Are states' rights more important than human lives?

[Hauldren Collider]

By the way, just in case it wasn't clear, I'm not defending Ben. I haven't read his posts. I'm sure he is absolutely completely wrong about anything he said.

[BlackCat]

I'm sure he is absolutely completely wrong about anything he said.

Yep, he's quite like you.

[giblets]

By the way, just in case it wasn't clear, I'm not defending Ben. I haven't read his posts. I'm sure he is absolutely completely wrong about anything he said.

Your prediction is correct.

[Hauldren Collider]

Yep, he's quite like you.

This is a paradox.

[BlackCat]

This is a paradox.

Nope. There are three posters here at Poly that are known to be inherently wrong by default : BK, Oerdin and HC

[Hauldren Collider]

It speaks to your low intelligence that you would include me on that list.

[DaShi]

He's right though. You are frequently wrong.

[BlackCat]

It speaks to your low intelligence that you would include me on that list.

Nah, your comment speaks more about your lack of reality

And don't think that you are on top of that list - Oerdin has credability when he talk about geology.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Nope. There are three posters here at Poly that are known to be inherently wrong by default : BK, Oerdin and HC

Very true.

[Ben Kenobi]

Hauldron Collider thinks that by disavowing me that he will gain status here. Oddly enough, it's not working.

[Hauldren Collider]

Very true.

You realize that would imply that Jaguar and Kuci are also generally wrong about everything, as well, yes?

[DinoDoc]

Wasn't it called The Affordable Health Care for America Act?

Health insurance rates going up by double digits: NYT
Remember that Nancy Pelosi told us that we needed to pass ObamaCare to find out what’s in it. Barack Obama promised to “bend the cost curve,” too. Looks like both of them were right, at least according to the Paper of Record, which discovers to its surprise that dumping nebulous mandates on insurers causes them to bend the cost curve sharply upward (via Instapundit):

Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.

Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.

In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.

Why should this surprise? The must-issue regulation built into ObamaCare increases costs for the insurers, who cannot draw all of the needed revenues from the high-risk pool, thanks to mandates on rates. That means those costs have to get spread out to everyone in the pool. This is nothing more than Risk Pool 101, a course that Congress flunked repeatedly in the ObamaCare debate.

And why are rates rising higher on individual premiums than employer-based premiums? First off, the economics of aggregation are always going to work out that way; insurers want large groups of customers, and it’s less costly in the long run to find customers that way rather than one at a time. I’d guess that the employer-aggregate pool might generate somewhat lower costs than the general population too (especially after must-issue), but that’s just speculation. What isn’t speculation is that ObamaCare heavily regulates the individual markets in 2014 based on a law that doesn’t have many details in how that is supposed to be accomplished, based on state exchanges that may never exist in more than half of the states. In that kind of environment, can anyone blame the insurers for basing premiums on worst-case scenarios this year?

None of this surprises those who both understand risk pools and the dynamic reaction to regulation. It’s amusing to see everyone else be shocked, shocked that ObamaCare ends up driving costs upward even further.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Across the street from the house I lived in until about four years ago, there was a woman who was a perfect example of cost scoping of high risk pools. It was an interesting neighborhood - one of the earliest 'burbs of San Diego with dirt roads, a trolley system and full of pre-WWI Craftsman houses, then two or three generations of re-building with crappier houses, then a development no-mans land in the 1960s and '70s when developers owned and operated the city council and planning commission and neighborhoods were pillaged by developers who would buy out all the old folks, then block-bust to push others out, consolidate lots and put in ugly ass generic apartments. Then in the late '80s, a new city council comprised of actual vertebrates decided a little regulation of zoning might actually help city and neighborhood development. So we had a 100 year old Craftsman in near perfect condition, across the street from little crappy apartments.

The neighborhood nutcase and her nutcase daughter had a solution to not being able to afford insurance. Call 911 and get the paramedics out there. They're legally obligated to respond, and as long as there is some medical issue, nothing they can do to legally sanction her. In five years, at least 80 paramedic responses and a half dozen ambulance rides. So I'm paying for her "health care" whether it's through "Obamacare" or not. The problem with the insurance rates going up argument is that it implicitly assumes we're somehow magically not paying for the uninsured and high-risk people's health care costs - that they have the basic courtesy to not access taxpayer funded health resources and just die quietly in a convenient location without imposing a cost burden on the rest of us.

One of the main reasons for the Romneycare individual mandate was that it was more cost effective overall to have those people in some form of standardized subsidized health care system, rather than playing games (or making genuine need-based calls) with public health and first responder resources. So yeah, insurance premiums will go up. That's a given. However, there should be (absent state, county and municipal game playing with budgets) offsetting external cost savings.

[DinoDoc]

(absent state, county and municipal game playing with budgets)

Why do you assume this? Can you post an example of the cost savings as well? Just one link will satisfy my curiosity.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Why do you assume this?

Just because costs decrease as a result of reduced non-essential first responder calls and reduced public health system access, doesn't mean the money will find its way back to taxpayers. I'm sure local government will find ways to hang on to it, without actually substantially doing anything useful with it, either. The core point that gets missed in the "higher cost" argument against the ACA is that costs for the previously uninsured already exist, they're just extermalized inefficiently. The real comparison isn't added costs from a base of zero, it's internalized cost vs a more inefficient externalized cost.