Thanks Obamacare for my 68% premium increase!

a reply to: peter_kandra
Realistic in a capitalistic society? I'm 56, haven't spent a night in a hospital since 1962, and my premium, based on a meager annual earning under $30,000, and I was paying as much as $1000 a month premium. Blue Cross Blue Shield, nothing fancy health insurance. THAT'S capitalism! Now its under $300 under Obamacare. You can't blame Obama. The legislation YEAH LEGISLATION, which is created and offered to a President for signing, comes from CONGRESS! QUIT BLAMING OBAMA FOR EVERYTHING! What did the Republicans offer? Just "free market" insurance. You know, the one where the CEO of the insurance company makes millions, as do the board of directors, VP's, CFO, other management people..... there IS no "free market", it is a MANIPULATED market. The legislation was in the hands of the lobbyists as well as Congress. Congress writes (or has it written for them by corporations) the potential law, the Prez signs. That's how it works in the U.S. system. It may have happened under Obama, and he may have pushed for legislation, but he does not write the bill. Congress is to blame. MY insurance went DOWN to a reasonable amount, NOT UP. It was over 1/3 of my income!

originally posted by: jaxnmarko
a reply to: peter_kandra
Realistic in a capitalistic society? I'm 56, haven't spent a night in a hospital since 1962, and my premium, based on a meager annual earning under $30,000, and I was paying as much as $1000 a month premium. Blue Cross Blue Shield, nothing fancy health insurance. THAT'S capitalism! Now its under $300 under Obamacare. You can't blame Obama. The legislation YEAH LEGISLATION, which is created and offered to a President for signing, comes from CONGRESS! QUIT BLAMING OBAMA FOR EVERYTHING! What did the Republicans offer? Just "free market" insurance. You know, the one where the CEO of the insurance company makes millions, as do the board of directors, VP's, CFO, other management people..... there IS no "free market", it is a MANIPULATED market. The legislation was in the hands of the lobbyists as well as Congress. Congress writes (or has it written for them by corporations) the potential law, the Prez signs. That's how it works in the U.S. system. It may have happened under Obama, and he may have pushed for legislation, but he does not write the bill. Congress is to blame. MY insurance went DOWN to a reasonable amount, NOT UP. It was over 1/3 of my income!

I don't blame Obama for everything, but the reality is that when you're the President, the buck stops with you, or at least it should and ACA is his baby. I won't get into the fact that he tries to pass blame and deflect on everything and I'll try to stay to the topic at hand!

That's great that your insurance costs went down. My annoyance is the fact that my insurance needs haven't changed, nor have my risks or claims increased, yet my premiums have skyrocketed. Another poster mentioned that ACA is really good at redistributing wealth and I think they're right. Another poster mentioned that perhaps a portion of the rate increase is because the maximum out of pocket deductible has been capped at 2 family members as opposed to 3 previously. That may be, but I originally chose the plan that I wanted, at a level of deductibles and co-pays that I wanted. My car insurance company doesn't arbitrarily decide to change my policy deductibles nor does my home owners, life insurance, etc.

Welp, that's me done. Moving back to Europe in 2015.


And raising the minimum wage is just unacceptable huh?

a reply to: jaxnmarko

Well at least there's one person in this thread who isn't a liar or a racist .

originally posted by: 8675309jenny
And raising the minimum wage is just unacceptable huh?

I don't see how that has anything to do with this thread but... Raising minimum wage would likely increase the price of premiums, along with everything else..

originally posted by: xuenchen
Sorry for your problem.

Many warned about this happening.

Are your deductibles higher also?

Deductibles can add up faster than the premium increases.

My premium went down a whole $6 dollars a month but it was my delectable that sky rocketed by 136%. I basically have catastrophic (I'd call it term health insurance) insurance.

And the people who didn't have insurance I know before, well, they still do not have insurance. Imagine that...

originally posted by: LordAhriman
a reply to: jaxnmarko

Well at least there's one person in this thread who isn't a liar or a racist .

originally posted by: 8675309jenny
And raising the minimum wage is just unacceptable huh?

I don't see how that has anything to do with this thread but... Raising minimum wage would likely increase the price of premiums, along with everything else..

Raising the minimum wage would also reduce the amount of HC subsidies they would qualify for.

The plan all along was to ruin healthcare. The goal is a single payer system. By destroying your chance at paying for your plan, the only option is to scrap this system altogether and have a single payer system.

Then, the government will control every aspect of your health, link your benefits to your complying with their mandates such as vaccines, diet, elective surgery etc.. There will be death panels because quite frankly they cannot give everyone what they want, and choices will have to be made.

