patrick.net

michaelsch says

how would you convince good doctors to work with Government Health Care System?

How many heart specialists don't accept Medicare ? Virtually all doctors would have to go with 'Medicare for all' if we had it.

oddhack says

My Dad is pleased with his “Government Health Care System” (Tricare + Medicare). He figures he’s received closing on a million dollars in medical treatment for angina, heart attack, multiple stents, an extremely rare liver cancer, lung problems, and various other indignities that come with getting to be 89 years old. Getting treatment at the Mayo Clinic which seems to have plenty of good doctors who “work with Government Health Care System”.

Exactly.

There is one problem that I never hear people talking about, and that is our economy. If health care is 16% of GDP and we "fix" our system cutting the cost say by 50% (for the sake of the example), doesn't that mean that our GDP takes an 8% hit ?

Given how things already are, maybe we can't handle fixing our health care system. You could think of our health care system as a permanent built in "stimulus" to our service oriented economy. Dang, I knew I should have gone in to health care.

marcus says

“fix” our system cutting the cost say by 50% (for the sake of the example), doesn’t that mean that our GDP takes an 8% hit

Yes, GDP is income and if health professionals and their suppliers are making half what they do now there will be less income in the national account.

However, this lost income to them becomes more discretionary income for everyone else. The extra money we'd have would start chasing other life expenses (foremost, higher rents and land values of course).

To avoid just having home prices rise in response we would have to raise taxes, like reverse the 2% cut to FICA (stupidest thing we've done EVER).

The USGOV has spent $3T more than it took in over the past two years. This is a very curious development and I don't really have any idea what's going to happen in response, to either us continuing this rate of borrowing, increasing it, or throttling it down. It all seems bad.

Also, medicine is largely wealth preservation not creation. There is an element of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window to it.

marcus says

There is one problem that I never hear people talking about, and that is our economy. If health care is 16% of GDP and we “fix” our system cutting the cost say by 50% (for the sake of the example), doesn’t that mean that our GDP takes an 8% hit ?

GDP aside, my take is that it's politically impossible to shrink the amount we spend on health care by 50% because doing so would throw 8% of the population out of work by (for all intents and purposes) eliminating the health insurance industry. Not going to happen short of a revolution that eliminates far more than that, that's easily enough people to guarantee losing elections for anyone who supports it.

bobcat says

The insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals, etc. are using the government as an instrument of plunder.

Ding Ding, It couldn't be explained any better.

oddhack says

GDP aside, my take is that it’s politically impossible to shrink the amount we spend on health care by 50% because doing so would throw 8% of the population out of work

Well that 8% and their spouses are only 16%, the other 84% aren't interested in supporting their 6 figure salaries, while we operate in the hole paying more on Obamacare than we do in rent or mortgage.

Tenouncetrout says

bobcat says

The insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals, etc. are using the government as an instrument of plunder.

Ding Ding, It couldn’t be explained any better.

Yes, but now what? The government has clearly been corrupted from the top down by corporate interests. It is not representing the people's interest. Well, OK, it represents the interests of some billionaires.

As the Declaration of Independence says: "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"

Have we arrived at the point yet when another revolution is necessary to remove corporations from government?

A good first step short of revolution would be to revoke the legal personhood of all corporations. Corporations are not human. They have no inherent right to anything. Only individual human beings have rights.

A second step would be to make corporate lobbying a serious crime with manadatory hard time or death for anyone involved in it. Corporate lobbying corrupts our laws from the inside. Corporations are literally writing our laws and handing them to Congressmen who don't read them before voting to approve them.

The right wing and the left wing have the same interest here: ending corporate power. The right should end it to create truly free markets rather than socialism for large corporations. The left should end it to protect the working man from de facto slavery.

But with corporations in control of Congress, the chance of democracy working to make these changes seems small.

