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Canary in the Obamacare Coal Mine


Valin

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obamacare-collapse-arizona-countyNational Review:

A county in Arizona is exposing Obamacare’s false premises and false promises.

Michael F. Cannon

August 30, 2016

 

The nationwide and ongoing exodus of insurance companies from Obamacare has reached its natural conclusion in Pinal County, Ariz., where every participating carrier has left the exchange. About 10,000 residents of Pinal County, where obesity and unemployment are higher than the state average, currently get health insurance through the Obamacare exchange. Come 2017, every single one of them will lose that coverage.

 

UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Aetna, and Blue Cross Blue Shield found that the taxpayer subsidies Obamacare offers cannot cover the costs of the pre-existing conditions it requires participating insurers to cover. Aetna and Blue Cross initially proposed raising premiums by a whopping 86 percent and 65 percent, respectively, before realizing that it still would not be enough. Even Arizona’s taxpayer-chartered Obamacare “co-op” plan — a warm, fuzzy, greedless nonprofit — had to abandon the field.

 

So 10,000 residents of Pinal County now have to find coverage for 2017 outside of the exchange — still at Obamacare prices, but without the benefit of subsidies that are only available through exchanges.

 

And Obamacare will still penalize those residents if they don’t buy coverage — even if the amount they must pay increases tenfold or more. Though they can no longer access the subsidies that made Obamacare coverage affordable, the fact that they are still technically eligible for subsidies means that, by law, coverage is still affordable for them and they must buy it or pay the penalty.

 

The disaster unfolding in Pinal County exposes every false premise and false promise of Obamacare’s architects.

 

(Snip)

 

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Loony: Minnesota ObamaCare rates to skyrocket by 36% to 67%
Ed Morrissey
September 2, 2016

Count Minnesotans among the consumers who will get a big rate shock in November when open enrollment begins for ObamaCare. Insurers have applied for massive increases in the state MNsure exchange, with premiums escalating between 36% to 67%, and possibly more. And they’ll get it, because the alternative for insurers is to pack up and leave:

 

 

 

Minnesota health insurers are seeking big premium increases next year for people who buy coverage on their own, with proposed jumps for thousands of people averaging anywhere from 36 percent to 67 percent.

 

About 270,000 people buy coverage through Minnesota’s individual market, where shoppers buy through insurers, brokers or the state’s MNsure health insurance exchange.

 

(Snip)

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Lies of Obamacare, part MMMMCCXXXII

Scott Johnson

Sept. 4 2016

 

Stuart Varney demanded an apology from Obamacare architect and propagandist Ezekiel Emanuel last week on FOX News. The lies of Obamacare resume whenever Emanuel moves his lips, but there is therapetic value in Varney’s beatdown on Emanuel. Emanuel retorts: “Your memory is just so poor about how bad the system was before.”

 

(Snip)

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wa2ia6mICc

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More Americans say Obamacare is a pain than a cure: Gallup poll

 

Americans are more likely to say Obamacare is a burden than a net benefit, according to a new poll that finds nearly three in 10 people think the health overhaul has hurt them and their family.

Gallup says 29 percent of Americans feel the Affordable Care Act has been harmful, up from 26 percent in May and an all-time high for the polling company.

Meanwhile, the share of people who say Obamacare helped them dropped from 22 percent to 18 percent.

More than half — 51 percent — still say the law had no effect on them, though it is a far cry from the 70 percent who felt that way in 2012, before the law’s main provisions took effect.

More than a third of Americans say the law will harm them in the long run, versus just under a quarter who think it will be a personal boon, according to Gallup.

The findings come at a pivotal time for President Obama’s signature law.Scissors-32x32.png

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/sep/8/more-americans-say-obamacare-pain-cure-gallup-poll/

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Obama meets with insurance CEOs on health law

 

President Obama on Monday met with executives from the health insurance industry, a sector with rising complaints about ObamaCare.

 

The White House said that Obama dropped by a meeting of several health insurance company CEOs, as well as Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell and advisor Valerie Jarrett.

“Administration officials underscored the importance of continuing the work that has helped bring the nation’s uninsured rate to the lowest level on record and solicited ideas for how to further strengthen the Marketplace,” the White House said.

