7 Reasons why Obamacare is a predicted disaster: A refresher

2) Obamacare Premiums. Multiple news reports and many here, including myself, have had increases in their premiums directly related to Obamacare. I have employer based coverage, and in order to get out ahead of the obamacare employer mandate, my company went ahead and conformed to the Ocare mandates, and my premiums increased 40%, and required me to pay out of pocket for Short term disability, which i previously had covered by my insurance, yet it was deemed, not good enough by the government. Luckily my company ate most of the premium increase costs, and i'm in good health, so my visits to the dr. are very rare.
However, those with their own private insurance are getting sticker shock, now that they are mandated to be covered completely by Obamacare.
49-State Analysis: Obamacare To Increase Individual-Market Premiums By Average Of 41%
From Obamacare facts own website.

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The high cost of healthcare insurance under Obamacare will likely mean that fewer young, healthy people will sign up for coverage, and President Barack Obama's recent administrative fix to allow Americans to retain their current policies could ultimately lead to insurance premium "sticker shock" for many consumers.

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The American Action Forum released a study last month showing that the lowest-cost health insurance coverage for a 30-year-old single male nonsmoker is set to increase by 260 percent between 2013 and 2014.

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"As a follow-up we have applied the same methodology to a 30-year-old single female nonsmoker purchasing the lowest-cost bronze level plan and the results – including an average increase of 193 percent – are just as shocking," the study disclosed.

Unfortunately it is this group of younger people the administration is depending upon for the success of the state-level insurance exchanges. An estimated 2.7 million 18- to 35-year-olds will have to participate for the Affordable Care Act to work as intended.

The outrage resulting from the millions of insurance cancellation notices prompted the Department of Health and Human Services last week to propose the administrative fix that would allow insurers to renew policies for current enrollees without adopting the 2014 market-rule changes.

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LINK

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Across North Carolina, thousands of people have been shocked in recent weeks to find out their health insurance plans will be canceled at the end of the year – and premiums for comparable coverage could increase sharply.

One of them is George Schwab of Charlotte, who pays $228 a month for his family’s $10,000 deductible plan from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina.

In a Sept. 23 letter, Blue Cross notified him that his current plan doesn’t meet benefit requirements outlined in the Affordable Care Act and suggested a comparable plan for $1,208 a month – $980 more than he now pays.

“I’m 62 and retired,” Schwab said. “This creates a tremendous financial burden for our family.

“The President told the American people numerous times that… ‘If you like your coverage, you can keep it,’” Schwab said. “How can we keep it if it has been eliminated? How can we keep it if the premium has been increased 430 percent in one year?”

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Blue Cross spokesman Lew Borman said Friday that large premium increases will affect about one-third of the approximately 400,000 North Carolina customers who buy Blue Cross insurance in the individual market. Some of their policies were canceled because they didn’t meet the new federal standards, he said.

The other two-thirds of individual customers have policies that are “grandfathered” and will have smaller premium increases similar to recent years.

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LINK

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After receiving a letter from her insurer that her plan was being discontinued, Deborah Persico, a 58-year-old lawyer in the District, found a comparable plan on the city’s new health insurance exchange. But her monthly premium, now $297, would be $165 higher, and her maximum out-of-pocket costs would double.

That means she could end up paying at least $5,000 more a year than she does now. “That’s just not fair,” said Persico, who represents indigent criminal defendants. “This is ridiculous.”

If the poor, sick and uninsured are the winners under the Affordable Care Act, the losers appear to include some relatively healthy middle-income small-business owners, consultants, lawyers and other self-employed workers who buy their own insurance. Many make too much to qualify for new federal subsidies provided by the law but not enough to absorb the rising costs without hardship. Some are too old to go without insurance because they have children or have minor health issues, but they are too young for Medicare.
Others are upset because they don’t want coverage for services they’ll never need or their doctors don’t participate in any of their new insurance options.

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The disruptions being caused by the new law have been especially jolting for those who support the ideals of the health-care overhaul.

Marlys Dietrick, a 60-year-old artist from San Antonio, said she had high hopes that the new law would help many of her friends who are chefs, actors or photographers get insured. But she said they have been turned off by high premiums and deductibles and would rather pay the fine.

“I am one of those Democrats who wanted it to be better than this,” she said.

Her insurer, Humana, informed her that her plan was being canceled and that the rate for herself and her 21-year-old son for a plan compliant with the new law would rise from $300 to $705. On the federal Web site, she found a comparable plan for $623 a month. Because her annual income is about $80,000, she doesn’t qualify for subsidies.

