Obamacare plan crippled by losses

[clacy]

I've talked to multiple brokers about this who are very familiar with what is going on with health insurance, and they all say it's widely known that the ACA policies are bleeding badly.  They will continue to have large price increases and there are several major insurers that are planning on or considering pulling out of the ACA market all together. 

Benefits have already been reduced to the point where most people are just paying $1,000's for catastrophic insurance but they usually have enormous deductibles/co-pays, etc.

I have no good solutions, but it definitely sounds like a train wreck.

[Libertarian666]

I don't understand why people have trouble grasping the fact that this is not an unintended consequence of Obamacare.

It was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that what the proponents of Obamacare actually wanted was single-payer, but they couldn't get it through Congress even with Democrat majorities in both houses. So instead they came up with a plan that was guaranteed to bankrupt the insurance companies so that they could then say "The free market (gag) has failed, so now we need single-payer".

[Libertarian666]

I don't understand why people have trouble grasping the fact that this is not an unintended consequence of Obamacare.

It was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that what the proponents of Obamacare actually wanted was single-payer, but they couldn't get it through Congress even with Democrat majorities in both houses. So instead they came up with a plan that was guaranteed to bankrupt the insurance companies so that they could then say "The free market (gag) has failed, so now we need single-payer".

I think you give politicians too much credit.

The other possibility is that they accidentally passed a plan that was guaranteed to give them what they actually wanted but couldn't pass as such, which seems pretty unlikely.

I know of the old saying "never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence", but I don't think it applies here.

[Xan]

The other possibility is that they accidentally passed a plan that was guaranteed to give them what they actually wanted but couldn't pass as such, which seems pretty unlikely.

I know of the old saying "never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence", but I don't think it applies here.

I'm with TPG. They couldn't possibly be smart enough to have planned intentional failure. Most of them didn't even read it before voting for it.

Agreed.  Tech, when you put it that way it seems unlikely, but when you consider that the only thing that needed to happen was for their plan to amount to a complete failure, then I think that even with their best effort to prevent it, it was unavoidable.

[MediumTex]

If Clinton was the Horny President and W. was the Dumb President, I think it's fair to say that Obama has been the Naive President.

[Greg]

If Clinton was the Horny President and W. was the Dumb President, I think it's fair to say that Obama has been the Naive President.

You need to keep going with this!

Obama: Green
GWBush: Dumb
Clinton: Horny
GHWBush: Wimpy
Reagan: ?

Reagan: The Actor?
Trump: The Entertainer?

[MediumTex]

If Clinton was the Horny President and W. was the Dumb President, I think it's fair to say that Obama has been the Naive President.

You need to keep going with this!

Obama: Green
GWBush: Dumb
Clinton: Horny
GHWBush: Wimpy
Reagan: ?

Reagan: The Actor?
Trump: The Entertainer?

Bush Sr. - The Caretaker

Reagan - The Spokesman

Carter - The Earnest Intellectual Worrier

Ford - The Bumbling Placeholder

Nixon - The Paranoid Liar

Johnson - The Insecure FDR Knockoff

Kennedy - Clinton's Penis and Obama's Na�vet� Brought Together

Eisenhower - Experience and Wisdom Working in Tandem

Truman - The Haberdasher Jap Irradiator

FDR - The Socialist with the Beautiful Voice

Hoover - The Unlucky Miner

Coolidge - Sleepytime is My Favorite Time

Harding - W. Foreshadowed

Wilson - Income Tax, World War and The Fed

Taft - 300 Pounds and I Throw it Around!

T. Roosevelt - Racist Jingo Peter Pan

[Reub]

If Clinton was the Horny President and W. was the Dumb President, I think it's fair to say that Obama has been the Naive President.

Utter nonsense! Why are you constantly excusing his destructive actions?

[MediumTex]

If Clinton was the Horny President and W. was the Dumb President, I think it's fair to say that Obama has been the Naive President.

Utter nonsense! Why are you constantly excusing his destructive actions?

Which one?

I assume you mean Obama, and you think I am somehow excusing him by saying he is naive.

