MNSure: All Is, Naturally, Proceeding As Predicted

The Blues are eliminating scads of individual plans.

In response Gov. Mark Dayton highlighted gains in enrolling more Minnesotans in health insurance plans since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. He also acknowledged the BCBSM departure reflects the instability in the market for individual and family coverage.

In other words, as people have been squeezed out of the private plans they originally chose, they are dribbling in to MNSure’s more expensive plans with higher deductibles and more-constricted networks.

He thinks has been told to think it’s a win.

“This creates a serious and unintended challenge for the individual market: the Minnesotans who seek coverage there tend to have greater, more expensive health care needs than the general population,” said Dayton. “Blue Cross Blue Shield’s decision to leave the individual market is symptomatic of conditions in the national health insurance marketplace.

University of Minnesota health economist Roger Feldman called the Blues’ departure a major blow to Minnesota’s already troubled individual market.

“What this says about the individual market is that it is very unstable and it has been disrupted by a number of events and we still don’t know whether it will recover or not from those disruptions,” said Feldman.

Apparently we have to cripple healthcare before we can save it.

16 thoughts on “MNSure: All Is, Naturally, Proceeding As Predicted

  1. Not to rub it in (much) but thanks to my wonderful, real American Governor, I have no idea what you’re talking about.

  2. Didn’t Governor Walker say bad things would happen if an individual state tried to play ball with Obamacare? Kind of like….was it the Medicare expansion? What did Oregon spend before they backed out all together?

  3. Excuse the threadjack, but I think you’ll like this.

    I’m in town on business today, and I stopped into the bar and grill next to Dave Bucky Thune’s “Art Gallery” on W. 7th for lunch.

    While leaving, I noticed Bucky had posted a “SAY NO TO LIGHT RAIL ON W. 7th” poster on his door
    http://i67.tinypic.com/k02ald.jpg

    http://i67.tinypic.com/k02ald.jpg

    This cocksucker was all about the choo-choo’s as long as it affected someone else’s biz. He was all about the smoking ban and told bar owners to pound sand when they complained.

    I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it; leftists are scum.

    If Bucky were to become the victim of some leftist’s gun free zone ordinance some day, I’d be a very, very happy man.

  4. Mitch, whenever my previous post gets out of moderation purgatory, please feel free to use the attached photo for twitter fun.

  5. What’s really a shame is that nobody warned that this would end up badly. Except for the entire right side of the aisle and every competent actuary in the country, of course.

  6. Swiftee……ahhhh Fat Davey Thune. The man who invited domestic terrorists to come to the Twin Cities and attack Republicans during the RNC. He even offered to find them places to stay while they planned their attacks.

  7. The insurance market was unstable before, and the rate of increase for EVERYONE has slowed. As someone in the insurance field for a number of years, including being knowledgeable about insurance plan approval in all 50 states, this idea that the previous era was superior in just fantasy.

    You have no factual basis to assert that individuals or families are being squeezed out of their prior plans nor have you addressed the substance of how many of those plans were so inadequate and overpriced for what they provided (and failed to provide) that many of those individuals and families ended up in bankruptcy due to medical expenses.

    Conservatives have to lie because the facts are not your friends.

    One more piece of worthless propaganda that appears to intentionally misinform your readers, on a topic about which you know next to nothing.

  8. Poor DG, once again you’ve got no facts on your side or you would have produced them.
    You would have quoted the HHS reports, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports, the Pew analysis, Robert H Johnson reports or the CBO study but you can’t can you. And you wont because these would be primary sources and you only consult secondary pre-spun and regurgitated cherry picked propaganda from DU, Kos, Huffpo, MoJo, and the like. All you can do is insult people with your ignorance.

  9. bikebubba, your side wants to end the ban on cancelling insurance for pre-existing conditions. The ACA has not ended badly, and YOUR side of the aisle has yet to come up with anything to replace it that has any merit.

    YOU LOSE conservatives. The USA is doing better under obamacare than it did before.

    More lies and calumny; taking a look at the FACTUAL record I see no evidence that Dave Thune “invited” domestic terrorist to attack anyone during the RNC. His connection to protesters that you claim appears to be baseless. Not that I’ve observed either of you, Chuck or Swiftee, to base your accusations on facts with any frequency.