A cheaper alternative on the federal exchange, she said, had a premium of $490 a month — but it was an HMO plan rather than the PPO plan she currently has. “I wouldn’t be able to go to the doctor I’ve been going to for years,” she said. “That is not a deal.”

And both the HMO and PPO exchange plans she examined had family deductibles of $12,700, compared with her current $7,000.

Robert Laszewski, an industry consultant, said he thinks the rise in rates was inevitable. The new law, he said, has resulted in an estimated 30 to 50 percent increase in baseline costs for insurers.

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LINK

3) They don't know how to implement it. There have been 27 different delays to the Obamcare rollout, and 2 of the most notable, are the employer mandate delays. Recently the Obamacare employer mandate was delayed a 2nd time to be enacted now in 2015, rather than this year. The simple fact is that the government does not know how to run the system. The website still isn't working correctly, premiums are skyrocketing, and rampant reports of id theft and fraud are coming from the rollout. They simply do not have all of the x's and o's covered and how could they? You can not tranform the entire healthcare system for the population of America with a convoluted 3000 page bill, that does not state any clear concise rules/regulations for the website, and have it being managed by someone as inept as Sebelius. Another obvious reason for the delay, is that the left does not want Obamacare forced on everyone before the elections because it will directly impact their chances of gettting re-elected.
4) It is unsustainable already. The youth they need for it to survive are not signing up. The Obamacare advocates stated that a generous 2.7 million young people would have to sign up for Obamacare in order for premiums to go down. Well, multiple reports have shown that those that will pay the lion's share of the increase in premiums are the young people they need to sign up. So how do you get someone to sign up for healthcare when you tell them that they will be charged more to subsidize everyone else's healthcare? You don't. The youth will not sign up, and premiums for all will skyrocket. Also, let's couple this with the fact that you are taking that 20-27 year old population out the equation, because via Obamacare, they can now be covered under their parents. Again, there is no possible way you can get enough young people signed up to mitigate the costs of this bill.

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Fears that insurance exchanges that are the linchpin of President Barack Obama's federal health care overhaul wouldn't attract the young, healthy people needed to make them financially viable are being heightened by the early results of signups in several states.

If it becomes a trend, that could lead to increases in insurance premiums and deductibles next year. Along with the paltry enrollment numbers released this week, officials in a handful of states said those who had managed to sign up were generally older people with medical problems — those with the greatest incentives to get coverage.

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Huffpo

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As Robert Frank pointed out in the business section of the New York Times, for Obamacare to succeed, millions of young, healthy uninsured people need to buy into the program and purchase insurance. All of them. One look at the proposed premiums for the bottom tier plans designed to attract those millions and anyone not blinded by wishful thinking could have seen that Obamacare was going to fail.

The cost alone of these "low end" policies are producing sticker shock when people see them. It gets worse when people see what the insurance companies are actually offering for these premiums. That's when they get the second shock.

Many uninsured are finding that the bronze or lowest end policies are being priced in the range of $250 a month and up on average and that they come with $6,000 yearly deductibles(pdf) to be paid out of pocket before they get full coverage. Until then, they pay 40% in co-pays until the $6,000 out-of-pocket is reached in addition to the monthly premiums. And again, this is for the bottom tier polices for a single person, not a family. Costs to a family are higher.

It doesn't take Warren Buffet's financial savvy to figure out that young, healthy uninsured Americans, who are largely uninsured because they cant afford health insurance in the first place, are not going to be flocking to buy these policies for the privilege of having a health insurance card in their wallets that requires another $6,000 out-of-pocket before their expenses are fully covered and includes co-pays of 40% of all initial costs until that $6,000 is reached. What most of them will do is what they have been doing – live without insurance and go to an emergency room if they need medical care where the law says they have to be treated whether they have insurance or not.

The returns so far on Obamacare bear this out and spell disaster. It's not about glitches on the website. The percentage of people who get to the site who are filling out applications is miniscule – as of this writing approximately 6m hits resulting in about 700,000 applications, or a little better than 10% of those visiting the site. And remember, applications are not enrollments, they are only people filling out a required general application before they are even able to see what's being offered and does not obligate an applicant to choose a plan.

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theguardian

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Bug, I applaud your effort, but this is WAY to much info FOR ME to absorb in this forum.

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Fixed it.

5) It does not provide quality healthcare.

