cshort wrote:
According to her, her existing policy was cheaper and had a lower deductible than a comparable policy under ACA.

We don't know if she's subsidy eligible, and as I suggested previously, she's almost certainly better off with the higher-deductible (non-HIX?) plan for around the same monthly premium that the article mentions she was considering.

i think the main thing that can be gathered from the article and her quotes is that like most Americans she has given very little thought to the matter of health insurance and her need for it.

cshort wrote:

drsmooth wrote:

cshort wrote:Without knowing what wasn't covered under her existing policy, from what I can tell she was much better off with the policy they just canceled

what can you tell from what Jerz provided upthread?

This is where it's difficult for anyone to do a good comparison. Did she have prescription drug coverage? If so, what were the co-pays? Were they for generics or branded drugs? Did she use out of network coverage? Dental? What would these be under the ACA? Right now, all we're seeing is high level premiums and co-pays, not much beyond that.

According to her, her existing policy was cheaper and had a lower deductible than a comparable policy under ACA.

Overall, premiums are much lower than what was anticipated. You are looking at the smallest part of the market and ascribing that to the entire system.

The GOP is being handed the 2014 midterms on a silver platter. Can't wait to see how they screw it up.

cshort wrote:The GOP is being handed the 2014 midterms on a silver platter. Can't wait to see how they screw it up.

srsly?

cshort wrote:The GOP is being handed the 2014 midterms on a silver platter. Can't wait to see how they screw it up.

Probably with that whole shutdown fiasco, and their push to the far right.

THAT'S WHAT DICK MORRIS THINKS SO IT MUST BE TRUE

cshort wrote:The GOP is being handed the 2014 midterms on a silver platter. Can't wait to see how they screw it up.

"ya heard, son?"

slugsrbad wrote:

cshort wrote:The GOP is being handed the 2014 midterms on a silver platter. Can't wait to see how they screw it up.

Probably with that whole shutdown fiasco, and their push to the far right.

With the ACA creating all of these sound bites, the last shutdown will be a distant memory. This has much more of a direct impact on the average citizen, and what's happening now is tailor made for campaign commercials. Hoyer came out today and admitted they knew all along people would lose their healthcare. This will be all over the air in Oct. As for using the shutdown, they might even have to be careful there. The GOP can point to delaying the Individual mandates as one of their demands that was rejected, and a delay might happen anyway. Could make their shutdown tactics look more principled.

That being said, they'll get into another debt limit fight or budget battle that will probably move the news away from the ACA. And you're right, they'll also nominate some more fringe candidates that have no chance of getting elected, vs moderates that could get them additional seats.

Bucky wrote:THAT'S WHAT DICK MORRIS THINKS SO IT MUST BE TRUE

NO ACTUALLY IT WAS JON STEWART

anecdotes are fun:

The name of Dianne Barrette is speeding around the newsphere today. This 56-year-old resident of Winter Haven, Fla., surfaced on a CBS News story today as a victim of Obamacare. Reporter Jan Crawford, in a “CBS This Morning” story, addressed the contradiction between President Obama’s pledge that those who liked their health-care plans could keep them and the ongoing disappointment of folks who are now getting kicked off of their existing plans because they do not meet federal requirements. Crawford found Dianne Barrette, who claimed that she’s looking at a tenfold hike in her plan. Here’s some transcript:

Last month, [Barrette] received a letter from Blue Cross/Blue Shield informing her as of January 2014, she would lose her current plan. Barrette pays $54 a month. The new plan she’s being offered would run $591 a month, ten times more than what she currently pays. “What I have right now is what I’m happy with, and I just want to know why I can’t keep what I have. Why do I have to be forced into something else?” [says Barrette]

Perfect sound bite for Fox News! In a chat with the Erik Wemple Blog, Barrette confirmed that three Fox News producers had called to sign her on. She’ll be appearing tomorrow on the imbecilic morning show “Fox & Friends,” “Your World” with the great Neil Cavuto and on Greta Van Susteren’s program, “On the Record.”
“You guys are going to be sick of my face,” jokes Barrette, who works as a realtor and pulls in about $30,000 per year.

More coverage may provide a deeper understanding of the ins and outs of Barrette’s situation: Her current health insurance plan, she says, doesn’t cover “extended hospital stays; it’s not designed for that,” says Barrette. Well, does it cover any hospitalization? “Outpatient only,” responds Barrette. Nor does it cover ambulance service and some prenatal care. On the other hand, says Barrette, it does cover “most of my generic drugs that I need” and there’s a $50 co-pay for doctors’ appointments. “It’s all I could afford right now,” says Barrette.

In sum, it’s a pray-that-you-don’t-really-get-sick “plan.” When asked if she ever required hospitalization, Barrette says she did. It happened when she was employed by Raytheon, which provided “excellent benefits.” Ever since she left the company and started working as an independent contractor, “I haven’t been hospitalized since then, thank God.” Hospitalization is among the core requirements for health-care plans under Obamacare.

plus, she likely would be eligible for subsidies to help pay for her now way better insurance options.

Controversies show how Obama’s inattention to detail may hurt his presidential legacy

Good on you, Washington Post

jerseyhoya wrote:

Yes, Obama is almost...Reaganesque in his failure to know things.

I appreciate that. The common defense in this thread from liberals has been "BUT BUSH", and it's good to mix up which previous Republican the left bashed for doing (or not knowing) XYZ so of course it's OK that Obama is now doing (or not knowing) XYZ.

