Originally Posted at Free Market Shooter
On Monday, Huffington Post author Kayla Chadwick posted an article titled “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People,” which was essentially an emotional plea without any constructive argument on why Americans should pay higher taxes as well as sign up for Obamacare:
If I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care? SIGN ME UP.
But if making sure your fellow citizens can afford to eat, get an education, and go to the doctor isn’t enough of a reason to fund those things, I have nothing left to say to you.
Well, since Chadwick has no problem telling Americans to pay more for their healthcare, she should have no problem signing up for an Obamacare plan herself. It sure appears as if Chadwick is on an employer-sponsored health insurance plan, as I imagine she would be singing quite a different tune if she had to “pay her own way” (with or without subsidies) via the Obamacare exchange.
First, Chadwick can go to the Obamacare exchange to sign up, but of course, only if it is either A) the “open enrollment” period, or B) she incurs a “qualifying life event” that would make her eligible to purchase insurance. If she’s merely switching carriers… no cigar, you have to wait till the open enrollment period!
Then, once you pick a plan, take a close look at that premium you’re paying:
Individual Coverage highlights
- Average individual premium: $393 for an individual not receiving subsidies
- In 2013, the year before major Obamacare provisions came into effect, the average individual monthly premium was $197
- Between 2013 and the first two months of the 2017 open enrollment period, average individual monthly premiums have increased 99% from $197 in 2013 to $393 in 2017
Bear in mind, Chadwick’s premium does not cover any basic medical costs until she hits her deductible. Also bear in mind the average deductible for an Obamacare plan; $4,328. That means Chadwick will need to pay her $393 monthly premium ($4,716 for the whole year) plus whatever her deductible is.
So Chadwick is on the hook for $9,044 before her insurance pays a dime for her medical care. This almost double the national average before the healthcare law took effect, and 60% higher since the “Obamacare exchanges” changed the way health insurance is purchased.
Don’t believe me? See for yourself:
Obamacare has nearly doubled the average health insurance premium and deductible, and that’s just the average; if you’re one of the unlucky ones (read: young healthy people who don’t use their insurance much, if ever), your premiums may have even tripled in price.
Of course, there are many counties in the US without any Obamacare options, as all insurers have pulled out of the exchanges in some areas. Even if you can find a plan, and qualify for a “subsidy” on your premiums, god forbid you should have to use your health insurance, because you will be left with that fat out-of-pocket deductible that Obamacare plans have caused to skyrocket, as seen above.
So why are all of those insurers pulling out of the exchanges, if the premiums have fattened their bottom lines so much? Simple; because of the monster out-of-pocket cost borne by the consumer when they actually have to use their health insurance. And what do you think the health insurance consumers do when they’re paying thousands of dollars already for their premiums and have no more disposable income available for healthcare? Surprise, surprise; they skip out on the bill:
A new TransUnion Healthcare analysis revealed a significant rise in the percentage of patients that didn’t pay their hospital bills in full. Approximately 68% of patients with bills of $500 or less did not pay off the full balance during 2016 – up from 53% in 2015 and 49% in 2014.
“There are many reasons why more patients are struggling to make their healthcare payments in full, the most prominent of which are higher deductibles and the increase in patient responsibility from 10% to 30% over the last few years,” said Wiik, author of the book and also principal for healthcare revenue cycle management at TransUnion. “This shift in healthcare payments has been taking place for well over a decade, but we are seeing more pronounced changes in how hospital bills are paid during just the last few years.”
And that’s not even the worst of it; which bills do you think consumers are the most likely to skip out on? You guessed it… the big ones:
– 63% of hospital bills were $500 or less; of those hospital bills, 68% were not paid in full in 2016.
– 14% of hospital bills were $3,000 or more; of those hospital bills, 99% were not paid in full in 2016.
– 10% of hospital bills were $500 to $1,000; of those bills 85% were not paid in full in 2016.
