Affordable Care Act Scare!

Anything is better than how it has been. Today if you choose not to buy any insurance, even catastrophic that just costs pennies a month (say with a 50K deductible) my hospital has to treat you when you show up in our Emergency department after being hit by a hit and run driver. Poor, unemployed, impoverished generally qualify for state or federal aid (medicaid) but the uninsured middle class don't so the hospitals do what they can to collect. Some will go after your home, but most non-profits don't and they force the rest of us to pay.

Ask if my premiums are going up with Obama Care? I don't know but I can promise you they will ONLY go up without it.

If you don't want insurance that's fine - but please get a large tattoo that tells us we don't have to treat you, your child or anyone one else who just assumes nothing bad will ever happen to them. I know I sound mean, but we all want to blame big government or poor/irresponsible indigents - it's the middle-class uninsured that's breaking this system. I'll take medicare insurance any day of the week over the cost of private insurance. I'll wait a year to get a knee replaced if' it's FREE, or wait a few months for my routine mammogram. Non profit hospitals give out billions of dollars of charity care - is it magic money? No, it comes from you and me though taxes or premiums. And the billions of dollars of charity care does NOT cover all that have needs. Next time a hospital tells you about all the lives they've saved, ask them how many patients they've turned away due to lack of funds. Ask them how many terminal children only get palliative care because there's no funding for treatable disease. It's horrific that it happens here in the United States and nobody cares - we just want cheap care for ourselves, and we'll tell ourselves that "those other people deserve no treatment" or "a charity will take care of them" nope. Doesn't work that way. Getting charity care is a lottery.

Sorry - I just get really fed up. People will spend hours HOURS online trashing ANY plan to solve healthcare and hardly ANY of them have actually read this plan, or the one from ten years ago, or the Clinton plan. ANY of the plans put forward would be better than the status quo.

Pure BS

Explain how, at least half as clearly and respectfully as HonestOmnivore has. I'm happy to listen. But just saying something is "BS" is not an argument.

Anything is better than how it has been. Today if you choose not to buy any insurance, even catastrophic that just costs pennies a month (say with a 50K deductible) my hospital has to treat you when you show up in our Emergency department after being hit by a hit and run driver. Poor, unemployed, impoverished generally qualify for state or federal aid (medicaid) but the uninsured middle class don't so the hospitals do what they can to collect. Some will go after your home, but most non-profits don't and they force the rest of us to pay.

Ask if my premiums are going up with Obama Care? I don't know but I can promise you they will ONLY go up without it.

If you don't want insurance that's fine - but please get a large tattoo that tells us we don't have to treat you, your child or anyone one else who just assumes nothing bad will ever happen to them. I know I sound mean, but we all want to blame big government or poor/irresponsible indigents - it's the middle-class uninsured that's breaking this system. I'll take medicare insurance any day of the week over the cost of private insurance. I'll wait a year to get a knee replaced if' it's FREE, or wait a few months for my routine mammogram. Non profit hospitals give out billions of dollars of charity care - is it magic money? No, it comes from you and me though taxes or premiums. And the billions of dollars of charity care does NOT cover all that have needs. Next time a hospital tells you about all the lives they've saved, ask them how many patients they've turned away due to lack of funds. Ask them how many terminal children only get palliative care because there's no funding for treatable disease. It's horrific that it happens here in the United States and nobody cares - we just want cheap care for ourselves, and we'll tell ourselves that "those other people deserve no treatment" or "a charity will take care of them" nope. Doesn't work that way. Getting charity care is a lottery.

Sorry - I just get really fed up. People will spend hours HOURS online trashing ANY plan to solve healthcare and hardly ANY of them have actually read this plan, or the one from ten years ago, or the Clinton plan. ANY of the plans put forward would be better than the status quo.

Resolved with indentured servitude!

I am a small business owner and I pay (so far) 100% of my employees insurance. I have been with the same carrier for 10 years. In January when I was up for renewal my rates went up 44%. Their reason was "this is the last year" that we can raise rates before the mandates kick in.

One thing I like about Canada - I pay $600/yr provincial health premium - that's 0.8% of my income. Together with my employers extended coverage, even my prescriptions are free.

Kat, I think that the system will (does) work on the state level. I disagree that this plan will work well at the federal level.

For the record, while my party may not like me - I'm a registered Republican. I vote moderate and my views have changed after years of working in internal auditing where I am paid to dig into the underbellies of corporations. After working for publicly held companies, some great others scum, I reluctantly took a job for a major medical non-profit. I have learned to respect the level of commitment and pride some of these hospitals take in treating their communities.

