You are assuming that the price will not change once the regulations go into effect. My biggest problem with this law is that it requires all kinds of coverages without any regulation on premiums.
Or, for that matter, the slow rise in health care *prices*? Health care prices in December 2012 rose by 1.7 percent compared to December 2011, the lowest year-over-year growth since February 1998. The 12-month moving average at 2.0 percent was the lowest reading since December 1998.
Yea it will control it all right. When I first moved to my current employer I paid $42 a month for 100% health coverage. That same coverage plan is costing me almost $100 a month. This next cycle, the 100% plan will not even be offered. THANK A LOT HUSSEIN!!!
False. Insurance companies have caps on their profit. The problem has never been insurance companies, they've just been the boogie man pointed to because everyone is scared to death to take on the medicine lobby. Our healthcare delivery system is the problem, not the middle man that is paying for it. Obamacare set a limitation on profit margins beginning last year. In Texas, most of the carriers issued refunds of premiums because they made too much money.How big did they miss Obamacare's target by? On average, less than 3%. So for every dollar they took from you in premium, they made less than 3 cents too much in profit. Obamacare attacks the wrong thing. Insurance companies have an incentive to drive down the cost of care, they weren't the ones that needed to be attacked. The people who need reform are doctors, hospitals and pharmaceuticals. Who is going to propose the law that tells a doctor how much profit he can make in a year? Talk to executives at Kelsey. They can tell you why the health industry is skyrocketing. Their model drives down costs. It's why they created kelseycare as an insurance alternative. Members of KelseyCare don't get screwed by the fact that the insurance company has to fight with all the other doctors and hospitals. They drive down the costs of things like MRIs and lower the cost of prescriptions through their clinics. Result? The cost curve is completely bent in the Kelsey system. Guess what? They partner with insurance companies to help make it work. Cigna loves them some Kelsey and has no problem creating lower rates to reflect their lower costs. Americans want to go to any doctor they choose, want their office visit and all labwork covered under $30, want brand name drugs covered at $30, free birth control, low deductibles, etc. It never occurs to the average American what their insurance company pays for those services. But, we'll all soon learn our lesson.
Insurance companies were demonized, but at the end of the day, they were given about 50 million new customers. They came out OK in the deal. And hospitals, pharma, and doctors were all squeezed to various extents in Obamacare to compress costs. Everything ranging from payment methodology based on outcomes instead of procedures to cutting Medicare payments to penalties for high readmission rates are designed to coax accountability and increased efficiency into the system. The issue is that these take time to put in place, and some are being done in smaller trials first to smooth out long-term implementation. But once of the biggest misnomers about Obamacare is that little was done on the cost curve side of things. And one of the biggest mistakes by Dems in promoting the law was to talk about universal coverage instead of all the other behind-the-scenes things in it. From the Forbes article posted earlier: Douglas Elmendorf, Director of the CBO, noted that while much of the savings are the result of a loss of wealth due to the recession. But, for the first time, Elmendorf was willing to say that a ‘significant part’ of the savings are the result of structural change in how healthcare is now being delivered. While the new data suggests that some of the changes in how providers are paid for delivering healthcare began—and were having a positive impact—prior to passage of Obamacare, the ACA codifies these changes in payment procedures for physicians and hospitals, taking what now appears to be programs that are slowing the growth in costs and applying them to all providers throughout the nation. There's a whole lot more stuff like this in the pipeline.
More on cost savings from the New England Journal of Medicine: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/...s-dream-of-medicare-privatization.php?ref=fpa In a development with potentially profound implications — both for Medicare itself and for the broader ideological fight between the two parties over the role of government — researchers writing in the New England Journal of Medicine believe that the growth in per patient Medicare costs has slowed, contra earlier projections that spending would soar at an unsustainable rate. More importantly, the researchers believe this trend will hold over time, thanks largely to the Affordable Care Act’s sweeping cost-control policies. It’s not yet clear whether the trend will be permanent — one key reason cost growth has slowed has nothing to do with policy or innovation, but rather that the economy has been depressed for years. But the ACA expanded on provider payment savings policies from the 2000s and adopted a plethora of new measures, some of which are already proving successful at reducing spending. On top of that, U.S. medical cost growth, long having exceeded other areas of the economy, is currently at a five-decade low and more closely in line with GDP. “On the whole, we do not believe that the recent slowdown in Medicare spending growth is a fluke,” wrote the researchers Chapin White and Paul Ginsburg. Thanks to the cost-control reforms over the last decade, they added, “the CBO projects that over the next decade Medicare spending per enrollee will grow substantially more slowly than the overall economy.” They argued that the ACA in particular lays the framework for longer term cost-control by transitioning the provider reimbursement system from paying for quantity to paying for quality, something even Republicans quietly believe is a good idea.
This is the issue that is most troubling to me....my fiance and I each pay $190/month for our coverage through blue cross blue shield. My father is a business owner and must buy his own, my mother has had some serious health issues in the past and he pays nearly $2600/month for them two, but soon he will be of age to go on government care....but all bs aside, my dad has alot of money, $2600 a month is nuts I don't care how you spin it.....the reason its so high? My mother nearly died of a blood clot about a decade ago and had a 9 day stay in intensive care and a series of surgeries that totaled out to a $280K charge, intensive care is nearly $20K/night if I remember and the best part of the bill....$70 per pill tylenol....thanks St Lukes that seems about right to charge when its about $3 for 100 pills.....the healthcare companies are the root of all evil, even now I get a common cold and the doctor wants to run bloodwork just to cover his ass from a potential lawsuit....that nets him more and costs your insurance more, all in all its a joke
Obamacare, to some extent, addresses this by moving away from the pay-for-procedure model to a pay-for-outcomes model that encourages each party in the process to push efficiency over just running lots of tests and expecting someone to pay for it. The early results are supposedly pretty successful, though there's a long way to go.
Pay for outcomes models were already being pushed by insurance companies. UHC and Humana began rating doctors based on outcomes and providing that information to patients. They had to fight doctors to get it done, needing the state to step in to approve it. However, I say again, Obamacare doesn't attack the cost driver. Here is an example: Patient has insurance through company that costs $450 a month. Patient has rheumatoid arthritis and requires monthly self administered injections as treatment. The NEGOTIATED cost of this prescription is $2500. $2500!!!!!!! Insurance companies are moving these types into a tier 4 copay where you have to pay 25% of the actual cost of the Rx with a stop loss. What does the patient do? Throw a fit about the company being cheap with a cheap insurance plan and tell people the insurance company sucks.
Yes - but as stated in the above articles, ACA requires a lot of this and forces acceleration of these changes. You're acting as though there's only one cost driver, and since Obamacare doesn't fix it, it does nothing on this front. The reality is that there are a lot of cost drivers, and Obamacare, to various extents, will address a variety - but not all - of them. All the early evidence and research thus far is pointing to the fact that Obamacare is indeed having a slowing effect on the cost curve. As I've said, we're still in the early stages of implementation so we really don't know what the long-term effect will be yet, but there's plenty of reason to believe there will be a significant and real positive impact.
Just read this, thought i'd post. Whole lotta tax talk related to the implementation of the AFFORDABLE care act. Middle America just keeps taking a pounding from our corporately bought represenatives. Taxing health insurance purchases now. Nice.
Yes, because if anybody has your best interests at heart, it's the wingnuts penning anti-HCR hit pieces to help insurance companies lower their tax bills.
I think you missed the point of the article. They're taxing the consumer on the purchase of health insurance. Did you read this one?