But don’t you worry; Chadwick is content to pay “a little more with each paycheck” for her health insurance to cover the needs of Americans, because if she doesn’t, “Tens of thousands of Americans will die”…
“Tens of thousands of Americans will die if this bill passes,” he said on the House floor. That’s a fact.”
…in spite of the fact that that Obamacare didn’t really save any lives at all, as the Mises Institute points out:
And yet, we see the opposite. Although the ACA passed in 2010, the full expansion of insurance coverage didn’t kick in until 2014. So the relevant metric is to see what happened to (age-adjusted) mortality rates before and after 2014. Lo and behold:
U.S. Age-Adjusted Mortality Rates per 100,000 (Annual, 2002–2015)Source: CDC WONDER Database
As the figure shows, if we control for the aging of the population, the mortality rate tends to fall over time. However, for whatever reason, after falling in 2014, the mortality jumped back up in 2015, erasing all the gains since 2013.
So go ahead, Ms. Chadwick, sign up for Obamacare. Go on and pay “a little more” for your health insurance, as I’m certain your employer-sponsored health insurance has left you oblivious to the true cost of Obamacare plans.
Of course, Chadwick would find this out first-hand if she were faced with a doctor’s bill of over $3,000. Statistically speaking… she is all but certain not to pay it in full. Then again, Chadwick did conclude with the following statement:
Futility can’t be good for my blood pressure, and the way things are going, I won’t have health insurance for long.
Maybe she is about to find out first-hand what type of health insurance bills those New York liberals she voted for have saddled Americans with.
I don’t have a problem with some kind of pool of cost sharing for truly catastrophic, unpredictable events. For instance, someone my SO worked with, 30 years old, healthy, started acting oddly. Turns out the guy had a brain tumor. Then another and another. Surgery, then tumors started showing up on the OTHER side of his brain. At that point I figured game over, and sadly I was right. I don’t have a problem covering that kind of event. Now when someone had a stroke, heart attack, or amputation who weights 390 pounds and is diabetic, that is not unforeseeable and it is preventable. I have a problem covering those costs. We can NEVER get control of the spiraling costs unless we dis-incentivize the behaviors that are contributing to them.
You can bitch about someone being overweight, an alcoholic or drug addict but what can you do about it. Deny them medical care? Then there are the thousands of hoodrats who show up in ERs with gunshot wounds. Some of them are paralyzed and require lifettime care. The Democrats will point out that the fat slob of a woman has 4 children and the paralyzed hoodrat is a father of some of them. Do you want to make those kids orphans ( I do because their parents are worthless) but foster care is even more expensive.
The Brits have the right idea, and they are widely recognized as having a superior healthcare system to ours: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/obese-people-and-smokers-banned-from-routine-surgery-as-nhs-attempts-to-cut-spending-costs-a7223731.html
Absolutely wrong Anon, the Brits Healthcare system is crap. They put you on a list & your number never comes up. They’re stopping 25 cancer drugs & treatment regimens. Not a problem unless you have cancer.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11340860/25-cancer-drugs-to-be-denied-on-NHS.html Many Brits with cash come over here for treatment!
But it costs less.
That’s what the healthcare debate is actually about, not the healthcare itself.
Isn’t this exactly what the warnings about “death panels” were about? Hidden within Obama’s stimulus program and retroactively brought into affect by the passage of the ACA was that a “board” would have the power to decide to deny coverage. The board ( DHS secty, Surgeon General, Budget office etc) compromising 9 members of different govt agencies factor whether the costs of care are warranted vs the “production quotient” or, to put it plainly–they decide if a person gets medical care pending whether they have any production value.
I kid you not–it took 20 years before the Brits began their rationing—now Canada is doing it, the VA already has a form of it by “delaying” long enough that sick people die–and Govt Healthcare in the States will also be rationed.
“You can bitch about someone being overweight, an alcoholic or drug addict but what can you do about it. Deny them medical care? ” – Yes, yes you can! I have no problem denying healthcare to someone who leads a high risk lifestyle BY CHOICE.