This article on Huffpo states it best

Doctor Shortages

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According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, the federal agency charged with improving access to health care, nearly 20 percent of Americans live in areas with an insufficient number of primary care doctors. Sixteen percent live in areas with too few dentists and a whopping 30 percent are in areas that are short of mental health providers. Under federal guidelines, there should be no more than 3,500 people for each primary care provider; no more than 5,000 people for each dental provider; and no more than 30,000 people for each mental health provider.

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), unless something changes rapidly, there will be a shortage of 45,000 primary care doctors in the United States (as well as a shortfall of 46,000 specialists) by 2020.

In some ways, the shortage of providers is worse than the numbers indicate. Many primary care doctors and dentists do not accept Medicaid patients because of low reimbursement rates, and many of the newly insured will be covered through Medicaid. Many psychiatrists refuse to accept insurance at all.

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Christiane Mitchell, director of federal affairs for the AAMC, predicted that many of the estimated 36 million Americans expected to gain coverage under Obamacare will endure long waits to see medical providers in their communities or have to travel far from home for appointments elsewhere.

During the debate over the ACA, Mitchell said the AAMC pushed for the federal government to fund additional slots for the training of doctors, but that provision was trimmed to keep the ACA from costing more than a trillion dollars over 10 years.

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Aging Boomers
There are various reasons for the shortages. Certainly a big contributor is the aging of the baby boomers, who may still love rock ‘n roll but increasingly need hearing aids to enjoy it. The growing medical needs of that large age group are creating a huge burden for the existing health care workforce. The retirement of many doctors in the boomer cohort is compounding the problem.

The federal government estimates the physician supply will increase by 7 percent in the next 10 years. But the number of Americans over 65 will grow by about 36 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Money also is a factor in the shortages. During the course of their careers, primary care physicians earn around $3 million less than their colleagues in specialty fields, which makes primary care a less appealing path for many medical students.

In mental health, the problem is that much of the work is in the public sector, where the pay is far less than it is for providers in other medical specialties, who tend to work in the private sector. As an example, according to the National Council for Behavioral Health, a registered nurse working in mental health earns $42,987 as compared to the national average for nurses of $66,530.

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]Valuing Work-Life Balance [/b]
But financial factors are not the leading reason that medical students are avoiding primary care, Mitchell said. In surveys of medical students conducted by AAMC, students valued “work-life balance” more than money when they were choosing their specialties. Because primary care often involves long hours and night and weekend calls, it is far less desirable to this generation of students.

“Half of the physicians in training are women,” Mitchell said. “You find more of them are looking for a career that might be compatible with part-time hours, that don’t involve being on call. Men are more engaged in child care today, and they have similar concerns as they consider their career choices.”

A steady stream of negative attention has made medicine in general a far less attractive career choice than it once was, according to Rosenberg of the National Council for Behavioral Health. Insurance headaches, pricey technologies, long hours and the risk of liability have convinced many talented students to eschew medicine as a career choice.

“Nowadays,” Rosenberg said, “the best and the brightest are talking about becoming investment bankers or going off to Silicon Valley.”

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LINK

You can't keep your doctor.

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Yesterday I testified before the House Ways & Means Health Subcommittee, arguing that Obamacare is going to restrict your access to providers.

No, in all likelihood, you can’t keep your doctor.

I found one Obamacare health plan that offers access to only seven pediatricians for a county with 260,000 children. Another Obamacare plan offers access to only nine dermatologists, most 100 miles away. A systematic analysis we did of the plans shows that, on average, their networks include about 40% to 50% of the number of specialists that are available in comparable commercial PPO health plans.

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Today, I have an op ed in the New York Times that I co-wrote with Dr. Zeke Emanuel arguing that – despite the conventional wisdom in the media – Obamacare is unlikely to cause a doctor shortage.

How can these two truths co-exist?

In my view, easily.

While there is unlikely to be a doctor “shortage” for the reasons we argue in the New York Times, that doesn’t mean that the Obamacare plans will enable broad access to these providers.

Quite the opposite.

The Obamcare plans are a throwback to the old HMO model that was soundly rejected in the 1990s in favor of PPO style health plans.

What Obamacare, in effect, tells Americans, is that the White House believes many people made the wrong choice when they rejected those HMOs in favor of PPO plans that offer broader access to providers (often in exchange for slimmed down benefits and, in many cases, higher deductibles).

Obamacare forces consumers to buy a broader menu of primary care benefits, and fixes their co-pays and deductibles at lower levels than many PPO style plans allow.

