Obamacare info the media never told us

These are links to IBHomo's MILLIONS paid in taxes?

or did you not understand any of this?

These are links to IBHomo's MILLIONS paid in taxes?

or did you not understand any of this? Originally Posted by Yssup Rider

Nope, they are links to the 100's of trillions you Ozombies cost our country... Spunk Liker...

It's called buying votes.

Of course, somebody has to pay. Just not your average Democrat Voter. Originally Posted by Jackie S

Exactly - the working and taxpaying slaves pay for free shit for the layabouts, who vote for the motherfuckers who egg them on to riot and demand more shit.
It is an unvirtuous circle.

Exactly - the working and taxpaying slaves pay for free shit for the layabouts, who vote for the motherfuckers who egg them on to riot and demand more shit.
It is an unvirtuous circle. Originally Posted by Jewish Lawyer

And the Demagogues keep getting elected.

You would think after the current Demagogue in Chief is finished, the Country would learn.

But it won't. The handle has already been pushed, the water has swirled, and the big Turd that was The United States of America is headed for the septic tank of failed Democratic Republics.

And the Demagogues keep getting elected.

You would think after the current Demagogue in Chief is finished, the Country would learn.

But it won't. The handle has already been pushed, the water has swirled, and the big Turd that was The United States of America is headed for the septic tank of failed Democratic Republics. Originally Posted by Jackie S

Then you'll be leaving with JLIdiot for the land of milk and Uzis?

And the Demagogues keep getting elected.

You would think after the current Demagogue in Chief is finished, the Country would learn.

But it won't. The handle has already been pushed, the water has swirled, and the big Turd that was The United States of America is headed for the septic tank of failed Democratic Republics. Originally Posted by Jackie S

Well put!

Well put ... Your ass on a plane back out of MY country!

How Taxpayers are Funding Obamacare's 'Insurer' Taxes


If you've been reading this blog you know that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare" or "ACA" in the below article) contains a set of provisions commonly called the "Three R's" program to provide taxpayer funds and additional premium to insurers who aren't as profitable as they'd like to be in the first three years of the exchanges. A few of Obamacare's 20+ new taxes are levied on insurers. Today, Kaiser Health News and the USA Today detail how states are stepping in to pay a significant portion of these taxes on behalf of insurers ahead of a September 30th payment deadline. Just think of it as a bonus bailout as we head into the fall season. The below is from Phil Galewitz:


When Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, it required health insurers, hospitals, device makers and pharmaceutical companies to share in the cost because they would get a windfall of new, paying customers.

But with an $8 billion tax on insurers due Sept. 30 -- the first time the new tax is being collected -- the industry is getting help from an unlikely source: taxpayers.
States and the federal government will spend at least $700 million this year to pay the tax for their Medicaid health plans. The three dozen states that use Medicaid managed care plans will give those insurers more money to cover the new expense. Many of those states – such as Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee – did not expand Medicaid as the law allows, and in the process turned down billions in new federal dollars.
Other insurers are getting some help paying the tax as well. Private insurers are passing the tax onto policyholders in the form of higher premiums. ...

Wait do you mean that insurers don't just pay all additional Obamacare taxes and fees from the bloated, yacht-buying profits of millionaire and billionaire CEOs? Flabbergasting! Okay, back to KHN:


Medicare health plans are getting the tax covered by the federal government via higher reimbursement.


Hey that works out well, doesn't it? The federal government can just step in and pay its own increased taxing schemes with your money. Why didn't we think of this before?


State Medicaid agencies say they have little choice but to pay the tax for health plans they hire to insure their poorest residents. That’s because the tax is part of the health plans’ costs of doing business. Federal law requires states to pay the companies adequate rates.

“This situation results in the federal government taxing itself and taxing state governments to fund the higher Medicaid managed care payments required to fund the ACA health insurer fee,” said a report by Medicaid Health Plans of America, a trade group.


That emphasis is mine.


Meanwhile, many Medicaid managed care companies have seen their share prices – and profits -- soar this year as they gained thousands of new customers through the health law in states the expanded Medicaid. Over half of the 66 million people on Medicaid are enrolled in a managed care plans.

A KHN survey of some large state Medicaid programs found the tax will be costly this year. The estimates are based in part on number of Medicaid health plan enrollees in each state and how much they are paid in premiums. States split the cost of Medicaid with the federal government, with the federal government paying on average about 57 percent.

...Florida anticipates the tax will cost $100 million, with the state picking up $40 million and the federal government, $60 million.