What happened to REAL charity hospitals? We had those before all of the games were played in the insurance industry.
Imagine this, doctors, yes doctors would actually volunteer their time to see patients, kind of like contractors volunteer their time to build homes for Habitat for Humanity. See, most people, especially professionals that are uniquely good at a certain skill, are mostly keen to use their skills to help others. However, that generosity tends to get soured when government, industry and various other opportunists twist a system in to nothing but a racket – from end to end – for THEM to make all the profits, then stick a gun in everyone else’s faces and tell them they WILL pay for it all…
I know some doctors, one of which is one of the top cardiac surgeons in the area. He HATES Obamacare, and the insurance industry, and his solitary wish is that he was able, financially to open his own practice, with little interference of government and the “industry” and simply allow him, and his patients to work with each other to fix their ailments. He also, BTW, volunteers overseas for 2 months out of the year for NO PAY AT ALL with an organization that helps in undeveloped countries. He would love to volunteer here, but the government and AMA will not allow him to do it without HUGE financial risk to himself.
Most thinking people have no problem with charity, and helping those that truly need help. However, if you are obese, or continue to use drugs, when you have been told these are risky life choices, then at some point it is time to say – fine, you can do what you want, that is your right, but I also have the right to tell you I am done enabling your bad behavior, and you will now have to deal with the consequences of your choices.
I am so sick of this bleeding heart libtard logic of – well we can’t just throw people on to the street. Well, most thinking normal people don’t throw truly needy people out on the street, but no one has any patience for people that continually cause their own issues, and expect everyone else to clean up their mess.
Dear Kayla…….I refuse to be held accountable and responsible for these people. Healthcare is an INDIVIDUAL responsibility and when the government horned in on the action after WW2 the costs ballooned. Same with welfare. The government took over the mission from the churches and what have we now? A bureaucracy that is unionized, inefficient and has burned thru $25 Trillion since Johnson’s Great Society programs beginning in 1964 with nothing to show for it. Inner city America is dead…just see Baltimore and the rest of the democrat led cities.
Obammacare was designed to fail and to be an easy hand off to single payer. The costs are already unimaginable in that people who were forced to go on the program can’t pay the copays or the deductibles. These are the very ones that Sen. Schumer decries will lose care……Right now the cost for medicare is funded thru payroll deduction and these monies only cover 21.5% of the actual cost of medicare. The rest comes out of hide and the general fund.
So Kayla, if you really want it then bust out that check book and start writing checks to cover America, Central America and South America while your at it……because when the gravy train kicks off they will be up here as someone’s wife, cousin, uncle, grand mother et al……
Kayla is an overweight, husbandless, childless moralizer. Take some responsibility, you dumb bitch, before you start telling other people what burdens they ought to bear. The only picture of her that google offered her up, has her holding a participation trophy.
She was raised by two mommies. Lesbians. Now, I know some decent lesbian couples and I’d rather a kid be raised by lesbians than languish in an orphanage or in mercenary foster homes, but I’d bet old Kayla has never heard anything but left wing opinions.
Being both an Engineer and Computer Scientist I can explain this to you lesser people. In scientific and mathematical terms: It costs too fucking much.
Health care eats up something like 16% (1/6) of our economy. It doesn’t matter how you slice it / dice it – it’s still the same amount of money. None of the players in the health care racket is going to take it ‘in the shorts’. So no Federal Plan will lower your costs, it’s just another income redistribution plan / tax – labeled as an “Exchange”.
You can find these stats using Google:
About one-quarter of Medicare outlays are for the last year of life
5% of Patients Create 50% of Health Care Costs
Until this changes – we are fucked.
It’s all about the arithmetic, isn’t it? (Not sarcasm)
Lesser people?………excuse me!
Can’t argue with data, only its interpretation. I agree with you, until this changes, we are screwed.