    But hey, if you have any FACTUAL and verifiable evidence that Thune invited people to come here to attack anyone, or encouraged them to do so, please provide it. Otherwise the stats on conservative domestic terrorists, as compiled by Homeland Security and cooperating agencies dating back to BEFORE Obama all indicate that it is those right wing nut domestic terrorists who are the far greater threat to the US of A, not Islamo-terrorists, and not liberal groups. If you look at actual convictions, including prosecutions of right wing domestic terrorists BY conservative prosecutors, the severity of the crimes and the numbers of the right wing terrorists are far worse than anything attached to anyone who attended or protested the 2008 GOP convention. That would be three guilty pleas re the 2008 GOP convention, 1 hung jury, and a lot of dropped cases because they were not prosecutable.

    I can appreciate that given the terrible whupping you righties took with that election cycle, combined with the continuing embarrassment of screaming and possibly drunken stupid that is Sarah Palin, the whole event is a bit of a sore one for you. And as the party of accountability for OTHER people, naturally you misrepresent yourselves as the victims when you are not.

    And given the damage done to the MN GOP by Fat Tony Sutton (I’m not the person who tagged him with that) and given his girth appears quite possibly to exceed that of Thune, you might not want to throw around that pejorative term so quickly. Sutton did far more harm to Republicans than Thune ever did.

  10. delusional DG said: “taking a look at the FACTUAL record I see no evidence that Dave Thune “invited” domestic terrorist to attack anyone during the RNC. “

    you mean other than the tv & radio & print media records of him making the invitation?
    You are completely corrupt!

  11. Well, Dog breath, I see a lot more fat Democrat elected idiots than the GOP. Of course, when they are feeding from the government trough for as long as they have, I guess it’s hard to control themselves.

  12. Same phenomenon driving the Allina nurses strike. They’re being asked to accept the same high deductible plans as the rest of the peasants, but because the union thought it bought a get out of jail card from the Party, it should be business as usual. My more conspiracy oriented friends believe Obama care was intended to fail, leaving single payer as the only option.

  13. DG: Thune DID specifically invite protesters to the RNC. I wrote about it back then (although the news stories to which I linked on the story – from WCCO TV in this case – have aged out).

    Given that many of the protesters specifically avoided abjuring violence – which, when aimed at a peaceful political event, is a form of terrorism – it’s not a big stretch.

    MPR’s Bob Collins was there:

    “What about what most people think when they hear a term like militant, violence, for example?

    “The violence that I’m worried about is the violence that’s being carried out in Iraq right now,” she answered, which isn’t really an answer.

    “You’re not answering my question,” a blogger said, uttering the five words that mark a great political journalist.

    “I know,” she said, adding that she doesn’t consider the blockades being planned — allegedly — by other groups “violence.”

    “That’s not what we’re planning,” she said.”

    If a Tea Party group had played peekaboo with threats like that, you’d be calling in the National Guard, DG.

  14. Although dog is a confirmed and prolific liar, I’m going to chalk up her twaddle regarding the 08 convention to ignorance, which in addition to lying, makes up most of her personal characteristics.

    And I’m going to do dog the favor of educating her. I had press credentials for the ’08 convention. I chronicled the leftist scum that threw bleach on an elderly woman. Although I didn’t witness the act, I did see the bags of human excrement they had thrown at people.

    It was me a couple of scumbags tried to intimidate when the noticed I was recording them. It didn’t work on me, but it was obvious it was a tactic they were familiar with.

    America hating leftists are always quick to resort to violence when real Americans dare use their right to speak the truth.

  15. Joe: wow, I’m “honored”.

    DG: the fact of the matter is that we were promised that we could keep our doctors and we could keep our health plans. The fact of the matter is that we were promised the “cost curve would be bent down”. The opposite is true.

    Fact of the matter is as well that hundreds of thousands are out of work because of the Health Insurance Deform Act, just like conservatives said.

    What’s better? Well, what we had before, for starters. Even better would be a system where the tax treatment of self-paid medical expenses was equal to that for employer paid expenses. Why is my medical insurance linked to my employer to begin with, other than history and Truman?

    And the GOP took a drubbing in elections….OK, we had a couple of weak Presidential candidates against the crook we have now, but it occurs to me that most Governors are Republicans, most state legislatures are Republican, and Congress is Republican. I could do with more “drubbings” like that, except I don’t want another Democratic crook in the White House.

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