Aetna Silver for primary + spouse (not the family plan, which is worse) is $454 per check after a $245 company supplement. So close to $700 every 2 weeks (if unsupplemented). $1400/month in Nebraska is enough for a nice single family home (2000-ish square foot finished plus an unfinished basement) in a good neighborhood.
The prices are just stupid-silly. But when you see what the health companies are charging, the insurance companies have no choice but to charge that much.
Well if you want to point fingers, we live in a society where anytime a baby is born in a hospital and doesn’t have an great outcome, there is a good chance that health system is going to be sued which is why so few OB-GYNs practice solo anymore. the Malpractice insurance is incredible.
Even before ACA and the exchanges came out, there were a lot of conversations about the fact it only works on demand… not at supply at all. It would also take time to get people who didn’t get regular care to stop using the more expensive ER care they’ve been using for years.
There is more to be done.
I am in Central California, and I currently pay (thru my company) over $1,500 a month for a pretty weak Blue Shield plan. I have looked into just dumping the company insurance and going to Covered California, where pretty close to the same insurance would end up costing me $450 +/-. Business has not been good and I would qualify.
Around here $1,500 a month would buy a nice house.
So, what does the silver plan lack compared to your current healthcare insurance? And presumably it’s actually cheaper?
it’s generally higher deductible and co-pays.
When I used them a couple years ago I was given a $250 a month credit to pay for health insurance that I bought through the market. The subsidies are based on your expected income for that year, so if you use up all the credit and then wind up grossing more than the income limit for subsidy qualification I imagine you’ll be paying some or all of that $3000 back on your income taxes. I believe I only used $150 a month because I didn’t want to risk that. I ended up making under the subsidy requirement anyway and wound up getting something like $600 back of unused credit on my tax refund.
Regardless of income, if you’re using these credits I believe you have to file taxes. That’s how they determine whether or not you’re even qualified to have received them.
Well it looks like my current plan is going up from $1,500 a month to $1,900, I really don’t know where I can find the extra $400 a month from. Previously living in the UK, Canada and France I never had to think about these things. I don’t know why they don’t get some tech company to build an efficient national infrastructure for a national health service, increase federal tax rates by 2 points across the board and give free healthcare to everyone. If I was president, that’s what I would do!
Because that would make sense, and be socialist and so 51% of the country would hate it.
Geez, and I thought ours going up 200 was bad. 1900 a month? For how many?
6 of us
There have now been things posted up on Trump’s transition site, about how their solution to pre-existing conditions is going to be high-risk pools.
For those who don’t know, high risk pools were things established by some states, where those people who couldn’t get insurance (usually due to pre-existing conditions) could get insurance through the state. Premiums for these people were generally 100% higher than healthy individuals.
This will hurt many people, very badly, if not implemented with some sort of protection for those patients. But the fact that they are essentially suggesting this at all, means that they seem to want to eliminate the protection that patients currently enjoy under the ACA.
This was one of the best aspects of the ACA, and now people want to remove it. I do not suspect that Trump supporters will realize this is happening until it is too late, or they simply will not care about those people with pre-existing conditions until it happens to them directly. This is very depressing to me.
My father was a Trump voter, too ashamed to admit it to his liberal family. I asked him what scuttlebutt around the town was, and he said that among those types, older white guys in the energy industry, there was less a sense of elation than relief. Finally, we’re not target that Democrats hate. Finally we have someone in our corner.
But the other major issue was the exploding costs of Obamacare/ACA. I think Democrats really missed this one and If there was any issue Democrats had their head in the sand over, and really still do, its “Obamacare”; coastal elites either are rich and don’t care or get their insurance from huge multinationals and don’t care. Small business owners and self employed are getting absolutely hammered. My father’s insurance has gone from $850 a month for two people to nearly $3000 a month with a 5k deductible and only an 80/20 plan that in practise only pays 50/50 in four years. He’s worried he isnt going to be able to afford retirement and sees no end to the cost increases.
I wonder now how much ballooning insurance costs influenced this election.
I think it’s fair to wonder if the correct first target for health care reform was universal coverage rather than cost. Because the ACA really didn’t have anything in it about cost, and that has been bad. Yeah, it’s great that XX million more people have healthcare, but the fact that insurance companies continue to raise prices so dramatically is a terrible side effect.
I know it’s more complicated than this, but the stories are rampant and ACA proponents have no good counter-argument.
The insurance companies would never let that happen.
Trump could probably do something, but he plans to just give them what they want, screw the uninsured and call it fixed.
It’d be interesting to ask him if he realizes that he’ll be the target of huge numbers of peoples hate now, for supporting Trump. I mean, I feel like this is going to be a real thing. I admit, I personally feel an almost seething resentment to Trump supporters at this point. I feel as though they should be made to suffer in order to understand the suffering that their choices are likely to cause others. Perhaps the consolation is that there’s a good chance they will.
