Why do People Hate Obamacare?

Events occurring and how they relate/affect Anabaptist faith and culture.
appleman2006
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Re: Why do People Hate Obamacare?

Post by appleman2006 »

PeterG wrote:
appleman2006 wrote:Be very thankful if you are one of the lucky ones that would pay more into the plan than you ever take out. Your dollars have gone to help others less fortunate.
This is an excellent perspective.
It really is the only perspective that people should have towards their insurance premiums. I do not understand the mentality that says that over the course of an insurance policy that unless I get back an amount in claims equivalent to the premiums I paid out it was a bad deal. That really is very selfish and wrong headed thinking.

Study the history of many old insurance companies and you will find that at their roots is simply a very simpe mutual aid type plan. At it's core insurance really is simply organized mutual aid.
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appleman2006
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Re: Why do People Hate Obamacare?

Post by appleman2006 »

PeterG wrote:
appleman2006 wrote:I think that if the base of people is large enough and if everyone with that large base has to start paying for coverage from little on up that it could possibly work. But if people are allowed to opt out for the healthy time in their life than no it will not work. If a system like this were put in place there would be no preexisting conditions. Because everyone would be covered from birth.
As an incentive for people to stay healthy premium deductions for claim free experience could be put in place as many other types of insurance do. But I think even this would have to be pretty limited in order for it to work. I think you have to be careful about using many church plans as a basis for success because as I understand it even some of these are having problems for the same types of reasons. People think they can do just fine on their own until a big sickness comes along. Than they expect the brotherhood to help out. They justify themselves because after all they always threw in a few dollars when the offering plate was passed for other sad cases.
Thanks for the reply. What you say here makes a lot of sense. Though I must say that what you're describing is the central idea behind Obamacare as I understand it, in theory if not in application.
I do not disagree but it was doomed to fail because insurance was being asked to take the equivalent of too many houses that had already burned down. Most insurance companies went running for the hills. The ones that are left are betting the farm on the fact that all the people in a particular state will have to insure with them but are also telling the government that they to will be forced to leave unless premiums are extremely high and deductibles border on the ridiculous and since they are often the last or one of the last companies to still be insuring in the state the government has little choice but to give in. There is not an insurance company out there right now that thinks that Obamacare will be a long term solution. A few of them are simply riding it out with the hopes that something better will be coming down the pipe.
For the record I do not think any of the Republican proposed solutions would work very well either. They might work quite a bit better for more people than the present plan but they will not help everyone.
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Bootstrap
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Re: Why do People Hate Obamacare?

Post by Bootstrap »

I agree with Peter. Appleman, you have an excellent understanding of insurance in general, but perhaps there are some details of Obamacare that you might not know about.
appleman2006 wrote:I do not disagree but it was doomed to fail because insurance was being asked to take the equivalent of too many houses that had already burned down. Most insurance companies went running for the hills.
Actually, this is precisely the lever that Republicans have been using to sabotage Obamacare since 2015. Salon explains it thus:
When the ACA was rolled out, telling insurance companies that they had to insure anybody who signed up, regardless of previous conditions or sickness, everybody realized that the insurance companies would probably lose money in the first decade or so, until previously-uninsured-but-sick people got into the system, got better, and things evened out.

To get the insurance companies to go along with this danger of losing money, the ACA promised to make them whole for any losses in any of the first decade’s years. At the end of each fiscal year, the insurance companies merely had to document their losses, and the government would reimburse them out of ACA funds provided for by the law.

The possibility of their losing money was referred to as the “risk corridor,” and the ACA explicitly filled those risk corridors with a guarantee of making the insurance companies, at the very least, whole.
So what happened?

Republicans passed bills to stop making insurance companies whole for losses obtained by taking on people with preexisting conditions.
As The New York Times noted on December 9, 2015, “A little-noticed health care provision slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.”

Rubio and a number of other Republicans had succeeded in gutting the risk corridors. The result was that, just in 2015, end-of-fiscal-year risk corridor payments to insurance companies that were supposed to total around $2.9 billion were only reimbursed, according to Rubio himself quoted in the Times, to the tune of around $400 million. Rubio bragged that he’d “saved taxpayers $2.5 billion.”

And, indeed, he had. But the insurance companies were thrown into a crisis. And, with Republicans in Congress absolutely refusing to re-fund the risk corridors, that crisis would get worse as time went on, at least over a period of a few years.
This is one of the major reasons that insurers are pulling out of markets and raising premiums, and it's not really a flaw in the design of Obamacare. Now Trump is threatening to withhold what is left of these payments, and only approving payments one month at a time. This makes it a whole lot harder for insurance companies to do business.

So when rates go up and insurers pull out of markets, I don't think the Republicans can claim innocence. And now that they are the party in power, I think they do have a lot of responsibility to find ways to fix the current situation. Ideally by working with the other party.

You can't have a civil war and govern at the same time. If we want a government, the people currently running things are playing the wrong game. Identify the problem, propose solutions, evaluate them, and execute. Business 101.
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Bootstrap
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Re: Why do People Hate Obamacare?

Post by Bootstrap »

Here's a ray of sunshine:

Bipartisan group floats ObamaCare fixes
Dozens of House lawmakers from both parties unveiled a series of proposals on Monday designed to fix problems dogging the Affordable Care Act.

