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Obamacare continues to crumble.

Fishking

Fishking

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We've already had a few providers pull out of the exchange of this supposedly amazing healthcare program. I find it interesting how the views on the ACA changes, depending on what is happening at the time. There was a lot of criticism and distancing language during the campaign season. Not many wanted to be associated with it. Then we had the horribly crafted Republican plan but the ACA was painted as an amazing program and how Republicans wanted to shoot sick people down in the streets for repealing such a wonderful thing.

As has been stated, the costs are going to continue to be prohibitive and we'll continue to see the trend of insurers dropping out.

Daily Wire

Two more insurance companies have announced that they will leave Obamacare's failing exchanges.

On Monday, The New York Times reported that Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield announced their intention to leave Iowa's Obamacare exchange next year because they lost $90 million in three years due to most of their enrollees having "expensive medical conditions."

"Finding solutions to stabilize this market is in the best interest of all Iowans, including providers of health care and insurance carriers,” Wellmark Chairman and CEO John Forsyth said in a statement. "No one really benefits from rising costs. While there are many potential solutions, the timing and relative impact of those solutions is currently unclear. This makes it difficult to establish plans for 2018."

....

On Friday, it was reported that Anthem Inc. is poised to leave most of the Obamacare exchanges, as they had lost $374 million last year. This is a significant development because, as Guy Benson pointed out at Townhall:

"Thanks to Obamacare's slow-motion implosion, just one single provider remains as a "choice" for consumers who live in roughly one-third of all US counties. In many of those places, Anthem has been that last holdout insurer, which is now reportedly about to end in 2018. Millions of Americans could be left with zero marketplace options, as the planned withdrawal of the last remaining US healthcare giant from most areas marks the latest sign that Obamacare is an unworkable actuarial nightmare."
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Fishking said:
We've already had a few providers pull out of the exchange of this supposedly amazing healthcare program. I find it interesting how the views on the ACA changes, depending on what is happening at the time. There was a lot of criticism and distancing language during the campaign season. Not many wanted to be associated with it. Then we had the horribly crafted Republican plan but the ACA was painted as an amazing program and how Republicans wanted to shoot sick people down in the streets for repealing such a wonderful thing.

As has been stated, the costs are going to continue to be prohibitive and we'll continue to see the trend of insurers dropping out.

Daily Wire
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obamas failures r endless this shows how uncompetent he was
 
 
Well, quite frankly it's a struggling government program that's going to get worse and needs to be rectified - either by improvement or replacement.

Not to try to be partisan here (God knows I am enough), but it's our government's duty to right this. So what are they doing?
 
I notice there is no talk about the states that initiated an insurance exchange. I guess that is why the republicnas didn't participate, so they could claim the PPACA failed when it is their incompetence to care for people that has failed.
 
The issue with health care in the USA can be summed up in one word: cost. We can't afford our health care system, either pre or post the ACA.

So, the Republicans are in power now. The Democrats weren't able to solve the problem of cost. Let's see what the Republicans can do
 
Chomsky said:
Well, quite frankly it's a struggling government program that's going to get worse and needs to be rectified - either by improvement or replacement.

Not to try to be partisan here (God knows I am enough), but it's our government's duty to right this. So what are they doing?
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Bwwaahahahahaha. When was the last time our government made anything "right"?

Obamacare was a disaster from the get go. Now what we had before wasn't working, we did need to do something. But we needed to do something intelligent and productive, and that wasn't Obamacare. It just made us all buy insurance. It didn't attempt to fix anything.
 
The government is too freaking stupid to look at to the nuts and bolts of the problem.

We need the medical lawyers, doctors, nurses, hospital accountants, insurance company accountants, hospital admins, and government officials to sit down and take as long as it takes to find a way to reinvent the Model T.
 
Ikari said:
Bwwaahahahahaha. When was the last time our government made anything "right"?

Obamacare was a disaster from the get go. Now what we had before wasn't working, we did need to do something. But we needed to do something intelligent and productive, and that wasn't Obamacare. It just made us all buy insurance. It didn't attempt to fix anything.
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I agree with your assessment of ObamaCare, though I once saw HRC comment to a group of single-payer proponents that "first we have to get everyone in". I thought that was an interesting statement, though it seems to me the easiest implementation of single-payer would be medicaid or medicare expansion - not ObamaCare.

But despite all the constant cooing around here how government is always some incompetent nemesis of the People, let's not forget government is how the citizenry accomplishes those tasks that cannot be done individually or privately. It's how we saved and rebuilt the world in 1945, sent a man to the moon, covered the country in interstate highways, developed the internet, etc., etc. Now it looks like the rest of the industrialized world has already figured-out health-care falls into this latter catergory - but we have not.

Yeah, government often falls short and is rarely optimal. But it's what we use to accomplish those big tasks that are required but aren't getting done.
 
RetiredUSN said:
The government is too freaking stupid to look at to the nuts and bolts of the problem.

We need the medical lawyers, doctors, nurses, hospital accountants, insurance company accountants, hospital admins, and government officials to sit down and take as long as it takes to find a way to reinvent the Model T.
Click to expand...
I do agree we need the best minds in the private and public spheres to work on this.

But right now over 40% of Americans do indeed enjoy single-payer healthcare in the forms of Medicare, Medicaid, etc. So it's not like we don't have reasonably successful currently working models extant.

I would be happy to see either of the above programs expanded, particularly Medicaid.
 
Chomsky said:
Well, quite frankly it's a struggling government program that's going to get worse and needs to be rectified - either by improvement or replacement.

Not to try to be partisan here (God knows I am enough), but it's our government's duty to right this. So what are they doing?
Click to expand...

