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The Stunning "Explanation" An Insurance Company Just Used To Boost Health Premiums By 60%
It may not have been easy for Blue Cross Blue Shield to admit to their clients their premiums are set to rise by 60% due to Supreme Court-mandated tax known as "Obamacare" but it would have been the right thing.
Instead, in justifying the boost to the two-month medical premium from $867 to $1.365, the health insurer decided to use the following excuse: "With advances in medical technology, prescription drugs and ways to treat injuries and illnesses, Americans are living healthier lives. [i.e., living longer] Because of these changes, we must adjust your premium to stay in line with increased costs."
In other words, if you want lower costs, and avoiding 60% healthcare inflation, just do everything in your power to prevent Americans from "living healthier lives."
And just in case anyone is still confused why plunging gasoline prices simply refuse to translate into greater discretionary spending, please keep reading the above letter until you finally get.
Finally, for those who are likewise confused how companies like Valeant can boost the prices of their drugs anywhere between 90% and 2300% in 2-3 years, and get away with it without nobody noticing...
... also keep reading the above letter until you finally get it.
h/t @JeffreyTetrault
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HaHa suckers. The Amish don't need no fucking Obamacare.
Diplomatic Immunity!
Dummies. You tax your healthy people and when they get healthier you tax them more!
And, why not!
The money you'd pay toward your deductible if you were sick can now be used to pay higher premiums since you're healthy.
We educate our own people as healthcare professionals. They do not seek excessive wealth. Envy is a sin in our culture.
It's really quite simple. A doctors visit is $25.
As i said above, the Amish are required to WORK...that is rayciss.
Oh, sorry about that rate increase, Mr. Tetrault.... I didn't sign up for that ObummerCare insurance services program. So, I may or may not be to blame for your rate increase. However, the tax fine that I paid to NOT join was still less than your rate increase.
bending that cost curve....UP! Mission Accomplished dickbag.
no one on the supply curve has any incentitive to cut costs...it is all cost plus
Average ER visit cost is $2,168. Deductible $2000. Insurance has contractual reduction with hospital for 250 of this price so the insurance company has to pay nothing. keeping the entire yearly sum of $17.172. Makes perfect sense to me. And I am sorry to everyone, I am one of those people choosing to live a healthy lifestyle.
So... when's the revolution???
I guess whenever the festivities begin?
So, you're living a healthier life - fuck you, pay me.
Dear Mr. Customer,
With epidemics of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, auto-immune disease and cancer, mostly cause by poor diet, and the dominant medical model of treating symptoms, rather than causes and ignoring lifestyle issues because curing disease doesn't pay, increasingly dramatic and more expensive treatments and medicines, many of them destructive and dangerous are coming into use pushing up costs, which you pay, regardless of whether you take responsibility for your own health.
But, hey, if you self-identify as a unicorn and want your dick relocated to your forehead, you're covered.
"But, hey, if you self-identify as a unicorn and want your dick relocated to your forehead, you're covered."
Fred, I don't care if you are French. You da man!!!
But then you gotta wear briefs over your head. OK, boxers.
to be alive in america is tax... a way for scum to suck money from you.. USA is dead
Medical IRA - YOU keep the money. You spend it on what you think you need.
Insurance/HMO/Gubment Health Care -SOMEONE ELSE gets the money. Someone else spends it on what they think you need.
How is it unclear which solution works best for the working man/woman?
All this crap about Gubment Health "Care" is a smokescreen about who pays. Idiots vote for liars who promise, "Someone else will pay for your healthcare!" No matter how much you smoke, how fat you are, stupid you insist on being, etc. It's a sham for them to get elected NOW with a PROMISE of somebody else picking up your tab in the future, i.e. an unfunded liability. Lies.
LBJ would be so proud. This is his Great Society.
Hey! I'm 150lbs overweight and somebody gotta pay for my fat cart, replacement hips and knees, diabetes, blood pressure and cholesterol meds. And all this shit's depressing so I need meds for that too. Of course I'm 100% disabled too, so keep that money coming too. It's an entitlement! I'm fucking entitled!!
http://news.healingwell.com/?p=news1&id=527389
Doesn't work too well if you don't have much of an income and are paying the insurance premium out of savings.
