Keeping your health care; when did they know you could not?

View 796 Friday, November 01, 2013

All Saints Day

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Barrack Obama, famously, 2012 Presidential Campaign.

Obama Officials In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare

Federal Register

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-06-17/pdf/2010-14488.pdf

It is now clear that the Obama Administration was quite aware that not only would most individual health care plans be cancelled under the Affordable Care Act, but also many of the employer provided health care plans would be unsatisfactory under ACA and therefore could not be kept by their holders. It is not certain that the President knew all this but to assume he did not would be to assume that he paid no attention to important matters in the implementation of his health care act, and out of ignorance announced that if you liked your plan you could keep it.

Napoleon Bonaparte said that one should never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. During the last days of the Romanov dynasty it was widespread within the Russian Empire that “the Little Father” could not have known of the terrible injustices going on, and “If only the Tsar knew” all the problems would be fixed. Pleas of incompetence rather than malice have often been a last resort for both incompetents and cynically for tyrants.

Meanwhile the enrollments are going very slowly, at a rate that will make it impossible for there to be enough young and healthy people to sign up at the new rates that will make ACA affordable. That is: the insurance companies can continue to offer ‘affordable health care’ to persons with pre-existing conditions only if the premiums are supported by enough people without pre-existing conditions now paying far higher premiums in order to pay for those who are already sick. That of course assumes that the level of health care continues rather than is drastically cut. The actual numbers used in assessing the costs and benefits also assume that costs can be lowered through many means including lower payments to care providers from medical specialists to orderlies; a questionable assumption.

I have no disclosable source for the following, but I feel an obligation to say it:

Subj: Fwd: Don’t log into Obamacare site.

Obviously I haven’t verified this, nor will I!

According to one congress critter, once you log in and sign up for Obamacare, YOU CANNOT BACK OUT. So DON’T LOG INTO THE SITE out of curiosity because it could haunt you.

I do not care to verify it either. I repeat I have no revealable source but it comes from someone I consider sane and intelligent.

Destroy the Market To Save It

Jerry,

As far as I know, the ACA shouldn’t directly affect your Kaiser coverage.

Indirectly, ACA pulls a bunch of nominal future funding out of Medicare, and at one point there was talk of discontinuing the Medicare Advantage program to save some of the money cut, but that seems not to have happened. At least not so far. My guess would be that the political fallout was deemed excessive, but that’s just a guess.

Also indirectly, if the ACA ends up damaging Kaiser’s delivery system, then of course you may have problems too.

Meanwhile, what actually is happening sounds unbelievable, but take my word on it. I’ve been following this closely for a while.

By deliberate design, forced by regulations promulgated by this Administration under ACA, the majority of us pre-Medicare types currently insured either individually or via employers will lose our current plans after 2014.

Employers will then have to either spend considerably more to substitute ACA compliant plans, pay modest fines and drop their full-time employees onto the ACA exchanges, or push employees back to part-time less-than-30-hours status.

Individuals will then have to either buy considerably more expensive (if healthy, as most are) ACA compliant plans, or do without and pay the fines.

This was all supposed to happen at the end of this year per the actual text of the ACA as passed. The Administration decided to delay most of this till 2015 (after the 2014 elections) by executive fiat.

I’m not sure why some but not all individually insured people are getting the chop on the original schedule, thus providing graphic warning of what’s to come. Apparently the insurance companies were left with the option to cancel individual coverage for ACA non-compliance at the end of this year instead of waiting till next. Apparently a lot of them are now exercising that option for their higher-cost customers.

Actual information as to the whys of this is scarce, probably for the obvious reasons.

The first few million individuals cancelled seem to be serving as the canary in a coal mine. I don’t know why this Administration let that happen. Perhaps it simply didn’t occur to them that the insurance companies might do this? Or perhaps they simply didn’t think anyone would notice.

Either way, November 2014 is now one year away. The canary has noisily died. The majority whose current insurance is yet to be affected by ACA should be finding out about it by next October, if not sooner.

The next 12 months will be interesting.

Porkypine

Physician friends tell me that some of their patients have truly horrible health insurance plans and are well rid of them; but of course they don’t know what they will get in exchange. Apparently there are some health care plans worse than if their holders had simply put the premium money under the mattress. At least they would have something. Of course with ACA images of babies and bathwater become inevitable.

The principle question on health care is, who is obliged to pay for what for other people? If I am entitled to something, someone else is obliged to pay. Given that we are borrowing money to do all this, we all have some share in the increasingly huge debt. This is one way to transfer money from younger people to older people, and from the productive to the unproductive,

And they never catch wise….

All news in Los Angeles is now concentrated on the incident in Terminal Three, in which a male person dressed in camouflage but probably not military issue clothing removed an AR-15 rifle from a bag and began shooting. The airport was shut down, no planes were allowed to land or take off, and massive ground and air traffic jams resulted.

The shooter was quickly subdued (and may or may not be dead). The shooter is rumored but not confirmed to be a TSA employee, and the victims, more than one but under ten are rumored but not confirmed to be TSA employees as well. At least one is said to be dead. An officer involved shooting is confirmed.

Planes are now landing at LAX. It is not clear if any are taking off yet. Traffic jams continue. As it happens I had to drive out to Kaiser this morning and heard this on the radio as I drove home When I first heard it all flights to LAX across the world were not taking off. That restriction appears to have ended. The International Air Traffic Jam is extensive and will take time to clear.

There were no consequences out here in the Valley where I live, but in west Los Angeles and surrounding communities it’s a pure-dee mess.