ACA is in trouble and could be on course for a death spiral

[Patriot Guard Rider]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027361678#post1

51 replies and the fight is on.

hill2016 (489 posts)

ACA is in trouble and could be on course for a death spiral
Don't need the Republicans in the House to shut it down, this could sink all on its own weight.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/rising-rates-pose-challenge-to-health-law-1447894371
Rising Rates Pose Challenge to Health Law
Higher-cost premiums for 2016 threaten the appeal of the program for the healthy customers it needs

http://www.wsj.com/articles/health-laws-strains-show-1446423498
Health Insurers Struggle to Profit From ACA Plans
As third enrollment season kicks off, insurers move to curb costs, boost premiums

http://www.wsj.com/articles/unitedhealth-cuts-guidance-evaluating-its-insurance-exchange-segment-1447933310
UnitedHealth Raises Doubts About Its Participation in Affordable Care Act
Insurer cuts earnings outlook, citing losses from health-exchange products

http://www.wsj.com/articles/more-health-co-ops-face-collapse-1445034912
More Health Co-ops Face Collapse
Colorado’s co-op and one in Oregon are folding, joining six others; coalition considers legal action





If you recall, ACA forces the mainly young/healthy/male to subsidize the old/sick/female by banning insurance companies from charging different prices based on gender or pre-existing conditions. There's a limit to how much they can charge based on age. There are also 10 essential benefits which are expensive to cover and not everyone needs.

So given the dynamics of higher premiums, it's logical for the young/healthy/male to start thinking whether they really need to be covered and should just drop out.

Which raises the premiums for everyone else in the pool since they are by definition sicker. Kind of an adverse self selection going on.

And despite what you may think of greedy insurance companies, they haven't been profitable either due to higher than expected costs. And if the health insurance companies can't be profitable, they are going to drop out.

So on the one hand you have the healthy people dropping out and on the other hand more and more insurance companies are going to drop out. That's by definition a death spiral.



Note: I haven't taken any position on ACA vs single payer in this OP. I'm just laying out facts and an analysis. So let's stick to facts and avoid name-calling, if that's possible.

Star Member FSogol (27,645 posts)
1. Actually, you just repeated a bunch of pro-insurance company RW memes about the ACA like

There are also 10 essential benefits which are expensive to cover and not everyone needs.


and

And despite what you may think of greedy insurance companies, they haven't been profitable either due to higher than expected costs. And if the health insurance companies can't be profitable, they are going to drop out.



You also fail to understand how insurance works which you demonstrate with:
So on the one hand you have the healthy people dropping out and on the other hand more and more insurance companies are going to drop out. That's by definition a death spiral.

You asswipe DUmmies were warned this would happen and we were called racists. You were warned this would happen and we were told 40 million would sign up and everything would be ok.

YOU. WERE. WARNED. YOU chose to ignore the warning.

No mercy from me. I hope your premium go up 400% and the deductibles go to $10,000.

YOU. WERE. WARNED.

Liberal disgust me.

[Duke Nukum]

The health insurance industry is just a culpable as the DUmmies in the creation of the ObamaCare Monster.  the health insurance industry was blinded by dollar signs in their eyes, which is really weird being that insurance companies are usually pretty good at math and DUmmies, as always, were/are/may forever be blinded by the promise of free shit.

[Carl]

An interesting glimpse behind the curtain.

Response to hill2016 (Original post)

Thu Nov 19, 2015, 01:28 PM

Star Member pnwmom (64,953 posts)
21. So why do you think young people would be willing to pay more in taxes

to support a single payer system that would be utilized more heavily by older people?

Response to pnwmom (Reply #21)

Thu Nov 19, 2015, 01:38 PM

hill2016 (489 posts)
24. I really think

this is a question to be posed to the young millennials who support Sanders' vision of single payer system.

Response to hill2016 (Reply #24)

Thu Nov 19, 2015, 01:41 PM

Star Member pnwmom (64,953 posts)
25. I think most of them are assuming it wouldn't cost them much.

But it would cost them just as much, based on income, as it would for older people at the same income. Though they would be getting far less in financial payouts.

And unfortunately, there are as many young people supporting Rethugs as there are young people supporting Sanders.

Which is why you leftist scum have to always lie about your promises of free shit.

[thundley4]

Not to pile on or anything, but...

Medi-Cal cancer patients don't fare much better than the uninsured, UC Davis study says
As  part of a massive coverage expansion under the Affordable Care Act, millions of people have been allowed to sign up for California's health insurance plan for the poor for nearly two years.

