Sunday, December 01, 2013

New website, same lousy ObamaCare

(My new American Thinker post)


The new website is off and running.  It may or may not work.  It's too early to tell.

However, the AHCA has a much bigger problem than a "groggy web site".


The real problem is that the AHCA is a lousy insurance policy that most Americans would not buy if it was offered in a completive marketplace. 

It is a policy designed by bureaucrats rather than supply & demand.    It is the US version of those Soviet cars or tractors designed in the Kremlin. 

Remember the one about the camel is a horse designed by committee?  Welcome to ObamaCare!

According to The Wall Street Journal, the AHCA is everything but affordable:  
"The law converts insurance products on the ObamaCare exchanges into interchangeable commodities that finance the same standard benefit at the same average expense over four tiers known as bronze, silver, gold and platinum.  
So, for example, a bronze plan covers 60% of health-care expenses and the beneficiary pays a lower premium to pick up the remaining 40% out of pocket. Platinum carries a higher premium for a 90%-10% split. But there can be little deviation from the formulas--that is, there is little room for innovation or policy choice--to suit customer preferences.  
In any case all four tiers are scrap-metal grade, because the rules ObamaCare imposes to create a supposedly superior insurance product are resulting in an objectively inferior medicalproduct. The new mandates and rules raise costs, so insurers must compensate by offering narrow and less costly networks of doctors, hospitals and other providers in their ObamaCare products. Insurers thus restrict care and patient choice of physicians in exchange for discounted reimbursement rates, much as Medicaid does.  
Nearly half of the ObamaCare plans are tightly managed HMOs, according to a McKinsey & Co. analysis. In states like California, Missouri and New Hampshire, many networks are 40% or 45% the size of those offered for normal commercial coverage. Patients face the prospect of waiting months and driving miles to clinics and county hospitals.  
Narrow networks can be a useful cost-control tool, to the extent people choose to give up medical options in return for lower premiums. But that's rarely what people want when they're choosing with their own money. Some 82.5% of eHealth customers in 2012 purchased preferred provider organization plans (PPOs) that are structured so patients can visit virtually any physician. 
The awful irony of this new ObamaCare health system is that all adults now enjoy mandated pediatric vision benefits, even if they don't have kids, but parents can't take their daughter to an expensive children's hospital if she gets really sick. Everybody gets "free" preventive checkups with no copays, but not treatment for a complex illness from specialists at an academic medical center.  If the old individual market was as bad as Mr. Obama said it was, then he shouldn't pretend it's a place worth going back to, even for a year's delay. His "fix" is necessary politically because ObamaCare's willful destruction of this alternative is the worst act of government mayhem since FDR's National Recovery Act. The Affordable Care Act's main achievement is turning out to be diminishing affordable care."
So who cares about the website?   The real mess is when people sign in and actually go shopping. 

P. S. You can hear CANTO TALK here & follow me on Twitter @ scantojr.




Tags: Obama Care website  To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the My View by Silvio Canto, Jr. Thanks!

Search This Blog