A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Has Your Health Insurance Become Lousy and Expensive? October 14, 2016

Boy mine sure has.  When I changed jobs, my new employer’s health insurance options were modeled directly on Obamacare lines, with so-called “platinum” or “Cadillac” plans – which were more or less the standard insurance previous employers going back 20 years had offered – were priced so high that virtually no one would purchase them, and, indeed, if one cranked the numbers, actually cost more out of pocket than the high deductible “low cost” plans they were obviously trying to push people towards.  So now I have a high deductible plan that still costs me about 2/3 as much per month to pay for as my previous “Cadillac” plan did at my former employer.

Not that I’m complaining, just noting the overall trend.  It seems my insurance is average these days, and better than what a lot of companies are now offering.  I learned from a friend that a very large defense contractor is dumping all their employees into a single low benefit high deductible plan, as a move to probably forcing them onto Obamacare next year, if they can find it.  This is obviously oriented to create an artificial demand for Obamacare, so that as it continues to implode, economically, it will be “too big to fail” and require billions in our money to continue to prop up.  Even more, the rules Obamacare is enforcing on all insurers is driving more and more out of the market for individual insurance entirely, again, surely by design.  The goal is single payer, and the plan is to so screw up private insurance that a public plan, with massive rationing a la England, will be the “only possible alternative” (the powers that be will endorse).

Obamacare was indeed designed to fail.  And our bishops largely supported it, as they themselves, through the USCCB and its predecessors, have been calling for government run and owned health insurance for over 100 years.

Michelle Malkin relates a tale of woe that is growing more and more common.  Private insurance is growing increasingly poor in service and expensive to have, if one is able to find it at all:

Once was a shock. Twice was an outrage. Thrice is a nightmare that won’t end. [A nightmare our national elites seem bound and determined to foist on all of us.  And that applies to both parties, or most all Republicans, anyway, who have done next to nothing to try to roll back Obamacare]

Over the past three years, my family’s private, individual health insurance plan — a high-deductible Preferred Provider Organization — has been canceled three times. Our first death notice, from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, arrived in the fall of 2013. Our second, from Rocky Mountain Health Plans, came last August. Three weeks ago, we received another ominous “notice of plan discontinuation” from Anthem informing us that the insurer “will no longer offer your current health plan in the State of Colorado.”

Every time we receive a cancellation letter, I recall President Obama’s big lie: “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”………

………Like an estimated 22 million other Americans, I am a self-employed small-business owner who buys health insurance for my family directly on the individual market (as opposed to group insurance through a company or third party). Our most recent plan features a $6,000 deductible with a $1,000 monthly premium. It’s nosebleed expensive, but provides us access to specialists not curtailed by bureaucratic gatekeepers. This has been important for us because several members of my family have required specialized care for chronic illnesses. [Sounds very familiar, but both my premiums and deductibles are somewhat higher]

Once again, however, I’ll soon be talking about our plan in the past tense. Choices for families like mine have evaporated in the era of Obamacare. In Colorado, UnitedHealthCare and Humana will cease selling individual plans next year. Rocky Mountain Health Plans is pulling out of the individual market in all but one county. Nearly 100,000 of my fellow Coloradans will be forced to find new insurance alternatives as open enrollment approaches on Nov. 1, according to the Denver Business Journal. As Anthem abandons PPOs, the cost of remaining individual market plans will soar an average of 20 percent.

It’s a nationwide implosion.

Individual market customers on the Obamacare exchange in Oklahoma learned last week that they’ll face average rate hikes of a whopping 76 percent. Last month, Maryland approved double-digit rate hikes for all individual market plans. In August, Tennessee approved rate increases of between 44 and 62 percent for three insurers still carrying individual market plans. And in Minnesota, where the individual market is on the brink of collapse, state officials recently agreed to raise rates an average of 60 percent next year — affecting an estimated 250,000 people both on and off the Obamacare exchanges. [We are all paying, and paying dearly, for Obamacare and its 3000 pages of provisions.  It is causing insurance prices to skyrocket across the board, as insurers have to increase cost to offset massive losses through people abusing the system.  More and more doctors are refusing more and more insurance plans, limiting options.  All of this was predicted, of course, but conveniently ignored.  Ultimately, they want single payer, and causing the private market to implode is the best way to overcome American’s strong – and very correct – opposition to Euro-style government health care schemes and rationing.  England is now forcing people with “incorrect lifestyles” to go to the back of the list for things like heart surgery.  You will be made to care.]

This wealth redistribution Trojan horse was sold to gullible Americans as a vehicle for expanding “affordable” access to health insurance for all. Now, millions of us are paying the price: crappier plans, fewer choices, shrinking access to specialists, skyrocketing price tags — and no end in sight to the death spiral.

Mission accomplished.

Obamacare in a nutshell:

Not just Obamacare, but Obama (did you see the sicko video of the women press corp (and probably many of the men) ogling his crotch while he sported a w–dy?), the media, the demonrat party, and leftism generally.  Evil.