dr ben carson...

[Guinevere]

Would you quit it with the actual facts, again? Sheesh, when will you ever learn its all about rumor and innuendo and fear.

[Big RR]

Sue--I do think the AHA changed the law and outlawed group plans for husbands and wife groups for family owned small businesses; at least that's what the information I got from Blue Cross claimed (and I never separately looked at it). These persons were required to get individual coverage, and I'm sure some lost out on either the cost or scope of coverage if not both. But I doubt these are all that many people. I doubt it was an intent of the AHA to drop these groups, but anytime a complex law is put together there are unintended consequences.

[Sue U]

It is true that spouses can no longer qualify as a small business "group" plan, and must purchase individual/family coverage instead. But that "group" was a dodge to begin with. Going solo, I had to buy individual/family coverage as I was no longer part of an employer's group; my out-of-pocket costs went up, but I can claim the premiums as a tax deduction. (I haven't actually run the numbers, but I suspect it is ultimately a wash economically.)

[Big RR]

Well I wouldn't exactly call it a "dodge"; many times spouses worked full time in the business and the group permitted them to get better coverage; and from what my friends have told me, audits were fairly common to see if the spouse was actually employed and oaid (and paid taxes on the wages; worker's compensation coverage was also required). For example, when BC sent me its communication it was offering, for about the same (from what I could see) a policy that was not as good in the prescription drug coverage--copays were a percent of the AWP of the drug instead of a fixed amount, which was only offered for group plans. Now I had an employee as well so it didn't affect me, so I'm not sure if it changed, but for an older business owner who was taking a number of drugs, the out of pocket cost could skyrocket.

[MajGenl.Meade]

audits were fairly common to see if the spouse was actually employed and oaid

That's what my wife said about me when I worked for her in the insurance agency. I was no help at all

[oldr_n_wsr]

any link to that oldr?

I was talking about last year (sorry if I didn't make that clear). I don't knwo what the number canceled this year.
From the Obomacare Facts website http://obamacarefacts.com/health-insura ... cellation/

Going into ObamaCare’s first enrollment period in 2013 4.7 million or the 270 million with health coverage lost plans.

That was out of the 7million or so they (the gov) claimed to have signed up for 2014.

ETA
Found another: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2 ... /17353673/

Hundreds of thousands of Americans will soon receive cancellation letters affecting their 2015 health care plans — and that number may quickly rise into the millions. This wave of cancellations will fall into two categories. The first group hit will be in the individual market, the same group that suffered through at least 6.3 million cancellation letters last year.
.

And the small business extension ends this year (2015) unless it's been extended again???

But that's still only the tip of the cancellation iceberg. A far greater threat looms for the 40 million Americans who receive health insurance through small business employers, also known as small-group plans.

Anticipating the crippling costs of Obamacare, many small businesses opted for early renewals at the end of 2013. This enabled them to continue their existing policies into 2014, avoiding Obamacare's onerous mandates for another 12 months. All small-group renewals this year, however, must comply with all of Obamacare's regulations and mandates for next year.

[oldr_n_wsr]

I agree there are parts that are good like keeping kids on your plan til 26 (we had that in NY already) especially since the job market for HS and College grads sucked (still sucks) and many of the jobs they are getting (if they get a job) do not have health coverage. Not being denied for pre-existing condition is another.
But all of this comes at a big cost especially given the groing medicare/caid numbers and those with subsidies. Nothing is free. Wait til the gov reaches all those 30million still not insured (which I thought was the main reason for this law).

[rubato]

A lot fewer unpaid hospital admissions due to Obamacare.

Big savings after less than 1 year. It will be more this year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/us/he ... .html?_r=0

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/won ... aid-bills/

Affordable Care Act Reduces Costs for Hospitals, Report Says

By ROBERT PEARSEPT. 24, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration increased the pressure on states to expand Medicaid on Wednesday, citing new evidence that hospitals reap financial benefits and gain more paying customers when states broaden eligibility.

