11–20 of 383 posts
I work with someone who has health insurance from the California exchange. His assigned doctor is about a 2 hour drive away. Maybe he has picked the cheapest plan but such a situation shouldn't really happen if this was well run.
Did he get put in an HMO? If he got a PPO plan, there shouldn't be a doctor assignment, right?
It could be that the only doctor he was able to find that could take his PPO plan is 2 hours away.
This makes it a no-brainer for anyone earning over ~$90k to get health insurance (as it's cheaper than not having it).
Yet it doesn't force low income earners into having private health insurance: they fall through to the safety net of the public healthcare system.
It's not a perfect solution; but it's perhaps slightly better than what the USA has at the moment?
I work with someone who has health insurance from the California exchange. His assigned doctor is about a 2 hour drive away. Maybe he has picked the cheapest plan but such a situation shouldn't really happen if this was well run.
_Assigned_ doctor? Did he get put in an HMO? If he got a PPO plan, there shouldn't be a doctor assignment, right? It could be that the only doctor he was able to find that could take his PPO plan is 2 hours away.
Kind of a contentless article - of course there will always be people who choose the penalty instead of coverage. Some will be rational choices, some will be short-sighted. It looks like the overall forces, though, are good for the ACA - the penalty is going up, more healthy people are signing up for coverage, the risk profiles are stabilizing, etc. All of this should theoretically help create more choice in the exch…
I don't know. I think the stories from people who are actually trying to use the ACA should bear a lot of weight.
I'm against Obamacare, but if I was for it, I would peg the penalties at 2x the avg basic exchange coverage price. Also, people with high deductibles should make sure you take advantage of tax benefits, HSA for instance. The $6000 deductible may really only be a $4800 deductible once you figure in the tax deduction. If you're talking Obamacare coverage being 20% higher than the penality (I'm assuming the penalty is n…
My current plan has an has an HSA component but the company that administrates the account, BenefitWallet, has some fine print in the account agreement that they charge an account fee for balances less than several thousand dollars. Realistically I only spend several hundred dollars per year on healthcare stuff so I don't think it is to my advantage to lock up that much money in a non-interest bearing account or pay…
Ah, the tragedy of the commons at work.
Healthy people don't buy insurance because it's too expensive. Insurance is more expensive because there are too many expensive sick people and not enough healthy people paying into it.
It's a terrible feedback loop, one which the IRS penalties were designed to solve.
Personal experience with ACA: As of 2016, we're onto our 3rd insurer. Each prior one has dropped our local doctors, physicians groups and hospital. With each insurance change, our deductible has gone up, our premium has increased and our co-pay, co-insurance has increased. In effect, our ACA plan has become an extremely expensive catastrophic insurance plan.
In Australia the penalty is 1% of your income (or more) https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Medicare-levy/Medicare-le... This makes it a no-brainer for anyone earning over ~$90k to get health insurance (as it's cheaper than not having it). Yet it doesn't force low income earners into having private health insurance: they fall through to the safety net of the public healthcare system. It's not a perfect solution; but i…
Pretty much anything would be. Health care in Italy was better than in the US, and that's saying something - Italy is a nice place, but not always run that well.
A more market-based system might be better too as at least for some things there might be some downward pressure on prices.
The current system (including pre-Obamacare in that as well) just sucks.
Kind of a contentless article - of course there will always be people who choose the penalty instead of coverage. Some will be rational choices, some will be short-sighted. It looks like the overall forces, though, are good for the ACA - the penalty is going up, more healthy people are signing up for coverage, the risk profiles are stabilizing, etc. All of this should theoretically help create more choice in the exch…
I don't know. I think the stories from people who are actually trying to use the ACA should bear a lot of weight.
An article about just a handful of people who choose to pay the penalty (rationally or not) is not a very enlightening way of evaluating the program overall, standing alone. I don't think this was the purpose of the piece, but it is naturally the way the piece will be used by opponents of the program. This is generally the role played by anecdotes in any policy discussion. (See the top of this thread for more examples.) For this information to be truly valuable for this purpose, it would be joined with a representative collection of stories about other people's experiences so one can form an accurate impression of how the program is actually working. (It could, of course, be debated whether the New York Times has provided this broader context in a meaningful way through its other ACA coverage.)
The article does provide some interesting human detail, and illustrate the depth of some people's convictions about (i.e., opposition to) the ACA, however, which seems valuable and enlightening in its own right. But this angle doesn't well serve anyone's political agenda.