Oops Obama: You Might Lose Your Doctor Under Obamacare
9:17 AM, MAR 14, 2014 • BY DANIEL HALPER
You Cant Make this stuff up : President Obama is warning Americans that they might have to change doctors because of Obamacare:
“For the average person, many folks who don’t have health insurance initially, they’re going to have to make some choices. And they might end up having to switch doctors, in part because they’re saving money,” said Obama in an interview with the medical website WebMD.
“But that’s true if your employer suddenly decides we think this network’s going to give a better deal, we think this is going to help keep premiums lower, you’ve got to use this doctor as opposed to that one, this hospital as opposed to that one. The good news is in most states people have more than one option and what they’ll find, I think, is that their doctor or network or hospital that’s conveniently located is probably in one of those networks. Now, you may find out that that network’s more expensive than another network. And then you’ve got to make a choice in terms of what’s right for your family.”
Obamacare is definitely NOT as cheap as your cellphone bill
President Barack Obama’s favorite new Obamacare sign-up pitches is that young enrollees, which the law banks on for sustainability, can get health insurance for the price of a monthly cellphone bill. But in reality, premiums are more than a little pricier.
“HealthCare.gov works great now,” Obama told Zack Galifianakis Tuesday in a Funny or Die “Between Two Ferns” video. “And millions of Americans have already gotten health insurance plans, and what we want is for people to know that you can get affordable health care — and most young Americans right now, they’re not covered.”
“And the truth is that they can get coverage all for what it costs you to pay your cell phone bill,” Obama said.
As competition heats up in the wireless war between the nation’s biggest carriers, prices and options for cellphone plans are spread across a wide range, depending on phone type, data limits, upgrade terms, etc. For comparison’s sake, we’ll define an average middle-of-the-road plan as consisting of a smartphone, two-year upgrade, unlimited calls, unlimited texts and an average of two gigs of downloadable Internet data per month.
Discounting taxes nationwide, that plan costs about $90 on Verizon, $80 on AT&T, $70 on Sprint, and $60 on T-Mobile every month. Both Sprint and T-Mobile offer the same plans with unlimited monthly data for $80. All pricing is relevant as of January 2014.
Delaying Obamacare’s Individual Mandate Due to ‘Hardship’ — Caused by Obamacare
How many times do you have to delay something to realize it’s just a really bad idea?
Amy Payne
March 13, 2014 at 6:30 am
It’s getting difficult to take any part of Obamacare seriously.
The Obama administration has altered or delayed it so many times—who can be sure what the law is at this point?
The individual mandate stating that every American has to purchase government-approved health coverage or pay a fine is supposed to kick in on March 31. That’s the deadline to sign up for coverage, supposedly to avoid this year’s penalty.
But Obamacare is never “settled law,” as the president and others have called it, because Health and Human Services (HHS) keeps writing more regulations.
Most recently, the administration extended the “hardship exemption” from the individual mandate for those who had their previous policies canceled because of Obamacare until October 2016.
To qualify, your plan must have been canceled because it wasn’t compliant with Obamacare, and you just have to tell the government you “believe” that other insurance policies are unaffordable.
The exemption means people who meet these criteria are free from the individual mandate. But if they want to buy coverage, they are given the special option to buy a “catastrophic” health insurance plan, which is not eligible for subsidies and typically would be available only to those under age 30.
When the exemption was first announced in December, Heritage experts Alyene Senger and Robert Moffit said this “is not going to simplify anything. Rest assured it is going to create even greater confusion for health insurers trying to sell these products. Also, don’t expect the unhappy consumers who’ve just lost their previous coverage to understand clearly which plan they can pick and be legally qualified to pick it.”
Due to the utter confusion and the underperforming signups on HealthCare.gov, reporters asked HHS this week whether the agency would simply extend the deadline for people to buy coverage. An HHS official responded that, “In fact, we don’t actually have the statutory authority to extend the open enrollment period in 2014.”
This administration hasn’t let a detail like legal authority stop it from overstepping its boundsmultiple times. And as Heritage’s Senger and Moffit put it, “issuing more government rules to correct the consequences of their unworkable government rules is the only thing they seem to know how to do.”
HHS quietly repeals the individual purchase rule for two more years.
