The Goat Pen

Heh...Trump's message.

Heh, both messages. Pitiful.

[youtube]A16fmpPvVEU[/youtube]

[youtube]AsU-mQrixp4[/youtube]

A curious choice to be the newest campaign manager, seeing as how she was against The Donald before she was for The Donald.

It has not been a good week for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare.

A slew of news, from insurers dropping out to possible fraud among healthcare providers, has all accumulated in a deluge of negative headlines for one of President Obama's signature laws.

In fact, it's gotten so bad that it appears that the whole program itself may be in doubt.

While there are issues, and this past week highlighted many of them, it does appear that there is a long road ahead before we have a definitive understanding of Obamacare's survival, and there's a good chance that it makes it.

On Monday night, Aetna announced that it would be dropping around 80% of their policies offered through the ACA's public-health exchanges after sustaining large losses on the Obamacare business.

This makes Aetna the third of the "big five" insurance firms (which includes Humana, United Health Care, Cigna, and Anthem) to announce a serious cut to their Obamacare business.

Whether Aetna did this due to business losses, as the company claims, or because of the Department of Justice's lawsuit blocked their merger with Humana is still up for debate, but regardless, the firm will be out of nearly all of the exchanges by 2017.

In addition to the Aetna news, the New York Federal Reserve put out a study Tuesday that showed one out of every five businesses in the bank's district — which includes parts of New Jersey and Connecticut — said they were reducing hiring due to Obamacare.

On top of all of that, the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) asked for public comment on instances in which healthcare providers directed patients to Obamacare over Medicare or Medicaid in order to make higher profits.

All in all, not a great week..............

Jeffrey Anderson, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, said that the problem is that there is a high likelihood that no young people will ever sign up for Obamacare.

"There are too many loopholes, too many ways to get around paying if you don't get insurance," Anderson told Business Insider.

For this reason, Anderson does not believe that Obamacare will ever work and shows it is in a "slow-motion death spiral." Basically, in his opinion, the only incentive structure to enter the exchanges will be when a person gets ill and needs the coverage. Since the ACA forces insurers to take people with pre-existing conditions, the insurers are forced to take on people they know will be a net negative to their bottom line.............

Obamacare, however, is also about more than just health insurance. It has become one of the biggest political touch points since President Obama first proposed the law in 2009. In the succeeding seven years, the cries for repeal or change have continued.

"This doesn't get resolved until either the Republicans win the presidency and both houses of Congress, or the Democrats do," said Anderson.

If the Republican Party takes ahold of all three pieces of the government, said Anderson, the law is likely to be repealed and a plan, similar to the one he has proposed, would be enacted. If it is the Democrats in control, it would go the opposite way and a single payer, government-run offering could come into play.

Cox agreed with the polarization and said that the exit of companies like Aetna and other recent issues with the law have raised calls for a government option to be implemented. If the government were allowed to offer a plan, this would be an insurer of last resort and could create competitions with only one private insurer.

I need to see the alternative or be convinced that having a huge amount of uninsured people is good for the country/economy.

The answer is (and was) expanding medicaid a bit to cover a higher percentage of the working poor.

Bklyn wrote:I need to see the alternative or be convinced that having a huge amount of uninsured people is good for the country/economy.

define huge amount versus number of people impacted by rising medical costs due to covering the uninsured and the pre-conditions

I believe this has been unsustainable from day 1 and most people pushing it in Washington knew it, but once the mandate was in place and accepted it paved the way for the real goal - a single payer system.

A system with no price controls and a mandate for participation. Yea, who would have thought it could have failed.

I do believe ACA was going to be (and always intended to be) used as a gateway to single payer. I will look more into what AA is saying (i.e. ask other medical professionals that are not from Alabama) because his sentence was way too short to be a real alternative to a problem that has been brewing for 30 years.

Oh Canada

The mandate was originally an idea that came from the right, and was the basis of Romneycare in MA. A yuge amout of American insurance is mandated (auto liability, auto/property coverage to satisfy lienholders/mortgagees, workers comp).

You've been bitten by the ants.

"A yuge amout of American insurance is mandated (auto liability, auto/property coverage to satisfy lienholders/mortgagees, workers comp)."

People that drive without auto insurance get in trouble. Can't really do that with sick people who don't have insurance. What do you tell them? Don't get sick?

A recent study shows that a vast majority of lower income households spend up to 30 percent of their income on car insurance alone, which is an outrageous amount considering the other expenses that they need to pay.

I can't believe that. How much can car insurance cost? $2000 a year (that's about 3 times what I pay)? That would mean their annual income is a little over $6K a year. I don't think there are that many people in this country making $6K a year or less...

I found that quote in an article on Auto insurance.org on government subsidized auto insurance

http://www.autoinsurance.org/what-is-go ... insurance/

does seem like a pretty unbelievable stat

Why do you lie Hedge?

Bklyn wrote:I do believe ACA was going to be (and always intended to be) used as a gateway to single payer. I will look more into what AA is saying (i.e. ask other medical professionals that are not from Alabama) because his sentence was way too short to be a real alternative to a problem that has been brewing for 30 years.

The difficult calculus would be where to move the line of coverage to and who pays for it, but the best solutions are always the least convoluted. My solution is elegant. Correct.

Ockham's razor.

Fancy with your alternate spelling.

It looks smarter than just a pair of cs.