Tuesday, November 5, 2013

All You Have to Lose Is Your Shitty, Expensive, Fraudulent Non-Coverage

This must be the repug propaganda that Anonymous in comments believes:

Health care overhaul means about 280,000 Kentuckians will lose current insurance coverage

Wow, Roger Alford - you're as bad as Ron Fournier in your desperation to blame Democrats for repug obstruction and sabotage.

No, 280,000 Kentuckians are not losing current insurance coverage. 280,000 Kentuckians are about to escape the trap of useless, fradulent, fake insurance that costs the earth and doesn't cover a fucking thing.

Talking Points Memo explodes the myth:

Across the country, insurance companies have sent misleading letters to consumers, trying to lock them into the companies' own, sometimes more expensive health insurance plans rather than let them shop for insurance and tax credits on the Obamacare marketplaces -- which could lead to people like Donna spending thousands more for insurance than the law intended. In some cases, mentions of the marketplace in those letters are relegated to a mere footnote, which can be easily overlooked.

The extreme lengths to which some insurance companies are going to hold on to existing customers at higher price, as the Affordable Care Act fundamentally re-orders the individual insurance market, has caught the attention of state insurance regulators.

The insurance companies argue that it's simply capitalism at work. But regulators don't see it that way. By warning customers that their health insurance plans are being canceled as a result of Obamacare and urging them to secure new insurance plans before the Obamacare launched on Oct. 1, these insurers put their customers at risk of enrolling in plans that were not as good or as affordable as what they could buy on the marketplaces.
All insurance companies are greedy motherfuckers and pathological liars. Get on the exchange. Discover the truth.

Scott Lemiuex piles on:

This is a very important point:

The employer-based health-insurance system is much more popular than the individual market. It’s also much more redistributive. The 25-year-old male in the loading dock has to pay the same premiums as the diabetic 60-year-old in accounting. Is this injustice an important part of the political discourse? How often do you hear people complain about it?

Every iteration of an alternative conservative health-care proposal would impose far more disruption on the status quo than would Obamacare. Most conservative plans involve drastically curtailing the tax deduction for employer-based insurance. That would create cancellation notices for many times the number of people currently seeing them. Even the more modest plans to scale back Obama’s regulation of the individual market would run the GOP into a political minefield. Which regulations do they want to strip away? Discrimination against people with preexisting conditions? Discrimination against potentially pregnant women? Mental-health parity? Every single one of those changes creates millions of angry potential victims.

This is exactly why the actual Republican Party health-care plan is not repeal and replace, but repeal and cackle. Republicans are on strong ground exploiting fear of change. They have understood perfectly well that they must avoid having to defend a different set of changes to the status quo. They have kept their various replace ideas safely to the side for exactly that reason.
I’d also note that there’s nothing in the status quo ante that guarantees that you could keep your existing insurance. You could, for example, lose your job.

And this is also crucial. A lot of anecdotes about “cancelled insurance” aren’t actually going to pan out.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Another important quality to consider in finding the best (or at least a very good) insurance company is its performance in paying claims for people who;ve experienced losses. You want an insurance company that pays its claims quickly and without causing extra stress. It can be difficult to assess this quality when purchasing a policy because you haven't experienced a covered loss. Consumer Reports has published some excellent articles that provide information about this quality.