Patrick,
Forgive me if I am getting this wrong, but it sounds as though you are carrying an individual policy. If you are planning to continue being self-employed, it might be worthwhile to look as the insurance picture from the point of view of an S corporation. In California, any two-person corporation can get corporate health insurance. Kaiser is willing to assign a family plan to the two employees of the corporation, if they happen to be married partners. Other insurers may require that each employee have an individual plan, and that can be a little more expensive. Regardless, you might find that your corporation has better options than you do as an individual, even though you will pay the state of California $800 per year for the privilege of being incorporated. For instance, corporate health insurance plans run under a yearly contract, so rates are predictable for a full year at a time. My experience was that rates were a little better, too.

Incorporation takes a few months. Getting health insurance takes a few months after that. But none of it is actually difficult.

Troy says

bob2356 says

The doctors work for the public system and run their private practices in addition

AFAIK the debate in Canada is allowing a parallel private *insurance* system. All Canadian practices are private, but the insurance is single-payer.
http://medicare.ca/main/the-facts/the-myth-of-the-european-model

That's why I said MOST rather than going through the list of 60 something countries that have public health care systems one by one. There are obviously many different models out there for public health care. The real question is why the US congress keeps dreaming up changes to the US healthcare system without studying any other countries systems to see if there are any better ideas out there. They don't even bother to look at the different models that exist within the US. Places like the Cleveland clinic and Mayo clinic are delivering quality health care at very reasonable cost. You would think the first thing congress would do would be to see what these places are doing and how they are doing it then use it as a model for reform. Na that would simply be too logical. There's no lobbying money in it either.

My insurance rate with Time Insurance went up about 50% last year and another 40% this year to $1,150 per month. ($5,000 deductable per family member and it doesn't cover much of anything until you hit the deductable) I called them to ask why. They said because of the new Health care bill requiring no limits for any serious condition they had to raise their rates to cover this.

THANKS ALOT OBAMA!!

It's not Obama's fault. It's the insurance company lobbyists, who prevented:

1. caps on premiums
2. the public option

Obama was definitely for a public option, and they killed it so that you would be forced to pay them, no matter what they charge.

Eliza says

In California, any two-person corporation can get corporate health insurance.

Thanks! That's a great idea and I want to try it.

Any idea where I should look for corporate premium rates? There's probably some website that collects them.

It’s the insurance company lobbyists, who prevented:

It's not their fault either, it's our fault for not demonstrating sufficient support.

The odd thing is that the filibuster belongs more in the House than the Senate. Lieberman is up for election in 2014, so his threat of filibuster was immensely anti-democratic (but very republican, in the sense of a government ruling over the people in their name but not being responsive to their wishes).

The lobbyists ginned up sufficient numbers of protestors to sabotage the town hall jazz that was going on in the Summer of 2009, while the left failed to counter-protest FOR such things as the public option.

It's easier for rich people to do their demonstration than the working poor, of course. The poor just get shat on, until something like the LA '92 events happens.

as for

1. caps on premiums

There are caps on premiums -- the MLRs of 85% for group plans and 80% for individual. The problem is that this is highly beneficial for KP and other insurers who own the billing side too.

Troy says

There are caps on premiums — the MLRs of 85% for group plans and 80% for individual. The problem is that this is highly beneficial for KP and other insurers who own the billing side too.

It just does not compute. There is no way that they're paying out 73% more this year than last year.

How is it beneficial for insurers who own the billing side? You must mean that they can bill very high, and then raise premiums and say they are complying with the 80% law? Yes, that's true. So they have no incentive to lower costs at all, either as an insurer or as a medical provider.

If we are still a democracy, it seems to me we should be able to obtain a better HC system. It would probably take an extremely big grass roots movement (probably utilizing internet) to get the money together to fight the powers that be.

Before that can happen, we (the government) would also probably need to make some really tough budgetary decisions.

http://www.healthcare.gov/foryou/individuals/index.html

There is no way that they’re paying out 73% more this year than last year.

