
Let's stop the brainwashing before America's young people become a tool of the socialist state, used to persecute political non-believers like the Hitler Youth or Red Guard before them.
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mrswdk wrote:Here's one step you can take to resist Obamao's propaganda machine:
Let's stop the brainwashing before America's young people become a tool of the socialist state, used to persecute political non-believers like the Hitler Youth or Red Guard before them.
mrswdk wrote:Nope.
WASHINGTON — Even as President Barack Obama sold a new health care law in part by assuring Americans they would be able to keep their insurance plans, his administration knew that tens of millions of people actually could lose those their policies.
“If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep your plan. Period,” Obama said as he pitched the plan, the unqualified promise he made repeatedly.
Yet advisers did say in 2010 that there were large caveats and that anyone whose insurance plan changed would lose the promised protection of being able to keep existing plans. And a report in 2010 said that as many as 69 percent of certain employer-based insurance plans would lose that protection, meaning as many as 41 million people could lose their plans even if they wanted to keep them and would be forced into other plans. Another 11 million who bought their own insurance also could lose their plans. Combined, as many as 52 million Americans could lose or have lost old insurance plans.
Some or much of that loss of favored insurance is driven by normal year-to-year changes such as employers changing plans to save money. And many people could end up with better plans. But it is not what the president pledged.
Caught in the firestorm of his broken promise, Obama on Thursday apologized.
“I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me,” he told NBC News Thursday evening. “We’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”
The shifting narrative started as Obama worked to sell the entire health care overhaul to a skeptical nation and Congress. To win support from those who already had insurance, he made the promise that no one who liked their plan would lose it. The key was that millions of plans would be “grandfathered” in the new law, thus protected from any new requirements.
Yet as insurance companies started notifying hundreds of thousands this fall that their current policies were being canceled in preparation for new ones, it became clear that many were not guaranteed to keep their plans.
The White House and Congress have focused on cancelations of plans in the individual market, where people buy their own policies.
Obama insisted anew Thursday that the problem is limited to people who buy their own insurance. “We’re talking about 5 percent of the population who are in what’s called the individual market. They’re out there buying health insurance on their own,” he told NBC.
But a closer examination finds that the number of people who have plans changing, or have already changed, could be between 34 million to 52 million. That’s because many employer-provided insurance plans also could change, not just individually purchased insurance plans
Administration officials decline to say how many employer-sponsored plans could change. But those numbers could be between 23 million to 41 million, based on a McClatchy analysis of estimates offered by the Department of Health and Human Services in June 2010.
Obama aides did acknowledge around the time the law was enacted in 2010 that some people could lose their coverage if their plans changed after the law was passed. Those people would in turn receive what the administration described as superior coverage. But in the years since the law’s passage, HHS officials have downplayed that consequence of the hard-fought law.
“If health plans significantly raise co-payments or deductibles or significantly reduce (them) . . . they’ll lose their grandfather status and their customers will get the same full set of consumer protections as new plans,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said at a June 15, 2010, news conference.
Many changes in the old insurance plans could trigger the loss of the protected status. Regulations issued by HHS state that the grandfathered status would be lost if the policies eliminate coverage for a particular condition, reduce the annual dollar limit on benefits, increase co-payments by as little as $5 or 15 percent, or increase out-of-pocket maximums by more than 15 percent or premiums by more than 5 percent.
Later in June 2010, Sebelius’ department published estimates in the Federal Register that 39 percent to 69 percent of employers’ fully insured plans would relinquish the coverage they had prior to the March 2010 passage of the ACA and thus would have to cancel or change policies.
About 60 million people are covered in fully insured plans, which make up about 40 percent of employer-provided health plans. Fully insured plans are usually offered by large employers. These plans have the insurance company rather than the employer assume the financial risk of annual health care expenses exceeding expectations. The rest of employers self-insure.
To escape having to provide the new law’s minimum required benefits, plans would have to largely maintain the co-pays, premiums and out-of-pocket limits that existed prior to March 2010.
