Saturday, October 18, 2014

ObamaCare customers afraid to use their benefits due to sky-high deductibles. So says the NY Times

ObamaCare customers afraid to use their benefits due to sky-high deductibles



It must have pained the New York Times to publish its article about how many ObamaCare customers fear to make use of their taxpayer-subsidized, hyper-regulated benefits because the deductibles are so high.  It's a devastating indictment of the Affordable Care Act, cutting deep into the very small number of Americans who actually find the ACA somewhat useful.  

Not only does ObamaCare have low approval ratings from the American public at large, it doesn't even score well among the group it was nominally intended to benefit most directly, the uninsured.  We hear a lot from ObamaCare defenders about how all of the expense, confusion, and abject failure of the program are worthwhile, because some number of people who formerly lacked insurance now have it.  That argument drifts into the stratosphere of lunacy once a rational observer backs out the number of "newly insured" who are actually enrolled in the ancient, insolvent, and inadequate welfare program known as Medicaid, and computes the cost per person who picked up real health insurance due to the ACA - it would have been far cheaper to simply hand each of those people a card that says "get all the medicine you want from any doctor you want, free, for life."  
And now we see vindication of a point made long ago by ObamaCare critics: not only are insurance premiums rising at least as much as they would have without the trillion-plus dollars sunk into ObamaCare - and absolutely skyrocketing because of the ACA in many parts of the country - but even among those who receive enough subsidy money from the rest of us to offset the high premiums, killer deductibles make their coverage much more expensive in practice, to the point of rendering them virtually useless:
Patricia Wanderlich got insurance through the Affordable Care Act this year, and with good reason: She suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2011, spending weeks in a hospital intensive care unit, and has a second, smaller aneurysm that needs monitoring.
But her new plan has a $6,000 annual deductible, meaning that Ms. Wanderlich, who works part time at a landscaping company outside Chicago, has to pay for most of her medical services up to that amount. She is skipping this year’s brain scan and hoping for the best.
“To spend thousands of dollars just making sure it hasn’t grown?” said Ms. Wanderlich, 61. “I don’t have that money.”
About 7.3 million Americans are enrolled in private coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, and more than 80 percent qualified for federal subsidies to help with the cost of their monthly premiums. But many are still on the hook for deductibles that can top $5,000 for individuals and $10,000 for families — the trade-off, insurers say, for keeping premiums for the marketplace plans relatively low. The result is that some people — no firm data exists on how many — say they hesitate to use their new insurance because of the high out-of-pocket costs.
Insurers must cover certain preventive services, like immunizations, cholesterol checks and screening for breast and colon cancer, at no cost to the consumer if the provider is in their network. But for other services and items, like prescription drugs, marketplace customers often have to meet their deductible before insurance starts to help.
While high-deductible plans cover most of the costs of severe illnesses and lengthy hospital stays, protecting against catastrophic debt, those plans may compel people to forgo routine care that could prevent bigger, longer-term health issues, according to experts and research.
Among other things, this means people are still using "cost-shifting" tactics to get "free" care at emergency rooms, which was one of the major problems ObamaCare was supposed to address.  In fact, there have been studies showing the abuse of emergency rooms has gotten worse since the ACA was passed.
We could have passed any number of sensible reforms to provide more affordable access to preventive services, and help people arrange for catastrophic coverage, without the rest of ObamaCare's monstrous, expensive, and Constitutionally dubious machinery.  The situation described by the Times article is not much different from the conditions that already existed before ObamaCare - it's risible for them to talk about "high-deductible plans covering most of the costs of severe illnesses and lengthy hospital stays" as if that were a feature of Obama's boondoggle, since that kind of coverage was already available, at more reasonable cost, before the ACA came along.  That's pretty much what insurance was, before Obama got hold of it.  This is all about turning "health insurance" into a welfare scheme, getting the middle class hooked on Big Government subsidies (without which they can't afford Obama's super-expensive insurance at all), creating vast new government agencies, and infecting the insurance industry with a fiscal virus that will kill it off in a few years, paving the way for single-payer socialized medicine.
Now, how's the already bleak picture of 7 million Americans with highly subsidized insurance they can't afford to use going to look after the subsidies provided through the federal HealthCareDotGov exchange are ruled unconstitutional, and the true enrollment numbers are revealed, showing there aren't actually 7 million enrollees anyway?  Quite a few of them have dropped out, or been found invalid, over the past year.  What's the cost per "newly insured" American, with insurance she can't afford to use because of the deductibles, going to look like then?  

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