HHS in 2010: 40-67% of those with individual insurance won't be able to keep it

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People need to watch Michael Moore's Sicko.  I don't ordinarily recommend his films because of the distortions in them but he does bring attention to so called "junk insurance."  It's insurance you pay money for for years but when you run into a real emergency they drop you and stiff you for most if not all the bill.  Sicko wasn't about the uninsured.  It was about the insured whose insurance plans didn't actually cover them when they were sick.



So throwing out statistics that say 40-67% of individual plans are getting tossed is misleading.  There are a lot of plans that were useless anyway and the government is doing everyone a favor and making them get real insurance.  Now I can't say if that 40-67% number is real and what percentage of that number is junk.  But there is enough junk out there Consumer Reports decided to report on it and someone made a hit movie about it.

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The idea that two olds were receiving adequate coverage for $228/mo is ludicrous.

Reading is fundamental!

Apparently adolescent snark is better than a thimble full of knowledge and common sense.

krazen1211, I don't know how old you are but one day God willing you will have a job and responsibilities and actually pay some bills and taxes.  Anyone who has had a job and had an employer based healthcare plan knows a non smoking 20 something healthy male paying $80 a month through work for health insurance is a pretty good deal.  People with a bit more common sense and insight know that $80/month you are paying is a fraction of the overall cost.  The employer pays the other 250+%.  So if you were to go into the individual market without the negotiating benefit of being in a large pool obviously you are going to pay much more for a similar plan.

krazen1211, it is painfully obvious you have never bought health insurance.  Anyone who has knows that something is fishy or impossible about two olds getting an individual plan for $228/mo.  If my parent's told me they were on a plan like that I would tell them to read the fine print and then forward it to me so my lawyer and I could go over it ourselves.

It really isn't even something to argue about.

Republicans always say they know everything about business.  If you can run a profitable company selling $228/month legitimate insurance to olds get off the internet and go become a multimillionaire.  If not stop trolling.

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They found that either the doctors they like were not available or were available only on plans which were much more expensive than what they have today.

Who cares?  You want the country ossified in a completely unworkable system simply because someone doesn't want to go out and find a new doctor?  I've moved so much for school and work it's unusual for me to have the same doctor for more than 2 or three years at a time.  People really need to get over it and become adults.

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That would be fine as a point of view.  But Obama said "if you like your doctor, you get to keep that doctor. period" when he was selling Obamacare law.  Now if he said "if you like your doctor, you need to get over it and become adults and look for another one" during the Obamacare bill debates and then the bill gets passed then of course people now should no reason to complain as the consequences were made transparent.  But that was not what took place.

What's your point?  The people complaining the most about this are the same crowd that fervently defend "Iraq has WMDs pointed right at our throats."  In the long list of lies that politicians have told me in the last 10 years or so this ranks as not worth mentioning.

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To some extend I can understand the Obama/Dem prospective.  By passing Obamacare on their own without GOP votes they now ended up "owning" the healthcare systems.  Any issues/problems in the healthcare system including standard annual premium increases now has the potential for it to be blamed by Obama's political enemies onto Obama.

C'mon man.  Everyone knows Obamacare as is exists is becomes of Dems bending over backwards to accommodate Republican trolls who in the end didn't vote for the bill anyway.  If this thing was written purely by Dems without any thought or quarter given to Republicans it would be very different.  Even after it was passed Republicans did nothing to help fund its development and roll out.

The Obamacare hearings are hilarious.  With all the faux outrage from Republicans you would think they were the mothers of this baby carefully nurturing it and the Democrats were a Catholic priest treating it like a choir boy.

The president is the boss and the buck stops with him but the fantasy you laid out is only for hardcore Republicans.  It is not for consumption by the general public.

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For the record, since liberals insist on making up drivel, one can go to the BCBS website and get quotes for 2013.

The plan here comes up as $257 monthly in zip code 28078. The 2014 plan comes up at $1153.

If that is the link you are getting all your "information" from then now your posts make sense.

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For the record, since liberals insist on making up drivel, one can go to the BCBS website and get quotes for 2013.

The plan here comes up as $257 monthly in zip code 28078. The 2014 plan comes up at $1153.

If that is the link you are getting all your "information" from then now your posts make sense.

It's not too hard to get the internet to work. Maybe when you figure it out you won't spew nonsense.

Anyone else clicking on this guy's link for that $257 quote and not getting an error?  Strange how everyone else's links just require a click but with Krazy we have to "figure it out."

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Family Deductible   $11,000 in-network / $22,000 out-of-network

Ummm... yeah.  I don't think 67% of the US population can take a $11,000-$22,000 family hit every year.