What I am doing it precisely the opposite.  What I am saying is that Obama came into office full of optimism and naivete and proceeded to fail at almost every turn because he didn't realize that without moving more toward the center, he simply wasn't going get much accomplished (and he hasn't gotten much accomplished).

If you think that Obama has done a lot of damage, imagine what would have happened with a Democratic Congress and broad support of the American public.  From my perspective, the efforts to contain Obama have been largely successful.

I suspect that I don't hate Obama as much as you, and I probably dislike W. more than you, but that's okay.  I tend to have a low opinion of all politicians, mostly because they simply can't be trusted with much of anything.  With that said, I tend not to get really worked up about individual politicians.  They are simply acting according to their nature.  Liars are going to lie.

I do like what Obama has done with marijuana law enforcement and framing it as a state law issue.  I think that policy has been pretty good as a victory for state's rights and personal freedom in general.

Obama has also deported far more illegal aliens than Bush or Clinton ever did, and it was on Obama's watch that construction of the border wall began.

I'm pretty sure you don't see it this way, but the Obama years could have been a LOT worse.  They could have been better as well, but don't discount the bad things that could have happened but didn't.  No new large scale wars, unemployment has fallen steadily, the economy has not fallen back into recession, no meaningful inflation, no tax increases for most people, etc.

In an alternate reality, I can easily imagine the U.S. in an economic depression as it fought a vast land war covering the entire area between Afghanistan and the Mediterranean.

Judging by Romney's track record as an ultra-liberal Republican, do you really think the last four years would have been a lot different under him?  I don't.

[Reub]

Why don't you think that Obama was just being naive with his marijuana policy? Why does he get credit for this minor act while no culpability for all of the damage he's causing?

[MediumTex]

Why don't you think that Obama was just being naive with his marijuana policy? Why does he get credit for this minor act while no culpability for all of the damage he's causing?

Maybe he was being naive, but I think that the results are still good when it comes to the federal position on marijuana law enforcement.

As far as everything else Obama has done, how can you possibly think that he isn't being held responsible for it?  Don't you see that the whole Trump phenomenon is a response to Obama's failure as a President?

Trump is to Obama as Obama was to George W. Bush. 

Obama is certainly being held responsible for his incompetence.  He gave Congress to the Republicans, and he's about to give the White House to Donald Trump.  How much more spectacularly can a President be repudiated than that?

[Pointedstick]

To be fair, Trump is also a reaction to 8 years of Bush and Republican control that saw Red America sink into a morass of economic misery from which most parts of Red America have still not fully recovered. Both of these guys have been pretty bad, in their own ways.

[MediumTex]

To be fair, Trump is also a reaction to 8 years of Bush and Republican control that saw Red America sink into a morass of economic misery from which most parts of Red America have still not fully recovered. Both of these guys have been pretty bad, in their own ways.

Yes.  I think that Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone yesterday makes it clear that W. set the stage for Trump just as much as Obama did.

I think that the establishment badly misunderstands the extent to which regular Americans are sick of politicians working for moneyed interests rather than for the American people.

[Reub]

Taibbi is a left wing hack and has been for decades.

[MediumTex]

Taibbi is a left wing hack and has been for decades.

Decades?  The guy is 45.

You don't have to agree with him, but his writing is very good.

[Reub]

Yes he's been around for decades and is a rabid, biased leftist with an agenda. I can't believe that you hold him in such high regard. Have they relaxed the pot smoking laws in Texas too?

[MediumTex]

Yes he's been around for decades and is a rabid, biased leftist with an agenda. I can't believe that you hold him in such high regard. Have they relaxed the pot smoking laws in Texas too?

He started publishing pieces in the late 90s when he was in his 20s, so I'm not sure where you're getting "decades" that he's been writing stuff you don't like.  It's probably been about the last seven years that Taibbi has been a really high profile writer.

Is there anything in particular you don't like about Taibbi?  It sounds like you don't read his stuff, so I'm not sure how you can be so certain that you don't like it.

[Pointedstick]

Outgroup! Outgroup! Outgroup! Contain the infection! Don't let it anywhere near you! It's enough to know that it's dangerous! Raise shields! Deploy T-cells! Fire photon torpedoes! Don't let it infect your mind!

