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Many See I.R.S. Penalties as More Affordable Than Health Insurance

nytimes.com

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Re: Many See I.R.S. Penalties as More Affordable Than Health Insurance

#61

Post by clamprecht »

tptacek wrote: post #27
jhulla wrote: post #4

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.

If you don't have preexisting conditions, you can still buy PPOs from the big insurers as non-ACA plans.

I spent many hours looking for this and couldn't find any individual PPO plans that cover Austin, Texas. If you know of one, please send it my way.

Re: Many See I.R.S. Penalties as More Affordable Than Health Insurance

#62

Post by eplanit »

mikeash wrote: post #35
dibujante wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Canadian, I am astonished at how expensive even the cheapest of these plans are. My monthly healthcare cost amounts to $178, once you factor in the taxes I pay that go to healthcare. That's cheaper than any of the plans in this article. How do people find these prices bearable?

They're cheaper than getting sick and not having insurance. I'll pay almost anything to ensure that a sudden medical event doesn't bankrupt me.

> "I'll pay almost anything to ensure that a sudden medical event doesn't bankrupt me."

Exactly, and reflects the mafia-esque choice imposed on the consumer when rates are increased: pay the absurd rate or face absolute ruin if (when) a sudden medical event occurs.

Re: Many See I.R.S. Penalties as More Affordable Than Health Insurance

#63

Post by methodover »

mgkimsal wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have preexisting conditions, you can still buy PPOs from the big insurers as non-ACA plans.

Don't you then face a penalty anyway for not having an ACA compatible plan?

I think he's saying, you can buy a plan from outside the official marketplace. You still want to get a plan that qualifies as a real health insurance plan for the purposes of the penalty. It's probably pretty hard to NOT do that when buying a plan, however.

Re: Many See I.R.S. Penalties as More Affordable Than Health Insurance

#64

Post by clamprecht »

privong wrote: post #39
ars wrote: post #33

The plans have been a disaster. They got rid of the only plan that makes sense for young people: Catastrophic insurance (deductible of over $10,000). The plans that remain have high enough deductibles to be worthless, but low enough to be expensive. The plans helps almost nobody. The only people who gain value from the exchanges are those who get a subsidy. To make things worse insurance companies are pulling out in…

> The plans have been a disaster. They got rid of the only plan that makes sense for young people: Catastrophic insurance (deductible of over $10,000). Don't forget, that was by design. The law needs young, healthy people to put money into the system to support the expenses insurance companies would encounter due to the increased coverage for less healthy people.

I am okay with paying more to cover others who can't afford it. What I'm not okay with is losing my plan, my doctor, and my benefits, all while paying more.

Re: Many See I.R.S. Penalties as More Affordable Than Health Insurance

#65

Post by x5n1 »

narrator wrote: post #56
x5n1 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so it goes, National Healthcare like Britain or Canada is what America needs and what the medical establishment does not want. But somehow I think America would screw that up as well.

I think it would bankrupt the government if they did single payer without price caps on drugs. We already spend about double, as a percent of GDP, on health care compared to other countries. Getting the costs under control is the only way to approach reforming health care that's going to work.

So get those costs under control, it's not like you need profiteers like your boy Shkreli profiteering off this stuff. Also ban drug marketing while you are at it. They spend half that money on marketing the drugs to consumers.

Re: Many See I.R.S. Penalties as More Affordable Than Health Insurance

#66

Post by mikeash »

eplanit wrote: post #62
mikeash wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're cheaper than getting sick and not having insurance. I'll pay almost anything to ensure that a sudden medical event doesn't bankrupt me.

> "I'll pay almost anything to ensure that a sudden medical event doesn't bankrupt me." Exactly, and reflects the mafia-esque choice imposed on the consumer when rates are increased: pay the absurd rate or face absolute ruin if (when) a sudden medical event occurs.

It's mildly terrifying. If you're unlucky enough to break a major bone or get cancer or something like that, you could literally be on the hook for millions of dollars. I lived overseas for a couple of years, and when I got back to the US one of the first things I did was obtain health insurance because of this.

Re: Many See I.R.S. Penalties as More Affordable Than Health Insurance

#67

Post by Frondo »

mgkimsal wrote: post #40
mecameron wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal experience with nearly all health care insurance plans since the 90's: Each year the premiums go up, the out of pocket costs increase, and benefits decrease (beyond more than general inflation).

I understand premiums going up annually. I don't understand 30-50% increases year on year.

When I read this stuff, I'm a little astounded about how bad the situation must be in other states. Here in the Pacific Northwest, my premiums have actually been going down and the plan offerings are getting better. The provider I was on did go out of business so I had to switch, and I'm now paying less for more services.

And, to be totally frank, having had a pre-existing condition that kept me from buying any insurance (literally no one would sell to me pre-ACA), the law's been a net positive for me.

I feel bad for people in other states, in Oregon it was been a pretty sweet deal for me.

Re: Many See I.R.S. Penalties as More Affordable Than Health Insurance

#68

Post by privong »

methodover wrote: post #60
privong wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a terrible feedback loop, one which the IRS penalties were designed to solve. But it shouldn't be surprising that the IRS penalties (in current form) could not solve this. This eventuality was predicted before the law was passed in the Senate (e.g., [0]). It seems fairly obvious that this would happen unless fines are somehow pegged to the cheapest insurance rates (as dpweb notes in this same HN story[1]). [0]…

Wouldn't the problem with that be, insurance companies would have an incentive to raise prices as high as they can, knowing that the public would basically be required by law to pay them (or an equivalent penalty)? That incentive sounds pretty terrible for the public. Great for insurance companies though.

> Wouldn't the problem with that be, insurance companies would have an incentive to raise prices as high as they can, knowing that the public would basically be required by law to pay them (or an equivalent penalty)?

The public is already required by law to pay the insurance companies. But with a fixed, lower fine, I suppose there's a "laffner curve", where insurance companies can't raise their prices too much or enough people will opt for the IRS penalty that the insurance market would stop having enough buy-in.

Re: Many See I.R.S. Penalties as More Affordable Than Health Insurance

#69

Post by millstone »

tomohawk wrote: post #32

Inevitable result of thinking that adding even more government intervention would result in better, cheaper plans. If they were really interested in making better, cheaper plans, they would roll back most of the ACA, eliminate the restrictions on buying across state lines (actually allow competition), and transfer the tax incentives for getting insurance from employers to employees. Basically, all they had to do to m…

The experience with credit card deregulation should put the lie to the idea that selling across state lines results in meaningful competition and better products.

After the Supreme Court ruled that credit cards could be issued across state lines, the issuers migrated to states with the weakest consumer protections. As expected, this was followed by a series of abuses: credit card issuers would raise rates without warning, hiked late and overlimit fees, and buried key information in fine print to obscure the true cost.

It fell to the federal government to impose stronger consumer protections, via the CARD Act.

Much of the ACA was concerned with strengthening consumer protections by ending policies like rescission, lifetime limits, or denial for pre-existing conditions. If we were to repeal the ACA and allow selling across state lines, we should expect the re-introduction of these policies and worse.

Re: Many See I.R.S. Penalties as More Affordable Than Health Insurance

#70

Post by ploxiln »

daurnimator wrote: post #13

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…

from TFA:

> For 2016 and beyond, the penalty will be $695 per adult or 2.5 percent of household income, up from $325 per adult or 2 percent of household income last year.

The difference is that health care costs in the US are nonsensical. So high that it's really hard for the penalty to be less than the cost of insurance, until you have a six-figure income. If you make low-six-figures, you very likely get good health insurance through your employer (which ends up being priced much more reasonably because the group includes mostly healthy people).

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