You Can Keep Your Doctor, Provided Your Doctor Is A Unicorn

Obamacare’s state exchanges are melting down – some faster than others, none faster at the moment than Tennessee:

Seventy-three out of Tennessee’s 95 counties will have only one insurer on the exchange, meaning no meaningful competition whatsoever. In regions where BlueCross BlueShield is pulling out, there will be two remaining major carriers, Cigna and Humana. The only large metro area with more options will be Chattanooga.

Then there are the premiums. State regulators have already approved the highest annual rise in the nation, a weighted average of nearly 56%, according to data at ACASignups.net. The rate increases authorized in late August include an average of 62% for BlueCross BlueShield, 46% for Cigna and 44% for Humana. The latter two companies could ask to revise their rates upward depending on how many former BlueCross consumers they pick up.

The idea that Obamacare is a conspiracy designed to fail, to leave only “single payer” government healthcare as a viable option, is looking less and less like a conspiracy theory.

Posted

October 14, 2016

Health Care, MNSure Debacle

Mitch Berg

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8 responses to “You Can Keep Your Doctor, Provided Your Doctor Is A Unicorn”

Sauk Fantoche

October 14, 2016

” looking less and less like a conspiracy theory.”
its certainly passed the theoretical phase…
golfdoc50

October 14, 2016

I’ll never be able to believe it was a classic conspiracy, with the plotters sitting in one room, hatching their plot. It was more like a perfect storm of government health care advocates, insurers seduced by crony capitalist guarantees, treacherous physician Quislings, intellectually lazy politicians. Obama, the consummate liar-in-chief, was the glue that held them together. I took early retirement because there was no f-ing way I was going to work for it.
Sauk Fantoche

October 14, 2016

Gore Vidal once explained with considerable condescension that you don’t need a room full of plotters or even a conspiracy too accomplish the nefarious because “its not a conspiracy if everyone thinks the same”. He went on to explain that that was the goal of modern academia.

” there was no f-ing way I was going to work for it.” good choice! The current exemplar of a visit with a Dr is: 30 seconds of intro small talk, then 6 minutes of talking to the Dr about your health, then 8 minutes of him entering data into the computer, then his 30 second dash for the door in hopes you won’t trap him with a door knob question and he’s gone because he’s scheduled to do at least 4 of these sessions an hour – its a factory job.
Scott Hughes

October 14, 2016

I believe there was conspiracies and conspirators!!

“You can’t do it political, you just literally cannot do it. Transparent financing and also transparent spending. I mean, this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies.”……Jonathan Gruber
Sauk Fantoche

October 14, 2016

the new Medicare regulation (MACRA) was just announced today – read up on it if you want to spend the weekend in a severe depression – it will add massively significant additional layers of software to the healthcare delivery process for the hospitals, clinics, therapists, and of course the insurance companies (boom times ahead for IT guys who work for UNH, HUM, etc) – that won’t drive up costs at all….
bikebubba

October 14, 2016

Slightly tangential, but I just looked up the costs imposed by smoking and obesity, and found that the net savings if everybody dropped the cancer sticks and the extra pounds might be pretty close to zero. At the very least, it’s not going to halve medical costs or anything–the highest estimate I could find was about 10-15% of costs.

In other words, medical costs are notoriously “sticky” because the goal in life is to live long enough to have some really interesting, cool disease attempt to kill you–and the treatment for those is expensive.

Which would be a long way of saying that while it’s good to see what we can do to drop costs, our big goal with regards to keeping medical costs manageable ought to be to improve the economy.

Just the opposite of what the goal seems to be on the left, sad to say.
Joe Doakes

October 14, 2016

The really frustrating part isn’t that We Told You So. It’s not even that the insurance companies told them so (they knew this was coming – that’s why there were reinsurance subsidies for the insurance companies the first three years). It’s not even that we’ve spent billions of dollars to set up a program that hardly covers any more people than before.

The really frustrating part is the original Obamacare law only provided subsidies to poor people who bought through state exchanges, but not through the federal exchange. Minnesota set up its own exchange so our state residents could get the federal subsidy; then Obama decided that was harsh so he gave everybody the subsidy and the Supreme Court decided the absolute prohibition was more of a guideline, really, so it’s all just fine.

$189 million in Minn Sure set up costs, wasted. How many vaccinations could that have bought?
Fat-shaming Bento Guzman

October 14, 2016

The number of uninsured adults dropped by 50%!
Or, put another way, the number of adults who say that they are uninsured dropped from 15% to 10%. That’s right, we federalized the healthcare industry, destroyed the concept of health insurance, to increase the number of insured adults by 5%.
You are basically getting your health care costs managed by the same people who manage the post office.
FYI, the head of the post office recently made it quite clear that the purpose of the PO is to deliver junk mail (paid advertisements and solicitations) in order to pay for the pensions of post office retirees. That is their business model.