In states that have expanded Medicaid, the White House said, hospitals are seeing substantial reductions in “uncompensated care” as more patients have Medicaid coverage and fewer are uninsured.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, and Jason Furman, the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said the data should persuade more states to expand Medicaid.

“Because of the Affordable Care Act,” Ms. Burwell said, “we project that hospitals will save $5.7 billion in uncompensated care costs this year. Hospitals in states that have expanded Medicaid are projected to save up to $4.2 billion of the total amount.”

Twenty-seven states have expanded Medicaid. Many of the others, which have balked until now, are likely to reconsider the issue when state legislatures convene next year.

White House officials said they wanted to work with Republican governors on Medicaid, as they did with Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, a Republican. They reached an agreement with Mr. Corbett last month on a plan to expand Medicaid by using federal funds to buy private health insurance for about 500,000 low-income people.

The administration did not single out other states for special attention, but Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas — all with Republican governors — are obvious candidates. Health policy experts estimate that 3.5 million people could gain coverage if those states expanded their Medicaid programs.

Uncompensated care represents the combined total of unpaid hospital bills and charity care provided to low-income patients.

Financial reports from investor-owned hospitals and surveys by several state hospital associations show that Medicaid expansion has reduced the number of patients who cannot pay their bills, Ms. Burwell said in issuing a report on trends in uncompensated care.

The study was part of a White House campaign to improve public perceptions of the Affordable Care Act before the midterm elections on Nov. 4 and the start of the next annual open enrollment period for people to buy health insurance, beginning on Nov. 15.

In the first enrollment period, which ended five months ago, the White House orchestrated an extensive national effort to enroll seven million people in private health plans through the federal and state insurance exchanges. The White House said it had signed up eight million people, of whom 7.3 million have paid their premiums and still have coverage.

Ms. Burwell declined Wednesday to set a numerical goal for the new open enrollment season. She said she was considering whether to do so.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that enrollment through the exchanges will climb to a total of 13 million next year and 24 million in 2016.

Charles N. Kahn III, the president of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents investor-owned companies, said, “The increased payments for previously uncompensated care are a plus for hospitals.” But he added: “You have to remember the context. We are living with heavy cuts in Medicare, which were put in place by the Affordable Care Act.”

Federal officials analyzed financial reports from hospital operators like HCA Holdings and Tenet Healthcare, as well as data collected from two dozen states by the Colorado Hospital Association. In states that expanded Medicaid, they said, hospitals reported increases in Medicaid admissions ranging from 17 percent to 32 percent, with no evidence of significant increases in other states.

Nine states led by Republican governors have decided to expand Medicaid. But Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, the vice chairman of the Republican Governors Association, has opposed expansion, saying it would move tens of thousands of people in his state from private insurance onto a government program.

yrs,
rubato

[rubato]

Just this year's enrollments:




Big success.

We will save even more in uncompensated care this year.

yrs,
rubato

[rubato]

And now, just because I like you and know that you need more practice reading charts and graphs:



http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/won ... aid-bills/




With text for those wishing to practice exegesis; Republicans will practice eisegesis, as is their wont:

HHS: Obamacare coverage is reducing hospitals’ unpaid bills
By Jason Millman September 24, 2014

Medicaid expansion seems to be playing a major role in the reduction of hospitals' uncompensated care. (Noah Berger/Bloomberg News)

The Obama administration is projecting that hospitals will face $5.7 billion less in uncompensated care costs than they otherwise would have in the first full year of the Affordable Care Act's coverage expansion.

Millions more people with health insurance means fewer uninsured patients are coming through hospitals' doors. That means fewer costs from bad debt or charity care from people unable to pay their bills, which amounted to about $50 billion for the nation's hospitals in 2012.

Five years ago, when advocates were still trying to build support for the bill that became the ACA, they saw the potential for reducing the costs of uncompensated care as a big selling point. That's because those costs were already getting passed along to the tabs of people who could pay. This "hidden tax" amounted to about $1,000 for family coverage, according to a 2009 analysis from Families USA.

