM) I'm still not getting my question answered: Why did there need to be ACA minimums that caused a bunch of existing plans to be non-compliant? You keep shifting all over the place. If the "vast majority" of plans were ACA-compliant, then cancellations were completely due to decisions made by insurers and not by the law itself. Part of the reforms were the "Patient Protection" and an attempt to ensure that every American has, at a minimum, adequate coverage. Where exactly that line for "adequate" falls is a policy argument. Part of it was increasing the risk pools so that coverage remained affordable for everyone with the guaranteed issue and community ratings.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Apr 16, 2015 -> 01:21 PM) No, plenty of people have been voluntarily paying for varying levels of coverage for a long time. In fact, the vast majority were already paying for as much as or more coverage than the new law required. So there really was such a thing as health insurance before. If their previous plan met or exceeded ACA minimums, then it's entirely up to the insurance company whether or not to continue offering any given plan. That's the insurer's choice, not an effect of the law. Which, if that really is the case that a vast majority of the cancelled plans were ACA-compliant anyway, it leads us right back to where it absolutely makes sense to compare premiums for similarly compliant plans both before and after the 2014 transition.

Every time somebody has treatment for an illness that isn't covered by insurance and doesn't pay their bill/ends up in medical bankruptcy, it affects everyone else.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Apr 14, 2015 -> 10:10 AM) I'd have to look up the rules for Oklahoma, but in the states I know of, even a reserve officer needs to be academy trained and state certified - not sure if that was the case here. Also, why on earth do you have relatively inexperienced reserves even be part of dealing with a friggin gun bust? That is just stupid. Apparently, supervisors were told to falsify training records. http://www.tulsaworld.com/homepage1/source...97b03c6c04.html

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Apr 16, 2015 -> 12:29 PM) That doesn't explain why it was necessary to force people off those plans. The ACA included regulatory changes as to what a plan must cover. Many of the cancelled old plans didn't meet those minimum requirements. Insurance companies could have continued these plans unchanged under grandfather clauses in the ACA, but they elected not to.

It's also worth pointing out that insurance companies could have continued the old plans unchanged if they wanted, but many opted to scrap the plans. Plans were changed and cancelled before the ACA regulatory changes, but 2014 brought a huge wave of cancellations and changes. How about some data, HH? Is there anything out there looking at a) how many people lost their old plans b) how much their premiums increased and c) whether their more-expensive new plans provided substantially more benefits than their old plans?

http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/239...panded-medicaid

Huh?

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Apr 15, 2015 -> 07:42 AM) No you don't really need to find the equivalent of a benchmark plan in 2013, because that's exactly my point. I'm talking about all the people who were forced out of their existing plans after 2013 because they didn't meet the requirements imposed in 2014. That group saw huge premium increases, and those are the people who bore the brunt of the impact of Obamacare. Those are the people who are paying the bill for all the people getting free or reduced cost insurance. Again, not saying that people don't deserve to have that insurance, but this bill was crafted in a way that completely screwed over a handful of people rather than spreading out the cost in a more equitable way. This is what needs to be fixed. It's simply not true that everyone who had to change plans."got screwed " or even had substantial premium increases. edit: the majority of increased coverage comes from two sources: people who can now afford insurance thanks to federal subsidies and Medicaid. Neither are funded by premiums paid to insurance companies.

If the economy is still doing as decently as it is today or better, the democratic nominee (probably Hillary) will stand a really good shot at winning. If not, the Republican will. It's more about that than any individual personality.

Hh that's still a good point about the exchange transition year, definitely harder to compare across that boundary. You'd need to find the equivalent of a plan that would meet the benchmark plan from 2013 and compare it to the first true benchmark plans from 2014.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 14, 2015 -> 02:30 PM) Is that premium + subsidies, or just premiums? Both, at least for the kff study. They give the breakdowns either way.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Apr 14, 2015 -> 09:19 AM) In my personal opinion, it's true. I wouldn't call a guy that's had hardly been in office a "hotshot senator". The only reason most of us had ever heard of him was because we're from Chicago, but he burst onto the national scene seemingly overnight to secure a primary victory and then the presidency. Obama first broke out with his 2004 convention speech

There are tons of studies out there looking at premium increases over the last couple of decades.

That sounds like a fantastic trip.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 4, 2015 -> 04:14 PM) well some googling found a report from Kaiser from January on health insurance premium changes year-over-year. A bunch of states/counties actually have negative premium growth rates, so that's a moot point anyway. http://kff.org/health-reform/issue-brief/a...e-marketplaces/ Here's that Kaiser Family Foundation study

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Apr 14, 2015 -> 08:27 AM) They're using a lot of statistical twisting to come to these favorable conclusions in a LOT of cases. Such as devoting a study to "individual" plans, and undoubtedly targeting a specific age range within that limited group. Individual market, but the ACA set up what are literally defined as benchmark plans. That's what the KFF study looked at. It wasn't some attempt by a partisan group to cherry pick certain categories. So far, we're only in the second year of ACA plans, and these studies are looking specifically at the individual market plans (as in, buying one-off plans for you or your family versus an employer group plan) available through the exchanges. They're comparing the premiums for the first round of plans offered for 2014 to the premiums offered in 2015. Overall, there's an increase in premium prices, but that increase is far below the pre-ACA trendlines. I don't think the ACA was actually expected to give a net decrease in health insurance costs pre-subsidies but to "bend the curve" and slow the rate of growth of health insurance premiums. Health insurance premiums were growing at rates around and above 10% prior to the ACA, and there's decent evidence so far that those growth rates are being brought down.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Apr 14, 2015 -> 08:18 AM) How about family plans? Sorry, mean the "individual market" versus the group market. The study's a couple of pages back. There was also a similar study done by McKinsey last year that found that premiums will be increasing only 4% on average and that people have a much greater choice in plan options. http://healthcare.mckinsey.com/sites/defau...%20Center_0.pdf