Often referred to as “junk” plans – Review & Outlook: ObamaCare’s Plans Are Worse – WSJ.com.
Easy for him to say. The reason this furor will continue even if the website is fixed is that the public is learning that ObamaCare’s insurance costs more in return for worse coverage.
Mr. Obama and his liberal allies call the old plans “substandard,” but he doesn’t mean from the perspective of the consumers who bought them. He means people were free to choose insurance that wasn’t designed to serve his social equity and income redistribution goals. In his view, many people must pay first-class fares for coach seats so others can pay less and receive extra benefits.
Liberals justify these coercive cross-subsidies as necessary to finance coverage for the uninsured and those with pre-existing conditions. But government usually helps the less fortunate honestly by raising taxes to fund programs. In summer 2009, Senate Democrats put out such a bill, and the $1.6 trillion sticker shock led them to hide the transfers by forcing people to buy overpriced products.
This political mugging is especially unfair to the people whose plans on the current individual market are being taken away. The majority of these consumers are self-employed or small-business owners. They’re middle class, rarely affluent. They took responsibility for their care without government aid, and unlike people in the job-based system, they paid with after-tax dollars.
And they are being screwed by Obamacare. There is no special interest group for small business owners. No Progressive editorial page writers are going to stand up for them against Obamacare. These small business owners and self employed are simply collateral damage
Our voices say “Don’t touch our junk”
Speaking of junk, the WSJ article goes on to call all plans “scrap metal”.
In any case all four tiers are scrap-metal grade, because the rules ObamaCare imposes to create a supposedly superior insurance product are resulting in an objectively inferior medical product. The new mandates and rules raise costs, so insurers must compensate by offering narrow and less costly networks of doctors, hospitals and other providers in their ObamaCare products. Insurers thus restrict care and patient choice of physicians in exchange for discounted reimbursement rates, much as Medicaid does.
Nearly half of the ObamaCare plans are tightly managed HMOs, according to a McKinsey & Co. analysis. In states like California, Missouri and New Hampshire, many networks are 40% or 45% the size of those offered for normal commercial coverage. Patients face the prospect of waiting months and driving miles to clinics and county hospitals.
Narrow networks can be a useful cost-control tool, to the extent people choose to give up medical options in return for lower premiums. But that’s rarely what people want when they’re choosing with their own money. Some 82.5% of eHealth customers in 2012 purchased preferred provider organization plans (PPOs) that are structured so patients can visit virtually any physician.
And Colorado is a perfect example. Of the plans available on the Connect for Health Colorado “Marketplace”, many are HMO’s and all have state based networks with one exception. Rocky Mountain PPO (not HMO) is a nationwide network. Prior to this year, ALL plans except Kaiser, had nationwide networks.
Not surprisingly, in general, Rocky Mountain PPO plans are the most expensive plans available.
Inquring minds want to know, what are policy holders supposed to do if they have a child living out of state (college) or they live close to the Colorado border and access care in a seperate state.
The WSJ concludes…
The awful irony of this new ObamaCare health system is that all adults now enjoy mandated pediatric vision benefits, even if they don’t have kids, but parents can’t take their daughter to an expensive children’s hospital if she gets really sick. Everybody gets “free” preventive checkups with no copays, but not treatment for a complex illness from specialists at an academic medical center.
If the old individual market was as bad as Mr. Obama said it was, then he shouldn’t pretend it’s a place worth going back to, even for a year’s delay. His “fix” is necessary politically because ObamaCare’s willful destruction of this alternative is the worst act of government mayhem since FDR’s National Recovery Act. The Affordable Care Act’s main achievement is turning out to be diminishing affordable care.
And regular readers of this blog, which I can probably count on one hand, know that I have had the exact situation bolded above, of taking my daughter to a speciality hospital, Children’s Hospital in Aurora. She has been admitted (in-patient) 7 separate times, not counting outpatient procedures and lab tests.
Keeping access to Children’s Hospital is a reqirement. A nationwide networkd IS a requirement both for our younger daughter if she should require treatment out of state and for our older daughter who lives out of state.
Thankfully our “substandard” and “junk” plan was purchased in 2009. That’s means we can keep it. To repreat myself,
