- Obamacare is an entitlement, and you can never shut one of those down. The Politico response is: well, yeah, they're basically entitlements, though you can quibble about the details. Obamacare is going to cost almost $2 trillion over ten years. But Congress could still conceivably scale these entitlements back, unlike every other entitlement.
- Obamacare is already "helping to slow" the growth of healthcare spending. Eh, not so much.
- Subsidies will fix the rate shock. Eh, not so much, and to the rate shock you'll have to add the sharp increase in out-of-pocket costs.
- It'll be like shopping for a TV. "It may get there, but it will take a while." For people who've never tried to buy insurance before, it could conceivably be less confusing than it was before, but for everyone else it's a nightmare.
- You won't have as many doctors to choose from. Yeah, but people who were uninsured didn't have any to choose from, so it's all good.
- Obamacare will reduce the deficit. You're dreaming; see above.
- Obamacare will usher in death panels. Oh, stop it, they won't be here for a little while yet.
Pesky talking points
Politico is not what you'd call a right-wing site. At most, it's "centrist," whatever that means, and it's generally positive about Obamacare. It's running a series of thumbnail PDFs to educate the pubic about this new law. So what does the article "Beware of the Obamacare talking points" tell us?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
What struck me was this:
“Narrow networks are why we don’t have rate shock,” said
health care consultant Robert Laszewski.
That makes it sounds like Laszewski is praising the narrower networks. That doesn't fit in with what Laszewski is saying about his own plan, which is:
And, wait all you people telling me rate shock does not exist, the new far more restricted plan costs 66% more than our current monthly premium. Mr. Rate Shock got rate shocked––and benefit shocked to boot.
Incidentally, I did a search for the Laszewski quote on the Internet and came up with only the Politico article. Laszewski does talk about narrower exchanges on his blog but he does not appear to consider their use within the exchanges to be an unalloyed good, as Politico seems to imply.
I wonder how long they'll be able to hide the part of the law that says you'll see only a physician of your skin color or ethnicity? Or that taxpayer dollars will now go to *promote* minorities in the medical fields in the forms of grants, affirmative action enrollment biases, yada yada yada.
And, just this morning, an article on Fox that hosptials are starting opt out of Xerxes designer jackboot.
You think it's bad now with the increased premiums and cancellations, just wait, there are a lot of left shoes still to drop.
I'm not sure where Laszewski was coming from, but his statement is true either way: the last available way to hide the rate shock is to squeeze the networks down to doctors with so few choices they're willing to work for half-pay.
A good way to check the adequacy of your network is to see whether the Mayo Clinic is in it, or at least the nearest hospital network with a decent reputation. The local doc-in-the-box is fine when you already know what's wrong with you and all you need is a prescription that only he can legally write (though you may have wait a month or so). But if you get really sick that's not what you're going to need. I think we're all going to have to figure out a way to set aside cash for future medical emergencies. It's going to be almost impossible to "insure" against them in the sense that that word used to have.
That means our standards of living are not what we thought they were.
A good way to check the adequacy of your network is to see whether the Mayo Clinic is in it, or at least the nearest hospital network with a decent reputation.
I've checked the Blue Cross network for 2014 and my local doctors and hospitals that are in the network now are in at least one of Blue's networks for next year.
What Blue isn't offering for next year is any out of network coverage and - I emailed to double-check this - no out of state hospitals are in their networks. So not only no Mayo Clinic but none of the big cancer specialty hospitals like Memorial Sloan Kettering or M. D. Anderson.
It looks like an insurer other than Blue Cross is still offering a POS plan with out of network coverage; I haven't yet looked to see who is in their network or what the basic coverage looks like.
That means our standards of living are not what we thought they were.
Not with regard to finances or with regard to peace of mind.
My reading of the tone of the article is that the writers are really uncomfortable as a general rule giving more than perfunctory credence to conservative critics. However, they are increasingly unwilling to believe Obama either, and more courageous about saying so.
It is as I noted before. Everyone is going to get off the Obama bandwagon right after next year's elections, and they are jockeying for the prestige of getting there first. But they don't want to be the first penguins pushed off the ice, either.
Post a Comment