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Anyone else clicking on this guy's link for that $257 quote and not getting an error?  Strange how everyone else's links just require a click but with Krazy we have to "figure it out."

We have this thing called google.

Cool.  So your link doesn't work.  Thanks.  Just post a link that does work.  It's not up to us to google evidence to support you.

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Family Deductible   $11,000 in-network / $22,000 out-of-network

Ummm... yeah.  I don't think 67% of the US population can take a $11,000-$22,000 family hit every year.

Don't project your shortcomings onto others.

Again krazen the fact you have never worked, paid taxes, and run a household comes shining through.  I make more money individually than the average family makes combined.  I have also purchase health insurance and worked at a hospital.  I don't just post snark on the internet from stuff I googled in a half a$$ed way.

krazen you can't run a country based on the fantasy people in your head.  You have to look at real numbers and use common sense.  Median household GROSS income is less than $53,000/yr.  After you pay taxes, find food and shelter, and get transportation you and your wife aren't going to have that much left to live on.  You are going to be devastated if you take a single $20,000 hit.  And if you have some chronic condition or something that requires 3 years of treatment you can easily add another $10,000 a year.

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Family Deductible   $11,000 in-network / $22,000 out-of-network

Ummm... yeah.  I don't think 67% of the US population can take a $11,000-$22,000 family hit every year.

This is supposedly the Obamacare option no?

I don't know what it is or in fact if it is even real.  The guy's link doesn't work.  What I do know is there is no way 67% of the population can can handle a $22,000 deductible so it doesn't represent the ideal situation for the majority of the people regardless or pre or post Obamacare pricing.

I really wish we could talk about the average plan for the average person.

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Family Deductible   $11,000 in-network / $22,000 out-of-network

Ummm... yeah.  I don't think 67% of the US population can take a $11,000-$22,000 family hit every year.

Don't project your shortcomings onto others.

Again krazen the fact you have never worked, paid taxes, and run a household comes shining through.  I make more money individually than the average family makes combined.  I have also purchase health insurance and worked at a hospital.  I don't just post snark on the internet from stuff I googled in a half a$$ed way.

krazen you can't run a country based on the fantasy people in your head.  You have to look at real numbers and use common sense.  Median household GROSS income is less than $53,000/yr.  After you pay taxes, find food and shelter, and get transportation you and your wife aren't going to have that much left to live on.  You are going to be devastated if you take a single $20,000 hit.  And if you have some chronic condition or something that requires 3 years of treatment you can easily add another $10,000 a year.

Wrong on both counts.

Then what is the median gross household income for the US?  Unlike you I don't mind being corrected.  And the $20,000 and $10,000 was your numbers.  If they are wrong why did you post them?

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Average as in median person?  Does the median person qualify for subsidies? I readily stipulate that Obamacare is a good deal for those in line to get large subsidies. And they should get subsidies, if based on means testing, and means testing alone (not by age, etc.). Pity we have this Rube Goldberg toy to effect it all.

To be honest with you I don't have much information about Obamacare.  I am really reserving final judgement until sometime next year.  I never rush into anything let alone this type of thing that is going to have a stampede of people going crazy on it for months.

People complaining about the website being slow or down must be joking.  After all the technological disasters from people like Apple I learned years ago to wait a few months for the dust to settle and for others to waste their time finding bugs and being inconvenienced before diving in.

Most of the chatter I see on TV and the internet is from biased people with an agenda.  I'm waiting for stuff to calm down and then get some first hand information and information from reliable people.

What I can say is even outside of the straight forward high deductible plans there are tons of other deceptive junk plans.  So it is in no way surprising certain plans were going to be shut down.  I don't see anything wrong with that.  Is it possible some good plans are being shut down and being replaced with worse plans?  Sure.  I just haven't seen anyone definitively make the case though.  Honestly haven't looked much though.

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That would be fine as a point of view.  But Obama said "if you like your doctor, you get to keep that doctor. period" when he was selling Obamacare law.  Now if he said "if you like your doctor, you need to get over it and become adults and look for another one" during the Obamacare bill debates and then the bill gets passed then of course people now should no reason to complain as the consequences were made transparent.  But that was not what took place.

What's your point?  The people complaining the most about this are the same crowd that fervently defend "Iraq has WMDs pointed right at our throats."  In the long list of lies that politicians have told me in the last 10 years or so this ranks as not worth mentioning.

I hear you.  I did not approve of the Iraq War either WMD or not.  The day of the Iraq invasion was the day I broke with the GOP and did not vote for for GOP in any election until 2008 when I still planned to vote Libertarian and my wife who was very negative on Obama convinced me to vote McCain despite his position on Iraq.  Sorry if I am going off topic, I am equally negative on the "non-truths" Bush II have on Iraq and Obama on Obamacare.  Both are equally not acceptable.  That one took place does not justify the other.