...Texas estimates the tax at $220 million, with the state paying $90 million and federal government, $130 million.

...Tennessee anticipates it will owe $160 million, with the state paying $50 million and the federal government, $110 million.

...California has budgeted $88 million, with the state paying $40 million and the federal government, $48 million.

...Georgia estimates the tax on its plans at $90 million, with the state paying $29 million and the federal government, $61 million.

...Pennsylvania predicts the tax will cost $139 million, with the state paying $64 million and the federal government, $75 million.

...Louisiana estimates the tax will cost $27 million, with the state paying $10 million and the federal government, $17 million.

Texas is believed to be the only state that has not yet agreed to cover the tax for its health plans, according to state Medicaid and health plan officials. “The premium tax is just another way that the costs of the Affordable Care Act are pushed down to states and families,” said Stephanie Goodman, spokeswoman for the Texas Medicaid program.

Medicaid officials in other states complain that paying the tax reduces money they could have spent on covering more services or paying providers.

“I do not feel I am getting anything in return for this,” said Tennessee Medicaid Director Darin Gordon.

Officials won’t know exactly how much states owe until the Internal Revenue Service sends bills to insurers at the end of August, and the Medicaid plans submit those to states.

The health insurer tax is estimated to bring in at least $100 billion over the next decade from all insurers, government auditors estimate. ...

“We consider this tax so badly construed that it should be reconsidered because it makes no public policy sense,” said Jeff Myers, CEO of Medicaid Health Plans of America.

The trade group, which represents both nonprofit and for- profit Medicaid plans, also opposes the tax because it takes money from Medicaid programs that could be used to pay plans to improve care, he said. ...


http://benefitrevolution.blogspot.com/



.

Nope, they are links to the 100's of trillions you Ozombies cost our country... Spunk Liker... Originally Posted by IIFFOFRDB

I would say the Ozombies have only cost us about 50 trillion - but it is hard to say for sure, plus now some dumbass will ask for a link

Just listen to a 1.5 hr interview of Craig on the Michael Berry show...

There is some good info on his blog. http://benefitrevolution.blogspot.com/ Originally Posted by IIFFOFRDB

I wonder how many Doctors are complaining about all the extra paperwork they have to do to satisfy Obama's bureaucrats? I'm sure the vendors of data processing software are happy, anyway.
Personally, I'd rather my Doctor not have extra paperwork/software expense/data entry burdens.

Thanks Obama!!

I would say the Ozombies have only cost us about 50 trillion - but it is hard to say for sure, plus now some dumbass will ask for a link Originally Posted by Jewish Lawyer

Some "dumbass" will ask you to back up your bullshit with facts

OH, The Horror! The Horror!

Where is that ASTRO-TURFING BITCH?



http://benefitrevolution.blogspot.com/

Benefit Revolution
Free Market Solutions for Employee Benefits and Human Resources


FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014


Health reform compels insurers to take all comers, with no express ability to moderate the inflow of sick enrollees. It also mandates robust, one-size-fits-all health plans with intense pressure to keep costs 'affordable'. The result? A perverse new form of subterranean, Y2.1K rationing:
A 20% to 50% reduction in available doctors
Removal of high quality, costly centers of excellence
Carrots and sticks to lure the healthy and dissuade the ill
Generic only drug plans
Reduction in fraud and abuse prevention efforts

No single, sweeping governmental approach can adequately nationalize or, in the case of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA” or “Obamacare”), semi-nationalize one-sixth of the American economy without dramatic unintended consequences. Economic self-interest demands that businesses find ways to maximize profit and minimize the restrains of governmental interference. When the Administration set out to write and implement PPACA, it did so with two overarching goals:
To cover the 45 million uninsured Americans; and
To stop insurers from underwriting plans with restrictions against new, sick, uninsured members.
Yes, I remember the second stated goal was to rein in costs, but even many of the law’s staunchest supporters have abandoned that mantra as it is clear PPACA is going to cost far more than it purports to save. At passage Obamacare was slated to cost just under a trillion dollars over the first decade. In the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) June projection, that cost is now set to be $1.4 trillion.

As for the first goal, the June CBO report also stated that the law will only make a minor dent in the nation’s uninsured population. There were 45 million uninsured when PPACA passed and after ten years under the law, we’ll still have 31 million uninsured.