Already this year, only 36 percent of employer plans were pre-2010 plans, compared with 56 percent in 2011, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a leading health care research organization. That means that millions of people’s plans already had changed or were canceled in the three and a half years since the law was enacted in March 2010.
That doesn’t automatically mean the plans were changed or canceled because of the new law.
“I think there needs to be great emphasis that plans are not being canceled because of ACA requirements,” said Jon Gabel, a senior fellow at the University of Chicago’s Health Care Research Department. “They’re being canceled because insurers do not want to ‘grandfather’ some plans.”
This week, after millions of Americans mostly in the market for individually purchased plans began receiving cancellation notices or price hikes from their insurance companies, Obama added the caveat that people could lose their plans if insurance companies changed the plans.
“Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really like that plan, what we said was you could keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed,” he said, adding the qualifier Monday during a Washington event with supporters.
PLAYER57832 wrote:Phatscotty wrote:The Efficiency of the Court System combined with the Compassion of the IRS
PS and let's just ignore the FACT that socialized medicine is not even being considered right now.
PLAYER57832 wrote:The primary fix is to require everyone to carry insurers and insurance companies to cover everyone at reasonable rates.
Phatscotty wrote:PLAYER57832 wrote:Phatscotty wrote:The Efficiency of the Court System combined with the Compassion of the IRS
PS and let's just ignore the FACT that socialized medicine is not even being considered right now.
How about now?PLAYER57832 wrote:The primary fix is to require everyone to carry insurers and insurance companies to cover everyone at reasonable rates.
so then why are millions losing insurance? Where are the reasonable rates?
Mr_Adams wrote:You, sir, are an idiot.
Timminz wrote:By that logic, you eat babies.
spurgistan wrote:But hey, at least these young healthy people don't have to worry about getting discriminated against for being old and sick when that, you know, happens to them.
spurgistan wrote:Phatscotty wrote:PLAYER57832 wrote:Phatscotty wrote:The Efficiency of the Court System combined with the Compassion of the IRS
PS and let's just ignore the FACT that socialized medicine is not even being considered right now.
How about now?PLAYER57832 wrote:The primary fix is to require everyone to carry insurers and insurance companies to cover everyone at reasonable rates.
so then why are millions losing insurance? Where are the reasonable rates?
The reason people are losing insurance is because their insurance was great at the expense of people who were actually at risk of being sick. The health insurance industry wasn't giving out Cadillac plans for cheap to people they thought might actually use it. Making bigger, more fair insurance pools might make insurance more expensive and worse for healthy young people who buy on the individual market (which is not 40 million people, dude) and I sure do wish that Obama hadn't said that no Americans would have sticker shock because that wasn't really gonna happen. But hey, at least these young healthy people don't have to worry about getting discriminated against for being old and sick when that, you know, happens to them.
BigBallinStalin wrote:Oh I see, I'll pay more now for a couple or so decades, and when I get old... who knows what the rates will be. Sounds like a shite deal.
thegreekdog wrote:spurgistan wrote:But hey, at least these young healthy people don't have to worry about getting discriminated against for being old and sick when that, you know, happens to them.
I wonder if young, healthy Americans will realize they are paying, substantially, for the benefits of older, less healthy Americans. And if they do realize that, what will they do?
jj3044 wrote:thegreekdog wrote:spurgistan wrote:But hey, at least these young healthy people don't have to worry about getting discriminated against for being old and sick when that, you know, happens to them.
I wonder if young, healthy Americans will realize they are paying, substantially, for the benefits of older, less healthy Americans. And if they do realize that, what will they do?
No different than in any other insurance market. There have been enough examples of this in the thread, so I'm not going to re-hash the same ol' argument.
Yes, changing from a 4-to-1 to a 3-to-1 spread from the youngest to the oldest means that the premium gap is smaller, so everyone is paying more towards the median price.
DoomYoshi wrote:My political sphere is alien to most.
However, every now and then, people who share thoughts with me also share thoughts with PhatScotty:
http://qctimes.com/news/opinion/mailbag/taxpayer-money-wasted-on-upgrades/article_336215ce-1d86-5b35-bff7-19386479c829.html
Does that make me a Republican?
