Will Obamacare get its act together in time?

[Captain ******* Kirk]

Why are you guys ****ting up my thread on the launch of the ACA to talk about Ted Cruz and the dumb****s who actually believed in his BS "defund Obamacare" publicity stunt?

[Sava]

My purpose is to shit up threads... all threads. Even my own... which are by definition, shit.

[Captain ******* Kirk]

I don't blame you.

[PLATO]

My purpose is to shit up threads... all threads. Even my own... which are by definition, shit.

[Captain ******* Kirk]

Ezra Klein: You wrote about how the problems on the back-end of the insurance portals, in the way they communicate with the systems of actual insurers, might be as bad or worse than the front-end traffic problems. What are you worried about, exactly?

Bob Laszewski: What I’m worried about is that when people go to their doctor in January they may walk in, and the doctor and hospital won’t find them in the insurer’s computer system or their bank account won’t be appropriately debited or they’ll be signed up for the wrong plan. I’m worried about all these things. Now, we have a few weeks to get this straightened out. But only a few weeks.

...

EK: You said a few minutes ago that they really only have a few weeks to fix this before they run into serious problems for the law. Is anything you’re hearing from the insurance side convincing you that the system is improving that quickly?

BL: There’s no evidence of any improvement so far. I say that factually, not as a shot at them. The question then is will they get there in time?

...

EK: What should the Obama administration do?

BL: I think the feds have to really solve their problems. I wouldn’t go on those sites now. People are just wasting their time. I think Mark Bertolini from Aetna made the comment this morning, and I agree with it that the smart move on the part of the Obama administration would’ve been to suspend the Web system, shut it down, go back, and fixed the problems. They would’ve taken a big political hit from Republicans for, like, two news cycles. But if they could bring it back in a month working smoothly, no one would remember five years from now.

‘Obamacare is a bit like the astronaut on top of the rocket’

[Captain ******* Kirk]

If the exchanges don’t get fixed soon, they could destroy Obamacare -- and possibly, the rest of the private insurance market. The reason that the exchanges were so important was that they were needed to attract young, healthy people into the insurance system. The worry was that if insurance is hard to buy -- if you have to do your own comparison shopping and then call the insurance company, and fax in some paperwork and two years of tax returns -- that the young and the healthy simply won’t do it. Sick people and old people who were getting huge subsidies -- and maybe the ability to buy insurance on the private market for the first time in a long while -- would overcome any obstacles, because if you’re spending $15,000 a year on health care, it’s worth a lot of your time to make sure that you have insurance. But if your biggest annual health-care expense is contact lens solution, you may just decide to skip it and pay the fine.

The administration estimates that it needs 2.7 million young healthy people on the exchange, out of the 7 million total expected to apply in the first year. If the pool is too skewed -- if it’s mostly old and sick people on the exchanges -- then insurers will lose money, and next year, they’ll sharply increase premiums. The healthiest people will drop out, because insurance is no longer such a good deal for them. Rinse and repeat and you have effectively destroyed the market for individual insurance policies. It’s called the “death spiral,” and the exchanges, like the mandate, were designed to keep it from happening.

Without the exchanges, the death spiral seems almost assured. The amount of work required to find a policy, figure out your subsidy, buy coverage and file the paperwork will be very high. And it’s unlikely that folks who can’t even be bothered to go to ehealthinsurance.com right now will do it. The Affordable Care Act made the task of signing up young healthy people on the exchanges even harder with its much-loved requirement that companies allow kids to stay on their parents’ policies until they’re 26, which took millions of potential buyers out of the pool. The ones who are left are going to be disproportionately poorer and less well educated than the middle-class offspring who can get cheap insurance through mom and dad. There’s a reason that virtually every person you’ve seen written up in an article as they tried to get insurance at a community center or clinic is some combination of over 55, retired or afflicted with a serious chronic condition.

Once the death spiral happens, it’s very difficult to recover from. That’s why if the exchanges don’t work soon, we need to hit the reset button and try again next year. This will be very, very difficult: Insurers are already selling policies under the new regulations, and those regulations have driven up costs for existing buyers. People who have been counting on being able to buy insurance through the exchanges will have to spend another year without. And of course, it will be politically embarrassing. But it will be even more politically embarrassing to get to December and find out that we have commanded millions of Americans to buy insurance on a system that doesn’t work. And it is not a good bargain to cover some people now, but in doing so, to make insurance unaffordable for millions more in a few years. If we can’t launch the system correctly, then we need to wait until we can.

Obamacare Needs a Drop-Dead Date

[Sava]

The only problems with the implementation of the ACA seem to be with the online functions... which is apparently due to the login system. Fixing that will be easy. You can still sign up in person or over the phone.

Not surprisingly, Republican governors are sabotaging the in-person sign ups by defunding or creating all sorts of hurdles.

So once again, if government isn't working, it's because the Republicans have sabotaged it.

[Captain ******* Kirk]

Wrong thread!

[Sava]

I'm gonna say user error on that one.

[MrFun]

Well would you look at that?

Affordable Care Act laws are having a positive net effect on the health care industry, leading to innovations and greater efficiency.

[Captain ******* Kirk]

I'm gonna say user error on that one.

It was user error putting it in this thread, but the embed code is also boned.

[DinoDoc]

Obamacare will double my monthly premium (according to Kaiser)

The schadenfreude part of my brain nearly overloaded with this one.

[dannubis]

Why ? Because you don't like people getting the healthcare they need (this is of course not according to your definition of need)?

[Docfeelgood]

Have any of you compared your health insurance and obamacare?

[DinoDoc]

Why ?

If you aren't a drooling moron you'd already know why I'd have a certain sense of schadenfreude the situation described in the post there.