Health insurance reform was long overdue. But did it need to be done the way the architects of the Affordable Care Act did it?
Obamacare was enacted, and the private health insurance market fundamentally changed, so that we could cover millions of people who previously couldn’t get coverage.
Are enough people getting coverage who didn’t have it before to justify the sacrifices the people who were already covered — in the individual, …
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The administration has confirmed that the individual policies that were supposed to be cancelled because of Obamacare can now remain in force another two years.
For months I have been saying millions of individual health insurance policies will be cancelled by year-end — most deferred until December because of the carriers’ early renewal programs and because of President Obama’s request the policies be extended in the states that have allowed it.
The …
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The Republicans have an alternative to Obamacare and they may have given the Democrats a big political gift.
The proposal was unveiled by Republican Senators Richard Burr (NC), Tom Coburn (OK), and Orrin Hatch (UT).
The Republican plan targets many of the most unpopular parts of the Affordable Care Act such as expensive mandated benefits and the resulting lack of choice, the individual mandate, the employer mandate, and age-rating disruptions.
My sense is …
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I recently asked if Obamacare was unraveling.
The Obama administration announced that they are delaying the employer mandate again.
In the announcement, they said that large employers, those with at least 100 workers, will only have to cover 70% of their otherwise eligible workforce in 2015 and 95% in 2016 and beyond.
The administration also said that employers with 50 to 100 workers will have their mandate to provide affordable health …
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Is Obamacare unraveling?
Rumors have been circulating in the marketplace all week that the administration was thinking of extending the individual health insurance policies that Obamacare was supposed to have cancelled for as much as three more years.
Those rumors have now come out into the open with Tom Murphy’s AP story that began running recently.
That the administration might extend these polices shouldn’t come as a shock. My sense has always been that at …
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Now that consumers can generally make an efficient health insurance purchase at Healthcare.gov and most of the state-run exchanges, we can finally get to the real question.
Are the healthy uninsured going to buy it?
The big health insurance changes Obamacare made to the individual and small group market were arguably done in order to get everyone, sick and healthy, covered in a more equitable system.
To be clear, no one I know …
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If the Obamacare health insurance exchanges are not able to get a good spread of risk — many more healthy people than sick — the long-term viability of the program will be placed in great jeopardy.
Given the early signs — far fewer people signing up than expected, enormous negative publicity about website problems, rate shock, big average deductibles, narrow provider networks, and a general growing dissatisfaction over the new health …
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After the disastrous launch of Obamacare the enrollment of 1.1 million people in the 36 state exchanges run by the feds is a major accomplishment. It is likely that the enrollment in the 14 state-run exchanges will take total Obamacare’s private insurance enrollment to near 2 million for the year.
Does this mean that Obamacare is finally on track and moving toward success?
At least the front-end of Healthcare.gov is now clearly …
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Is Obamacare even partly responsible for the slowdown in health care costs?
That is silly.
First, Obamacare is not a health care reform law; it is a health insurance reform law. No one on either side of the debate has ever argued anything different.
Does the law have some limited cost containment features in it?
Yes. But these are either pilot projects or are years from being fully implemented.
I have heard the …
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From 27,000 enrollments in October to a reported 100,000 enrollments in November, the Affordable Care Act’s website is apparently working better and getting more people signed up.
But is it fixed well enough to handle the expected wave of at least many hundreds of thousands of people eager to get guarantee issue health insurance for the first time or replace a canceled policy by January 1?
Here are some of the press …
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Covered California, the state-run Obamacare health insurance exchange, announced recently that 59,000 people have so far signed up for health insurance.
Given that California amounts to about 10% of the nation’s population, this would suggest a smooth running federal exchange might well have enabled the Obama administration to have met its national first month goal of 500,000 sign-ups.
But the California enrollment also points to the real challenge Obamacare faces.
In the first …
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My sense is that the biggest reason Obamacare is now in trouble is because of the top-secret way in which the administration has handled the rollout. If they had developed the computer system in a transparent way, the marketplace would have told them long ago this would not work.
No one outside the inner circle at the Department of Health and Human Services has any idea what’s really going on behind …
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What will health insurance cost in 2014?
Will the new health insurance exchanges be ready on time or will the law have to be delayed?
There will be sticker shock
First, get ready for some startling rate increases in the individual and small group health insurance marketplace due to the changes the law dictates.
In a November 2009 report, the CBO estimated that premiums in the individual market would increase 10% to 13% …
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They both are and they both aren’t.
I’ve never seen a week in health care policy like last week. The media reports have to be in the thousands, all trying to make sense of the furious debate between Obama and Romney over Medicare.
As someone who has studied this issue for more than 20 years, it has also been more than exasperating for me to watch each side trade claims and for …
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