Sunday, October 28, 2012

Employees to Face Obamacare Sticker Shock

As government's meddling in the healthcare sector expands, things get even more crazy. Your part of premiums paid for healthcare insurance will not go down, but your deductible is likely to soar.

From Reuters:
Visit to New York City orthopedist: $223. One X-ray: $50. One follow-up magnetic resonance imaging test: $766. Total bill for checking out that aching shoulder: $1,039 - all to be paid by the patient, rather than the insurer.

Healthcare has gone retail.

Over the next 18 months, between one quarter and one half of Americans who get insurance coverage through their employers will pay more of their doctor bills themselves as companies roll out healthcare plans with higher deductibles, benefits consultants say. The result: sticker shock...

...corporate America's adoption of high-deductible plans is accelerating, partly because of Obama's healthcare reform, which requires insurance plans to provide more expansive coverage such as preventive care...

Several industry surveys forecast a two-percentage-point increase in the number of companies offering only high-deductible plans in 2013 to about 19 percent, and a larger jump of anywhere from 5 to 25 percentage points in 2014.

"2013 is almost a calm period before a period of intense change in 2014," according to Randall Abbott of Towers Watson & Co, a Boston-based senior consulting leader at the human resources firm.
Got that?  Much higher deductibles, but premiums climbing. Michael Tanner reports:
Individuals will also end up paying more. Already, ObamaCare has increased insurance premiums by 2%-4%. And the government’s own actuaries project that, in the future, premiums will rise by 7.9% per year, roughly twice as fast as they would have without ObamaCare.

4 comments:

  1. I think it has long been an open secret that the point of ObamaCare is to wreck the healthcare system in preparation to replacing it with a 100% government-run single-payer system.
    Will the media let them get away with it?
    Hmm....this would appear to be a question which answers itself, no?

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  2. My employer added a high deductible plan with an HSA account that they contribute $1000 a year to for a family. The HSA works like an IRA in that contributions are pre-tax and the money in the account is portable. It seems like a secondary retirement account to me if you think that the point of saving for retirement is to purchase future goods and services. I'd prefer this... Lower premiums, higher deductibles, fewer maintainence and preventitive health coverage in the plan and an ability to build interest generating, tax protected capital over decades to pay for the goods and services I want.

    I hate health insurance. I think it's a put option on your health that expires monthly. It's the most expensive way to pay for healthcare over time.

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  3. Which makes the claims of "first dollar coverage" patently laughable. This has been a decade and a half long phenomenon.

    The point of Obamacare is for employers to shed that pesky health insurance benefit, once and for all. It's never about what they say...

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  4. The Bought and Paid For Media (aka TB&P4M) supports TPTB at all turns, so don't expect to see this on GMA. Or Today with Matt Lauer.

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