"When there's uncompensated care, it gets fed back into premiums," Council of Economic Advisers chairman Jason Furman said Wednesday in a briefing with reporters. However, officials said they didn't specifically calculate how the lower costs from uncompensated care would show up in the premiums people pay for coverage.

The reduction in uncompensated care is much greater in states that expanded their Medicaid programs under the Affordable Care Act, according to the new report. About three-quarters of the reduction in uncompensated care, or $4.2 billion, will be seen in about half the states that expanded their Medicaid programs under the federal health care law.

The new uncompensated care figure is based on a previous Department of Health and Human Services projection that an additional 10.3 million people gained insurance in 2014 — though, as previously explained, it could be another year before we have the most reliable numbers. For the new report, HHS also reviewed publicly reported data from the five largest for-profit hospital groups and surveys from major hospital associations.

As the following chart shows, the major hospital systems and associations reported major reductions in uninsured admissions when comparing the first quarters of 2013 and 2014. The drop was more pronounced in states with expanded Medicaid programs.



Meanwhile, the administration said the Medicaid expansion seems to be driving an increase in hospital volume. Hospitals in expansion states saw the volume of Medicaid patients increase between 4 percent and 31 percent between the first quarters of 2013 and 2014, but HHS said it didn't find evidence of an increase in non-expansion states.

yrs,
rubato

[wesw]

i m on Kasich now. get with it man!

[BoSoxGal]

Carson doesn't believe in evolution, among his other weird beliefs:

Former neurosurgeon Ben Carson rallied Republicans at the Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday, stirring up speculation once more that the conservative activist will seek his party's presidential nomination next year. Carson has never run for office and only recently registered as a Republican, but as the author of six books over more than two decades, he does have a considerable paper trail—and it's starting to get him into trouble.

In his 1992 book Think Big, for instance, Carson proposed a national catastrophic health care plan modeled on federal disaster insurance, which would be funded by a 10-percent tax on insurance companies. He also proposed re-thinking best practices concerning end-of-life care, advocating for a "national discussion that would help us all rethink our culture's mind-set about death, dying, and terminal illness"—similar to the provisions of the Affordable Care Act that conservatives now dismiss as "death panels." (A Carson spokesman told BuzzFeed last week that the health care proposal is "as relevant to his view today as our current military action in Afghanistan is compared to our military strategy in Afghanistan two decades ago.")

Although filled with inspiring stories of medical miracles and his own rough-and-tumble roots, Carson's books also reflect the views of a social-values warrior whose anti-gay comments recently caused him to withdraw as a commencement speaker at Johns Hopkins University, his longtime employer. A sampling:

On intelligent design (from Take the Risk):

From what I know (and all we don't know) about biology, I find it as hard to accept the claims of evolution as it is to think that a hurricane blowing through a junkyard could somehow assemble a fully equipped and flight-ready 747. You could blow a billion hurricanes through a trillion junkyards over infinite periods of time, and I don't think you'd get one aerodynamic wing, let alone an entire jumbo jet complete with complex connections for a jet-propulsion system, a radar system, a fuel-injection system, an exhaust system, a ventilation system, control systems, electronic systems, plus backup systems for all of those, and so much more. There's simply not enough time in eternity for that to happen. Which is why not one of us has ever doubted that a 747, by its very existence, gives convincing evidence of someone's intelligent design.

On the failing of the fossil record (from Take the Risk):

For me, the plausibility of evolution is further strained by Darwin's assertion that within fifty to one hundred years of his time, scientists would become geologically sophisticated enough to find the fossil remains of the entire evolutionary tree in an unequivocal step-by-step progression of life from amoeba to man—including all of the intermediate species.

