Tag: healthcare

Finding out what’s in it: Vulnerable Democrats are now whining about the Medicare cuts imposed by Obamacare, by the very law they refused to read and then imposed on us.

The article notes how these same Democrats were also very blunt about lying that Obamacare would not force any cuts to Medicare, before the law was passed.

Finding out what’s in it: “If I do not receive my medication, I will die.”

And then there’s this Obamacare story from California (HT commenter Cotour): Man’s back surgery on hold because he can’t find a doctor in California who will take his Obamacare insurance.

The law is such an inconvenient thing: The Obama administration unilaterally delayed the employer mandate for medium sized businesses today.

The government will now exempt companies employing between 50 and 100 full-time workers from complying with the mandate that they offer employees affordable health insurance by another year, until 2016. Companies that have 100 or more full-time workers, defined as employees who work more than 30 hours per week, still will have to begin complying with the mandate to offer such coverage in 2015 or face financial penalties of up to $3,000 per worker.

Gee, didn’t the Democrats and Obama shut the government down only three months ago, calling the Republicans terrorists for suggesting Obamacare be delayed and screaming that it was “the law of the land!”?

A new study has found that healthcare costs for small businesses have doubled since Obama became President.

The study’s research period begins in 2009, before Obamacare went into effect, but even then I guarantee that the early cost increases were in anticipation of the law that was coming and that no one wanted. Since then, the law has only made things worse.

In a related story, AOL cuts employee benefits, citing Obamacare as the cause.

Finding out what’s in it: An Obama supporter discovers she was betrayed by Obama and Obamacare.

My plan was canceled last fall. According to the regulators behind ObamaCare, it was a subpar plan that should no longer be sold to consumers. Another 16,000 Tennesseans on the same plan were similarly dumped. Many, like me, liked their plans and wanted to keep them. This wasn’t my insurer’s fault at all. CoverTN actually fought for me to keep my health care. After I received my cancellation notice, the folks at CoverTN requested that the federal government give them a waiver, which would let them grandfather my plan into ObamaCare. Their request was rejected.

This left me with no health plan and only one choice: Buy a plan through the ObamaCare exchanges.

After weighing my options, I settled on a “platinum” plan. This was the best plan that I could choose. A “bronze,” “silver” or “gold” plan all would leave me paying exorbitant amounts of money on my frequent, and expensive, trips to doctors and specialists. But the platinum plan was the lesser of two expensive evils. My new plan costs me $373 a month, even after a small subsidy. By comparison, my old plan only cost me $57 a month. And I now pay 25 percent co-insurance on all doctor visits until I reach my out-of-pocket maximum of $1,500. This is much higher than under CoverTN.

All told, I’m likely going to pay more than $6,000 more each year for my medical care.

Just remember: Even as the insurance cancellation notices were going out last fall, the Democrats and Obama were refusing to negotiate any changes to Obamacare, even vowing to shut the government down rather than negotiate. They must really love this law and the things it is doing to innocent people like this woman.

Obamacare marches on: Sick children in Washington state denied insurance coverage for specialty treatment at a children’s hospital.

And then there’s this: A woman with a brain tumor finds she can’t afford treatment any longer, partly because her fees are higher and partly because her employer has cut her hours to avoid Obamacare.

In many cases, people will begin to negotiate directly with their doctors and hospitals. In the long run, this is actually a good thing, as it gets rid of the middle-man insurance company, which shouldn’t really be involved for most routine treatments.

In the short run it is a disaster, however. And just because Obamacare is causing this shift is not a reason to think Obamacare is good. The law was specifically touted by Obama and the Democrats as a way to reduce costs and get everyone health insurance. We now know that was an outright lie, as the law is doing the exact opposite.

Finding out what’s in it: One in five enrollees in Obamacare are likely to have their policy canceled for not paying their premium.

And why have they not paid their premiums? “We figure either those people had a change of heart or thought it was too expensive.”

Wait until later this year, when the cancellation notices go out from small businesses. People will then be so happy the Democrats and Obama were willing to shut the government down in October to keep their law in place.

Finding out what’s in it: The dislike of Obamacare has risen, among the uninsured.

Weren’t the uninsured the group of people Obamacare was designed to specifically help? If their rejection of the law has risen, it provides more evidence of the law’s failure.

Which is no surprise to anyone willing to listen to any analysis of the law by any conservatives these past four years.

Finding out what’s not in it: Enrollees in Obamacare in California are discovering few doctors or hospitals willing to accept their plans.

Worse, they are finding that the lists of doctors and hospitals that supposedly accept Obamacare is wrong.