Well, you did hit the age 45 zone, right? My new benefits chart shows the premiums go up from $210 to $285/mo between early 40s (40-44) and late 40s (45-49). That's almost 40% right there.

Then there's the removal of gender-specific ratings, which add another 20% to men apparently. We don't have women bits, but we have to join their risk pool now thanks to ACA. Good for women, bad for men!

There's also the 2011 changes mandated by ACA -- elimination of lifetime limits, no more rescission for anybody, no more pre-existing exclusion for kids, and young adults under 26 can stay on parents' plan.

Only the rescission change and lifetime limit applies to me, and I figured if I needed more than $5M in benefits I'd have bigger problems than running out of insurance . : ( Oh well. I didn't support ACA for what it'd do for me, I supported it for what it do for the millions of Americans excluded from the system.

(Which did in fact include me in the 2002-2005 timeframe, I applied to BCBS in 2004 for the same sort of policy I have now, but they refused due to me having visited a orthopedic surgeon in late 2003 for a knee pain issue. Under the mandate, in 2014 or whenever BCBS will no longer be able to exclude people like that)

ou must mean that they can bill very high, and then raise premiums and say they are complying with the 80% law?

yes, that is my naive understanding of the advantage integrated HMOs have over pure-insurers like BCBS.

marcus says

It would probably take an extremely big grass roots movement (probably utilizing internet) to get the money together to fight the powers that be.

The way I see it, WE THE PEOPLE are the true enemy of ourselves. "Government takeover of healthcare!", "Death Panels!" etc can bamboozle waay too many voters.

The American people didn't really know it, but November's election was also a referendum on the implementation of health care 2011-2012. The Democrats really failed to frame the election this way, but that's going to be the cold hard reality of the thing.

It takes top-down leadership to form a progressive agenda, fight for it, and ram it through.

Bottom-up is a pipe dream.

Troy says

Bottom-up is a pipe dream

The republicans seem to be able to do both, albeit with a lot of corporate money.

marcus says

The republicans seem to be able to do both, albeit with a lot of corporate money.

There is an Establishment that exists that is beyond money, really. It has Interests, which involve securing and preserving its profitable access to the world's resources of natural wealth.

The boardroom scene in Network was IMHO pretty f----ing close to the truth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI5hrcwU7Dk

"The world . . . is a business, Mr Beale."

FOXNEWS, along with the rest of the VRWC propaganda mills feeding it, provide a critical defense of the conservative Establishment we have today. This healthcare battle wasn't about healthcare, it was about creating Obama's Waterloo and stopping any progressive momentum that we had won in 2006-2008 thereby.

There existed a collection of Powers in the Establishment that had sufficient pull to play the right cards to screw things up for us, largely the same coalition that got together in 1993 to torpedo HillaryCare.

Obama's advisors had to bend a bit to coopt enough players in the System to get what they could through the process. It was a close-run thing as it was.

The battles of this decade are going to be about this Establishment's campaign to roll back the surviving welfare state programs of the New Deal and Great Society.

The Establishment sees what the Eurosocialists have won, and do not want that to happen to the good ol' United States of America, the land of opportunity to get and remain rich. They like the current tax rates, TYVM, and want to see them moved lower and not higher like how the rest of the world taxes them.

Money only has influence in politics because voters are too stupid to be immune to the bullshit. We've been living in a bubble of trickle-down and borrowed-money good times since 1980 or so, but We The People may be becoming more exposed to the harsh realities of what the Establishment has in store for us should we continue to surrender our political power that the Founders wisely -- if hesititantly -- gave us.

It just does not compute. There is no way that they’re paying out 73% more this year than last year.

I wonder if the law demands that The Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) of 80%/85% should be the same in each age bracket, or whether the insurance company can play games with it.

Hmm, the new law that they have to spend 80% on actual healthcare just started literally yesterday, Jan 1st:

http://www.moneytalksnews.com/2010/11/30/new-rule-insurance-companies-must-use-premiums-to-pay-medical-bills/

So maybe these new hikes were simply a way to grab as much money as possible before they had to start being a little bit fairer.

