StrangeSox

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Oct 31, 2013 -> 07:25 PM) Im not sure why you are piling on Jenks. He was honest, he thinks that people should get some support but he doesnt want the govt just throwing money around if people arent going to be responsible with their health. Thats not an outlandish position. In fact maybe things would work better if people tried to flesh out ideas instead of harping on hypocrisy. His criticism doesn't appear to be limited to government subsidization but to the broader idea of insurance itself--everyone paying into a big, collective pool and only some of us using that money.

Jenks, is it fair to say (based on your previous posts) that you don't even really believe that there's a significant number of people out there who lack access to affordable health care? You seem to be arguing that we should do something to address that problem, even if you don't know exactly what that would be*, but my impression in the past has been that you don't accept that it's even actually a problem. *you don't need to have some fully developed substitute or anything in order to criticize existing systems and structures, I hope that was phrased neutrally enough.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 31, 2013 -> 05:02 PM) Pretty sure the IRS and federal loan companies do a pretty good job of keeping track of those things. So you want to provide BCBS with your tax return every year so that they can adjust your policy costs appropriately every year? This would effectively eliminate the entire concept of group plans (i.e. what a majority of americans have). I'm struggling to understand what your envisioned policy here is and why it should be that way.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 31, 2013 -> 04:59 PM) I dunno, not an expert there. I just know the solution doesn't have to be a single payer system where the government just sets a price and everyone falls in line. Well, that's a solution that works pretty damn well in a lot of other places (including a significant portion of this very country). All you're offering is a simple ideological objection and no alternative.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 31, 2013 -> 04:56 PM) That you should be responsible for yourself as much as possible and once you can't society should help out? Yeah, SO contradictory. Insurance plans should have deductibles that differ based on an individual's income/wealth/debt-to-income ratios? Sounds like an administrative nightmare.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 31, 2013 -> 12:53 PM) I consider an "everyone pays into the collective pool regardless of how much you take out" system socialistic. Okay I think others have already pointed this out but this is the basic concept of insurance risk pools. I guess it's pretty accurate to describe the concept of insurance as collectivist, but that seems like an odd objection unless you're a hardline libertarian or something.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 31, 2013 -> 10:37 AM) No, i'm saying that I don't think insurance companies increase premiums willy nilly or for some nefarious profit-driven motive. Yes, they obviously seek as much profit as possible, but competition doesn't allow them to jack up prices or get rid of plans for profit motives alone. I don't think I've said anything different here. We agree that health insurance companies will try to get people to buy the plans that maximize their profits the most, and that they're constrained by market and regulatory forces in that regard. In this case, there may be real regulatory effects, but there may also be predatory tactics using the regulatory changes as an excuse coupled with the entire industry working in a cartel-like faction to all agree to uniformly make these changes. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that happened. Lots of people get notices every year that some options are changing and/or that their prices are changing.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 31, 2013 -> 04:39 PM) I want a system where first and foremost, if you have the means to pay, and you have issues with your health, YOU pay for it out of YOUR pocket, because it's not the rest of societies responsibility to pay for YOUR mistakes of smoking, eating McD's 5 days a week, not exercising blah blah. If you lost the life lottery, tough titties. But that's not at all how health insurance works for a majority of Americans, before or after the ACA. A lot of people get coverage through Medicare/Medicaid/VA, and an overwhelming majority of the rest of us get it through group plans with our employers. And it's also pretty odd to describe the need for health care primarily in terms of some unhealthy habits you don't care for. I don't eat fast food, I don't smoke, I exercise, and yet I still have a couple of chronic conditions that I've had since birth (allergies, ADHD) and that I'll always have.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 31, 2013 -> 04:39 PM) Reducing costs by some means, This is a pretty important detail that can't just be hand-waived away. How do you reduce costs and provide basic health care access for every American if you're dead set against a full-blown socialized system and against the mandate that enables community rating and guaranteed issue?

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Oct 31, 2013 -> 03:10 PM) Can we not have both? Can't we have a system where everybody gets basic coverage, but those with means can get better coverage. i.e. basically how every socialized system works

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Oct 31, 2013 -> 02:49 PM) There is an incentive for any for profit insurance company to NOT pay claims, or to not insure people who, by virtue of losing life's lottery, have conditions that would cost the insurance company more to insure. Further, there's an incentive to shareholders to have the insurance companies maximize profit (the rationale behind the massive bonuses and salaries that CEOs and other high level executives obtain). When the insurance companies control the access to health care and are motivated by profit, the unlucky are excluded. That's why for profit, publicly traded, health insurance is a poor system to build a national health care system on. This can apply somewhat to "non-profits" as well. Just look at modern academia "non-profits" with bloated administration staff with huge salaries.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 31, 2013 -> 02:48 PM) We're getting there, step by step. lol

