Thanks Obama: Ohio health insurance premiums to rise 88% on average

Ohio Says No to an Obamacare Health Exchange
Fact Sheet ​

OHIO WILL NOT RUN AN OBAMACARE HEALTH EXCHANGE: On Nov. 16, 2012 Gov. John Kasich notified the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that Ohio will not run an Obamacare health exchange in Ohio, but will instead leave that to the federal government to do.

Is stupidity a communicable disease?

This is a pattern that we will see again and again.

States that choose to maximize the ACA will help their citizens.

States that choose to spite their poorest and neediest cit izens (in the case of Ohio - against the will of its own citizens who chose Obama twice...) will not help their citizens.

 

THANKS OBAMA

another pitiful job

 

thanks Obama!

**** Ohio!

 

I suggest you start a telephone campaign to the Ohio Amish.

 

This can't be true. Just as the New York Times.

 

And that's the end of this thread. Hilarious that it gets shot down so fast. It wasn't long at all before the blame for this got cleared up.

 

So to be clear you guys think that letting states run their own healthcare instead of the federal government is what drives rates down in ny and leaving to the Feds is why rates are going up in places like oh? I just want that for the record...

 

I think having a state trying to implement a policy to the best of their ability vs resisting it as much as possible certainly would have an effect. How much is unclear. For example, Texas and Ohio aren't participating in Medicaid expansion, which changes the composition of the potential new entrants to the market, and also leaves a much larger uninsured population that has to be subsidized by the insured population.

I think a better comparison than NY - which has a lot of unique circumstances - is California, which also had price drops despite already being on the cheaper end of the spectrum. But there are still a lot of unknowns there in terms of the different starting points in OH vs CA. For example, my understanding is that OH's current system is set up where people with pre-existing conditions are more excluded from the system than normal; so in their case, the new people joining the system are less healthy than in other places.

We still need more data at this point, though. Each state that releases data adds to the information we have, and we'll get a better and better picture of what's driving the differences between states with lower rates vs higher rates.

 

Basso, way to be slow on this one. This was a story in June and you're only picking it up now? Your blogs and twitter feeds need to keep up.

Lets list the problem with the Dept of Insurance's "logic"

1st the study ONLY looked at premiums. It didn't compare changes in deductibles (which go way down under the ACA), it didn't compare copays, or doctor access, or any of the other things that factor into cost and quality of care.

2nd multiple insurance providers said that she literally made up some of the "premiums" that were used to compare. The Ohio Dept of Insurance didn't even release the data sets that they were comparing. They only listed a select few samples that they compared.

3rd The study didn't include health care subsidies from the ACA that reduce the cost of premiums and out of pocket costs.


Basso, if this were a true story, the entire news media would have picked it up and there wouldve been a firestorm. Now I know Republicans like to play this game in their head where the media is secretly out to get them and is intentionally hiding the truth on things like health care so I suppose there's no actual way of convincing you of this.

But good try man. Take a state that refuses to participate in the exchange system and release a study headed by the Lieutenant Governor of all people (and not an objective non-partisan insurance analyst) and shockingly there are issues.

Also, Ohio, unlike California and a few other states, did not request permission to reject Insurance exchange bids. So if she was really so concerned about premium prices, she could have asked the administration for the authority to reject overpriced bids.


This is all shocking news everyone.

 

The Columbia Journalism Review shot holes in the numbers coming out of Ohio and California. The only fairly certainty will be a 2-3% decrease in costs due to ObamaCare pushing to go paperless. We will all have to wait and see how things are 10 years from now. Even then neither party will admit they were wrong, like the Republicans with homosexuals and liberals with prohibition.

 

I think I do a good job at being rational and impartial on this subject, so don't dismiss what I'm saying here.

I do not believe you really understand what drives rates OR what the implementation of the exchanges means. For a big thing, the premiums you pay are not what is being used to subsidize the premiums for the poor through the exchanges (which will be up in Texas as well.)

 

Sorry - I wasn't clear. I'm not talking about funding the Obamacare subsidies. I'm talking about the general idea of insured patients subsidizing uninsured ones. When a poor person doesn't have insurance, they wait until something really bad happens, and then get emergency care which they likely never pay for. In the end, this raises the cost of insurance because, indirectly, the hospitals charge more to their insured patients to balance out their costs of non-payment.

If you expand Medicaid, you eliminate a lot of that expense that is currently being subsidized by insurance. Another way to look at it is that Texas is rejecting billions of dollars in free federal money. But those people will still have medical expenses that have to be paid by someone - some of that will come from the state; some will come from the pockets of the hospitals; some will come from the uninsured population that does pay their bills; and some comes from the insured through higher negotiated rates for procedures.

That's the cost I was referring to - not the Obamacare subsidies.

 

Ah yes, I understand what you were saying now and I don't disagree with that portion of it.

 

justtxyank is like the reincarnation of weslinder- a conservative who actually engages in good faith, informed debate. Really refreshing.

 

I'm basically just a lurker here now (thank god!), but want to backslap on this to agree wholeheartedly.