The Obama administration should have been getting regular traffic light updates on ACA. When it went yellow, thse reports should have offered detail about how to address the problems, and went they went red they should have transitioned into a briefing that the president was to recieve directly. I cannot hold the president accountable for not watching the program schedule nor do I want that position dealing with that detail.

A question is if this was esclated in a way that described the true situation or if it was deemed better to hide the status and hope for the best. Bad news travels slowly, especially when political capital is involved.

CGI is complicit as they should have halted work with starting this program in Spring 2013, especially since they now say that the schedule was too compressed to execute and that it did not allow time for testing. You cannot accept a contract, where a legal entity commits to delivery, then fail to deliver. Perhaps they are in breach depending on the contract details.

it's a big screwup, and the buck stops at sebelius on something like this. i doubt presidents are briefed on the ins and outs of something such as how the coding is going on the website construction. she should be fired. i just dont think republicans get to be up in arms about it based on their own track record.

as for president obama, this is what happens with presidents, is it not??? you keep them enough out of the loop on particulars to stave off the other side. it's happened for decades since Nixon. that's just how it is, unfortunately. one can hate that and still realize it's how the game is played. presidents don't even keep up with technology, on purpose. they live in a bubble. it's hte job of outside forces to burst that bubble, unfortunately. it's a ridiculous idea that the buck does not stop with the president, but they are purposely kept in the dark because of what's happened in the past to presidents who dug in too deep. what you hope is they pick good administrators. Sebelius looks to be a failure with this implementation, and the bigger failures appears to be the mechanism for how we pick contractors. i've seen time nad time again how contractors are picked with no relation to previous performance, but instead their ability to bring stuff in under a certain budget.

i don't think he's that great of a president, to be honest. i think he's done some obvious things, some long-term decent things, but is very defensive and afraid of confrontation or holding to long-held convictions for hte sake of some false civility/bipartisanship that the other side will never allow. he's nowhere near the worst president of my lifetime, though.

the ACA is seeing premiums go down, coverage go up, and what is covered go up. people who were living year to year on crappy policies were going to see those policies change anyway because that's what those policies do. what those policies do not do is cover jack shit. and yes, you have to pay for proper coverage for yourself. it's common sense. you don't get to pick a $30/mth policy that obviously will cover NOTHING should you get truly injured or sick and then go apply for medicaid with your pumped up bills that hospital charged you. no, you pre-cover yourself to avoid THAT sticker shock. that's insurance, insuring against the unlikely, the what ifs, the 'i never saw it comings'. you don't get to be irresponsible because you are currently healthy and then just believe you'll be healthy the rest of your life so you don't need to go to a doctor or have hospitalization coverage. it's absurd on its face.

and yes, there is something known as the commonwealth. catholic social teaching, the common good, the social contract, whtaever you call it, it exists. time to get used to it, since we've been living in it for years and years and it's worked great up to this point.

why we need to send this NSA stuff to the courts:

Newly declassified National Security Agency documents reveal that the agency didn't ask for court approval before collecting the location data of some cellphone users. That's a problem because location data is far more personal and revealing than other forms of "metadata" that the courts have held the government can access without court approval.

An April 1, 2011 memo to a member of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee from an attorney with the NSA's Office of General Counsel states that the Department of Justice advised the agency that collecting cell site location data for testing was fine under the current order. But NSA didn't ask for specific sign-off from the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court (FISC), the secret court that oversees the spy agency's programs. Instead, the memo notes that the NSA believes that Justice "orally advised" the court that the NSA was collecting location data sets for test purposes.

Much of the U.S. government's authority to collect metadata without a warrant is derived from a 1979 Supreme Court ruling over the small-scale collection of call records. But that ruling was made long before the widespread use of cellular technology and the surveillance applications that came along with it. The courts haven't set clear precedents on how location data should be handled given those more current applications.

A July ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that individuals don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy for location data collected by phone companies, calling the data the equivalent of a "business record." But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit recently held that police need a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to the vehicle of a suspect. And in a ruling on similar GPS case last year, five Supreme Court Justice suggested that even without a physical trespass, ongoing electronic surveillance may be "an unconstitutional invasion of privacy." But the court did not rule specifically on how the government may use private data collected by modern technology.

part of the problem may be judges who do not get the similarities, and thus do not set precedent for this sort of overreach. then there is the 'oral advisement' ridiculousness.

Speaking of courts, since the FISA court was enacted in 1979 there have been almost 34,000 application requests sent in for surveillance warrant approvals. Of the nearly 34,000 requests only 11 have been denied. I was expecting FISA to be a rubber stamp of the executive branch, but not to that degree.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... aphic.html

how egregious were those 11, amirite

jerseyhoya wrote:Controversies show how Obama’s inattention to detail may hurt his presidential legacy

Good on you, Washington Post

pacino wrote:it's a big screwup, and the buck stops at sebelius on something like this. i doubt presidents are briefed on the ins and outs of something such as how the coding is going on the website construction. she should be fired. i just dont think republicans get to be up in arms about it based on their own track record.

As you allude to, Pacino, this is not necessarily an isolated thing. He's seems disconnected from all of the major events in his Presidency.

Read through this collection of events here, and tell me that Obama is engaged as he should be. Healthcare.gov implementation, snooping on foreign allies through the NSA, Syria, IRS snooping on conservative groups, Benghazi talking points, seizing phone records from reporters.... All of these responses by the administration were poorly managed by the administration, and Obama claimed to not know about any of these things until they became public knowledge. He either needs to be delegating this work to better people, or managing them more closely. Maybe both.

Just imagine if this was Bush, and Bush claimed to not know about any of these things in advance. You'd be having a field day.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1 ... 2724696396