I’m supposed to care about the rainforest, climate change, the whales, poverty, racial inequality, gender inequality, homosexual inequality, microaggressions, refugees, the homeless, inner city youfs, the sick, the elderly, the hungry, the dyslexic, ADD kids, single mothers, obese people, disabled veterans, the endangered white rhino, etc.
Meanwhile no one gives a shit about me. No one would give me a dollar if I needed one. My fellow citizen has no problem talking down to me, flipping me off, or honking their horn at me.
Sorry, but I’m just all out of fucking compassion. The author of the chastising article can shove it until she’s down here with the rest of us.
I’d give you a dollar. Do you need a dollar?
Yeah, here’s what it is. ObamaDontCare was supposed to save us each $2500 / year in premiums, keep our plan and doctor if we liked them, and so on.
The first OCare plan I signed up on was something like $125 / month for all four of us.
Since then, two have aged out. One has their own plan and pays it, no idea what it costs. One has own plan that I am paying for (college senior, no job no money) and it’s $158 /month. The two of us are now paying $618 / month. Plus the occasional “service” fee for doctor visits, medical tests, and so forth. Our medications and discounts probably get us at least half of that in actual medical benefits, true.
But my HOUSE payment is ~$590 / month.
Pharma, hospitals and doctors saved my wife’s life eight years ago from cancer treatments. We were not charged anything like what it cost – but then, the bills were all bogus ($35 bottles of aspirin, $10 bedpan, you get the idea) so we have no idea what it really cost. Some of the charges weren’t even documented in the bills, just a blanket “bed and room” fee for X days at $YY per day: what was really included, and what did it really cost? We have no idea. Between the bogus charges and the insurance negotiations, how do you even start to establish a cost for treatments of anything, let alone cancer?
If I go get a car, I know what the payments will be. I know what my house payments are. I know what it costs for everything I get at the grocery store, the hardware store, the gas station. I don’t like the idea of getting ripped off; I like the idea of freeloading (getting what I didn’t pay for) even less. Why can’t the medical industry break out what something costs, and be honest? Say “charge to insure the uninsured’s medical care, $150 / month” or whatever it is. Say “charge to pay doctors who overcharge to finance houseboats” or whatever it is. Say ” charge to pay for clerks to fill out government-mandated forms” or whatever it is.
Just quit lying to us and making it all cloudy so we can’t bitch – or make any changes of our own.
In both the original and current plan, are those subsidized or non subsidized costs?
Those are what I am paying from my checking account each month. The subsidies (claimed) are huge; thousands and thousands. That’s kind of strange, because my wife totalled up what our prescriptions and visits SAY they are worth, and it’s within a few hundreds of what WE are paying. Exactly what are we being subsidized from?
Another pain: I am a consultant, or a self-employed person to the OCare people. At the end of the year, I am supposed to estimate my NEXT year’s total income (to allow the OCare people to figure out what they THINK my subsidy should be). If you’re not a wage slave or fixed-income retiree, this can be challenging: in 2015 I guessed wrong, and wound up owing them several thousand dollars. Last year I guessed over what I actually made, and wound up getting a refund. Do you have several thousand dollars sitting around waiting for a levy? I had to put it on my credit card in 2015, and pay it off (still paying it off, actually, but at least this year it didn’t get bigger).
This year the crystal ball might be off again, but in case DJT and the CONgress don’t kill this monstrosity, I am putting away money to pay off any levy without going FURTHER into debt-by-government-decree.
“Exactly what are we being subsidized from?”
The total cost of your insurance premiums, the balance of which is being paid by other people who aren’t subsidized.
But since the medical industry NEVER says what something (pill, procedure, stay) actually COSTS, how do you know what the “total cost” of the insurance premiums IS? Isn’t this like saying the “sales price” is 50% off the “regular price” which NO ONE in their right mind would ever pay?
