I got to keep my plan with no dental coverage at all. I suspect there's more to the story than this...
:shrug: not much. She retired at 60, as part of her package her company continued to pay her insurance until Medicare picked up at 65, then her insurance went away because it lacked pediatric dental. So now she's an elderly woman who is already on a fixed retirement budget who has to either come up with years of expensive health insurance she hadn't planned on, or take the risk to go without until she hits 65.
yes. Miss. Did you miss it. It was sort of big news. The White House admitted it, but then claimed it didn't matter, because all those plans were bad, anyway.
Two points:
1. No, it is not.
YES, it is. When you use the coercive power of government to mandate something,
you are the cause of it.
2. The situation is even more complicated. There's nothing against the law for insurance companies to continue to offer whatever plans they like. However, they must offer plans under certain constraints
Alright. I want you to look
real hard at the bolded sections there, and tell me if you notice the tension between those two items.
Hint: If you can do
anything you want, but only within
these guidelines, then you can't actually do anything you want.
and individuals must have insurance with certain features. Companies made choices to continue, or not, certain plans.
Because to do otherwise would be to
violate the law.
So, IPAB is a death panel in the relevant sense? The IPAB is deciding who will live and who will die, on a by-name basis? That was the accusation from folks like Palin...
No, it wasn't. That was the mockery made of the argument by the left. The IPAB was designed to ration healthcare. The argument made was that this would result in the same kinds of calculations that get made everywhere else government is put in charge of rationing healthcare, where the government chooses to restrict or effectively deny care to high-cost and high-risk patients because that's where you make your savings.
The Actual Conservative Arguments ran like
this:
...Both here and across the pond in the UK, government agencies ration healthcare. In the UK, the rationing board is ironically called NICE, or National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Under ObamaCare, the comparable agency is IPAB, the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Rationing boards evaluate “cost effectiveness” of treatments and medications, deciding which ones to pay for, or not.
If the rationing board decides to not pay for a particular treatment or drug, patients are out of luck. If the denied treatment is lifesaving, guess what follows? Hence the characterization of these rationing boards as “death panels.” Sarah Palin warned of “death panels” within ObamaCare but as usual was ridiculed by the media. Yet in the UK, their National Health Service (NHS), the model for ObamaCare, just demonstrated another example of their death panels. “Six breast cancer drugs are to be banned from use by NHS patients,” according to the Daily Mail. How’s that for “war on women”?...
and
this:
...if President Obama wanted to keep a lid on that particular controversy, he just selected about the worst possible nominee for director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the office that oversees government health care programs. Obama’s pick, Dr. Donald Berwick, is an outspoken admirer of the British National Health Service and its rationing arm, the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness (NICE).
“I am romantic about the National Health Service. I love it,” Berwick said during a 2008 speech to British physicians, going on to call it “generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just.”...
Berwick was referring to a British health care system where 750,000 patients are awaiting admission to NHS hospitals. The government’s official target for diagnostic testing was a wait of no more than 18 weeks by 2008. The reality doesn’t come close. The latest estimates suggest that for most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within 18 weeks. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is only 20 percent.
Overall, more than half of British patients wait more than 18 weeks for care. Every year, 50,000 surgeries are canceled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed. The one thing the NHS is good at is saving money. After all, it is far cheaper to let the sick die than to provide care....
Well, run for office. 