Doctors will lose all ability to make decisions with their patients and moral is going to plummet. This crisis is designed because of the power it gives the government to control such important decisions. If you have a sick child you will comply or you will not get the help you need, your benefits like ss and medicaid will be cut. Some might think I am extreme, but this is exactly how the other socialist communist countries dealt with their people. America will never again have free choice in healthcare.

What libs say:




What someone warned us was coming eons ago:

a reply to: ausername

yes it IS a socialist wealth redistribution plan - in reverse, from the poor to the rich.

a reply to: SubTruth

It will go on and on and on and..................on.
We will rant on internet forums, we'll yell at the TV news [ when we're not watching Dancing With The Stars or football ] we'll bitch to our neighbors, write letters to our Congressmen and rage at the injustice of it all.
But no one is going to do anything. We're gonna sit here like always and let it roll over us.
People can get pissed and say I'm wrong, they can say that we're Americans By God and we won't stand for this!!
Yeah. We will. Because no one is going to do a damn thing. People are scared of the IRS. Afraid to tell these companies to shove it, that they're tired of some CEO making millions while their kids have to eat Ramen for the 3rd time this week so they can pay the insurance.
You're going to complain.
You're going to get angry.
You're going to do exactly what you're told.

a reply to: peter_kandra

It isn't really a novel idea, except in the US..

originally posted by: wmd_2008

I will ask this question is any of the premium due to the simple fact that in the USA when anything goes wrong all people think about is suing for outrageous sums of money

I think that has a noticeable impact.

First, the medical staff/hospital will have their own insurance to protect them from being sued. The more likely they are to be sued (successfully or not) and the higher the potential awards, the more than insurance is going to cost. That cost will be passed on to the patient.

Second, it leads to an increase in "defensive medicine". Patients can end up being given a battery of expensive (and sometimes pointless) tests and procedures, not because they have any real value in diagnosing or treating the condition, but to ward off a potential lawsuit at a later date. The cost of which is, again, passed on to the patient.

Not all doctors operate this way, but the litigation culture promotes an environment where that sort of approach becomes more likely.

Another impact is the reimbursement issue, which can lead to self-paying patients being charged more to cover the losses from not getting properly reimbursed by insurance companies/government programs.

The ACA has not been beneficial to me at all on so many different levels. The only benefit for me has been that it has reinforced the need for me to proactively take care of my own health much more aggressively. One major thing of many that I do not like about it is there are entirely different outcomes for people depending on how their particular circumstances interface within the insane complexities of the legislation. For example, my sister's friend who has COPD had her insurance company deny her coverage for her oxygen under her ACA compliant policy. She is forced to purchase the oxygen on her own dime. Of course, this is after shelling out a little over $1200 dollars a month for insurance. Prior to the ACA, her insurance had no issues with including oxygen as a covered item.

Whenever one is forced into a market at the point of a government gun, the price will only go up while the quality of the product will only decrease. I prefer to call the ACA the Health Insurance Company Profit Assurance Act (HICPAA).

a reply to: peter_kandra

My insurance jumped about $250 extra a month in premiums. And the hospitals in the coverage system has shrunk as well.

Thanks Govt for screwing up yet another facet of private life.

originally posted by: BilboBaggins3
a reply to: ausername
yes it IS a socialist wealth redistribution plan - in reverse, from the poor to the rich.

I spelled it out earlier in the thread, its called fascism , with oligopolies running things behind the scenes. Despite what many continue to claim the USA is NOT socialist, NOT communist and NOT even a Republic, but instead a Reactionary leaning, Protestant values based, Fascist State. The current "owners of capital" CAN & WILL "legislate" mandatory purchases in the future, if revenue does not match their expectations or projections. If someone chooses not to buy them, they will simply pay a "penalty" at tax time. When the "owners of capital" run out of consumer goods that they can force people to buy, which are used to go to work, like gasoline, internet connection, car insurance, bus/subway fare, cell phones, suits/uniforms, soap, deodorant, razors, etc, they will simply make it law that you MUST to buy them, in certain quantities before tax season. You will not be allowed to be frugal in the future because the "owners of capital" will take close to the same amount back in the form of "penalties", when you choose to "not buy" and then don't have the proper "coupon" to prove you bought these items, in the required quantities, when taxes come due.

What we have is Fascism, plain and simple. We need to stop tiptoeing around the various ideological nuances of the topic and call it out for what it is.

a reply to: peter_kandra
Well, if you've got kids there's no way you can be without insurance but I turned down my COBRA after leaving employment with the school system in my state and have been totally without health insurance for the past 4 years. The amount of money I've saved has paid for a lot of things over that time period! My wife and I have found that we get a 20% discount paying cash in the Medi-Centers we use when we've got the sniffles and, so far, I haven't fallen off a windmill at the ranch while working on them.

