Thread: Health Care Passes

^The one thing the above article fails to mention, is that these are private insurance companies setting the rates physicians will be paid. They are doing this to be price competitive with other insurance companies within the exchanges.

Neither the ACA nor Covered California are setting those doctor fees.

Originally Posted by misskit

They are doing this to be price competitive with other insurance companies within the exchanges.

This is the result of a free market and not Socialism.

Exactly.

The pathetic lowlifes will stop at nothing;

Update, 7:15 a.m. Dec. 3: The California GOP revised its shadow website for the Affordable Care Act roughly two hours after this post first appeared. The site's homepage now carries a direct link to the state insurance exchange Covered California, as well as more prominent links to Covered California on the "Learn More" tab and the "I don’t have insurance" tab.
Opponents of the Affordable Care Act never stop producing new tricks to undermine the reform's effectiveness. But leave it to California Republicans to reach for the bottom. Their goal appears to be to discredit the act by highlighting its costs and penalties rather than its potential benefits.
The device chosen by the Assembly's GOP caucus is a website at the address coveringhealthcareca.com. If that sounds suspiciously like coveredca.com, which is the real website for the California insurance exchange, it may not be a coincidence. Bogus insurance websites have sprung up all over, aiming to steer consumers away from legitimate enrollment services. Just a couple of weeks ago California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris shut down 10 bogus insurance sites, some of them with names very similar to the real thing. She must have overlooked the GOP's entry.
To be fair, the California GOP announced its website in August. But some members have recently stepped up their promotion of the site. The site has a featured spot, for example, on the homepage of Assembly Republican Leader Connie Conway (R-Tulare). Conway's spokeswoman, Sabrina Lockhart, says other members may be pointing their constituents to the site "as a resource" to help them navigate the new law.
If that's so, constituents needing useful information about how to deal with the Affordable Care Act would be well advised to look elsewhere. As an aid to understanding and navigating the Affordable Care Act's new requirements and opportunities for coverage, the GOP site is worse than useless. Finding a link there to the Covered California website, which after all is the main place residents can go to obtain insurance in the individual market, is a chore -- there isn't a link to it at all on the GOP page.
Instead, you're offered links labeled "I already have health insurance," "I don't have health insurance," or "I'm an employer." The second link, which presumably covers most residents looking for help through the act, leads to a page dominated by a calculator for the penalties imposed for not buying insurance -- not exactly what you need if you're already looking for insurance. If you have the patience, you can find a link to Covered California toward the bottom of the page.
As for the quality of information provided on the site, it's questionable; that's a charitable way of saying that some of it is dead wrong.
For example, the website claims that the Affordable Care Act will increase the federal deficit, asserting that the "non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated in a March 2012 report that coverage expenses under the Affordable Care Act will cost the country a total of $1.76 trillion total by 2022 and add over $1 trillion to the federal deficit."
Is that so? The site links to this report by the CBO, which states on page 2 that the act will "on net, reduce budget deficits over the 2012–2021 period." Get it? Reduce the deficit, not add to it. The GOP's nasty trick is to consider only the costs of coverage, without netting out the cost reductions and new revenues in the law. Oh, by the way, the CBO also projects that the ACA will reduce the number of uninsured people in the United States by more than 30 million. That's a plus, by most reckoning.
The GOP website's digest of recent news articles is led, at the moment, by a Wall Street Journal op-ed by a San Diego businesswoman who claimed to be one of Obamacare's "losers." As we pointed out in this closer look at her story, her life may well be saved by the Affordable Care Act's outlawing of insurance exclusions for preexisting conditions. (She's a cancer survivor.)
One can certainly sympathize with the California GOP's desire to become relevant again to the lives of Californians, who have all but voted the party out of existence in the Golden State. Given that California is one of the real bright spots in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, one might think that the state's Republicans would recognize its value to voters, instead of trying to fill their constituents' heads with irrelevancies, misinformation, and misrepresentations. One would be wrong.


An underhanded anti-Obamacare stunt by the California GOP [updated] - latimes.com

Originally Posted by misskit

^The one thing the above article fails to mention, is that these are private insurance companies setting the rates physicians will be paid. They are doing this to be price competitive with other insurance companies within the exchanges.

Neither the ACA nor Covered California are setting those doctor fees.

It's still the free market out there if you haven't noticed.

Obama hasn't enacted full-on Socialism/Communism - yet...

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

It's still the free market out there if you haven't noticed.

Obama hasn't enacted full-on Socialism/Communism - yet.

That's because he has not the ability nor the desire to implement either Socialism or Communism. The only people who believe this nonsense are the koolaid sipping, brainwashed nitwits on the far right.

the stock market is at record highs, and these dopes are claiming obama is a socialist or communist.

And corporate profits are at all time highs.
And the net worth of America's richest 1% is at all time highs.
And wealth inequality is at all time highs.
Obama is most definitely a Socialist for the Oligarchs.

Not that bad, since the website is running properly and paper isn't needed any longer.

Originally Posted by misskit

Not that bad, since the website is running properly and paper isn't needed any longer.

How's that SS# hanging in there, eh?

Doctors in droves are abandoning Obamacare in CA.

Read the news...

If you like your medications, you can pay for your medications

But, but, we were told we'd get a $2,500.00 per year in the plan we wanted and the Doctor we had? Did Obama lie?

"The nation’s new health-care law says insurers can’t turn anyone away, even people who are sick. But some companies, patient advocates say, have found a way to discourage the chronically ill from enrolling in their plans: offer drug coverage too skimpy for those with expensive conditions.
Some plans sold on the online insurance exchanges, for instance, don’t cover key medications for HIV, or they require patients to pay as much as 50 percent of the cost per prescription in co-insurance — sometimes more than $1,000 a month. . . .

