With each passing day, we learn more and more about the horrible effects of Obamacare.
Here are just some of the “new” revelations.
While there is ample evidence that premiums have risen for many if not most people, the NY Times finds that the supposedly lower premiums come with much higher deductibles, On Health Exchanges, Premiums May Be Low, but Other Costs Can Be High:
For months, the Obama administration has heralded the low premiums of medical insurance policies on sale in the insurance exchanges created by the new health law. But as consumers dig into the details, they are finding that the deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs are often much higher than what is typical in employer-sponsored health plans….In El Paso, Tex., for example, for a husband and wife both age 35, one of the cheapest plans on the federal exchange, offered by Blue Cross and Blue Shield, has a premium less than $300 a month, but the annual deductible is more than $12,000. For a 45-year-old couple seeking insurance on the federal exchange in Saginaw, Mich., a policy with a premium of $515 a month has a deductible of $10,000.In Santa Cruz, Calif., where the exchange is run by the state, Robert Aaron, a self-employed 56-year-old engineer, said he was looking for a low-cost plan. The best one he could find had a premium of $488 a month. But the annual deductible was $5,000, and that, he said, “sounds really high.”By contrast, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average deductible in employer-sponsored health plans is $1,135.
That is not exactly news, but that the NY Times is now up to speed with the rest of us is important because it helps filter the information down even to low information NY Times readers.
Jim Geraghty has more bad news, But Other Than All That, Obamacare Had a Good Weekend!:
You Know the Latest News on Obamacare Is Bad. But You Don’t Know How It’s Bad.The threat that Obamacare could end up shutting down volunteer firehouses, the site not working again, the administrators demanding bonuses and raises . . . rough end of the week for Obamacare. But things had to get better this weekend, right?Nope.Behold, members of Congress and their staff, unable to purchase insurance through the exchanges. I’ll give you a moment to stop laughing at the hardships of other people….Then the state of California decided that they could do whatever they wanted with the personal information that insurance shoppers typed into the site..l.Then we learned the implementation in Maryland was even worse than anyone imagined….Finally, remember all of those administration officials telling the public to use paper applications if the web site wasn’t working? Well, now they’re not so sure there’s time to process all of those….
Stop Jim, Stop! You are depressing me.
Let’s go to a real “expert,” Dr. Death Panel himself:
Well, there’s always Medicaid, free health care for those who can’t afford it. We’ve already seen that there will be too few doctors willing to take the reimbursement rates, but could it be even worse than that? You betcha.
ObamaCare created a Medicaid time bomb:
The good news, if you want to call it that, is that roughly 1.6 million Americans have enrolled in ObamaCare so far.The not-so-good news is that 1.46 million of them actually signed up for Medicaid. If that trend continues, it could bankrupt both federal and state governments.
This all is stressing me out. At least I can load up on meds to ease the pain, right? Right!?!?
No, You Can’t Keep Your Drugs Either Under Obamacare:
These are the ways that Obamacare cheapens the health coverage in order to pay for all of its expensive mandates. Obamacare is a throwback to the old HMO model of the 1990s, which promised a broad package of coverage for primary care benefits like vaccines, and routine doctor visits. But to pay for these benefits, the Obamacare plans skimp on other things – principally the number of doctors you’ll have access to, and also, the number of costlier branded drugs that make it onto formularies.
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