The ObamaCare debacle has made such an insane mess of the health insurance industry that I'm still waiting for the dust to settle and see if there's ever going to be anything that's worth looking at again. Until then we'll just pay our fine - if one exists by that time next April 15th if the Republicans take back control of things. Here in Texas I don't think a HC exchange exists since I have heeded all the warnings to stay away from the Obama Care website due to its spyware laden content so I don't really know.

This "regime" is not the sole entity to blame for the mess we're in, for certain. I vote Republican while holding my nose and dream about a clone army of Ron Pauls.

originally posted by: peter_kandra

originally posted by: wmd_2008
a reply to: peter_kandra

Makes me glad I live in the UK even with it's problems the NHS here is good value you, have a percentage deducted from your salary and health care is basically free at point of use irrespective of how much the treatment would cost.

I will ask this question is any of the premium due to the simple fact that in the USA when anything goes wrong all people think about is suing for outrageous sums of money

You may have a point. I personally think that tort reform is long overdue. Interestingly, I just read an article recently that claims that the savings would only be 2 to 3%. I'm not buying that.

Me neither - while sort of anecdotal, here's a little experiment. Turn on the tv midday for any random half-hour, and count the number of "1800 BAD-DRUG" or similar trolling for victims advertisement, trying to put together a class-action basis for whatever. These run on hundreds of stations, 5-10x an hour, all day long. Must be a worthy investment for these legal firms.

Defensive medicine also plays a part - "they" say it's a small part , but similarly, think it's understated.

My fundamental opposition to "Obamacare" was that it was trying to solve the wrong problem. They needed to try to make medical care more affordable, but instead, they made it more expensive, and then "gave it away" - primarily by driving up the costs for everyone else. These bureaucrats and lawmakers simply don't understand economics - and it shows.

Here's the thing - we spend more than *any other country* on medical care - 17.9% of GDP per the World Bank. We could afford universal care with that kind of spending with some commonsense cost controls - reducing torts risks, reducing fraud in government entitlement programs, reducing / eliminating redundant bureaucracies, and so on (and on.)

I often joke that the intent of the ACA was to make privately-provided insurance so expensive, so unusable that people will beg the government to go single-payer, basically Medicaid for all. I'm not sure I believe it's actually a joke - pretty sure that, in the minds of some of its architects/implementers, this was a cynical plan to do precisely that.

Well... I work for a small business and I have health care now.

I didn't before.

a reply to: ForteanOrg

We can bitch and moan about it all we want. The only thing that will make a difference is if many people ban together (boycott) and refuse to pay these high premiums.

If you recall, this was shoved down our throats in the middle of the night, with law makers not even reading the full documentation of what this was going to entail.

If we pay and suck it up, we will continue to receive more of the same until there is no middle class left in this country. just poor and the rich.

originally posted by: carl6405
a reply to: ForteanOrg

We can bitch and moan about it all we want. The only thing that will make a difference is if many people ban together (boycott) and refuse to pay these high premiums.

If you recall, this was shoved down our throats in the middle of the night, with law makers not even reading the full documentation of what this was going to entail.

If we pay and suck it up, we will continue to receive more of the same until there is no middle class left in this country. just poor and the rich.

Government and Big Business knew the Millennial Generation was going to do just that with car insurance, health insurance, student loans and cable TV subscriptions, so how did they decide to stop it, effectively, nipping it in the bud?

Mandatory purchases, enforced through fines, if the "mandatory purchase quota" is not met. The other way was though the brute force of cultural pressure. For example, people whom don't have smart phones are deemed "less employable and up to date" than people whom do have smart phones with expensive data subscriptions, in some rare cases the job application can only be accessed through a smart phone or tablet app.

Resistance to the accumulation of debt and dropping out of the system is not going to work, as many here keep preaching. There is some truth to the thought that Americans citizens are a form of "asset" for the credit worthiness/evaluation of the USA. Mandatory Purchases are a hint to the reality of such a possibility. Government and Big Business WILL make people buy things though legislation eventuality, Obamacare is just the pilot study.

Hence the need for ALL Americans to start recognizing that we are now a Fascist nation, where business tells the people what to do and buy, with government acting as the enforcement "muscle".

truth-out.org...

$500 a MONTH?!?!? Wow.

I live in England (NHS blah blah, not gonna bore you all) but bloody hell! I had no idea people had to pay that sort of money for their insurance?

Is that very expensive or average?

How the hell do normal people dare set foot in a hospital? Is it a question of "shall I Keep the leg or not go bankrupt?"


I see the increase is huge, but if that's fairly standard then that was a SERIOUS problem as it was!