For the record I did approve of it.  It was more a trust and naïveté thing.  I never voted for Bush.  Never approved of him as president.  But when people asked me about the war I simply said it is too big of a decision to make lightly.  He is the commander in chief and I have to trust him.  Besides I never imagined that a US president could mount an invasion on that scale based either on a lie or no information.  The thought was too disturbing for me to accept.

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When you grow up and you buy insurance, including homeowners insurance, auto insurance, and others, you might realize that the point is not to hit the deductible every single year, and making some bizarre assertion that someone like Mr. Schwab would be hitting the deductible every year is of course pure nonsense.

What?   The example I gave was hitting the deductible for 3 years?

3 years≠every year for the rest of your life

Where do you get the idea just because someone hits their deductible it always means that was their intent?  My post made no statement regarding intent.

Let me explain this for the common sense impared.

Say you are on a car trip on a holiday weekend.  You are two states away from your home and there isn't an in network hospital in site for miles.  You get into a bad car accident.  Boom.  Right there that is over $20,000.  Which is your out of network deductable.  For the net three years you have multiple surgeries, a long hospital stay, multiple doctor follow ups, and of course copious amounts of physical and occupatinal therapy.  Assuming you are stabilized at some point you can be moved closer to home to an in network facility and upon final discharge you can see in network physicians and physical therapists.  You can also have some follow up surgeries in network.  Okay so that is $20,000+$10,000 (or $11,000) + $10 (or $11,000).  That would break the median family.  This is not the type of thing people are shooting for when they say they want health insurance.  That's all I'm saying.

Let's look at plans for the average person.

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When you're old enough to buy a car, I suggest shopping for something called first party medical benefits. It costs about $40 a year and provides $50k of accident health care coverage for me. For a fellow like Mr. Schwab, such is much preffered over getting screwed by a bunch of liberals who jacked his premium to $1200 so that others could be freeloaders.

The mathematics here is heavily amusing. While claiming that some cannot pay $10k out of pocket they increase this good fellow's premium to $14k per year.

Lol.  When people resort to concrete thinking you know they don't have a point.  So car wrecks are the only way people get $20,000+ hospital bills now?  Very interesting.  Even in the thread where we discussed young people skipping out on insurance no one said anything that inane.  At this guy's age he needs to be getting all kinds of screenings and could end up with a cancer diagnosis or heart attack any day.  Love to see him get his auto insurance to cover his $20,000 deductible from the heart attack he had while sitting on a coach at his son's place out of state.

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Ah, the backtracking already. I hope Mr. Schwab doesn't take your poor financial advice.

Whatever healthcare he needs of course he will pay for with the savings on his low premium. At least, before you people jacked up his insurance rates.

Well I hope he doesn't take your financial advice and get auto insurance when he doesn't own a car.

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For some reason, the moral hazard issue vis a vis folks with skeletal plans does not get mentioned enough. One can have a debate about what the minimum level of coverage should be, but there clearly does need to be a minimum. It may well be that Obamacare got the balance wrong here (choice on the one hand, moral hazard on the other), but it got the overall concept right. As many have pointed out, one would think that the moral hazard issue would be one that those on the Right would be particularly sensitive to, but no, not this time - for obvious reasons.

^This.

I am no expert and I haven't done much research on Obamacare.  I figure I'm going to wait a couple of months for stuff to settle down before I go to the website... Like I do with every tech roll out.  I doubt Obamacare is perfect.  That is statistically impossible.

Insurance in a general sense is pretty basic.  You take in premiums, invest the money, and pay out claims.  What's left over is your profit... If you are a profit generating entity.  If you know the size and frequency of the claims, which I do, then you know, Obamacare or not, something is fishy about two olds allegedly on a plan for $257/month.  If they are high net worth individuals that are doing a kind of self insurance then yeah that makes sense.  But for the average family leaving themselves potentially exposed to $20,000 is dangerous.

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I get that not everyone wants to get into the weeds of the details and will accept a bundled policy in exchange for their lack of knowledge. I don't get why the same system needs to create disincentives for those who are willing to put in the effort to determine their personal needs.

The website signed up like 6 people out of a nation 0f $330+ million on day one.  And now you want to make things even more complicated?  let's straighten out the current mess before we layer other moving parts on it.

The law can be changed and improved.  I'm not really getting bent out of shape about a millionaire having to kick in a little more dough for their surgery.  Particularly when they are over the age of 60 and going to be on medicare soon.  Less than five years of paying whatever isn't going to kill this woman.