People who expected the new plans to provide pharmaceutical coverage comparable to that of employer-sponsored plans have been disappointed. In recent years, employers have compelled workers to pick up a growing share of the costs, especially for brand-name drugs.

But insurers selling policies on the exchanges have pared their drug benefits significantly more, according to health advocates, patients and industry analysts. The plans are curbing their lists of covered drugs and limiting quantities, requiring prior authorizations and insisting on “fail first” or “step therapy” protocols that compel doctors to prescribe a certain drug first before moving on to another — even if it’s not the physician’s and patient’s drug of choice. . . .

“2014 is going to be a scary year. People are going to have to stop taking medicines they are already stable on because of this,” said [Daniel] Kantor, the immediate past president of the Southern MS Consortium, a group of doctors, social workers and advocates who work with patients with the condition."

AIDS advocates say drug coverage in some marketplace plans is inadequate - The Washington Post
How 'bout those ballooning deductible levels too, eh?

Another Doctor Closes His Practice Due To Obamacare.

Sign of the times, huh?



Lachlan Markay @lachlan Follow Kentucky doctor takes out newspaper ad space to blame Obamacare for the closure of his practice
9:43 PM - 10 Dec 2013

^

The doctor is mistaken in blaming the ACA for his leaving his practice. He was required, even before the ACA, to keep electronic records but he didn't want to update his office to modern procedures.


A Kentucky doctor who took out a local newspaper ad saying he was closing his practice “due to the policies of Obamacare” is shutting down his practice because of federal requirements to transfer from paper to electronic records.

Dr. Stephen Kiteck of Somerset, Ky., said the financial burden of electronic records is “too much of a burden to overcome” and that he didn’t want to “make a long-term investment” in his small medical practice.

Though Kiteck’s ad blames Obamacare, the electronic health care incentive programs were part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 — the federal stimulus act — and not part of the Affordable Care Act, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Kiteck said he is approaching retirement age, and that he and his office are “computer illiterate,” adding that he would need special training to add electronic records. He said it would be a financial burden and take “thousands of man hours or woman hours to get the records on the computer.”

Here's Why That Kentucky Doctor Is Closing His Practice "Due To The Policies Of Obamacare"

^
Irregardless (love that word) the good doctor is closing down his practice due to Obamacare requirements and the community he used to serve is now w/out one more doctor.

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

the good doctor is closing down his practice due to Obamacare requirements

No he is not. Did you not read this;

Originally Posted by misskit

He was required, even before the ACA, to keep electronic records but he didn't want to update his office to modern procedures.

I have not been in a doctors office that did not have computers or electronic records in as long as I can remember. I would say it is past time for this old coot to be put to pasture. If he is not up to speed with current technology he is obviously unable to provide the level of care that his patience deserve.

obamacare enrollments surpass 1 million

http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/2...enrollment.pdf

Almost No One Is Buying Private Insurance Through ObamaCare Exchanges

That's a slightly different take that the Lamestream Media's gushing ObamaCare Enrollments Surging headlines but it's accurate.

Here's the bottom line.

Just about 1.2 million people have gained health coverage through Obamacare, according to new federal data released Wednesday morning. Approximately 365,000 of those people have purchased private insurance and 803,000 have been determined to be eligible for the public Medicaid program. These numbers count data from both October and November, and show an especially quick growth in HealthCare.gov enrollment.

And now we have endangered Democrats like Sen Mary Landreau of LA running anti-Obamacare ads.

Stick a fork in it...

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Almost No One Is Buying Private Insurance Through ObamaCare Exchanges

The cowboys in Florida aren’t gonna be happy with this Cuban.

As news breaks that enrollment has surpassed one million, it turns out one of Obamacare's fiercest critics is among Republicans showing some "secret love" for the law.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) signed his family up on the federal healthcare exchange and has opted to take a federal subsidy offered to lawmakers and staff, the Tampa Bay Times reports.

"Senator Rubio spent time looking at all the options and decided to enroll through the D.C. exchange for coverage for him and his family," Rubio's spokeswoman Brooke Sammon told the Times, adding that "Senator Rubio is following the law, even though he opposes it."

The Washington Post notes that Rubio's fellow 2016 GOP presidential prospects Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) have also joined the D.C. exchange.

Rubio has previously tried to kill Obamacare, even declining last March to support a stopgap bill to fund the government unless it also defunded "this Obamacare bill that is going to be an absolute disaster for the American economy."

tick tock

Amazing: Landrieu Completely Throws Obama Under the Bus in First TV Ad

And she's just one of the first. Soon to be a deluge...

Last week Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) said if she could vote for Obamacare again, she would. Now for some reason she’s completely distancing herself from it? If you are to believe this ad, President Obama lied to her constituents.

But there’s just one problem here: in 2009 Landrieu herself said if Americans liked their health care plans, they could keep them. Oops:



These endangered Democrats have a wee problem, eh?

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/danield...tv-ad-n1761227

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Almost No One Is Buying Private Insurance Through ObamaCare Exchanges

After struggling with HealthCare.gov at first, Wilson, 39, signed herself up for a subsidized private health plan and enrolled her kids, 3 and 7, into Medicaid for medical and dental benefits on Dec. 1, Wilson, a college professor who has worked part time to take care of her children since her husband died in 2011, told HuffPost via email. This year, Wilson's plan costs $438 a month, she said. Next year, she will pay $219 a month, after $114 in tax credits, for a Silver plan with a lower deductible and dental coverage.

"As a young widow with two young children, I'm very relieved," Wilson wrote.