The program, known as Medi-Cal, now serves more than 12.5 million people, nearly 1 out of every 3 Californians. But there have been persistent concerns about the quality of care, with questions about whether patients can find doctors and get the help they need.

Now a new analysis adds weight to those worries.

In the first study of its kind, UC Davis researchers found that compared with patients with other kinds of insurance, cancer patients with Medi-Cal were generally less likely to have their cancers caught at early stages, receive recommended treatments and be alive five years after diagnosis.

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-cancer-disparities-20151119-story.html

The rest of the article basically says that having no insurance is just as effective as Obamacare for patients when it comes to cancer detection.

[DumbAss Tanker]

The health insurance industry is just a culpable as the DUmmies in the creation of the ObamaCare Monster.  the health insurance industry was blinded by dollar signs in their eyes, which is really weird being that insurance companies are usually pretty good at math and DUmmies, as always, were/are/may forever be blinded by the promise of free shit.

They foolishly believed that the Obama Administration would actually enforce that mandatory enrollment thingie, and punish those young Democrat voters for not signing up, so their calculations were based on an entirely wrong estimate of the revenue stream.

[CollectivismMustDie]

hill2016 (489 posts)

ACA is in trouble and could be on course for a death spiral
Don't need the Republicans in the House to shut it down, this could sink all on its own weight.

Where can I sign up to help? Is there some way I can 'get out and push'?

And even if it does fail, the damage you short sighted idiots have done through passing it is already done, and can't be undone even if obozocare fails in its entirety. I look forward to the day when the supreme court cites obozocare as precedent for ruling that you DUmmies are compelled by law to buy a product or service (soap for example) which goes completely against your grain.

Only then, will a tiny 'percentage of a percentage' of you ignorant arrogant fools understand.

CMD

[Delmar]

Where is the vanilla rhapsody primitive?  It used to be when anything got posted that put down the BarryCare Act, vanilla rhapsody was all over it with a bunch of pajama boy talking points.  Tired of defending the piece of crap BarryCare?

[landofconfusion80]

Where is the vanilla rhapsody primitive?  It used to be when anything got posted that put down the BarryCare Act, vanilla rhapsody was all over it with a bunch of pajama boy talking points.  Tired of defending the piece of crap BarryCare?

It worked for one of the co-ops and well, you know....  it probably has a gofundme somewhere.

[98ZJUSMC]

The health insurance industry is just a culpable as the DUmmies in the creation of the ObamaCare Monster.  the health insurance industry was blinded by dollar signs in their eyes, which is really weird being that insurance companies are usually pretty good at math and DUmmies, as always, were/are/may forever be blinded by the promise of free shit.

Yeah they were.  Big time.

And unfortunately, there are as many young people supporting Rethugs as there are young people supporting Sanders.

Here we come to save the daaaaay!

[98ZJUSMC]

It worked for one of the co-ops and well, you know....  it probably has a gofundme somewhere.

Maybe it wasn't certified?

[SVPete]

ObamaCare will collapse, as long predicted. Obama chose to do O-Don't-Care through the existing insurance companies rather than shut them down and through their upper manglement in prison, so when the dust settles from the collapse, DU folk will have a ready-made scapegoat. It is true that insurance companies went along with ObamaCare; their alternative was being killed as corporations, and imprisonment for their upper manglement.

[67 Rover]

If you recall, ACA forces the mainly young/healthy/male to subsidize the old/sick/female by banning insurance companies from charging different prices based on gender or pre-existing conditions. There's a limit to how much they can charge based on age. There are also 10 essential benefits which are expensive to cover and not everyone needs.

Sorry that is not how insurance is suppose to work so maybe that is the problem
?

[DumbAss Tanker]

Sorry that is not how insurance is suppose to work so maybe that is the problem
?

It eliminated catastrophic-only policies, which is generally all young single males were usually interested in buying (If they were interested in buying any health insurance at all) to force the young unmarried males to pay the lion's share for all the huge cost of all the free shit for women and the 'Enroll anytime, with no pre-existing condition exclusions' for the rest, and was designed to force them to buy the ACA-compliant policies by making it a legal requirement.  Unfortunately for the bullshit-dazzled insurance companies looking to reap the huge rewards, the young men stayed out in droves and the Oministration did not have the political will to push hard on the penalty part and drive them into it.