For his part, Peter Lee, Covered California’s executive director, acknowledged that consumers may be getting misinformation from the state agency or insurer about whether their providers are participating. But, he said, the exchange is prepared to help those consumers get new plans that more suitably meet their needs. “If our directory or the directory of the health plan is wrong and a consumer wants to change plans, we’ll work with them to make sure they can do so,” Lee said in a news call this week. [emphasis mine]

Finding out what’s in it: The credit rating agency Moody’s has downgraded its outlook for health insurancers from stable to negative because of Obamacare.

In other words, the agency now expects many of these companies to go bankrupt because of the costs and regulations imposed on them by the healthcare law.

Aren’t we all glad Obama and the Democratic Party forced this law on us?

Repeal the damn law: A woman spends six weeks trying to cancel an Obamacare insurance policy.

Ms Hill was told by an ObamaCare operator that she needed to call her insurance company, who passed her back to the Federal Exchange. Ms Hill claims the terminate button on Obamacare’s website did not work, and that she spent ‘several hours a day’ on hold with the Health Insurance Marketplace. Finally, Ms Hill drove to her insurance company’s headquarters in Kansas City, 100 miles from her home, and they were able to help her cancel her ‘Obamacare’ plan.

Remember, Obamacare essentially asks the equivalent of the DMV to handle the complex task of running the nation’s health insurance industry. And we all know how efficient the DMV is!

Repeal the damn law! A cancer patient discovers that she can’t keep her doctor or even get treatment, because of Obamacare.

I realize I am a racist and a terrorist for repeatedly demanding that Obamacare get repealed, but unlike the Democrats and President Obama — who are willing to defend this law under all conditions — I don’t like it when innocent people die because of some stupid regulations imposed on them by self-righteous elites who really don’t know what they are doing.

Obamacare for small businesses: Higher premiums, less generous coverage, and more paperwork!

As the writer at the link adds, “What’s not to like?”

Aren’t you glad the Democrats have stood firm for this law, through thick and thin, even forcing a government shutdown to prevent even a minor change to it? And doesn’t it warm your heart that there are rumors that the Republican leadership is considering backing off its push to have the law repealed?

“Over the weekend, it seems as though the national media finally figured out what most ObamaCare critics have predicted all along.”

And what did these giants of intellectual thought finally figure out? They discovered, as conservatives have been trying to explain for four goddamn years, that Obamacare is a insane mess, it doesn’t work, it is raising costs, it is preventing people from getting health insurance, and it should never have been passed in the first place.

What a shock!

Incompetence beyond belief: The Spanish language Obamacare website is unreadable to Spanish speakers.

The site, CuidadoDeSalud.gov, launched more than two months late. A Web page with Spanish instructions linked users to an English form. And the translations were so clunky and full of grammatical mistakes that critics say they must have been computer-generated — the name of the site itself can literally be read “for the caution of health.”

“When you get into the details of the plans, it’s not all written in Spanish. It’s written in Spanglish, so we end up having to translate it for them,” said Adrian Madriz, a health care navigator who helps with enrollment in Miami. [emphasis mine]

I normal expect the government to do a poor job in most things, but this level of idiocy astonishes even me. For example,

As for the language, Plaza, the New Mexico professor, said a recent examination by her research students concluded that the translations were done “by a computer-generated process” and came across as awkward.

“There are problems with the verbs and word order that make sentences hard to understand,” said Plaza, who helped develop an audio version to help residents in New Mexico sign up. “Sometimes,” she added, “it’s just the terms they use.”

The website translates “premium” into “prima,” but that Spanish word is more commonly used to mean a female cousin, Plaza said. A more accurate translation, she said, would be “cuotas,” ”couta mensual” or “costo annual.”

It is a good thing the Democrats have demanded Obamacare go into effect right away, as they are also the ones in charge of implementing it.

Repeal the damn law! One health insurance company has now announced that the mix of old/sick and young/healthy buying insurance under Obamacare is far worse than expected.

In other words, the only way the company can make a profit is to raise its premiums so high — in order to pay for the costs of its mostly sick customer base — that no one will be able to afford to buy the insurance.

But then, none of this is a surprise to conservatives. You can’t outlaw Adam Smith’s laws of economics, as Obamacare tries to do. All that will happen is that you will distort the market enough to destroy any businesses in it. Just ask anyone who lived in the communist bloc in the 20th century.

Some individuals who thought they had enrolled in a healthcare plan on the Obamacare website are discovering that their insurance company has no record of them.

This is what you get when you ask the DMV to run your healthcare system. Big government bureaucracies always, repeat, always do a bad job at these kinds of large scale complex tasks.

But then, anyone who read anything written about Obamacare by conservatives back in 2009 and 2010 would have been warned that this was going to happen. It ain’t a surprise, except to liberals who refuse to consider anything conservatives say because it must be racist!