In healthcare there's one overwhelming issue that no one seems to talk about - who cares about quality? Who comes into hospitals, digs into records, interviews patients, looks at outcomes and quality of life and then feeds this information back into the system with a "fix it or you're out" message? Is it Blue Cross? United HealthCare? no. Of course not! It's that horrible evil government of ours requiring that hospitals get more efficient, do a better job actually healing patients and get their costs under control. I've been on the inside, helping dig up the data, connect the systems and figure out how to fix things- only because we had stimulus dollars bribing us to do the work. And the two major medical systems I've worked in BOTH put people in charge of this money to make sure they would leverage every last dollar to improving patient outcomes. It's pretty effing awesome actually!

Who requires mega-corporations to sign that the management team actually understands their own accounting system? Congress did it -not stockholders. Making the CFO sign that he or she can be held personally responsible for the financial accuracy of a corporation's financial disclosures. I've been in the room and watched how this has changed things.

How big should government be? Big enough to keep the playing field fair, to enforce the law to assure safety. Without some kind of federal requirement to protect us from ourselves - your child might be the one that dies. None of us know what our future holds. If you're self insured you could lose it due to a failure of your business or the economy. If you have insurance through your company this year, next year they could cut it. If you are well employed with a great job - and you have a terminal illness you may not be able to continue to work, and therefore qualify for insurance throughout the treatment of your disease.

By the way - in most states there's a one to two year hold between becoming qualified for medicaid and actually getting it. This keeps those entitled folks from quitting their uninsured jobs, to qualify for medicaid when they experience a major medical issue. This is how we protect ourselves form un or under insured persons just quitting their jobs when they're sick and using our payroll taxes to pay for the insurance that they chose not to purchase until they needed it.

I won't begrudge you the right to opt out of medical care - you can opt yourself and your children out if you like - but there's NO WAY you should be able to show up begging for treatment if life doesn't pan out like you expect. Again - it's FINE to choose to stay uninsured as long as you promise to stay OUT of hospitals no matter WHAT happens to you unless you have cash to pay up front. Otherwise you're just a taker like any other unemployed American asking for a taxpayer handout.

Feel free to hate Obama care - but you should at least man up and provide a workable alternative. At least it's 95% of what we Republicans were asking for back in the day - that's not bad coming out of a Democrat held executive branch!

Kaiser is fear mongering. You do not have to use the government plan to be covered. You can use any plan you choose, including the one you're already on. Kaiser didn't even have the decency to site their sources. Their metrics are unverifiable.

If your current insurance company is planning on bumping your coverage costs to these astronomical levels, you need to switch your coverage. Do some health insurance shopping. Maybe you can group up with other small businesses and get a group rate.

What if you have a minimum coverage plan that doesn't meet the new mandated minimal coverage, can you still keep it?

That's a good question.
In MA, companies had a grace period to bring their level of service up to standards if they wanted to be a provider in the state. The companies are making money, the burden is on them to provide a standard minimum level of coverage.

One thing I like about Canada - I pay $600/yr provincial health premium - that's 0.8% of my income. Together with my employers extended coverage, even my prescriptions are free.

So your federal, provincial and GST taxes don't go towards health care at all, just the $600?

I was wondering the same. What are they paying in taxes total compared to the taxes on Americans with SS, income, payroll taxes? Not to mention any State or Local taxes.

And what if your current plan has to make changes to their policies to meet the Obamacare standards? I can bet they will raise their premiums along with that...

There's also going to be a huge variance from state to state because some force insurance to cover a lot of things that other states don't. i.e. if insurance has to cover alternative therapies & the like your monthly rates will be higher than if you live in a state that only requires the basics be covered.

The penalty for not having health insurance should be $1,000, it should be guaranteed refusal of emergency care. That will wake everybody up to the need for single payer real quick.

Don't know where they get their estimates, I pay a lot more than $951 for myself. Plus each year my premiums go up and coverage goes down.

My mother-in-law found out last week that she needs both knees replaced. The surgeon suggested that she have them both ASAP, because with the ACA, Medicare will not pay for it or aftercare for people over 65 beginning in 2014. Can someone please tell me how this is called “Affordable” if she has to sell her house to pay for it?

People, in general, fear what they don't know. A lot of people don't understand the system, the inherent problems, or how to go about fixing them. Taking a survey qualifies them to trash the plan they don't understand.

Unfortuanately, this is the problem. No one understands the plan, not even the politicians who wrote it!