Currently meeting to do just that. [I'm not referring to the left]
 
Chomsky said:
Well, quite frankly it's a struggling government program that's going to get worse and needs to be rectified - either by improvement or replacement.

Not to try to be partisan here (God knows I am enough), but it's our government's duty to right this. So what are they doing?
Click to expand...

Playing team D off of team R and seeing who can win over the other instead of working for the benefit of the people they are supposed to represent?
 
Dittohead not! said:
The issue with health care in the USA can be summed up in one word: cost. We can't afford our health care system, either pre or post the ACA.

So, the Republicans are in power now. The Democrats weren't able to solve the problem of cost. Let's see what the Republicans can do
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If the giant pile of steaming crap of a bill they recently tried to pass (may or may not have been written in crayon) is any indication then I don't see team R figuring it out anytime soon.
 
Fishking said:
Playing team D off of team R and seeing who can win over the other instead of working for the benefit of the people they are supposed to represent?
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SOP, I believe. Nothing is for the People any longer, it's all Party Power and the Establishment.
 
Chomsky said:
I do agree we need the best minds in the private and public spheres to work on this.

But right now over 40% of Americans do indeed enjoy single-payer healthcare in the forms of Medicare, Medicaid, etc. So it's not like we don't have reasonably successful currently working models extant.

I would be happy to see either of the above programs expanded, particularly Medicaid.
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From what I understand, Medicaid sucks and has a lot of the same problems. Medicare is the one that seems to work and has a moderate amount of an approval rating by those on it.
 
Fishking said:
From what I understand, Medicaid sucks and has a lot of the same problems. Medicare is the one that seems to work and has a moderate amount of an approval rating by those on it.
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I used Medicaid as an example because it seems on the surface to offer more cost containment, but yeah the idea is that almost 1/2 the country is on single-payer systems that are functioning reasonably enough, or close enough that they could likely be fine tuned to perform well enough. They are working proven models, with no need to re-invent or highly experiment or jump-off some abyss.
 
It is not the government's duty to right this. If people don't want insurance then let them not have insurance. The neediest Americans are already on Medicaid. Every day I go to work and people are trying to buy the cheapest insurance they can get away with. The kinds that only pay 3 days of hospital stays and 4 dr. office visits a year and find that sufficient. They have no regard that insurance is paying for protection and have no idea how insurance actually works.
 
reinoe said:
It is not the government's duty to right this.
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That depends if you're not acknowledging that government has already interfered in this field so much to this point and has significantly contributed to making it worse.
 
Dittohead not! said:
The issue with health care in the USA can be summed up in one word: cost. We can't afford our health care system, either pre or post the ACA.

So, the Republicans are in power now. The Democrats weren't able to solve the problem of cost. Let's see what the Republicans can do
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Its not cost. So the percentage of growth in costs has gone down. Meanwhile DEMAND for services has gone up.. tremendously because of the baby boomers aging and retiring.

cost-growth-health-care.jpg
 
Dittohead not! said:
Even that 4% growth rate is higher than general inflation.
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And so is demand for our services.

Interesting is it not that while demand has been growing...

growth in spending has been slowing...

Can you explain that? Do you think that happens normally?

I'll help you out.. it doesn't. And that's because since 1997.. the federal government has been taking steps to reduce healthcare costs.. and rather dramatically when you consider how much demand has increased.
 
jaeger19 said:
And so is demand for our services.

Interesting is it not that while demand has been growing...

growth in spending has been slowing...

Can you explain that? Do you think that happens normally?

I'll help you out.. it doesn't. And that's because since 1997.. the federal government has been taking steps to reduce healthcare costs.. and rather dramatically when you consider how much demand has increased.
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Of course it doesn't. If demand grows, so does cost.

Now, how do we interpret that graph? Does it mean that overall spending for health care is going up by 4%, or that the cost of individual services is going up that much? If it's the former, then that is good news, as demands have been increasing as you said. More people have insurance now, plus the population is aging, both of which will increase demands on health care.

This is the first I've heard that the government is taking steps to reduce costs, but it certainly must if we're to live with the cost of our health care system. I'd hope more steps could be taken, but only so much can get past the insurance lobby.
 
Fishking said:
We've already had a few providers pull out of the exchange of this supposedly amazing healthcare program. I find it interesting how the views on the ACA changes, depending on what is happening at the time. There was a lot of criticism and distancing language during the campaign season. Not many wanted to be associated with it. Then we had the horribly crafted Republican plan but the ACA was painted as an amazing program and how Republicans wanted to shoot sick people down in the streets for repealing such a wonderful thing.
Click to expand...

Uncertainty isn't good for the insurance business. The GOP has spent years chipping away at the exchanges, depressing enrollment by refusing to market and putting roadblocks in front of navigators, defunding the startups that were entering the markets for the first time, destabilizing the risk pools by handicapping the risk corridors.

And now they've got full control of government. The House GOP continues to sue to discontinue the cost-sharing subsidies and the administration has signaled that it thinks it will be to its political benefit to "collapse" the markets.

What do you expect insurers will choose to do with respect to the marketplaces? What's amazing is that anyone is considering continuing their participation in 2018.
 
I'm all for competition. What a joke.
Remember when my cable bill was $10.
Now only one provider $200?
Market forces are a myth. Does anyone really believe that drug and insurance companies want to give us low prices. You may get a cheap plan which is worthless
I remember my drug company collaboration with other drug. How much should we charge today arguments
 
Why is it never mentioned that medicare overheads are 2% insurance companies 20%
And we want insurance companies to compete?
How dumb can we be? I guess ask the repubs
 
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