Well, at least supporters of PPACA’s 2,500 statutory pages and additional 30,000 to 40,000 pages of regulations can point to the fact that insurers may no longer turn away potential customers. Even the sickest among us who show up after they have been diagnosed with a devastating illness won’t be denied care. And on its face, that is true. But again, our country’s infatuation with the elimination of all consequences for individual decision-making has simply added confusion, complexity and deep market distortions to an already overly complicated industry.

Insurers are not sitting back with open arms and welcoming all of the poorest, sickest and most costly patients. Instead, we are now in a brave new world of rationing, restriction, and manipulation in order to nudge the worst risk among us to choose the other insurer’s plan. The below is an overview of the allowable ways insurers can restrict sick folks from flocking to their plans under PPACA.

Doctor Rationing
Nothing in Obamacare keeps an insurer from reducing its costs by eliminating the top 10, 20 or even 50 percent of most expensive doctors from its network. In California, we have seen nearly every insurer implement this strategy at some level both in and out of the Exchanges. In fact, insurers are now being sued by consumers who claim that they have been denied the right to healthcare by the insurer’s severe restriction of available doctors.

Contracting with fewer doctors than your competitor presents two economic advantages to an insurer. First and most obviously, you reduce the cost of your medical service team by eliminating, for example, the top third of most expensive doctors. Secondly, less doctors means longer wait times and the customers most likely to put up with longer wait times are the healthiest ones that never need to go to the doctor anyway. Intensive plan users don’t put up with excessive wait times because they can't. Healthcare policy expert, Doctor John Goodman has written extensively on this principle of 'rationing by waiting'.

Treatment Rationing
Another very simple way to keep costs down and ensure that the very sickest Americans don’t sign up for your plan is to remove or greatly curtail access to costly centers of excellence. High end treatment centers for cancer, transplants and dialysis represent a massive portion of any group’s medical claims. By removing those places from your network an insurer creates a poignant disincentive for the sick to enroll. For the limited number of high costs specialists that are available the insurer can further restrain utilization by checkering the process for care with a litany of required referrals, second opinions, and tests before treatment can begin.

Patient Rationing
Insurers and self-funded employers are also getting in on the action by taking advantage of the industry’s favorite new buzzword: wellness. Wellness means many things in the benefit world. Information-only programs (the overwhelming majority of them) don’t work, waste time, but allow the touchy-feely crew to feel good - as if they’ve accomplished something.

Wellness that can work, however, comes with a carrot or a stick. From an insurer’s standpoint, offering robust health and wellness perks such as discounts on gym memberships, for example, attract the right kind of clientele: the already healthy ones. On the flip side, we are seeing growth in the brand of wellness that comes with corporate spankings from momma and poppa employer. Most often administered by self-funded health plans, these programs charge employees an extra $50, $100 or more for their health insurance if they are not keeping weight down, alcohol away and tobacco out of their lives. It now looks, however, like some of these spankings have become ruthless enough that the grandma and grandpa federal agencies are about to put a stop to them.

Drug Rationing
Over the last decade, prescription drugs have represented one of the fastest growing costs for all health plans. In Obamacare’s new school of rationing, plans have begun to add additional deductibles onto, for example, brand name prescriptions. Plans that wish to go further implement what we call generic-only plans that limit a patient’s choice solely to generic drug coverage unless there is absolutely no generic drug available for the treatment required. Plans with these restrictions attract younger, healthier enrollees while pushing the costly folks who need specialty autoimmune or hemophilia medication to seek out plans with more robust prescription benefits.

Fraud and Abuse Protection Rationing
PPACA limits what an insurance company can keep for all overhead (rent, payroll, utilities, other expenses and profit) to 15% or 20% depending on the size of the insured group. Stated alternatively, an insurer in California’s large group (over 50 employee) insurance market must pay 85 cents of every dollar on medical claims for its insured and can then keep 15 cents for itself. If the insurer miscalculates and ends up with 16%, it must rebate 1% back to all of its policy holders in the state. Out of that 15% also comes customer training and fraud prevention. So guess what we now get less of?

Virtually all insurance fraud shows up as claims anyway. So if an insurer becomes less vigilant about fraud and abuse monitoring, claims elevate. When claims elevate, insurers can charge a higher premium and the 15% they are allowed to keep also grows. The disincentive here is truly disturbing. But it is a classic example of an unintended consequence of price controls in a quasi-free market.