Troy says

The Establishment sees what the Eurosocialists have won, and do not want that to happen to the good ol’ United States of America

I agree. Europeans see that the ballot box is their main weapon against the re-establishment of hereditary aristocracies. Americans just don't get it yet. Of course they see they are getting poorer, and the press has plenty of articles about how the top 1% is getting vastly richer, but they have not yet made the obvious connection: the fact that they are being robbed by that top 1%, and they are voting to get robbed in the future even more, in the name of "freedom".

actuaryfromsg says

Did you know it costs close to $4000 per day to stay in a hopsital in SF? It costs only US$300 here in Singapore, and half that in Thailand and the hospitals here are better.

Yes, our system is utterly unhinged. I agree that the hospitals should bear a huge part of the blame, especially since their claim about having to raise prices to cover expenses from the uninsured is provably false:

http://patrick.net/?p=603813

I wrote Robert Reich about all this, and he actually replied:

The assumption was that competition among insurers, along with a requirement that they spend 80 percent of their revenues on health benefits, would be sufficient enough to keep prices down. But I’m far from sure that’s correct.

Thanks for writing and have a good new year.

Robert B. Reich
Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy
Goldman School of Public Policy
University of California, Berkeley

Cool, Patrick. Robert Reich is on my weekly reading list.

Look what's just starting to happen in DENTAL (at least in my area of Vancouver, WA). I'm seeing "NEW PATIENTS WELCOME!" banners all over the place and ads for discount dental prices appearing in the paper. I was driving through Seattle a few weeks ago and heard a radio ad for "dental implants only $800!" Just a year or two ago this was unheard of.

My dentist told me that the number of patients with good dental insurance (never that high in the first place) has shrunk dramatically as plum jobs with benefits continue to go bye-bye. Since few people can afford $1100 for a single crown, $800 for a root canal, or even $140 for a simple cleaning -- he's being forced to CUT PRICES! If you pay CASH, he now charges $650 for a crown and $95 for a simple cleaning. I told him if he wants more cash patients coming through the door he's going to have to cut those prices in half AGAIN. He grimaced, shook his head and agreed. I'm hoping the future for dentists is that they're going to have to compete on price and service like Best Buy and Circuit City. So far, this is happening very gradually, giving dentists time to adapt.

Maybe the same will happen in medicine as people gradually fall off the insurance rolls, until finally doctors and hospitals have to compete for CASH patients? Instead of my doctor charging $323 for a 10-minute visit like he does now, he's going to have to charge $25 or $40 max. -- or maybe even settle for a couple of plucked chickens. That $3,175 per night regular hospital bed? Now it's $125 per night, and to keep you from going somewhere else, maybe a mint on the pillow and fresh cut flowers in the vase?

Oh, they will scream and moan that the sky will fall and the Earth will stop rotating on its axis without insurance, but I'd bet a significant amount of money that they WOULD find a way to operate in a competitive environment like everyone else and STILL make money!

Thanks for the blog Patrick!

"What about the Democrats?" "What about the Democrats?" "What about the Democrats?"

you always hear that like frogs in a swamp when someone online criticizes Republicans.

We are having the biggest yearly budget deficits EVER, under Obama and his Democratic supporters

What about these graphs:

Graph: Total Nonfarm Payrolls: All Employees (PAYEMS)

Household Sector: Liabilites: Household Credit Market Debt Outstanding (CMDEBT)

don't you understand?

The bubble boom economy of 2002-2007 was a total, outright fraud. We're basically back to 1999 now in terms of employment.

Much of the present budget-deficit road to hell we're on was started by Bush in his last year:

Graph: Federal Debt Held by the Public (FYGFDPUN)

The debt held by the public jumped from $5T to $7T before the first half of 2009 was through. You might remember that 1Q09 was when the world was going to end. I think it's safe to say that the only thing keeping the rubber side down now is the massive deficit spending that's going on now.