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 30, 2013 -> 01:43 PM) It makes no sense to me that a health young person who doesn't use health care as often needs to pay MORE for coverage. If anything, they should pay the least amount out of anyone. I just wanted to add that, for the majority of (non-Medicare/aid) Americans that get their health insurance through group plans provided by their employer, this is already how things work. The healthy 22 year old fresh out of college will pay the same premiums for an individual plan as the 65 year old who's already had a bypass surgery. More from the Incidental Economist (quoting Josh Barro) Some 90% of people with private insurance receive it through an employer, and those plans are generally priced using “pure” experience-rating. This means the company serves as one giant risk pool, and a firm’s youngest employees have the exact same insurance premium as their eldest colleagues. The practice has roots in tradition and history; unions started negotiating these kinds of contracts after World War II, and other plans followed suit. But it’s also a matter of law: HIPAA and the ADA prohibit premium variation by health status. Age rating is constrained somewhat—though not entirely—by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

QUOTE (Jake @ Oct 30, 2013 -> 09:07 PM) Yikes. She'd be f***ed if she ever wanted to see a doctor or actually got sick. I take a medicine that is $400/month without insurance; I'd never get by on something like that. Yeah her particular "insurance" plan sounded like a straight-up con job. She was paying over $50/month for them to throw in a few bucks here or there.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 30, 2013 -> 09:06 PM) This. SS I'm not sure how you're not seeing this. My wife's health insurance has changed companies I think three times in the last 6-7 years. CIGNA, AETNA and BCBS. And luckily the costs have been roughly the same each year, which means someone in their HR department calls around every year to get the best price. Now all the insurance companies can jack up the prices and blame it on these requirements. Before they had to operate within that fine line that the market would tolerate. No, not "this." Are you really under the impression that health insurance premiums have, in aggregate, held steady over the past 6-7 years? People have been seeing substantial yearly increases (5-15% or more) for a while now. If insurance companies are using ACA as an excuse to extract even more rents from the rest of the economy, well, that's even more damning evidence against their existence. edit: steadily increasing health care costs are a major impetus behind the PPACA in the first place. Now, it will be interesting to see what happens with prices over the next several years (though I think we've already started to see a reduction in premium increases in the last few years?), and it could very well be that Obamacare is a poorly designed policy. And, undoubtedly, some portion of people are going to be stuck paying more for "better" plans that they won't actually use because they won't need healthcare. But, really, every story I've seen that's had even a minimal amount of detail, with the exception of Crimon's claimed cost increases, has turned out to be vastly overstated or just ridiculously incorrect. edit2: as a kicker, my premiums for my pretty awesome, relatively inexpensive plan are dropping by 1% this year! Obamacare works!!!

Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren Out-Journalisms CBS News on Florida Woman’s Junk Insurance I think every story I've seen with actual details about the plans and premiums so far has ended up exactly like this. “Your $54 a month policy is a pretty, you know, bare bones policy, “Greta said. “Why do you want to keep that one, except for the price? Maybe you can get something better with a subsidy?”

QUOTE (Cknolls @ Oct 30, 2013 -> 05:35 PM) The website has never crashed. Lol you mutant.. so does anyone know what this post is referring to?

I had a couple of friends who found a way to spoof their modem's MAC address, find a list of Comcast customers' authorized MAC addresses, and pick a MAC address that was far enough away that they were on a different segment of Comcast's network and the conflict wasn't detected. Got free cable internet for a few years doing that.

that movie was horrible, I don't understand the love for it. I think I watched it based on the praise it got here years ago.

Also, if anybody is curious about dynamics of COBRA insurance and how the ACA may affect that whole market, this was posted at another forum by someone who works in the insurance industry:

By the way, I think this just continues to demonstrate why relying on private insurance to ensure health care access to every American (if you agree with that goal) is a really clumsy and inefficient way to do it, and that at a minimum some sort of public option if not single-payer would have been a much easier solution.

QUOTE (CrimsonWeltall @ Oct 30, 2013 -> 04:22 PM) Because now they're stuck insuring unhealthy customers that they're going to take a loss on. They have to offset that somehow. But they can only do that because they have the leverage of the mandate, right? Otherwise, why wouldn't they be selling you the more-expensive plan before? Taking on more losses might be a motivator to really try to maximize your profitability, but BCBS wasn't sitting around not investigating how to maximize their market share and profits prior to community rating/guaranteed issue. They just didn't have the leverage/excuse to drop these less-profitable plans and only offer the more-profitable plans without all of the substantial changes in the market going on over the next couple of months.

They're going to try to maximize profits at all times--that's their job. Whether or not that have to offset new costs (community rating, guaranteed issue) or not, I don't see why they wouldn't go with the business model that pushes more people into higher-profit products. This shift could easily be a result of the incentives from Obamacare (individual mandate, new coverage minimums), but they're always going to try to have the highest possible prices with the lowest possible expenditures. Every business trying to turn a profit does that. Adding in the (mostly healthy) mid-20's crowd isn't an additional cost, it's the big windfall that's supposed to allow these companies to remain profitable (or in the case of 'non-profits,' still make enough money to pay their staff as if they were for-profit). If you want to expand coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and go with community ratings so that it's reasonably affordable for them while still working within the existing US health insurance market, I don't see a good way around what the ACA is basically trying to do.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 30, 2013 -> 03:43 PM) Probably so they can afford to pay the costs of people with pre-existing stuff. I'm sure it has to do with their bottom line. If those plans were profitable before, then the only reason to cancel them would be to push people into even-more-profitable plans using the mandate as leverage.

So, if those low-premium, useful plans met the minimum requirements (or were very close, only requiring minor changes), why are the insurance companies no long offering them? It's a legitimate question.