Rationing has always existed in healthcare in one form or another and it always will. All of the techniques described in this article existed before Obamacare. But Obamacare’s simultaneous removal of pre-existing limitations and mandate for robust, comprehensive coverage forced insurers to ratchet the rationing up and move it into the shadows where it will metastasize into all of our healthplans.

Remember When Obama Said Obamacare Would Not Cover Abortions?… Yeah, He Lied About That, Too


http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014...bout-that-too/

Posted by Jim Hoft on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 12:41 PM


Barack Obama promised several times that abortion funding would not be included in Obamacare.


It was a lie.
Insurance companies are including secret fees to cover the costs of abortions in their Obamacare premiums.

And now a new report from the GOA shows Obama repeatedly misled Americans.
LifeNews reported:



When he signed the Obamacare bill into law, President Barack Obama promised the American people that Obamacare would not pay for abortions — going as far as signing an executive order to that effect. A new GOA report shows he misled Americans.

Despite a promise President Obama made to lawmakers and the American public in a special joint session of Congress on healthcare reform that “under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortion” a new report released by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) today documents massive new public funding of abortion in the President’s healthcare law.

The GAO report also found that nearly all of the insurance issuers sampled are not itemizing the required separate abortion surcharge on its bills – confirming that the Obama Administration is ignoring the law’s abortion accounting gimmick.

ObamaCare Scorecard Now Includes 450 Employers with More Than 100 School Districts Cutting Workers and Hours

http://news.investors.com/politics-o...#ixzz3CyBEDVeX

Univ. of Chicago Econ Professor: The Myth of ObamaCare's Affordability


In summary:
Americans will work fewer hours less productively under the perverse disincentives of PPACA
Society has to make sacrifices in order to deliver healthcare to more people
Workers and production are taken away from other industries to beef up healthcare

The following is from Casey Mulligan writing in the Wall Street Journal. His entire post is certainly worth the time to read. Here is an excerpt:

... Although the ACA helps specific populations by giving them a bigger slice of the economic pie, the law diminishes the pie itself. It reduces the amount that Americans work, and it makes their work less productive. This slows growth in both personal income and gross domestic product.

In further expanding the frontiers of redistribution, the ACA reduces the benefits of employment for both employers and employees. Employers that don't provide health insurance are either subject to large penalties based on the number and types of employees that they have, or are threatened with enormous penalties when they get the opportunity to expand their business. About a quarter of the nation's employees, more than 35 million men and women, currently work for employers that don't offer health insurance. These tend to be small and midsize businesses with employees who already make less than the average American worker. The result of penalizing businesses for hiring and expanding is going to be less hiring and expanding.

Another sixth of the nation's employees—almost 25 million people—are in a full-time position that makes them ineligible for the law's new and generous assistance with health-insurance premiums and cost sharing. They are ineligible for subsidies simply because they are working full time and thereby eligible for their employers' coverage. Because the only ways for them to get the new assistance is to move to part-time status, find an employer that doesn't offer coverage, or stop working, we can expect millions of workers to make one or more of those adjustments.

Most people wouldn't give up working merely to qualify for a few thousand dollars in assistance. But it is a mistake to assume that nobody is affected by subsidies, because there are people who aren't particularly happy with working, planning to leave their job anyway, or otherwise on the fence between working and not working. A new subsidy is enough to push them over the edge....

The law has effects that extend well beyond the employment rate and the average length of the workweek. People, businesses and entire sectors will jockey to reduce their new tax burdens or enhance their subsidies. Their adjustments to the new incentives will make our economy less productive and stifle wage growth, even among workers who have no direct contact with the law's penalties and subsidies.

The "29er" phenomenon is a good example of how the law harms productivity. Because ACA's "employer mandate" requires firms with 50 or more full-time workers to offer health plans to employees who work more than 30 hours a week, many employers and employees have adopted 29-hour work schedules. This is not the most productive way to arrange the workplace, but it allows employers to avoid the mandate and its penalties....
... [T]his ... exacerbates the societal problem that the economy cannot expand its health sector without giving up something else of value.... The ACA as a whole will have the nation working fewer hours, and working those hours less productively.

I estimate that the ACA's long-term impact will include about:

3% less weekly employment,
3% fewer aggregate work hours,
2% less GDP and
2% less labor income.

These effects will be visible and obvious by 2017, if not before. The employment and hours estimates are based on the combined amount of the law's new taxes and disincentives and on historical research on the aggregate effects of each dollar of taxation. The GDP and income estimates reflect lower amounts of labor as well as the law's effects on the productivity of each hour of labor. ...