Woke up this morning to this story in my Albuquerque Journal: The New Mexico insurance pool to cover the uninsurable is informing it’s 8,300 customers that their rates will go up 23.8 percent July 1st!! Obamacare is hurting so many in our great Country! Obama must be impeached! America cannot take much more! The poorest of the poor are being hurt. How much more bad news for the taxpayers of this Country can come out of this Administration?
The NMIC is increasing its rates because people can no longer be denied coverage due to preexisting conditions or life caps on insurance paid.
More people are being insured with Tier 1 insurance companies, so they don’t have to use a high-risk high-premium insurance company like the NMIC.
This is not an Obamacare disaster. This is a very good thing. Poor people are benefiting, not being hurt.
Sir, Obamacare is a disaster, it is destroying health care in America. Costs are rising, it’s hurting the middle class, rates went up, many Hospitals are hurting In the Journal this morning the write up stated that pool enrollees who are younger than 65 and receive Medicare because they are disabled and who need extra coverage to handle medical bills might need to remain with the pool since they CAN’T BUY MEDIGAP POLICIES until they turn 65, about 800 of these folks. I am sorry Sir, you will not convenience me and all my Doctor, and Nursing friends, pharmacists, middle class folks that have either had their policy canceled or cost increased that Obamacare is a good thing, it’s ugly out there. I have friends in their 20’s with families and their insurance increased dramatically, with Obamacare and his economy he is breaking that back of the middle class.
PS… In my rounds as a Pastor in the hospitals I have not had one person tell me Obamacare is good for our Country, it’s horrible, the worst program ever introduced by a President of the United States.
I appreciate your anecdotal evidence, but healthcare costs are rising because of malpractice lawsuits, for-profit insurance companies, healthcare conglomerates, and drug/device companies. Concerning the ACA, they rise due to the laws and regulations that don’t allow health insurance companies to drop patients when they get too expensive, and because of insurance companies who want to keep their hefty profit margins. I know it hurts when costs go up, but in this case, they are going up for a very valid reason.
I agree with you that it is a great shame that approximately 2.5% of our population is on the individual insurance market and had their policies cancelled or changed in some way. In the vast majority of these cases, it was because their insurance did not meet the standards set by the ACA which protect the individual from huge premiums and poor reimbursement percentages. For the other 97.5% of Americans, the ACA is a benefit to them by putting the regulations on insurance companies, making medicare cheaper, and expanding medicaid, but it is still not right that the minority is getting cost increases.
And I know it doesn’t help to try and ease their pain by telling them their insurance is actually better than what it was before with things like no annual caps on coverage and without copays for things like cancer screenings and regular check ups.
We have a very broken healthcare system. And it is extremely cruel especially to people on the individual market. Three in five bankruptcies are brought on by medical bills. Countless people dropped from their insurance or denied coverage without a word from the insurance companies or Congress. Tens of millions without any insurance at all. And all of us with insurance subject to the whims of corporate bureaucracy and and convoluted incentives and the luck of whether we had the right insurance at the right time even as we switched jobs and got sick and lost coverage and scrambled to replace it and moved and married and started businesses and closed businesses and all the other ways in which life is messy and complicated.
This effort to reform our health care system is ambitious and noble and flawed and worth the fight. And the most unfair, cruel, reckless thing that we could do would be to turn around and go back to where we came from.
To amend my first paragraph statement, I only meant that the costs associated with better health care are valid.
What the insurance companies do with the regulations is up to them, but I would not blame the regulations for how these massive companies choose to pass on the slight increase in costs to protect their enormous bottom lines.
Thank you for your comments, I’m not into throwing around stats like a Politician, but I’m talking about real people here, I counsel them daily, I see the pain of not getting the right treatment, like medications or delayed treatment, or cancelled policies, or rates that people can’t pay because of Obamacare, I see first hand with my eyes the hurt of people. God Bless you and we just disagree on this mess and the mess of an unGodly President, the worst our nation has had.
I am encouraged by your heart for people who are hurting. Thank you for that.
In my opinion, hard evidence is our best weapon on making informed decisions about what is happening in our country, and how policies affect us. The bottom line is that millions of uninsured are getting affordable health insurance, and millions will have their pain and hurt alleviated. It is a step in the right direction.
Thank you for your Kind words Mark, we just proved that we can disagree and not get nasty. God Bless you and yours forever and ever.
Indeed.
Mark W.,
I personally witnessed healthcare companies working with the President to write this law. While I agree that healthcare needed to go somewhere, I am issuing quite a few “I knew its”. As a lifelong healthcare professional that is conducting doctoral level analysis of the healthcare system, I knew that the law would encourage higher insurance rates and healthcare conglomerates, also called ACOs. The law was designed to support the viability and profitability of these structures, while achieving access to care for all. Good healthcare is expensive. Innovation, research, and individualized care plans cost time and money. That is one of the things that make the American private sector healthcare system different. For the most part, people receive individualized Care. In other countries and many times in the public sector healthcare model, people get cookie cutter treatment plans that do not address individual needs. The cost of doing that is much less.
Rebecca,
In general, I agree with you. But, I would not call the American population necessarily much more healthy than other 1st world countries that have more state-regulated healthcare. The US does not even rank in the top 20 healthiest countries in the world, according to the WHO and the UN. In fact, every country in the top 20 has publicly sponsored healthcare as the majority provider.
Obviously there are other factors involved in the health of a country besides the healthcare, so I’m not making a direct correlation.
But, to say that all public sector healthcare models provide less adequate healthcare than private sector is not true. I know that you did not say that, I am just expanding your observation.