7 Ways Obamacare's Surrender to Hospital and Big Pharma Profits May End Up Coming Out of Our Wallets

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/affordable-care-act




1. What they’re not telling us about the exchanges The ACA health exchanges are marketplaces set up to enable the uninsured who the law requires to buy private insurance or pay a financial penalty to choose among competing private insurance and qualify for a federal subsidy to cover some of the costs. But premiums, deductibles, co-pays and other fees can run to thousands of dollars. Even in the cheapest plans buyers are expected to pay 40 percent of the cost. Subsides may not make these plans “affordable.” Many younger, healthier people are likely to select the cheapest plan, one outside the exchange with fewer covered services, or just go without coverage entirely and pay the fine. Further, small businesses can buy coverage for employees through the exchanges, but the premium and co-pay subsidies will not cover family dependents, a huge hole that will leave many uncovered. Insurers offering lower rates the first year in hopes of acquiring many new customers are likely to raise rates later, as has occurred in Massachusetts, the model for the ACA. A recent study in the journal Health Affairs found that 38 percent of families buying plans through the Massachusetts exchange reported a financial burden and 45 percent said costs were higher than they had expected.

2. The high cost of taxing health benefits

For the first time, the law will tax health benefits beginning in 2018 through the misnamed “Cadillac tax” a 40 percent excise tax on comprehensive health plans. The inevitable result will be fewer employers offering good health benefits, and far more people pushed into skeletal, high deductible plans with far less coverage and much higher out-of-pocket costs. The New York Times just reported that 17 percent of employers this year are stepping up cost shifting five years before the tax goes into effect.

3. An incentive to employers to cut coverage or full-time jobs

Under the ACA employers with 50 workers or more must offer coverage to full time employees or pay a fine, but not to part-timers. Nurses and other workers are increasingly in battles with employers who are demanding elimination of coverage for part time employees, citing the ACA as their pretext. Regal Entertainment, Papa John’s and other companies are reducing workers’ hours to under 30 per week.

4. The wellness scam

“Wellness” programs that enable businesses to transfer more healthcare costs to workers with “unhealthy” factors like smoking or high blood pressure or cholesterol levels are rapidly spreading, actively encouraged by the ACA which offers premium discounts to participating employees. However, health disorders are as likely to derive from chronic or genetic conditions as “life style choices” and economic factors which have a disproportionate impact on the poor. The cost reductions also fall far short of the hype. The federal government apparently buried a report it mandated for the ACA from the Rand Corporation on wellness programs which showed the overall savings are, at best, modest. The programs make insurance unaffordable for some workers, and "keep the sickest workers from affording the care they need," said Alan Balch, vice president of the Preventive Health Partnership, an alliance of the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Heart Association.

[midnight]

1. I wonder how many of this select commission that were given this legislative bill from the insurance

insurance lobbyist were members of ALEC?

[SamKnause]

2. Health Care

Single payer makes sense.

Single payer would lower the costs of medical care.

The large majority of U.S. citizens want single payer !!!!!

Too bad the majority of U.S. citizens did not have a lobbying group to attain single payer.

"Make me do it", certainly failed.

The political clout and momentum this president has squandered is astonishingly disappointing.

[djean111]

3. Single payer - if it means just lowering the Medicare age - won't save on drugs,

as far as I can tell, unless whoever is in charge also gets rid of the rule that Medicare cannot negotiate with Big Pharma.
The whole system of what is charged for health care has to be revamped.
The thought that "we" could ever have made Obama do anything is absurd. It was a sound bite, that's all it ever was.

[SamKnause]

4. Health care 2

Agree.

It is insane that we can not negotiate with the drug companies.

I am beginning to think that everything was a sound bite.

Nothing will change until the cesspool known as DC is cleansed.

It seems their job is to cause problems, not solve them.

Cause problems for we the people.

Coddle Wall Street, corporations, CEOs and the MIC brass.

[canoeist52]

5. Yep, this is the problem. Insurance doesn't mean coverage.

They should have defined insurance first. If you can't afford the deductibles you can't afford to use your "insurance" - but I think that was known and part of the plan.

[Egalitarian Thug]

7. ...nor health care. n/t

[Egalitarian Thug]

6. K&R But nobody could've predicted...