[obumazombie]

Libs were expert at telling voters the shortcomings of their health insurance policy.
They told voters their policies they held were "junk", then proceeded to replace the "junk" policies with owebumacare.
Because the lib overseers knew what was best for voters, and were not shy about forcing it upon them.
But a funny thing happened along the way.
The voters saw right through the scam.
Thanks Jonathan Gruber.

[Karin]

All FSogol can say is "bullshit," which is of course a brilliant argument.  The OP then proceeded to link to several articles from the New York Times.  And many others from Washington Post, etc.  But most of the posts are either "Wall Street Journal Boo!  Murdoch!" or "Horseshit!"

They just wallow in ignorance. 

[obumazombie]

The press's reluctance to relay Obamacare-related bad news has been obvious for years.
Nowhere is this more consistently the case than at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press.

Over half of the state non-profit co-ops set up under Obamacare with $2 billion-plus in taxayer funding are failing.
The AP has generally treated those failures as local stories, even though they relate to the Affordable Care Act, the passage of which they still call President Barack Obama's "signature domestic achievement."

Most of the other co-ops are either incurring huge losses, have become undercapitalized, or both.
So watch, in context, how AP business writer Tom Murphy, in a dispatch primarily about UnitedHealth Group's announcement that "it is pulling back from its push into the Affordable Care Act's public insurance exchanges":

WHY IS IT (i.e., UnitedHealth Group) STRUGGLING?

The insurer has been hurt in particular by customers who signed up for coverage outside the open enrollment window and use more health care in general than those who bought coverage during open enrollment.

Insurers expected challenges as they built this business over the past few years.
They have been struggling, in particular, to attract enough healthy customers to their coverage to balance sicker patients who use a lot of health care.

WHO ELSE IS HURTING?

Several smaller, nonprofit insurance cooperatives said recently that they would stop selling coverage on the state-based exchanges.

Aetna Inc. said last month that its exchange enrollment fell 11 percent in the third quarter, but company leaders also said the exchanges remain a good market.


Obvious problems:

Though readers could infer that the co-ops are involved with Obamacare, Murphy didn't identify them as entities specifically created in the legislation to try to "prove" that non-profit, government-financed entities could show the big, ugly profiteering insurance companies how to run a business efficiently and effectively. (Cue the laugh track.)
The question Murphy asked was:
"Who else is hurting?"
It wasn't: "Who has stopped selling coverage?"

But Murphy wouldn't even answer his own question, only telling readers that "several"
— normally defined as between 2 and 5
— co-ops have stopped selling coverage "recently."
 

The fact of the matter is that, as seen at the following graphic originally found at the Washington Post, 12 co-ops are or will shortly be closing their doors:







Also, as seen above, at least five others are in some degree of trouble.
Perhaps as many as six haven't crossed into the troubled category, but most of their performances have hardly been impressive.

A few, particularly Maryland, Massachusetts, and Oregon, look like they should be classified as troubled.
Deceptions such as these are the exception rather than the rule in the press's coverage of Obamacare developments.

It seems inevitable that some reporter will look at the wreckage of the co-ops and utter that infamous punch line in the joke about surgeons: "The operation was a success, but the patient died."




Let owebumacare die a dignified death that it never had a chance at during it's inception.




full article...


http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tom-blumer/2015/11/21/ap-only-tells-readers-several-obamacare-co-ops-are-hurting#sthash.6eTNr1CP.dpuf

[Texacon]

Oh, the media was even more complicit than that. They kept telling people the fine was like $100 for not getting insurance and would go up each year. I listened very closely every time they reported that and not once did I hear them mention it was $100 OR 1% of your gross income with the percentage increasing every year.

What is the percentage at now? 3%?  I don't know any more, I gave up keeping track since pieces go into effect each year.

KC

[Carl]

The inherent problem with Ocare is the inherent problem with leftism/marxism,it presumes one can prod or legislate away human nature.
No place else is that more obvious then in economics.

Water can`t naturally run up hill without something behind it to force it yet the left has visions of a perpetual motion machine where with a little priming it can be a self powering loop.

Ocare presumed that with a bit of nudging and unsustainable gifts people would flock to it.
Short of the point of a sword (where leftism always has to lead) it was never going to happen. 

[miskie]

The point of OCare is to collapse, taking the insurance companies with it. - Leaving no choice other than a government run system.

The only problem is it is collapsing ahead of schedule. - People still have time to second guess if its worthwhile to have Obamacare at all. it was supposed to fail after millions more were enrolled, to create a massive crisis that could only be solved by immediate government intervention.