I agree that it had a big impact, but I think folks seem to forget what was happening to our health insurance costs prior to the ACA. I mean, this was only 6 years ago.
America’s expenditures on healthcare, prior to the ACA, were exploding.
Here is a graph of the per-capita healthcare expenditure in the US:
Note, there’s no bump in that graph. It’s a fucking straight line at about a 45 degree angle. The ACA did, essentially, NOTHING to change our expenditures on healthcare. Now, at the time of its passing, some may recall that I criticized the plan for exactly this reason… That it was not addressing what I felt was the most important problem.
However, at this point, I feel the need to point out that it’s entirely disingenuous to try and fault the system for causing INCREASES in spending, because it absolutely has not. Costs have continued to increase at pretty much exactly the same rate as they had previously, for decades.
And the GOP’s plans, thus far, offer absolutely nothing at all which will change this.
And if you want to look at expenditures compared to GDP instead of per captita, it becomes even more obvious:
Starting in 2010, it flattens out. The ACA didn’t increase how much we were spending on healthcare, as a country, despite increasing coverage to a huge number of people.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. I have a friend who is an ardent Trump supporter, for no reason other than she loved him on The Apprentice and Hillary is a killer. It’s been… hard.
My only consolation is there’s no family Thanksgiving dinner this year, due to my father recovering from surgery. I don’t know if I’d be able to keep my composure (it’s hard enough even in the best of times).
I’m glad (genuinely) that we’ll continue to find common political ground past the election that brought us together at last, Timex.
I elected to stay here in Raleigh rather than go home. I can’t. . . I can’t be around my dad right now. His FB wall is a mountain of anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT, anti-liberal, anti-immigrant hate. He married a fucking Guatemalan. I just can’t do it.
I gave them some sob story about my partner’s new job sucking up all her time, but the reality is, we’re both taking off a bunch of time and spending time doing things that won’t break our hearts.
I have always tried to approach all things from a rational perspective. That’s why I’m a computer scientist, perhaps.
But the anger I feel towards Trump supporters, while perhaps understandable, is ultimately not rational. And we need to come to terms with this.
While things like the repeal of the ACA will no doubt harm Trump supporters (in many cases, as they are largely unemployed and/or elderly, they will be harmed worst of all), this is not a beneficial outcome. While a sense of comeuppance may feel momentarily good, it does not help myself or anyone else in any real sense. At best, it could serve as some sort of “learning moment”, but I feel at this point that there is little that can be done to “teach” people about such things long term.
Likewise, feeling hatred for these people is not productive. I acknowledge that the feeling is there, but I also acknowledge that it’s not the right choice. Not because they are undeserving of it, but because you can’t simply kill millions of people. Hating them will not make them go away.
The best path forward is to try an talk to these people, and engage in rational, honest discussion. Such discussion will never be quick, or easy, or comfortable. But it must be had. A big part of it is simply allowing others to understand our own experiences and fears. To simply put ourselves into the position of the other person.
Christ, I hear you.
My dad is a highly educated man, but at this point he’s had his mind rotted by the far right. Part of it is that he’s old, I guess. And he’s got that casual racism/bigotry that I suspect most folks who were born in the 40’s have. But what makes me so incredibly frustrated is that even if I present him with absolutely concrete evidence that something he says is wrong, it just bounces off. I feel like he’s fallen into some pit, and can’t be pulled out.
I can’t speak for him but I imagine he probably don’t care. Democrats don’t care about him anyway - an old white guy in the oil industry - so what is he losing? Yea. There is a certain logic to resource extraction regions voting Republican, and i’ll admit that from their perspective its fairly logical. But they do represent that old tax and regulation policy first and only branch of the Republican base. That they help enable elect our own little Hitler is probably incidental to them but it’s what happens when you only vote your pocketbook, but from these guys point of view they’re always voting Republican no matter who the candidate is. They’ve probably never actually dealt with a candidate that causes real fallout nationwide though.
As far as the cost of health care; absolutely. ACA didn’t cause runaway health care costs over the whole industry, but it forced insurers to pay for more people, which distributed out to the paying population did seem to cause a pretty large spike in personal insurance costs. And considering that costs just aren’t going down it does seem unsustainable. I haven’t looked at this closely but certainly anecdotally even here it seems like costs are increasing by pretty huge percentage jumps. It just occurred to me when writing above that in the retrospective of “what went wrong” for Democrats the elephant in the room, so to speak, might be unsustainable cost of health care.
I don’t suppose that there’s any advocacy group out there that is well-funded enough (and that those of us with some resources could make contributions to) to put out some “Harry and Louise”* type ads to educate people on the fact that “Obamacare” is the ACA, and that without it a lot of bad things are coming back, and that the insurance market (for employer plans too!) is going to go into a death spiral, and to let your Congressman know etc.?
*the ad campaign that killed “Hillarycare” in 1993-4.