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One of the cases I'm describing here is a former Democratic congressional staffer who was a strong proponent of the ACA at its passage. Hardly a 1%er. I don't see why she should pay double because the Feds couldn't emulate any of the number of online insurance engines that already exist.

I think the situation is complex and we are operating in an information vacuum.  I am willing to say there is a lot I don't know.  But what I do know was there was a lengthy period where Republicans could have helped shape this thing and they chose not to.  In fact they chose to obstruct, sue, defund, and basically destroy it.  Are you at all surprised after such a process the final product is less than ideal in some instances?

I am going to wait for the website to get fixed and substantial numbers for people to sign up.  I am going to wait for a solid amount of objective data instead of a drip, drip, drip of anecdotal stories.  I've been burned too many times on the internet where people go off on a long discussions and some critical piece of information was left out intentionally or unintentionally.

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Van Jones and Politifact have some interesting information...



So apparently it is only the extreme minority of individual policy holders that keep their policy for more than two years.  And individual policy holders are a minority compared to empoyer policies and medicare and medicaid.  This looks like the Catholic birth control thing.  People want to make vast changes to national policy to accommodate a tiny minority of people.

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I'm trying to figure out which one of these statements is a lie.  Strange that someone who spends months telling young people not to get insurance now tells us he has had the exact same insurance plan since he was in his early thirties.

Someone please make sure Torie's account hasn't been hijacked.  For all we know the real Torie could be tied up in a basement somewhere.

Ezra Klein claims yes, while a commenter down below about the article says no.

The commenter notes in essence, that no matter how much lipstick you try to put on it all to make it pretty, the fact of the matter is that Obamacare is a bad deal for many young people, as opposed to just waiting to get sick, and then get insurance...

FWIW, I have had the same individual policy since 1984, and still have it.

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It's obscene to complain that you can't afford $250/mo for health insurance when you're spending $250/mo on vacations, $65/mo on cable, and $500/mo on entertainment, all while living in a half-million dollar home. And certainly health care is more important than dry cleaning.

Yeah and $125/month on "gifts."  WTF?!  Obamacare objections just keep getting stranger and stranger.  I thought the Republicans and yellow Avatars told us that a poor person having a DVD player was living the dream.  Now we learn you need a minimum of $125/month for "gifts" to be considered civilized.  I love how it's one set of rules for the 99% and another set of rules for the 1%.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understanding-poverty-in-the-united-states-surprising-facts-about-americas-poor

Holy Sh-t!  70% of the lazy takers have a VCR!  Wow!

Who here gets $125/month worth of "gifts" from their parents?

If I was making $100K I would not get a $350K mortgage.  My parents made a heck of a lot more than $100K and their mortgage was not even half that size.  Live within your means.

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That is the most ridiculous budget most of us have ever seen.  If these people want to live in a half million dollar home on a $100K salary they deserve any @$$ reaming that comes their way.

Look man this isn't theoretical.  I had a roommate last year and our combine income was comfortably over $100K.  We did not live in a house.  We rented a basic two bedroom apartment.  We didn't have a $125/month "gift" budget.  And neither of us was married or had children.  You can choose to have a child.  You can choose to hand out $125 worth of gifts a month and you can choose to have an excessive cable bill.  We are all just wondering what in the world that has to do with the president?  The man is busy.  You mean to say you can't sort that situation out yourself?

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That is the most ridiculous budget most of us have ever seen.  If these people want to live in a half million dollar home on a $100K salary they deserve any @$$ reaming that comes their way.

What now?  Houses cost a lot in places where high incomes are available.  $100,000/year is an unusually high income, and not redily available in cheap places like Missouri, where the houses cost less.  In economically vibrant states $500,000 is a cheap house.

There are plenty of doctors, lawyers, computer programers, accountants, etc who live in dual income households and make $100,000.

The reason Texas is so hot is there is plenty of cheap land and oil.  If you have an education you can easily make $100,000 in Texas.  Heck it is easier in Texas than NYC because NYC is full of professionals all competing.  You can get a sweet 3 bedroom 3.5 bath 2 car garage close to downtown Houston for around $300K.  If you drop $500K you are living a totally pimped out lifestyle.  If you are willing to do the park and ride thing in those Texas cities you can live in the 'burbs and get a nice place for around $200K.

I've lived in high cost places and low cost places.  My pay went up for certain jobs in high cost places but by and large having a solid job in a low cost place is the way to go.  A lot of people could move and get a better budget but they want to live a certain lifestyle.  Well fine.  But the government shouldn't have to make allowances for that.  That's why when people say I left California because it was too expensive I say good.  That's what is supposed to happen.