Updated March 12, 2014 3:13 p.m. ET
ObamaCare’s implementers continue to roam the battlefield and shoot their own wounded, and the latest casualty is the core of the Affordable Care Act—the individual mandate. To wit, last week the Administration quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to purchase health insurance or else pay a tax penalty.
This latest political reconstruction has received zero media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department didn’t think the details were worth discussing in a conference call, press materials or fact sheet. Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don’t comply with ObamaCare benefit and redistribution mandates. Our sources only noticed the change this week.
Union: Obamacare will slash wages by up to $5 an hour
By Paul Bedard | MARCH 9, 2014 AT 11:15 AM
A national union that represents 300,000 low-wage hospitality workers charges in a new report that Obamacare will slam wages, cut hours, limit access to health insurance and worsen the very “income equality” President Obama says he is campaigning to fix.
Unite Here warned that due to Obamacare’s much higher costs for health insurance than what union workers currently pay, the result will be a pay cut of up to $5 an hour. “If employers follow the incentives in the law, they will push families onto the exchanges to buy coverage. This will force low-wage service industry employees to spend $2.00, $3.00 or even $5.00 an hour of their pay to buy similar coverage,” said the union in a new report.
“Only in Washington could asking the bottom of the middle class to finance health care for the poorest families be seen as reducing inequality,” said the report from Unite Here. “Without smart fixes, the ACA threatens the middle class with higher premiums, loss of hours, and a shift to part-time work and less comprehensive coverage,” said the report, titled, “The Irony of Obamacare: Making Inequality Worse.”
If it seems like your paycheck is mysteriously shrinking every year, it’s probably true and it’s certainly not a mystery as health insurance costs continue to climb steadily.
“Our latest report finds a continuing increase in healthcare premium costs for employees, with an emphasis on shifting costs for family members, spouses and dependents, going up at an even higher rate than for employees,” said Julie Stone, a senior consultant at Towers Watson Management.
“Nearly 50 percent of employers are increasing the cost for dependents at a higher rate or faster rate than employees, and here is also a large number of organizations that have implemented the spouse surcharge when the spouse doesn’t have coverage elsewhere,” Stone said.
So how much more do workplace benefits cost, on average?
“Costs have gone up for the last couple of years for employers in the neighborhood of 4 to 4½ percent,” Stone said. “But employees are picking up a good share of that, with the average employee increase over the past five years being 5 percent a year. That may not sound like a lot but it’s twice the CPI, it’s a lot more than people’s salaries are going up, so it’s pretty significant from a paycheck perspective.” (Matthau/NJ101.5)
New health insurance marketplaces signing up few uninsured Americans, two surveys find
By Amy Goldstein, Published: March 6
The new health insurance marketplaces appear to be making little headway in signing up Americans who lack insurance, the Affordable Care Act’s central goal, according to a pair of new surveys.
Only one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private plans through the new marketplaces enrolled as of last month, one of the surveys shows. The other found that about half of uninsured adults have looked for information on the online exchanges or planned to look.
The snapshots from the surveys released Thursday provide preliminary answers to what has been one of the biggest mysteries since HealthCare.gov and separate state marketplaces opened last fall: Are they attracting their prime audience?
The findings emerge as the Obama administration has been revising a series of rules that define how the 2010 law works in practice. According to a variety of health-policy experts who support and oppose the law, the changes are in response to consumer hesitancy and political opposition that linger — at least, in the early going — as the law’s major provisions have taken effect.
The rule changes have postponed or relaxed aspects of the law, sometimes to adjust for technical problems, other times to push into the future controversies that have arisen from specific groups of consumers or parts of the health-care industry.
Obamacare Architect: ‘You Don’t Need a Doctor for Every Part of Your Health Care’
March 5, 2014 – 6:54 AM
By Susan Jones
A medical assistant takes a patient’s blood pressure as her husband and baby look on at the Country Doctor Community Clinic in Seattle. (AP File Photo)
(CNSNews.com) – Under the Affordable Care Act, the Health and Human Services Department is spending billions of dollars to expand community health clinics, which are mainly staffed by nurse practitioners and physician assistants.