 

The meeting comes as several large insurers, such as Aetna and United Healthcare, have announced that they are pulling back from the ObamaCare marketplaces next year, citing financial losses. Scissors-32x32.png

 

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/295488-obama-meets-with-insurance-ceos-on-health-law

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Obama meets with insurance CEOs on health law

 

President Obama on Monday met with executives from the health insurance industry, a sector with rising complaints about ObamaCare.

 

The White House said that Obama dropped by a meeting of several health insurance company CEOs, as well as Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell and advisor Valerie Jarrett.

“Administration officials underscored the importance of continuing the work that has helped bring the nation’s uninsured rate to the lowest level on record and solicited ideas for how to further strengthen the Marketplace,” the White House said.

 

The meeting comes as several large insurers, such as Aetna and United Healthcare, have announced that they are pulling back from the ObamaCare marketplaces next year, citing financial losses. Scissors-32x32.png

 

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/295488-obama-meets-with-insurance-ceos-on-health-law

 

And what? He said Hillary will give you all good jobs if you can just keep quit about rates until after November?

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Another Obamacare Co-Op Folds, Leaving Only 6 Remaining

 

Health Republic Insurance of New Jersey is folding after the state’s insurance commissioner put the Obamacare co-op in “rehabilitation” due to its hazardous financial condition.

 

The co-op had a liability of $46.3 million under the Affordable Care Act’s risk adjustment program, according to the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance. That program was designed to transfer money between insurers in case one insurer had more costly enrollees

 

“Despite our hard work and growing customer base, the unfortunate necessity for complying with the [Affordable Care Act’s] risk adjustment mandate has put the company under considerable financial strain,” said Tom Dwyer, the co-op’s CEO.

 

The closing will force 35,000 customers served by the New Jersey co-op to find a new plan in 2017. The co-op was initially awarded $107.2 million in taxpayer-funded loans in 2012 and received an additional $1.9 million in 2013.Scissors-32x32.png

http://freebeacon.com/issues/another-obamacare-coop-folds/

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Grand Theft Health Insurance

 

Recently, the national Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association has been aggressively lobbying Congress to ignore the Obama administration’s illegal diversion of tax dollars into the pockets of—you guessed it—health insurers.

 

At issue is funding for the “transitional reinsurance” program in section 1341 of the Affordable Care Act. In that section, Congress instructed the Department of Health and Human Services to collect $20 billion in “contributions” over three years from private health insurance plans, apportioned by enrollment, and then use those funds to defray the cost to insurers of their most expensive enrollees with Affordable Care Act compliant individual market coverage.

 

In the same section, Congress also instructed the department to collect “additional contributions” of $5 billion over three years, but specified that those additional contributions “shall be deposited into the general fund of the Treasury of the United States and may not be used for the program established under this section.”Scissors-32x32.png

 

http://dailysignal.com/2016/09/14/grand-theft-health-insurance/

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  • 3 weeks later...

Minnesota Obamacare exchange 'near collapse'

 

The Minnesota state insurance commissioner says the state's Obamacare insurance exchange is "near collapse" and to save it, insurers must raise their rates on average by 60% and allow the companies to limit enrollment.

 

Bloomberg:

 

“It’s in an emergency situation -- we worked hard and avoided a collapse.” Rothman said in a telephone interview. “It’s a stopgap for 2017.”

 

On average, rates in the state will rise by about 60 percent, said Shane Delaney, a spokesman for MNSure, the state’s marketplace for Obamacare plans. About 250,000 people, or 5 percent of the state’s population, were covered under plans bought on the individual market, including plans bought on the Affordable Care Act markets as well as outside it.

 

Many people in the exchanges are eligible for tax credits to help reduce the cost of the premiums, Rothman’s office said, though those subsidies cut off once a family of four has an income of $97,200 or more. The law requires all Americans to buy insurance or pay a penalty. In Minnesota, a low-cost plan for a single person last year had annual premiums of about $2,800, before any tax credits, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.Scissors-32x32.png

 

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/10/minnesota_obamacare_exchange_near_collapse.html

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Minnesota Obamacare exchange 'near collapse'

 

The Minnesota state insurance commissioner says the state's Obamacare insurance exchange is "near collapse" and to save it, insurers must raise their rates on average by 60% and allow the companies to limit enrollment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Obama's Ideas to Fix Obamacare? Expand Medicaid, Offer a 'Public Option'

 

(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama is "quite proud" that his signature health care law has expanded coverage to 20 million more Americans. But he admits the law could be strengthened, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Monday.