Your argument would seem to propose that my insurance SHOULD cost $XX, as some kind of “market” or “fair” price would reflect. Since the entire medical industry does pricing like the “mirror house” at the circus, how would you ever know if you are paying “fair” prices, “unfair” prices or any multiple of either?
BY THE WAY, I got exactly ZERO choice on being “subsidized”, or even HAVING insurance: it was ordered at the point of IRS penalties. Want to discuss the morality of forcing someone to buy something “for their own good”? How many folks are even worse off than I am, having to choose between good and valid goals (say, saving for their kids college) and paying for “health insurance” that they may or may not be able to USE (deductibles) should they actually NEED it?
Perhaps “Total price” or “Total amount”would be the better term, Total cost for the one paying it meaning the price of the premium not its reason for being that amount as a result of assorted costs to the insurer.
Theyll never do that because people would revolt if it became clear what they were actually paying for. I had an idea for a website, but have no idea how to go about doing this, but here it is – enter in your total tax bill, and it will break down, to the penny, what exactly you paid for each part of government. I think when people saw that the majority of their money is spend on care for indignants and old people, our insanely bloated military budget, and salaries for the flunkies that rule us, they’d be a lot more inclined to demand an end to it. The same could be done with health insurance bills and hospital bills of course. But our owners will fight that kind of transparency tooth and nail.
Because it is much better (for them) to have the cloudiness, then they can charge whatever they want, no one can call them on their BS. Kind of like the complicated CDS and CDO squared that was sold to yield chasers in the run up to the housing crises in 2008. “Trust us, we are math geniuses, the risk does not matter because it is just too complicated”. Meanwhile the simplest truth ultimately won out (as it tends to always) that if people did not pay their mortgages, these notes weren’t worth shit. A poster above summed this one up in its simplest form as well – it just costs too damn much, and they are trying to hide that with BS.
Smedley Butler said “War Is A Racket “. If he could have lived long enough he would have included Healthcare in that quote.
Let’s not forget the CONgress critters who left the capital after the prescription drug bills was passed in order to take million dollar a year jobs with Big Pharma .
You guys are mostly talking cost and I pretty much agree with you.
Here is a different take on healthcare.
A British baby has a rare disease and his parents raised over $1mm to bring him here for experimental treatment.The British healthcare system and courts said no,they appealed it to the European court of appeals and were turned down.
The hospital is apparently rushing to pull the plug now that they have permission from the courts to do so.
We can argue cost and who pays but should govt or a hospital have the power to overrule family?
Don’t ever forget how important the second amendment is.
We’re self-employed. For 2017, our premiums rose to nearly $1,800/month for a silver plan. That’s over $21,000/year. Guess what? We’re now uninsured. Thanks, Obama.
But libs like Kayla Chadwick don’t a rat’s ass about those of us who pay our own way.
(For catastrophic health coverage, we now use Medi-Share, a Christian Health Sharing Ministry. Technically, it’s not insurance, but it offers us some protection and costs only $550/month.)
Does Medi-Share get you out of the Obamacare fines for not having Obamacare insurance?
Happily, YES.
There’s an exemption for people participating in religious health sharing plans, at least for now. Who knows what will happen with the new bills being hacked out in the House & Senate.
But to get onto Medi-Share, you have to fill out all those classic health-history forms. The whole process was a bit of a grind, and my S.O. had something they excluded from coverage for a period of three years. (A joint replacement, which will likely needed at some point.) Still, we’re very glad we did it.
For us, Medi-Share serves three purposes:
(1) Gets us out of paying the penalty
(2) Provides catastrophic coverage for major medical emergencies
(3) Gives a middle-finger to Obamacare. We’re no longer feeding the beast.
*Medi-Share pays nothing until you reach your deductible. Our is just under 4K, I believe. It also doesn’t cover things that violate traditional Christian beliefs, like abortions, etc.
Additional Info:
If you want to calculate your potential cost for Medi-Share, here’s the link:
https://mychristiancare.org/program-options/
I wish it were easier for pre-existing conditions.