“It’s going to be one part of a complex part of the health care system,” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the architects of Obamacare, told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly Tuesday night. “So if your kid has a sore throat and you want to find out if it’s strep throat, or your kid has what appears to be an ear infection and you want to find out if it’s otitis media — you really don’t need to go to the pediatrician. You can go to these clinics.”
Chris Christie: Tired of Obamacare? Elect new president
Chris Christie had some advice Tuesday for a constituent worried about Obamacare: “Elect a new president.”
The exchange occurred during a town hall-style event the same day that the GOP New Jersey governor, a potential White House hopeful, came under fire for his own support for Medicaid expansion under the health care law.
How is it going to affect the seniors, their insurance?” asked a woman who said she was from Toms River, NJ. “A lot of the doctor staff here are saying that they’re going to get out of it now. What do we do?”
“Yeah, well, elect a new president,” Christie said to applause at the Ocean County event.
Christie said there are areas where he and President Barack Obama agree — and spent much of the event detailing his administration’s efforts to work with the federal government on Superstorm Sandy recovery and expedite a sometimes-sluggish aid process. (Titus/Politico)
New O-Care delay to help midterm Dems
By Elise Viebeck
The Obama administration is set to announce another major delay in implementing the Affordable Care Act, easing election pressure on Democrats.
As early as this week, according to two sources, the White House will announce a new directive allowing insurers to continue offering health plans that do not meet ObamaCare’s minimum coverage requirements.
Prolonging the “keep your plan” fix will avoid another wave of health policy cancellations otherwise expected this fall.
The cancellations would have created a firestorm for Democratic candidates in the last, crucial weeks before Election Day.
The White House is intent on protecting its allies in the Senate, where Democrats face a battle to keep control of the chamber.
“I don’t see how they could have a bunch of these announcements going out in September,” one consultant in the health insurance industry said. “Not when they’re trying to defend the Senate and keep their losses at a minimum in the House. This is not something to have out there right before the election.”
One in Three Say They’ve Been Personally Hurt by Obamacare
By Andrew Johnson
March 3, 2014 3:46 PM
One-third of Americans say the Affordable Care Act has had a negative impact on them personally, while 14 percent say the law has helped them, according to a new Rasmussen survey. The poll finds that public dissatisfaction with Obamcare remains nearly as high as it was during the height of the website’s problems last year.
Rasmussen finds that more people say they have a “very unfavorable” opinion of the law than have a favorable opinion of it at 41 and 40 percent, respectively. Fifty-six percent of respondents said they view the law unfavorably, just shy of a high of 58 percent in November of last year. Of the 40 percent who have a favorable opinion, only 16 percent view the law ”very favorably.
Sebelius Contradicts herself Dismisses 7M Sign-Up Goal for Obamacare
February 25, 2014 – 11:50 AM
By Melanie Hunter
(CNSNews.com) – Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Tuesday dismissed the goal of 7 million Obamacare enrollees by the end of March as something that the Congressional Budget Office made up.
However, that contradicts Sebelius’s own statement on national television in September that “success looks like at least 7 million people having signed up by the end of March 2014.”
“First of all, 7 million was not the administration. That was a CBO Congressional Budget Office prediction when the bill was first signed. I’m not quite sure where they even got their numbers. Their number’s all over the board, and the vice president has looked and said it may be closer to 5 to 6,” Sebelius told HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill.
IRS Warns: Obamacare Tax Must Be Paid with Tax Return
Agency employs Orwellian term “Shared Responsibility Payment” to describe Obamacare individual mandate tax.
President Obama’s Internal Revenue Service today quietly released a series of Obamacare “Health Care Tax Tips” warning Americans that they must obtain “qualifying” health insurance – as defined by the federal government – or face a “shared responsibility payment” when filing their tax returns in 2015. The term “shared responsibility payment” refers to the Obamacare individual mandate tax, one of at least seven tax hikes in the healthcare law that directly hit families making less than $250,000 per year.
In “Four Tax Facts about the Health Care Law for Individuals” the agency writes:
Your 2014 tax return will ask if you had insurance coverage or qualified for an exemption. If not, you may owe a shared responsibility payment when you file in 2015.
In “The Individual Shared Responsibility Payment- An Overview” the agency warns Americans they must prove they were covered each and every month of the year:
For any month in 2014 that you or any of your dependents don’t maintain coverage and don’t qualify for an exemption, you will need to make an individual shared responsibility payment with your 2014 tax return filed in 2015.
