Health Care Thread

Employers have an entire year to switch to complaint plans, but it's going to be Obama's fault when they instead wait for their plans to expire, choose to pay the penalty, offer zero wage compensation, and keep the profits for themselves. Obama's fault, right. Totally buying it.

BurnemWizfyre_sl said:

Let's get this straight, if the government hires someone to do a job and the people hired to do the job fails, its the governments fault?

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If you give a gun to a chimp and the chimp shoots someone you don't blame the chimp.

fanaskin_sl said:

Especially when that company had a known horrible track record, yes.

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Not especially, ONLY. The only fault with the government is picking the wrong company, they had no hand in it failing other than picking the wrong horse. It is an important distinction that needs to be understood, if they picked a company with a proven track record (which they should have) and the same results happened, it wouldn't still be the governments fault.

fanaskin_sl said:

It's the governments fault for encouraging bad business this isn't the first time this company has delivered a substandard product and way over budget, but who keeps paying for it? You and I, this company is a product of government bloat not a random aberration.

There is a totally different psychology when you spend other people's money instead of your own.

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This isnt what was being discussed and you need to admit you were wrong, you don't get to claim what you did below and act as if the company isn't a private sector company just because the government paid them to do a job. The only thing the government did wrong was pick the wrong horse, the fucking end.

It's not private when the government is in charge that's the whole point is they can't fail because the taxpayers pay for everything. It's totally false to call that a private sector arrangement when the government is the employer

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fanaskin_sl said:

That's the same point except instead of frozen in time it shows a pattern over time, the governments ability fair near infinite money combined with corruption distorts the scenario the company operates, it's no longer operating in private sector conditions.

People are people its not like public sector employees have different DNA, it's the conditions they work under that change their habits and options and thus change behavior.

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Look garglechimp the only thing I have been arguing with you about is that a private company paid by government is still a fucking private company, the only thing the government did wrong was choose the wrong horse. I am not going to get into you with all the stupid shit you just said because quite frankly I don't have the time nor the patience to deal with that.

Kreugen_sl said:

Employers have an entire year to switch to complaint plans, but it's going to be Obama's fault when they instead wait for their plans to expire, choose to pay the penalty, offer zero wage compensation, and keep the profits for themselves. Obama's fault, right. Totally buying it.

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Yes. Because without Obamacare the plans, which have been more than sufficient for the vast majority of people for the past 40+ years, would have just kept on keeping on. Obamacare is what imposes ridiculous requirements like maternity care for men and menopausal+ women.

Cause and effect. Amazing how that works.

Tad answer plz

tad10_sl said:

So you are saying that people aren't going to lose insurance when the employer mandate hits?

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Every company I've been with actually got more back in tax refund for providing insurance than they paid in for their portion of the policies - and the fine on top of losing the tax benefits would make it even more palatable to provide benefits. So yea, I don't see it happening.

Maybe in razor thin places that have no net tax burden so they can't take benefit from the tax refund (although you can defer it for 5 years I think? Not sure, never needed to for the ones I worked for though - they were all quite far in the black) that might not be the case, but for the other 80-90% of employers that are actually generating a taxable profit, it's literally cutting off one's nose to spite one's face to drop insurance from employees. You'll get a worse, less productive workforce - in exchange for creating a larger net financial burden on the company since all those deductions you'd get for providing insurance go away.

[Not sure how the scaling works exactly it was accounting that took care of the numbers - but usually for the numbers I got were about 1.5x in deductions for every dollar we provided in insurance benefits at Wegman's in just the Federal deduction, and usually the local was another 0.8x or so that stacked with it in MD, 0.4x in PA, and I can't recall NY's (I want to say 0.6x but that's just filling out numbers, don't honestly recall)]

tad10_sl said:

Yes. Because without Obamacare the plans, which have been more than sufficient for the vast majority of people for the past 40+ years, would have just kept on keeping on. Obamacare is what imposes ridiculous requirements like maternity care for men and menopausal+ women.

Cause and effect. Amazing how that works.

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Looking over plans in a national index for BC/BS from pre-ACA (2008 specifically their last national catalog I have on hand) - maternity coverage appears in every single plan in almost every single state. 2/3 of those it looks like it ties in with general OB/GYN requirements.

Flipping through quickly - looks like 29 states of BC/BS that every single plan including maternity care in every single policy in 2008 - doesn't look like they have all 50 states in here so it's not 29 vs 21, but I'm having trouble concentrating this second already. [Decided to throw out an ancient 40" CRT that's been taking up space in the basement solo... I'm gonna be feeling off for quite a while]

tad10_sl said:

Yes. Because without Obamacare the plans, which have been more than sufficient for the vast majority of people for the past 40+ years, would have just kept on keeping on. Obamacare is what imposes ridiculous requirements like maternity care for men and menopausal+ women.

Cause and effect. Amazing how that works.

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Sufficient enough that the number one reason for bankruptcy in this country is healthcare costs?

Tension and Flaws Before Health Website Crash - NYTimes.com

Pretty interesting article

CGI and other contractors complained of endlessly shifting requirements and a government decision-making process so cumbersome that it took weeks to resolve elementary questions, such as determining whether users should be required to provide Social Security numbers. Some CGI software engineers ultimately walked out, saying it was impossible to produce good work under such conditions.

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As a result, the president?s signature initiative was effectively left under the day-to-day management of Henry Chao, a 19-year veteran of the Medicare agency with little clout and little formal background in computer science.

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Despite the behind-the-scenes crisis, the president expressed confidence about the exchange just days before its debut.

?This is real simple,? Mr. Obama said, during a speech in Maryland on Sept. 26. ?It?s a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health insurance plans side by side the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak, same way you shop for a TV on Amazon. You just go on, and you start looking, and here are all the options.?

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What a farce.

60% of the time the old system worked 100% of the time.

Draegan_sl said:

Sufficient enough that the number one reason for bankruptcy in this country is healthcare costs?

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Didn't this get debunked? I thought that medical costs were a factor in something like 60-70% of bankruptcies, but not the foremost "cause". Can't find the article, but I think it was a fairly small amount (5-10%ish)of bankruptcies where medical bills could be directly linked to bankruptcy (i.e. without those bills the families would have remained solvent). Here's something on the first point.

We'll take Clyburn's statement first. It's become a talking point for supporters of the new health care law to say that medical costs are the leading cause of bankruptcy filings. But we have written twice before (in2008and2009) that there are several factors contributing to bankruptcies, including job loss and household consumption. It would have been more accurate for Clyburn to say health care costs contribute to most bankruptcies, not that they are the cause of most bankruptcies. Even astudyby Harvard University researchers most often cited by Democrats and their allies says: "Illness or medical bills contributed to 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007.

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And then, of course, we have to assume that Ocare is going to reduce those financial burdens, right?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...-probably-not/

Woolhandler, who is the co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, has previously conductedresearchon rates of medical bankruptcy in Massachusetts, before and after the state expanded health insurance access. She found that in 2009, two years after the insurance expansion took effect, just about half the debtors (52 percent) attributed their bankruptcy at least in part to medical bills. In 2007, before the expansion, the number stood at 59 percent.

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She publisheda paperthis month in the journal Health Affairs, which looked at which costs were faced by families who had gained insurance through the Connector, Massachusetts's version of a health-care exchange. She found that 38 percent reported a financial burden (defined as having difficulty paying medical bills) and 45 percent said costs were higher than they had expected.

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So if coverage only costs $100 a month they won't be getting a $250 subsidy? You don't say.