Of course that was 150 years ago, and there is still no such evidence. It's just not there. But when you bring that up to the proponents of Darwinism, the best explanation they can come up with is "Well...uh...it's lost!" Here again I find it requires too much faith for me to believe that explanation given all the fossils we have found without any fossilized evidence of the direct, step-by-step evolutionary progression from simple to complex organisms or from one species to another species. Shrugging and saying, "Well, it was mysteriously lost, and we'll probably never find it," doesn't seem like a particularly satisfying, objective, or scientific response. But what's even harder for me to swallow is how so many people who can't explain it are still willing to claim that evolution is not theory but fact, at the same time insisting anyone who wants to consider or discuss creationism as a possibility cannot be a real scientist.

On abortion (from America the Beautiful):

This situation perhaps crystallizes one of the major moral dilemmas we face in American society today: Does a woman have the right to terminate another human life because it is encased in her body? Does ownership convey absolute power of life and death over the owned subject? If it does, then NFL quarterback Michael Vick was unfairly imprisoned for torturing and killing dogs in Atlanta.

On gay parents (from The Big Picture):

Recently a homosexual couple brought a child in to be examined on one of our neurosurgical clinical days. During lunch, after the couple had left, one of my fellow staff members commented favorably on the couple's obvious love and commitment to the child. He said to me, "I know you don't approve of homosexual relationships and wouldn't consider their home a healthy atmosphere in which to raise a child. But I was impressed by that couple. I think their sexual orientation is their business. Think what you want, but it's just your opinion."

My response wasn't nearly that politically correct. "Excuse me, but I beg to differ," I said. "How I feel and what I think isn't just my opinion. God in his Word says very clearly that he considers homosexual acts to be an 'abomination.'"

On how gay marriage brought down the Roman Empire (from America the Beautiful):

I believe God loves homosexuals as much as he loves everyone, but if we can redefine marriage as between two men or two women or any other way based on social pressures as opposed to between a man and a woman, we will continue to redefine it in any way that we wish, which is a slippery slope with a disastrous ending, as witnessed in the dramatic fall of the Roman Empire.

On Washington[Redacted] owner Dan Snyder (from One Nation):

On the other hand, many of the greatest achievers in our society never finished college. That includes Bill Gates Jr., Steve Jobs, and Dan Snyder, who is the owner of the Washington [NFL franchise].

(Carson elsewhere defended Snyder's refusal to change his team's name and called the oft-criticized owner "far from the demonic characterization seen in the gullible press that allows itself to be manipulated by those wishing to bring about fundamental change in America.")

On Independence Day (from Think Big):

I do not get to see many movies, but when I watched the video of Independence Day with my sons, I was struck by the portrayal of the resistance efforts mounted against the alien invaders from outer space. The frail and arbitrary distinctions so often made between various segments of society, even between different countries and ideologies, instantly melted away as the people of the entire world focused not on their differences but upon a common threat and the common goal uniting them—the protection of the planet from alien invaders.

Unlike some of his fellow candidates, though, Carson has made little effort to sugar-coat his most polarizing views. Even before he revealed any political ambitions, he'd moonlighted as a traveling Creationism advocate, giving speeches on the subject and even debating skeptic Richard Dawkins on evolution in 2006:

[wesw]

I believe in evolution and (italics) creation.

but I m very liberal....

[Lord Jim]

The frail and arbitrary distinctions so often made between various segments of society, even between different countries and ideologies, instantly melted away as the people of the entire world focused not on their differences but upon a common threat and the common goal uniting them—the protection of the planet from alien invaders.

He stole that one from the Gipper:

In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside of this world.

[rubato]

The frail and arbitrary distinctions so often made between various segments of society, even between different countries and ideologies, instantly melted away as the people of the entire world focused not on their differences but upon a common threat and the common goal uniting them—the protection of the planet from alien invaders.

He stole that one from the Gipper:

In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside of this world.

Who borrowed it from hundreds of others before him. It is a very old and oft-repeated idea. It was fear of GB which was used to bring unity to the original United States and the United Provinces of the Netherlands were united by the common external enemy of Philip II.



yrs,
rubato