In “IRS Reminds Individuals of Health Care Choices for 2014”the agency details the calculations Americans can look forward to if they are liable for the tax:
If you (or any of your dependents) do not maintain coverage and do not qualify for an exemption, you will need to make an individual shared responsibility payment with your return. In general, the payment amount is either a percentage of your household income or a flat dollar amount, whichever is greater. You will owe 1/12th of the annual payment for each month you (or your dependents) do not have coverage and are not exempt. The annual payment amount for 2014 is the greater of:
1 percent of your household income that is above the tax return filing threshold for your filing status, such as Married Filing Jointly or single, or
Your family’s flat dollar amount, which is $95 per adult and $47.50 per child, limited to a maximum of $285.
As confirmed by previous IRS testimony to the tax-writing House Committee on Ways and Means, “taxpayers will file their tax returns reporting their health insurance coverage, and/or making a payment”.
Once fully phased in, the Obamacare individual mandate tax will rise steeply, to a maximum of 2.5 percent of Adjusted Gross Income or $2,085 – whichever is higher
Read more: https://atr.org/irs-warns-obamacare-tax-must-paid-a8164#ixzz2uQCUxug5
Follow us: @taxreformer on Twitter
Ignore the Administration’s Inflated Obamacare Coverage Numbers
Peter Suderman|Feb. 24, 2014 12:24 pm
In a speech to the Democratic Governor’s Association last week, president Obama touted the success of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. “We’ve got close to 7 million Americans who have access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion,” he said.
That’s false.
We don’t know how exactly many people have gotten health coverage through Medicaid for the first time as a result of Obamacare, but the actual number is certainly much lower than the 7 million President Obama claimed.
As The Washington Post’s Fact Checker explains—again—the 7 million figure comes from reports counting the number of people who have enrolled in Medicaid since October 1 last year, when Obamacare’s online exchanges launched. But many of those enrollments are in states that did not participate in the law’s Medicaid expansion, and many of those who signed up in states that did participate were renewing existing coverage. Avalere Health, a health consulting firm that has been tracking Obamacare’s implementation, estimates that the number of new enrollees is somewhere in the range of 1.1 to 1.8 million. (And that number counts people who were previously eligible prior to Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion but signed up after the fact.)
That’s Medicaid. What about private coverage? Once again, solid numbers are hard to pin down. But the true number of enrollees is virtually certain to be lower than the administration’s headline estimates.
The administration said earlier this month that, by the end of January, 3.3 million people had signed up for private coverage through the exchanges. But that figure leaves two important questions unanswered: How many people have paid the first premium, a requirement to actually be enrolled in coverage? And how many of those people were previously uninsured?
Insurers Seek Healthy Enrollees, Doctors Educate New Patients, Employers Wrestle With Added Costs
On Jan. 1, the key provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect. Americans gained access to new health plans subsidized by federal dollars. Insurers no longer can turn away people with existing conditions. Millions are now eligible for new Medicaid benefits.
But the federal law also upended existing health-insurance arrangements for millions of people. Companies worry about the expense of providing new policies, some hospitals aren’t seeing the influx of new patients they expected to balance new costs and entrepreneurs say they may hire more part-time workers to avoid offering more coverage.
Tell Us
How Has the Health Law Affected You?
The law’s true impact will play out over years. It will depend in part on whether backers overcome serious early setbacks, including crippling glitches in the new online insurance marketplaces and many states’ rejection of the Medicaid expansion. But another obstacle the law faces is pushback from some consumers and industry over the higher costs, complex rules and mandatory requirements it imposes. ( Watch doctors, business owners and patients share their stories about the health law, and tell us your own. )
So far, 3.3 million have signed up for plans through the new government marketplaces, federal officials said Feb. 12. About 6.3 million were determined eligible for Medicaid through the exchanges over the final three months of 2013, including people who might have been able to enroll without the law.
The law’s potential for change can be seen in the lives of people like Jaime Hood, a 37-year-old in Belton, Mo. She suffers from hemophilia and had been rejected for coverage until this year. Now, she will have access to drugs and other treatments she sometimes skipped.
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