The Bush economy of 2003-2007 was fueled both by deficit spending and about $1T/yr of consumer debt take-on. We've lost the latter, which has been replaced with more of the former.

Here's a graph of that:

Household mortgage debt vs Debt Held by the Public

In this chart you can see the hyperbolic debt bubble (the red line) taking form during the Bush years of 2002-2006, then hit the wall in 2007 as the bubble completely popped as the last idiots to buy a house were found.

Note that the blue line has been pushed upwards 2009-2010 to replace the lost money pump of the housing bubble cash machine. We can argue the wisdom of doing this, but I think it's safe to say things like the DOW and S&P would be a smoking crater right now and not back at their 2008 levels if we hadn't intervened with fiscal policy like we did 2009-now.

but I cannot believe the one-sidedness and the bias in your comments!

You don't seem to understand the seriousness of the situation the REPUBLICANS put this country in with the series of crucial policy mistakes they made 1998-2004. The Democrats, for all their faults, left the Republicans with a pretty clean state of affairs when the electorate booted them out of office in 1994. In 12 short years the Republicans -- along with a large degree of complicity from Clinton and his neoliberal cohorts in the 90s -- simply destroyed everything. The list is long. Would you like a summary?

“no, I don’t support socialists”

You are another miseducated ameritard who doesn't even know what the word "socialist" means. Don't worry, you and your pals in this groups number in the millions.

Do you really have your head that far up your ass as to blame America’s journey toward Banana Republic status solely on the Republicans, and not the Republicans AND the Democrats?

OK, point to a failure the Dems have committed, 1985 to now.

I’m thinking you probably won’t let my comment be posted for long.

I'm thinking you don't have an intelligent thought in your head.

FalconMaster says

Here’s a MAJOR reason your insurance premiums are skyrocketing

The biggest change "thanks to Obama Care" is making insurance gender-neutral, only one risk pool instead of two.

BCBS says that can raise rates "up to" 17% (I assume for males). The other things you listed are only 1-4% of the rate changes according the BCBS update coverage booklet I received last month.

Falconmaster, looking over your history I saw this:

"The easy availability of credit, which is money printed out of nothing"

as a fundamental flaw in your understanding of how wealth works. Credit is NOT money from nothing. Credit is somebody's SAVINGS lent to somebody else.

The reason there was a credit glut in the previous decade was simply due to the SAVING GLUT. And the saving glut came from the tax cuts and widening wealth gap between the upper class and the toiling classes.

Wealth inequality is the greatest this country has seen, at least back to the late 20s. Upper classes have the advantage of professional money managers and compounding interest, and at the end of the day their vast paper wealth has to effectively CONFISCATE the product of working Americans as their monetary buying power overwhelms middle America's paltry wages from labor.

So much of America now is built on rent-seeking and other non-productive, degenerate forms of capitalism. This is our true problem and I fully admit the Democrats have basically zero institutional commitment to fixing this. They did in the 30s, but those times are gone and haven't quite returned yet (but they're coming, and hard).

Helene Jorgensen notes that medical care isn't like expensive TVs, and the "free market" doesn't, and I think cannot (although she wouldn't be responsible for my opinion), work in health care. First, comparing costs for health care is nearly impossible. Not only is it impossible for people to compare costs on hospital websites, but the treatment for various conditions is based on individual medical history. In addition, you can't check out a doctor's performance before submitting yourself to treatment. (And even were it possible, you don't know if a given surgeon will do as well with you as she did with the surgery you observed.) And of course, there's no return window for medical services. You can't ask for your cancer back because you've found someone who would do a better job. And finally medical services aren't optional. You can live without a big expensive TV, but you can't live without treatment for many medical problems.

