It's a minor improvement, surely, that this poor child posting at the Daily Kos is confronting the painful task of reconciling data with mental models. He's discovering to his horror that, although he was promised that Obamacare would reduce his health insurance costs, in fact his premiums are about to double. How can this be, he wails?
He should start with the understanding that all that business about lowering premiums was complete balderdash intended to tamp down the fires of resistance long enough to get through a couple of election cycles. It's impossible to believe anyone was serious about floating those claims. Then our callow young poster should consider the real aim of collectivized medicine, considered in the most favorable light to its proponents, which is to even out the good and bad luck of a population with a mix of sicker, healthier, younger, and older members, some of whom are exposed to the expense of pregnancy (their own or a dependent's), or heart disease, or cancer, and some of whom are less so. If such a motive is confronted honestly, it should be blindingly obvious that young, healthy people are going to take it in the shorts in terms of increased costs. How else could it work?
But as usual, this young fellow was hoping that things could get cheaper for all those unlucky people without getting more expensive for people in his relatively fortunate position. His consent was bought cheap, without his ever having to consider the cost. Now he has to think about what it's worth to him to be compassionate.
Lately, I'm noticing something else odd. A lot of the outrage over the newly-rolled-out premiums is over the horrifying discovery that the only way to keep premiums down is to have high deductibles and co-pays. As my husband noted, all you have to do is add in health-savings accounts and you get a proposal that W might have floated. Maybe my high-deductible, low-premium policy is going to survive this debacle after all. What's more, maybe a lot more people are going to get used to the idea of buying insurance for cash, rather than having their employer purchase it for them with invisible money. Maybe they're also going to get used to buying most of their medical care with cash (in all but the most medically disastrous years), so that they start noticing price signals again. Heck, maybe we'll even start getting price signals again.
Wouldn't it be ironic if Obamacare didn't destroy the American health system, after all, but avoided doing so only by destroying what collectivists imagined were the functional bits?
11 comments:
If such a motive is confronted honestly, it should be blindingly obvious that young, healthy people are going to take it in the shorts in terms of increased costs. How else could it work?
By raising taxes on everybody, not by raising my premiums. The taxes bit works better, because I'm one of the disadvantaged; my taxes won't go up. I not paying any taxes, anyway.
In this poor urchin's defense, my "theory" is easily seen through by and your "obvious" readily apparent to any thinking person over the age of 12--or 50. He's of a generation, though, that our educational system never taught to think.
Maybe my high-deductible, low-premium policy is going to survive this debacle after all.
Maybe not. The deductibles on the Obamacare policies are turning out to be higher than the deductibles required for a High Deductible policy to be eligible to have a companion HSA. If you want an HSA, that's a threat.
The per cents of costs paid by these Obamacare policies also are turning out to be lower than those paid by the insurance policy you have and "will be able to keep."
But since that's all the fault of someone else, don't count on Obamacare's failures to produce anything other than additional Obamacare add-ons to fill the gaps in the existing Obamacare--and to create newer, wider, deeper gaps.
See minimum wage laws and farm price support laws and food stamps to see how governments fix things.
Eric Hines
My sense of outrage is limited to the ways in which this changes the relationship between citizens and government, or even between citizens and citizens. Everyone in America now has a financial interest in my life choices, and yours. Sooner or later they'll wield the force of government to compel us to make ones that are cheaper for them.
But in terms of the plans, at least here in Georgia, what strikes me most is how the government plans are worse across the board than my grandfathered plan. I can pay more in premiums for a catastrophic plan with a vastly higher deductible -- $12,700 a year!
Or I can pay a whole lot more for a Bronze plan that offers 60% co-insurance -- but my current plan offers 70% in-network, and 50% outside.
And as for Silver plans...
This is a pretty clear example of what happens when government meddles in markets. The insurance companies have no incentive to keep down costs, because the subsidies will remove the pain of payment from so many people, and the mandate obligates them to buy your product anyway.
It's worse across the board.
How can it be anything but worse across the board? It requires everybody who is already paying for insurance to assume the costs of everybody who is NOT currently paying for insurance, PLUS the cost of government. Those are not small costs being assumed by the people who are already paying.
Valerie
Grim, I wonder how long it will be before we are assessed a surcharge for our dangerous motorcycle riding life. Or any other activity the state does not approve of.
Funny thing that they started with smokers. That's the tell, I suppose.
Raven, you already were assessed a surcharge for driving a dangerous vehicle down the road - its called insurance. Everyone who drives a vehicle down the road is so dangerous they have to have a gun pointed at their head to force them to buy car/motorcycle insurance.
As for surcharges for things the government does not approve of, mandatory government remittances are included in the price of gasoline, ammunition, and alcohol. I know I am missing other obvious things...
My high deductible policy was cancelled and I'm being tossed into Obamacare. I look at it as simply another tax. I pay $2000/year penalty on top of my usual 15% SSDI and additional income taxes, and continue paying my medical costs out-of-pocket. Nothing has changed, except that I have to set aside more emergency medical savings than I did before (probably the difference between the old premium and the federal fine.)
I'm not going to enroll in fed "insurance" unless absolutely forced to, in part because of the lack of data security and privacy.
LittleRed1
What's confusing me is all the stories about people who have had their high-deductible policies cancelled, because the feds at HHS don't approve of it. At the same time, the word from the exchanges is that people are shocked at how high the deductibles are. Is this a case of the three bears, where the feds have decided that deductibles in a very restricted range are the only ones that are j-u-u-u-st right?
I can't quite figure out why Blue Cross hasn't cancelled our very high deductible policy yet.
Our health carrier informed us they are departing the insurance biz. At first glance we (wife and I) can get a new bronze plan with ,higher deductible at three times the cost.
Beware those of you with a household income around 60K, there is is a "cliff" at, IIRC, $60,520. Below that the Gov. subsidy is enormous- on the order of 8-10K per year. Above it, there is none- so to break even your income would need to rise to the the low $70's.
I'm not sure why they didn't cancel mine, Tex, but I'm glad they didn't. All the new options are manifestly worse: more expensive both in premiums and deductibles.
Battleblue1: Someday we should sit down and figure out just how much extra tax we pay for exercising our freedom not to submit to our "betters'" ideas about what we should do with our lives.
I'm still waiting to see what the premiums do at work. They did email everyone recently to let us know the existing plan complies with the ACA an would continue in 2014, but open enrollment hasn't started yet. The husband's employer is dropping the coverage it offered part-time employees because it doesn't comply with the new rules. Husband will stay on VA coverage for the time being. I'm just wondering if they will, at some point, tell him he's not eligible anymore because he's making too much money. Don't know what that threshold would be.
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