Tag: politics

Finding out what’s in it: It ain’t your doctor!

As Americans have begun shopping for health plans on the insurance exchanges, they are discovering that insurers are restricting their choice of doctors and hospitals in order to keep costs low, and that many of the plans exclude top-rated hospitals. The Obama administration made it a priority to keep down the cost of insurance on the exchanges, the online marketplaces that are central to the Affordable Care Act. But one way that insurers have been able to offer lower rates is by creating networks that are far smaller than what most Americans are accustomed to.

In other words, because of Obamacare, you will either have to pay for your doctor up front and without any help from insurance, or you won’t be able to keep your doctor at all. So much for that promise.

An Obamacare supporter begins to see the light.

None of the surprising disasters he describes should have been a surprise to him, but for the fact that he likely considered any criticism in 2010 of Obama or Obamacare by his conservative friends pure racism and not worth listening to. Thus, he never heard them tell him that these disasters were exactly what was going to happen.

Will he change his voting allegiances come November? I doubt it. Too many of the liberal voters I have met in my life are downright bigoted when it comes to politics. To them, Democrats are “the good people who protect the weak and poor” while Republicans are “the evil racists who want to starve little children.” With this simplistic view of the world, they are generally unable to consider the possibility that they have this wrong.

It appears state insurance regulators are also telling Obama to go to hell with his lawless announcement that the parts of Obamacare causing him political troubles are temporarily suspended.

Commissioner Mike Kreidler said Thursday he won’t allow insurance companies to extend their old policies that didn’t meet the requirements of federal health care reform. An estimated 290,000 Washington residents have received notices that their old insurance policies will be canceled. “Trying to do what the president has proposed would be very disruptive to the insurance market in the state of Washington so no, we will not be allowing insurance companies to extend these policies,” he said. “You’d have to go back and re-rate all of the policies, and the premises for what they originally proposed rates would all change.”

That is Washington. Arkansas has also issued a similar ruling.

I repeat: The Republicans should introduce today a bill to repeal Obamacare in full.

Update: “Insurers are furious about the White House’s new Obamacare plan.”

Surprise, surprise! Insurance companies are already saying that they cannot go along with Obama’s decision to suspend the cancellation of insurance policies.

As stated by an insurance representative:

This a new insanity.

I do not know how the insurance carriers and federal government are going to be dealing with this. First, many states require a 60-day notice of a change in plan or a cancellation. It’s November 15! How can they comply with this new element of federal law, and with their state laws?

As I said, if I was an insurance company I would continue to simply follow Obamacare as written. This action carries the least legal risk.

Which means Obama’s proposal today is mere show and will accomplish nothing. The Democrats remain politically exposed. If the Republicans had any brains, they would move now to propose a full repeal of Obamacare.

The law is such an inconvenient thing: With a wave of his hand, Obama today has declared that insurance companies need not cancel policies forbidden under Obamacare.

In remarks at the White House today, Obama said, “I completely get how upsetting this can be” lose insurance plans that I promised Americans would be able to keep. “To those Americans, I hear you loud and clear.”

But there’s a catch with president’s proposed solution. The president is not proposing that the law be changed to allow all health insurance plans grandfathered into Obamacare’s eligibility requirements.

No, instead the White House is saying that it will use “enforcement discretion” to allow illegal health insurance plans to be able to still be sold. That is, the Obama administration will not enforce the penalty on individuals for not having eligible health insurance plans and they’ll allow the insurance companies to still sell so-called bad plans — plans they technically can’t sell under Obamacare.

If I was an insurance company I would not take Obama at his word. If they don’t cancel these forbidden policies, they might find the administration coming after them later for not obeying the law.

Also, this action by Obama solves none of the political problems facing the Democratic Party for its creation of Obamacare. Even if it happens, it is merely a one year delay in the cancellation of these policies, which would place their final cancellation to just before next year’s election.

Republican House leader John Boehner in 2010, on the day Obamacare was passed, successfully predicting its every failure and lie since.

It didn’t take clairvoyance to make these predictions, merely a willingness to read the bill and apply common sense.

It wasn’t just Obama: Ten Democrats who repeatedly lied about Obamacare.

Each one made the same false claim that no one would lose their doctor or health plan because of Obamacare.

Obamacare and the unstoppable project.

On multiple occasions over the past 18 years, I have been that IT consultant yelling “Stop!” to a client (sometimes a software developer, sometimes a customer) who very much does not want to hear that. In one instance, the executive vice-president in the charge of the project I had just spent a few months reviewing walked out of the meeting in which I was presenting my findings in order to track down and destroy all copies of the report containing those findings. Likewise, I’ve had a few engagements that have ended abruptly due to my insistence on honesty and reality, but I sleep well at night, so the trade-off is excellent.

Stick around till the end, because the Dilbert cartoon there encapsulates everything we know about how today’s federal government operates: “You should buy twice as much.”

You think their website is bad? The Obama administration has had to issue 254 corrections to its own Obamacare regulations.

The damage wasn’t limited to little-used regulatory language that needed to be fixed of careless mistakes. The medical loss ratio requirement has been hotly debated as a tool to limit insurance companies’ profitability. Billed by The Washington Post as the “provision that terrifies insurers,” the policy forces insurance companies to spend a mandated percentage of patient premiums on patient care in order to keep premiums artificially low. Twenty-four corrections were issued to the Medical Loss Ratio rule alone. Some parts of the regulations were “technically inaccurate and [conflicted] with language elsewhere,” according to Batkins. Some corrections had to be corrected again later on.

The report pointed to the real-world effects of mistakes in the dense regulations, specifically federal officials’ assumption that it would take 28 minutes to complete an online application via the federal exchange, which turned out to be drastically wrong. [emphasis mine]

Remember, the word “regulation” is really about control and power. One entity, the government, gets to regulate the behavior of others. The problem is that this particular government, whether run by Democrats or Republicans, is wholly incompetent.

President Obama’s new big lie.

The article, which outlines why Obama’s claim that all those canceled insurance plans are “substandard” is an outright lie, also had these two paragraphs scream out at me:

Cancer patients whose plans are cancelled are getting whacked the hardest. They are losing access to the specialized cancer hospitals and oncologists treating them. And they will get meager help, if any, paying for innovative cancer drugs that cost thousands of dollars.

The most troubling provision in Obamacare’s Section 1311 gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services blanket authority to control how doctors and hospitals treat patients. This is all in the name of improving “quality.” This could mean everything in medicine.

Ain’t it great how the Democrats have stood by this law from day one?

It is time to start considering the worst case scenario for Obamacare,

that the exchanges continue to malfunction, that plan cancellations go into effect, that insurers see the political winds shifting and stop playing nice with the administration, and that significant numbers of people are left stranded without coverage as a result. Rather than reforming the individual market, which was flawed but did work for some people, Obamacare will have destroyed it and left only dysfunction and chaos in its wake.

The article looks hard at the situation, and sees nothing but disaster. The policies that have been cancelled cannot be reinstated easily, if at all. The people whose policies have been cancelled cannot enroll in a new plan because of the failure of the Obamacare website. The result: Come January large numbers of Americans who once had catastrophic health insurance — to protect themselves against a sudden health emergency — will no longer have that insurance and will be exposed.

The Democrats wanted this, they created this, they demanded this, and now they have given us this. And in a sane world there would be no doubt that come November they would be fired for this. Sadly, I have doubts it is a sane world.