re: Thomas Gallatin: Obama Doubled Your Healthcare Premium

Posted on 5/26/17 at 9:42 pm to bonhoeffer45

Posted by Taxing Authority

Houston

Member since Feb 2010

57386 posts

Posted on 5/26/17 at 9:42 pm to bonhoeffer45

quote:
Quit being intentionally dumb.

is that what you think that was?

quote:
The point made twice now is that the full context of exchange premiums is important. What a person's out-of-pocket costs actually are pre and post-subsidy, and the total unsubsidized premium costs. Ignoring one or the other easily lends itself misinformation without prior knowledge.

Nope. One is a portion of the price. The other is the entirety of the cost. If were measuring cost, measuring a portion of it isn't "context".

quote:
My point even earlier has been that the ACA did very little to address ever increasing prices in the system.

No disagreement from me on that.

quote:
The AHCA does nothing to improve this though.

Nothing will. You can't give away massive amounts of a product or service and simultaneously make it "cheap" for those that pay for it.

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Posted by bonhoeffer45

Member since Jul 2016

4367 posts

Posted on 5/26/17 at 9:55 pm to Taxing Authority

quote:
Nope. One is a portion of the price. The other is the entirety of the cost. If were measuring cost, measuring a portion of it isn't "context".

You just said nothing that was not already covered.

Total costs is important for contextualizing certain things, so you don't want to ignore it. But when a person, like the OP and the person this conversation has stemmed from, begins talking about the consumer impact of premium rises, and throws in things like employer based insurance premiums(another wrench to this discussion due to tax subsidies and employer contribution changes) quoting total costs with what his out-of-pocket premiums, without providing more context is highly misleading. either intentionally or through ignorance. I would add ignoring the context of pre-ACA trends is also poor form.

Had this been a blog post simply about raw prices and unadjusted consumer costs, ignoring that context would be fine. But it wasn't.