Like most necessity markets, medical care doesn't operate according to supply and demand, which requires a buyer and seller both equally able to walk away from the deal.

rich_wicks says

See what happens when the government creates a cartel which everybody is required by law to purchase from?

We're still 3 years away from that.

I knew health care rates would be going up due to the changes. The changes we got this year are all good, so it's a big win.

The mandate is even better

Conservatives/Republicans complaining about ACA are the biggest hypocrites around. The damn law is entirely conservative and was taken from the 1993 Chafee plan, which had such cosponsors as Bob Dole, Orrin Hatch, and Ted Stevens.

Senator Hatch himself had the temerity to criticize "Obamacare"'s mandate recently, when he proposed the exact same thing less than 20 years ago.

The only stupid thing about the law was the 1099 requirement on cash transactions. Senator Baucus offered an amendment late last year to cleanly remove it, but the Republicans refused to go along.

Bunch of demagoguing hypocrites, the lot of you.

my wife works for health insurance. She does their number crunching to figure out the rates they need to charge.

All of the insurers right now are raising rates to cover the costs for incoming healthcare reform. The reform regulated insurance industry, but it did nothing about the healthcare (hospital) networks... probably because most people aren't even aware that such exist.

How about this idea for Patrick:

Drop the insurance totally and go 'self insured'.

Scary yes. In this case in the event of catastrophe you declare BK to get out of medical bills. Just make sure to run up all credit cards and other debt you can before u go BK. U could charge the medical bills on the credit cards. Not as sweet as buying gold bullion then declaring BK - but that is illegal. Medical BK is not.

So with this plan your credit cards and the BK court BECOME your backup catastrophe 'insurance'. (after u go BK though this plan is not available since u can only BK every 7 years right?)

what a mess we have created when this 'plan' is a rational option for working people.

Yes, bankruptcy is a viable alternative, except for that 7 year limit. If I self-insure and am then bankrupted by medical costs, I'll have 7 years where they won't even provide anything but emergency care, right?

Then I or a family member could easily die because they refuse to treat us.

ChrisLosAngeles says

All of the insurers right now are raising rates to cover the costs for incoming healthcare reform.

Yes, I think that's it, except that it's not to cover the costs of incoming healthcare reform, it's to take as much as possible right now, for the executive bonuses, before healthcare reform starts to really kick in.

rich_wicks says

See what happens when the government creates a cartel which everybody is required by law to purchase from?

No, all these price hikes are BEFORE the mandate, which still hasn't even started yet.

Insurance is definitely a private cartel, not created by the government except in that the insurance companies are exempted from anti-monopoly laws. It's a massive ongoing failure to regulate.

ragingpinko says

Helene Jorgensen notes that medical care isn’t like expensive TVs, and the “free market” doesn’t, and I think cannot (although she wouldn’t be responsible for my opinion), work in health care. First, comparing costs for health care is nearly impossible. Not only is it impossible for people to compare costs on hospital websites, but the treatment for various conditions is based on individual medical history. In addition, you can’t check out a doctor’s performance before submitting yourself to treatment. (And even were it possible, you don’t know if a given surgeon will do as well with you as she did with the surgery you observed.) And of course, there’s no return window for medical services. You can’t ask for your cancer back because you’ve found someone who would do a better job. And finally medical services aren’t optional. You can live without a big expensive TV, but you can’t live without treatment for many medical problems.

Like most necessity markets, medical care doesn’t operate according to supply and demand, which requires a buyer and seller both equally able to walk away from the deal.

Wow, yes, all that is totally true!

OK, should I create a website like gasbuddy.com, but for medical care, where everyone enters what they actually pay and the quality of service they feel they got?

Then you could look up any medical exam, condition, or treatment and see what various places near you are charging and what the quality is. At least for non-emergencies.

It would be fiendishly complicated though, because the costs are split among individuals, employers, insurers, and government. It would be hard to know what each of them paid.