[MediumTex]

Outgroup! Outgroup! Outgroup! Contain the infection! Don't let it anywhere near you! It's enough to know that it's dangerous! Raise shields! Deploy T-cells! Fire photon torpedoes! Don't let it infect your mind!

I'm sure Taibbi would be impressed that his writing was considered that dangerous.

[Reub]

So you're saying that he's only been a left wing hack for 17 or 18 years and not 20?

http://www.commdiginews.com/entertainme ... ias-33863/

[MediumTex]

So you're saying that he's only been a left wing hack for 17 or 18 years and not 20?

http://www.commdiginews.com/entertainme ... ias-33863/

I'm saying he has only been a professional writer for 17 or 18 years, which is not a period people typically think of as "decades", though technically I guess it sort of is, since it's more than one decade.

You say he's a left wing hack, I say he's a good writer with a keen eye for hypocrisy.  It's cool.  We don't have to agree.

[MediumTex]

So you're saying that he's only been a left wing hack for 17 or 18 years and not 20?

http://www.commdiginews.com/entertainme ... ias-33863/

I read Taibbi's review of American Sniper and thought it was pretty good.  What did you not like about the review?

The movie did gloss over a lot of Chris Kyle's rough spots, and sort of presented a guy who never actually existed doing things that never actually happened, including the sniper vs. sniper storyline, which was pure fiction.

I think it's fair to point that stuff out, especially if you are pointing out how the whole Iraq war only makes sense if you fictionalize why it was fought and overlook what its true cost was. 

How would we feel if a foreign country invaded the U.S. based on a false story about our weapons capabilities, and then proceeded to occupy our country for 8 years while over 100,000 of our people died because of the mess the invading force made out of their peace keeping efforts?  And then, after all of that, the movie industry from the invader's home country made a movie celebrating the life of a sniper who killed dozens of Americans who were engaged in the legitimate activity of protecting their homes and communities from the invading force.  All I'm saying is that there is another side to that story, and Taibbi helps us see it, and I think that helps to prevent another Iraq-type debacle from occurring.

[WiseOne]

I'm pretty sure you don't see it this way, but the Obama years could have been a LOT worse.  They could have been better as well, but don't discount the bad things that could have happened but didn't.  No new large scale wars, unemployment has fallen steadily, the economy has not fallen back into recession, no meaningful inflation, no tax increases for most people, etc.

I fully expect that this will be the Democrats' playbook for the election.  You can certainly make the case that George W was far more of a disaster.  And regarding Obamacare, remember what happened with Medicare expansion under W?

I would genuinely like to see a real study made of Obamacare, to determine the reason for the high costs.  The current losses could be transient, if it's due to a lot of delayed care on the part of the newly insured, but if there's been a big surge in chronic prescription writing, then the pharmaceutical companies are the ones bleeding the rest of the health care field dry. 

It could also be cost-shifting from hospitals to insurance companies, since catastrophic care for the uninsured has mostly been paid by hospitals.  Theoretically this should be reflected in reduced hospital charges, but unfortunately Obamacare (and other measures passed by this administration) has increased costs for hospitals to such an extent that charges are increasing, not coming down.  So the problem could be not the Obamacare insurance structure, but instead all the other dreck that came with it:  EHRs & "meaningful use", care guidelines mandating all sorts of extra tests & treatments, and the host of new charges & taxes.  Probably mostly EHRs.  That has been a shockingly expensive and disastrous experiment.

[Kriegsspiel]

I think you give politicians too much credit.

The other possibility is that they accidentally passed a plan that was guaranteed to give them what they actually wanted but couldn't pass as such, which seems pretty unlikely.

I know of the old saying "never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence", but I don't think it applies here.

I'm with TPG. They couldn't possibly be smart enough to have planned intentional failure. Most of them didn't even read it before voting for it.

If only the crafters of the bill needed to be smart enough to know what it was going to do, that would make it more probable.

[MachineGhost]

If this trend continues, which it likely will, premiums will skyrocket even more. This mess needs to be fixed. But how?

Abolishment and/or Medicare For All.  Sanders has hit that nail on the head.