“The last great hope for this country is that Republicans and Democrats prove they can work together,” Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), co-chairman of the Problem Solvers Caucus, said in a statement.

The group’s plan features five prongs.

It would create a “stability fund” to help states reduce premium costs for those with pre-existing conditions; repeal a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices; overhaul the employer mandate by exempting businesses with fewer than 500 employees, up from the current 50-employee threshold; and make technical changes encouraging states to “experiment” in new ways to reduce costs and offer more coverage options, including efforts to sell plans across state lines.
Perhaps most significantly, the proposal would also guarantee federal payments, known as cost-sharing reductions, to insurance companies that reduce out-of-pocket costs for low-income patients. President Trump is threatening to cancel those payments to make ObamaCare "implode," and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said Sunday that “no decision’s been made" about future payments.
“He’s going to make that decision this week, and that’s a decision that only he can make,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said on “Fox News Sunday.”

The continued uncertainty sets up a potential showdown with Republican lawmakers who want to maintain the subsidies.

Members of the Problem Solvers Caucus have been meeting quietly in recent weeks to draft bipartisan reforms to ObamaCare as Republicans struggled to pass a repeal-and-replace plan in the upper chamber. After the Senate repeal plan failed last Friday, the House group rallied over the weekend to finalize their reform package, focused heavily on propping up ObamaCare’s insurance markets for both individuals and employers.
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appleman2006
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Re: Why do People Hate Obamacare?

Post by appleman2006 »

Interesting. That certainly does put things into a different perspective. And it makes more sense to me now how they thought that any insurance companies would have possibly gone for this.
But I do still see quite a number of problems with this plan and can see at least partly why the Republican would have had concerns. One, ten years would of not fixed the problem. I estimate you would of needed at least 30 and maybe even more if deductibles and premiums had not been raised to what they were which I am assuming was also not part of the original plan.

And the amount of money the government would had had to cough up just over the next ten years to make all of those companies whole as in profitable would of finished you off financially for good.

I will give the democrats marks for trying even if it had about the same chance of succeeding as the first time I climbed on a bike. The end result for me was a high speed crash into a white picket fence. I think the end result of this even under Obama's original plan would of been every bit as disastrous. Lots of tears, lots of blood, and a smashed up country.
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appleman2006
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Re: Why do People Hate Obamacare?

Post by appleman2006 »

Bootstrap wrote:Here's a ray of sunshine:

Bipartisan group floats ObamaCare fixes
Dozens of House lawmakers from both parties unveiled a series of proposals on Monday designed to fix problems dogging the Affordable Care Act.

“The last great hope for this country is that Republicans and Democrats prove they can work together,” Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), co-chairman of the Problem Solvers Caucus, said in a statement.

The group’s plan features five prongs.

It would create a “stability fund” to help states reduce premium costs for those with pre-existing conditions; repeal a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices; overhaul the employer mandate by exempting businesses with fewer than 500 employees, up from the current 50-employee threshold; and make technical changes encouraging states to “experiment” in new ways to reduce costs and offer more coverage options, including efforts to sell plans across state lines.
Perhaps most significantly, the proposal would also guarantee federal payments, known as cost-sharing reductions, to insurance companies that reduce out-of-pocket costs for low-income patients. President Trump is threatening to cancel those payments to make ObamaCare "implode," and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said Sunday that “no decision’s been made" about future payments.
“He’s going to make that decision this week, and that’s a decision that only he can make,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said on “Fox News Sunday.”

The continued uncertainty sets up a potential showdown with Republican lawmakers who want to maintain the subsidies.

Members of the Problem Solvers Caucus have been meeting quietly in recent weeks to draft bipartisan reforms to ObamaCare as Republicans struggled to pass a repeal-and-replace plan in the upper chamber. After the Senate repeal plan failed last Friday, the House group rallied over the weekend to finalize their reform package, focused heavily on propping up ObamaCare’s insurance markets for both individuals and employers.
For the sake of your country I hope they get it figured out. I for one am not optimistic. The one ingredient you need the most is gone. Money.
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PeterG
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Re: Why do People Hate Obamacare?

Post by PeterG »

It may well be that this is the only reasonable, civil, multi-perspective discussion of Obamacare on the entire internet. :clap:
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appleman2006
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Re: Why do People Hate Obamacare?

Post by appleman2006 »

PeterG wrote:It may well be that this is the only reasonable, civil, multi-perspective discussion of Obamacare on the entire internet. :clap:
:hug: :)
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Bootstrap
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Re: Why do People Hate Obamacare?

Post by Bootstrap »

appleman2006 wrote:For the sake of your country I hope they get it figured out. I for one am not optimistic. The one ingredient you need the most is gone. Money.
Almost every country in the world has found a way to make this work. I think we can too.

We can fix the problem. Or we can fix the blame. We can't do both. For the last 10 years, the focus has been on fixing the blame. If that's really what we want, we can keep doing that. And it's become a fixture of mainstream culture.

There's plenty of money. Especially if we decide to do things like pay only for things that actually work, give incentives for healthy behavior, and putting pressure on overpriced prescription drugs and medical procedures. Can't complain about money if we're not willing to do anything to confront the cost side of the equation.
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appleman2006
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Re: Why do People Hate Obamacare?

Post by appleman2006 »

I like your optimism Bootstrap.
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