FalconMaster says

are you familiar with the term Fractional Reserve Banking? Banks can take your $10 and loan $100 (or more). How can they loan $100, when you only have $10 (ten) on deposit ???

you've actually got it backwards. They take my $10 and loan $9 (or actually $10, it depends on the type of account).

They magically “create” $90 out of thin air, loan it to poor suckers, and charge them interest on it!

What happens is that the person who borrowed my $9 then -- if he doesn't need to spend all of it -- ALSO puts it in a bank, and then the bank lends $8.10 out again.

But at no time is debt-money actually created without a balancing "savings" somewhere.

http://mises.org/

why does that not surprise me. Goes well with the Gary North crap you've also posted here.

Patrick--

Unfortunately buying health care isn't like buying a TV or a new dress. You know enough about TVs to know what you want (size, plasma, lcd etc.) pretty easily. What if you have knee arthritis? What treatment will work, and how well it will work, have a lot to do with things you, as a patient, know little about. You're dependent to a large extent on what others tell you to buy.

Troy says

FalconMaster says

are you familiar with the term Fractional Reserve Banking? Banks can take your $10 and loan $100 (or more). How can they loan $100, when you only have $10 (ten) on deposit ???

you’ve actually got it backwards. They take my $10 and loan $9 (or actually $10, it depends on the type of account).
They magically “create” $90 out of thin air, loan it to poor suckers, and charge them interest on it!

What happens is that the person who borrowed my $9 then — if he doesn’t need to spend all of it — ALSO puts it in a bank, and then the bank lends $8.10 out again.
But at no time is debt-money actually created without a balancing “savings” somewhere.
http://mises.org/
why does that not surprise me. Goes well with the Gary North crap you’ve also posted here.

That was their "traditional" way. During the bubble it got changed. Banks actually made loans first and borrowed "reserves" after just to meet reserve requirements.

Yes, bankruptcy is a viable alternative, except for that 7 year limit. If I self-insure and am then bankrupted by medical costs, I’ll have 7 years where they won’t even provide anything but emergency care, right?
Then I or a family member could easily die because they refuse to treat us.

They won't refuse to treat you. You will sign some kind of paper promising to pay later on. Later on they will negotiate with you for payments you can afford.

ChrisLosAngeles says

All of the insurers right now are raising rates to cover the costs for incoming healthcare reform.

Yes, I think that’s it, except that it’s not to cover the costs of incoming healthcare reform, it’s to take as much as possible right now, for the executive bonuses, before healthcare reform starts to really kick in.

So what? It did not start yet, but they are already insuring themselves by raising premiums...

Or at least, that's their excuse to raise premiums. After all, the whole "healthcare" reform (from insurers perspective) was nothing but an attempt to redistribute money streams in and around health care. They just use any opportunity to max their gains and to lower their loses.

Patrick, You are getting locked in denial about the fact that this reform has created those opportunities.

michaelsch says

You are getting locked in denial about the fact that this reform has created those opportunities.

The 80% MLR apparently came in to the legislation behind their back.

"UnitedHealth, for instance, has about 392 subsidiaries, according to Goldman Sachs health-care analyst Matthew Borsch. Its average MLR for individual policies is 69%, dragged down by a 63% ratio at its dominant Golden Rule subsidiary"

. . .

"Humana Inc. could owe $63 million in rebates, said Mr. Borsch. The Louisville, Ky., insurer's 2009 MLR for the individual business was 68%, with a 54% ratio at a unit in Georgia"

. . .

"American National Insurance Co., of Texas stopped marketing individual policies last month. A spokesman for the company said it operates its plans at about a 60% MLR, and didn't want to retool its business model to meet the new requirements."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703374104575336951608609446.html

Without the MLR regulations the reforms would be awful. With them, I'm willing to see what happens. The previous status quo is not something I want to return to, in 2004 I personally got burned by the preexisting condition thing and that's simply no way to run a railroad.

http://www.angrybearblog.com/2011/01/mlr-provisions-kick-in-today.html