A reader just sent me a link to this early draft of a letter that healthcare companies are about to begin sending out regarding Obamacare. Maybe we are both reading this wrong, but according to this draft, Obamacare doesn’t guarantee you any level of coverage in your meta level of bronze, silver, platinum, or gold. Rather it guarantees the whole group of enrollees in your care level tier, an overall percentage of coverage. Those are two very different things. Notice the letter specifically makes note of this on the second page, where it clarifies what a set percentage of cost coverage means:
“(Please note: this does not mean that your insurance company will pay that specific percentage of every bill. It simply means that the insurance company will pay that average percentage for all policyholders over the course of the year.)”
As an example, saying you are guaranteed that 90% of your medical bills will be covered is very different from saying the government will pay 90% of total medical expenditures in the nation. One guarantees you what you pay for, the other sets up a situation, where maybe the government makes you pay 100% of your bills, while covering 100% of the bills of 9 other people. Overall, your group gets 90% coverage, even though you ended up getting nothing. According to this, you can legally end up being forced to buy an insurance which will not legally have to pay for any of your specific bills.
Am I the only one who thinks this is engineered corruption, designed to confer perks on the connected, and redistribute resources to the good little Leftist voters, through the law?
When an unemployed, welfarite, single-mom shows up at the ER every three days with her ten little kids, complaining that all of them have asthma, and she can’t pay for any of it, I suspect that she will get all of her yearly bills fully covered, and we will be stuck making up the difference in coverage, among the enrollees in our coverage tier. If so, that is redistribution, plain and simple.
If you are a Tea Party member, can the IRS just decide that your cancer treatment isn’t covered because it will be too expensive? Or can they just say you are too rich, so you should have to mortgage your house, and pay for it yourself? Maybe means testing for coverage is why they decided to have the IRS oversee all of this, rather than Health and Human Services (The left just tried to get means testing for military health coverage rates this year, and already means testing is supposed to determine if you will get a subsidy to cover your purchase of an Obamacare policy, though some doubt that will work).
All of your means data (ie. tax data) and political affiliations data (through being on 501c membership lists in IRS records) will already be easily available, in-house at the IRS, which wouldn’t have been the case at HHS. HHS would have had to officially request such data, and create a paper trail Congress could follow. Maybe means testing and party testing will happen unofficially now, maybe they intend to codify it in law later. Either way, the mechanism is already there – under this administration, that’s no accident.
Just what we needed. An affirmative legal mechanism designed both, to allow the irresponsible to take actions designed to screw the responsible, and the Leftists in government a mechanism by which to create yet more headaches for anybody stupid enough to try to be productive, or desire freedom.
Anybody think it is worth shutting down government to stop this debacle now?
Obama Care mandates the benefits but not who will provide them. To survive, insurance carriers are developing “skinny” networks of providers which will effectively reduce the doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies patients can access. Rather than the current scenario where 85% of the population can see basically any doctor they choose, while the other 15% goes to county we will begin to develop a 3, 4, or 5 tier system where only the top 10% (?) will be able to have complete access. No doubt government employees will be well represented in the top 2 quartiles.
Medicare will still suck but a lot more money will be dumped in. Without expanding the provider networks, much of this money will get sucked up by the infrastructure without really delivering more care. There will just be more patients chasing the same number of doctors.
Fascinating insights. Thank you for that.