 

"The president does have some ideas for things that we could do to further strengthen Obamacare. The first is to find a way to ensure that every state across the country is expanding Medicaid, consistent with what was envisioned in the law."

 

Earnest said "too many Republican governors" have blocked Medicaid expansion "just because of political differences" with Obama. But some of those governors point to the anticipated cost of Medicaid expansion.Scissors-32x32.png

 

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/obamas-ideas-fix-obamacare-expand-medicaid-offer-public-option

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Obamacare Is Dying, And The GOP Should Be Its Death Panel

 

When The New York Times tells you Obamacare is “ailing” and must change to survive, rest assured that the law is in serious trouble.

 

Then again, people who read The New York Times might be under the impression the only way to fix a collapsing state-run program is to pass another, more intrusive state-run program — in this case, a “public option.”

 

In truth, it was probably something of a shock to most Times readers that the Affordable Care Act had struggled at all. For years, left-wing punditry has been churning our prodigious quantities of Obamacare fanfic, praising and hailing every ACA stumble as another unrealized measure of success. They made this denial loop possible by reframing Obamacare’s expectations and reimagining its purpose.

Here’s something worth remembering: If we evaluate Obamacare using the parameters Democrats themselves laid out when campaigning and passing the historically partisan reform, we have no choice but to view it as a debacle.

Of course, there’s the obvious instances of outright falsehoods: take Obama’s “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan.” Millions of Americans have been forced off their insurance plans, no matter how much they liked them.Scissors-32x32.png

 

http://thefederalist.com/2016/10/04/obamacare-is-dying-and-the-gop-should-be-its-death-panel/

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Obama’s Latest Bailout For Big Insurance Aims To Cover His Lies

 

It never rains that it doesn’t pour. Even as nonpartisan experts at the Government Accountability Office concluded that the Obama administration broke the law with Obamacare’s reinsurance program, the Washington Post reported the administration could within weeks pay out a massive settlement to insurers through another Obamacare slush fund—this one, risk corridors.

 

The Post article quoted Republicans criticizing risk corridor “bailouts.” But in reality, the Obama administration itself has admitted using risk corridors as a bailout mechanism—trying to pay insurers to offset the costs of unilateral policy changes made to get President Obama out of a political jam. These two interlinked bailouts—one political, the other financial—explain this administration’s rush to pay off insurers on its way out the door.

 

Let’s Go Back to 2013

 

To understand the risk corridor story, one must head back to fall 2013. Millions of Americans received cancellation notices in the mail, informing them that their existing health insurance would disappear once Obamacare’s major provisions took effect. Those individuals also faced long odds to buy replacement policies, given that healthcare.gov and related insurance exchanges remained in a near-constant state of meltdown. Amid the controversy, President Obama had to apologize publicly for misleading the American people with his “like your plan” pledge—which Politifact later dubbed the “Lie of the Year.”Scissors-32x32.png

 

http://thefederalist.com/2016/10/03/obamas-latest-bailout-big-insurance-aims-cover-lies/

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@Valin

 

Yep, Dr Emanual (Rahms Brother) is as much of an incompetent and abrasive idiot as his brother. I wrote a piece on him at Wide Awakes when he was hired to help with this healthcare farce. He loves abortion and the 'Death Panels' were his baby. He believes strongly in euthanasia.

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@Valin

 

Yep, Dr Emanual (Rahms Brother) is as much of an incompetent and abrasive idiot as his brother. I wrote a piece on him at Wide Awakes when he was hired to help with this healthcare farce. He loves abortion and the 'Death Panels' were his baby. He believes strongly in euthanasia.

 

I don't know about that! I bet Rahm can be even more of an abrasive idiot. biggrin.png

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@Valin

 

Yep, Dr Emanual (Rahms Brother) is as much of an incompetent and abrasive idiot as his brother. I wrote a piece on him at Wide Awakes when he was hired to help with this healthcare farce. He loves abortion and the 'Death Panels' were his baby. He believes strongly in euthanasia.

 

I don't know about that! I bet Rahm can be even more of an abrasive idiot. biggrin.png

 

 

They must have had some very 'special' parentsrolleyes.gif

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Obamacare Premiums Up 16% in Wisconsin

 

Obamacare premiums in Wisconsin will rise by an average of 16 percent next year, according to the state’s insurance commissioner.