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But the tradeoff is access.To pay for the expanded Obamacare benefits, consumers are forced into narrow networks that limit their choice of doctors. This cheapens the policies enough to offset the other costs.

Some consumers mistakenly believe that if they buy a Silver, Gold, or Platinum plan under Obamacare, they can buy up their benefits. It doesn’t work that way.

Mostly what vary between the different “metal” plans is the co-pays and deductibles. In many cases, the networks are exactly the same as the bronze plan networks.

As for a doctor shortage, don’t count on it. Most of the predictions of a looming shortage make straight-line assumptions from today’s use of doctor resources.

As we argue in the New York Times today, there’s every reason to believe that technology will continue to make the aging process itself (and the treatment of many diseases) a far less resource intensive endeavor – and ones that require fewer physician inputs for a higher level of “outputs” in terms of improved healthcare.

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6. Obamacare will lead to 2.5 million + people reducing their hours.

And now let's dive into the economic impact on businesses directly contributed to Obamacare. As stated above, the delay in the employer mandate was mostly due to the elections. This is because once enacted, many people will either lose their jobs or have their hours cut. According to the CBO, 2.3 million + will have their hours cut or lose their jobs as a direct result of obamacare.
LINK

But why? Why would hours be cut or jobs be lost simply because of a mandated healthcare program? Simple, because of the mandate. The employer mandate requires companies that employ 50 or more people to either provide their employees with Obamacare standard insurance, or face a fine, and then the employees will be required to buy Obamacare. This directly leads to job loss. If you are an employer, and you employ 50+ people, and most of them are hourly workers; the restaurant industry is a prime example; you must now pay for an added cost of health insurance. A proper business owner will have to find a way to mitigate the cost of this insurance. Therefore hours will be cut below 30, in order to not have to pay for insurance, and/or employees will be laid off to keep under that 50 employee mark. This has happened to a cousin of mine, in anticipation of this law, who works at the chimes. She is now working 2 jobs to supplement the lost hours she was having at chimes.

Another statement that came from the left and Jay Carney this week, is that the cutting of these hours is a good thing. And that now, by having Obamcare, and not working as much, people will free themselves up from job lock and be able to explore their entrepreneurial dreams. This assumption is false in many ways.
1) The white house is acting under the delusion that the 2.3 million who lose their hours/jobs are all entrepreneurs who were just waiting for the opportunity to start their own business. The glaringly obvious illogical assumption aside, where will these people get their loans from now, to start their own business? In order to start a business you need capital, a business plan, an idea, and investors/loans. If the bank makes their money off of giving out loans and people repaying them with interest, or on investments, and savings deposits (Basically their money is made from reinvestments of other people's money), then how will the bank even have the capital to lend, if people's hours are cut, and they are unable to make deposits or investments in the first place? Bank loans will be much more picky about who they choose to invest in, and loans will either be given out with very high interest rates, or will not be given out at all.
2) So the claim is that reduction of hours and obamacare is great because it allows "expression and freedom" to the former full time worker. What about paying bills? If you lose your hours, how do you afford a mortgage, utilities, car notes, etc... You just compounded the problem of not affording health insurance, to now not being able to afford to live.
3) Obamacare is not free, and as proven above, is more expensive now, than before. So now your hours are reduced, you are struggling to pay bills, and now you are paying more for insurance. Explain how this is "freeing" to someone.

The simple fact, is that the CBO projection is a) understated and b) devastating to the Obama regime. They simply putting lipstick on a pig. All this does increase the economic impact on everyday citizens who are unfortunate enough to have to get Obamacare.

Reducing reasons from 10 to 7, because i've combines some in each point.

I see i got 2 downvotes after i posted the first reason. Do you care to explain your reasoning?

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see i got 2 downvotes after i posted the first reason. Do you care to explain your reasoning?

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What's a 'downvote?' I'm being disenfranchised.

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It has been reported that 30% of those enrolled in Obamacare didn't make their first payment, did the government still pay their subsidies?

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It's funny. The left are calling them every name in the book. These are the people the left changed the entire healthcare system for.

LINK

So this adds an 8th wrench in the mess that is Obamacare. What do they do, if their enrollees do not pay? Do they still count them in the enrolled list? I doubt it. Now you have a huge margin of those that initially enrolled not on the list, and you still are pushing the agenda through? And like the above stated, are they still getting subsidies? Well done Democrats. Well done.

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I hope some Obamacare advocates chime in with an equally detailed counter-perspective, just so I can get the full picture. But, I doubt that will happen

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Yup, surprisingly silent response from the proponents of the law.