Even if HealthCare.gov is fixed by the end of the month (unlikely), Obamacare is going to be repealed well in advance of next year’s election. And if the website continues to fail, the push for repeal—from endangered Democrats—will occur very rapidly. The website is a sideshow: the real action is the number of people and businesses who are losing their health plans or having to pay a lot more. Fixing the website will only delay the inevitable.
It is important to remember why it was so important for Obama to promise repeatedly that “if you like your health insurance/doctor, you can keep your health insurance/doctor.” Cast your mind back to the ignominious collapse of Hillarycare in 1994. Hillarycare came out of the box in September 1993 to high public support according to the early polls. This was not a surprise. Opinion polls for decades have shown a large majority of Americans support the general idea of universal health coverage. But Hillarycare came apart as the bureaucratic details came out, the most important one being that you couldn’t be sure you’d be able to keep your doctors or select specialists of your choice. The Clintons refused to consider a compromise, but even with large Democratic Senate and House majorities the bill was so dead it was never brought up for a vote.
Remember “Harry and Louise”? Obama did, which is why he portrayed Obamacare as simply expanding coverage to the uninsured, and improving coverage for the underinsured while leaving the already insured undisturbed. But the redistributive arithmetic of Obamacare’s architecture could never add up, which is what the bureaucrats knew early on—as early as 2010 according to many documents that have leaked. The wonder is that Obama’s political team didn’t see this coming and prepare a pre-emptive strategy for dealing with the inevitable exposure of the duplicity at the heart of Obamacare’s logic. Now that people are losing their insurance and finding that they may not be able to keep their doctor after all, Obamacare has become the domestic policy equivalent of the Iraq War: a protracted fiasco that is proving fatal to a president’s credibility and approval rating. The only thing missing is calling in FEMA to help fix this Category-5 political disaster.
Senate Democrats endangered for re-election will lead the charge for repeal perhaps as soon as January, after they get an earful over the Christmas break. They’ll call it “reform,” and clothe it in calls for delaying the individual mandate and allowing people and businesses to keep their existing health insurance policies. But it is probably too late to go back in many cases. With the political damage guaranteed to continue, the momentum toward repeal will be unstoppable. Democrats will not want to face the voters next November with the albatross of Obamacare.
The politics of the repeal effort will be a game theorist’s dream. Tea Party Republicans will resist “reforms” to Obamacare in favor of complete repeal. Democrats will try to turn the tables and set up Republicans as obstacles to reform, hoping to inoculate themselves prospectively from mayhem at the polls next November. The House might want to insist that the Senate go first; after all, it was the Senate version of the bill that the House had to swallow after Scott Brown’s election in January 2010. The House can rightly insist that the Senate needs to clean up the mess they made. Obama may well give Capitol Hill Democrats a pass on a repeal vote, and veto any bill that emerges. He’ll never face the voters again.
This wouldn’t be the first time that a health care entitlement was repealed. The same thing happened in the late 1980s with catastrophic coverage for seniors. Because seniors were made to pay for their benefits under that scheme, the uproar forced Congress to repeal the measure barely a year after it went into effect. Obamacare looks to be on the same political trajectory, and for the same reason. Obamacare represents the crisis of big government; the limits of administrative government have finally been breached. For the first time ever, some polls are showing a majority of Americans doubting the goal of universal health coverage.
The hazard of the moment is that a compromise “reform” that drops the mandate and attempts to restore the insurance status quo ante could leave us with an unfunded expansion of Medicaid and a badly disrupted private insurance market. Republicans should avoid both the political traps and a new fiscal time bomb by being ready with a serious replacement policy, based on the premium support tax credit ideas that John McCain advocated (poorly) in 2008. While anxious liberals are in dismay, they should recognize that Obamacare may well have achieved its chief purpose of making universal or at least greatly expanded health coverage a fixture of American social policy. The cost to liberalism may prove fatal, however.
rockfist wrote:All politicians are car salesmen...until we don't have politicians who exempt themselves from their own laws and don't have career politicians its all we will get.
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