 

“Consumers in Wisconsin will be facing an average 15.88 percent increase, but that is just an average,” said commissioner Ted Nickel. “Consumers in some areas may see increases as high as 30.37 percent.”

 

For individuals whose health insurer exited the market and are left with no health insurance, the federal government will automatically re-enroll the individual in a new plan if the individual doesn’t purchase coverage through the exchange. This action transfers a consumer’s personal information to another insurer without the consumer’s consent.Scissors-32x32.png

 

http://freebeacon.com/issues/obamacare-premiums-16-wisconsin/

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Obamacare Premiums Up 16% in Wisconsin

 

Democratic governor: Health law 'no longer affordable'

Oct 12 2016

 

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Minnesota's Democratic governor said Wednesday that the Affordable Care Act is "no longer affordable," a stinging critique from a state leader who strongly embraced the law and proudly proclaimed health reform was working in Minnesota just a few years ago.

 

Gov. Mark Dayton made the comments while addressing questions about Minnesota's fragile health insurance market, where individual plans are facing double-digit increases after all insurers threatened to exit the market entirely in 2017. He's the only Democratic governor to publicly suggest the law isn't working as intended.

 

Dayton's comments follow former President Bill Clinton's saying last week that the law was "the craziest thing in the world" before he backtracked.

 

"The reality is the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable for increasing numbers of people," Dayton said, calling on Congress to fix the law to address rising costs and market stability.

 

(Snip)

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Obamacare customers lose access to top Tennessee hospital

 

Tennessee's highest-ranked hospital will be out of network for all Obamacare customers next year, after Blue Cross's abrupt withdrawal from the state's insurance marketplace last month.

 

Vanderbilt University Medical Center confirmed to the Washington Examiner that it will be outside the networks of medical providers covered by the three insurers selling marketplace plans for 2017.

 

The hospital system, which is ranked nationally in nine adult and 10 pediatric specialties, is in network this year for Tennessee residents with Blue Cross marketplace plans. But Blue Cross announced in September it is withdrawing from the major urban areas of Memphis, Knoxville and Nashville, where Vanderbilt is located.Scissors-32x32.png

 

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obamacare-customers-lose-access-to-top-tennessee-hospital/article/2604505

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Independent doctors face forced retirement with health system changes

 

Independent doctors say their future looks dim under a Vermont all-payer system, and some are even weighing a worst-case scenario of forced early retirement.

 

Though Gov. Peter Shumlin’s administration has said that independent practices will be free to choose between fee-for-service and the all-payer system, a closer look at Vermont’s proposed health care model tells a different story.

 

The all-payer model would require participating physicians to come under the leadership of a statewide accountable care organization, which would set a global budget at the beginning of each fiscal year.

 

http://watchdog.org/278578/independent-doctors-face-forced-retirement-under-all-payer-model/

 

Dr. Daniel McCauliffe, a private dermatologist at Rutland Skin Center, and Dr. Robert Emmons, a private psychiatrist in Burlington, both say they would never join an accountable care organization.

 

“ACOs fundamentally are organized for rationing care. That does not compute with my code of ethics,” Emmons said.Scissors-32x32.png

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More Than 1 Million to Lose Obamacare Plans as Insurers Quit
Zachary Tracer, Tatiana Darie, Katherine Doherty
October 14, 2016

A growing number of people in Obamacare are finding out their health insurance plans will disappear from the program next year, forcing them to find new coverage even as options shrink and prices rise.

At least 1.4 million people in 32 states will lose the Obamacare plan they have now, according to state officials contacted by Bloomberg. That’s largely caused by Aetna Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and some state or regional insurers quitting the law’s markets for individual coverage.

aSign-ups for Obamacare coverage begin next month. Fallout from the quitting insurers has emerged as the latest threat to the law, which is also a major focal point in the U.S. presidential election. While it’s not clear what all the consequences of the departing insurers will be, interviews with regulators and insurance customers suggest that plans will be fewer and more expensive, and may not include the same doctors and hospitals.

 

It may also mean that instead of growing in 2017, Obamacare could shrink. As of March 31, the law covered 11.1 million people; an Oct. 13 S&P Global Ratings report predicted that enrollment next year will range from an 8 percent decline to a 4 percent gain.

 

Vanishing Plan

 

(Snip)

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