Yeah I know, I know but I'd rather pay out of my (dwindling) savings than submit myself and my information to the Obamacare website.
My grandfather never signed up for Social Security or Medicare because he considered those programs to be unamerican and for the weak.
I used to take advantage of MCRA. Boy did that change.
Checked into the HSA with the law change.
So tell me, where you gonna invest it in the centrally planned?
At the time I looked into it, you could invest this in a brokerage account administered by the HSA for double the trading costs of any brokerage.
Unless a self-directed PM option is available, I'd run like hell.
It's nothing more than another scam to tie up your funds while being rererererehypothecated.
nobody coulda seen this coming...rationing of health services ..exploding prices..hear of any insurance co's going BK??
no me either.
Health Republic of New York is the latest. Could spread to 22 out of the 23 co-ops set up with assistance from the federal government.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/09/28/feds-admit-more-obamacare-co-op-flops-...
Winning./sarc
Edit: Oops. Looks like someone else closer to the situation posted below about Health Republic of NY.
Put all your assets into gold. Bury it in a hole. Quit your job. Let the gubmint pay you to not work, plus pay for all your medical care!
Stop playing their games. WALK AWAY!!! Google: 8 Forms of Capital. Research. Get the advice you need. Plan. THEN GET THE F OUT OF THIS TOLLBOOTH SOCIETY!
This article shows that healthcare providers now consider themselves entitled to exist (and prosper) regardless of performance. Thanks Obamacare!
Perhaps voting for a loose cannon for president is wise -- it will be an improvement.
why not, we have had a radical socialist. Stalin would be proud of the bunghole.
...and all his republican supporters.
The scumbags in Congress who passed ObombaaCare ,could care less they have their own h/c plan paid for totally by US
The people who are paid out of the Leadership Fund are the ones still covered under that nice plan. On the House side that means these people and their staffers.
http://www.house.gov/leadership/
On the Senate side, that means these people and their staffers.
http://www.senate.gov/senators/leadership.htm
Apparently a staffer in Nancy Pelosi's office managed to sneak that in. My congressman (who did read the entire bill) told me that Nancy Pelosi honestly seemed surprised when it was pointed out to her. Then again, she first had to pass the bill so that she could find out what was in it "away from the fog of the controversy".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-05TLiiLU
The less elevated congress critters can be covered under Obamacare, their spouses plan, or any other plan for which they qualify.
They'll be covered same as everyone else when the entire planetary ecosystem collapses.
Equality bitchez.
Expendable.
And americans still think that completely privatized health care works. Stuck on stupid. So many countries have a socialized system and privatized at the same time. The socialized system forces the private carriers to keep their prices down.
Utilizing 6 month waiting lists. What ever happened to giving the doctor say...a DIRECT PAYMENT?
For the huge majority of cases a 6 month waiting list is pure propaganda in those countries with a dual system. And if you were to suggest that you have to wait 6 months for emergency that would be totally ridiculous. Problem is, I have received medical care in many other foriegn countries, with both private and socialized, so I know propaganda when I see it.
could had single payer.
'The United States National Health Care Act, is a perennial piece of legislation introduced in the United States House of Representatives by Representative John Conyers (D-MI) every year since 2002.[46] The act would establish a universal single-payer health care system in the United States, the rough equivalent of Canada's Medicare, the United Kingdom's National Health Service, and Taiwan's Bureau of National Health Insurance, among other examples. Under a single payer system, all medical care would be paid for by the Government of the United States, ending the need for private health insurance and premiums, and probably recasting private insurance companies as providing purely supplemental coverage, to be used when non-essential care is sought. The bill was first introduced in 2002,[46] and has been reintroduced in each Congress since. During the 2009 health care debates over the bill that became the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. H.R. 676 was expected to be debated and voted upon by the House in September 2009,[47] but was never debated.[48]'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_health_care#National_policies...
Which for all *its* problems would have been far better in virtually all ways than the ACA and certainly with regard to costs.
Makes sense cost wise - basic coverage by government, private insurance for 'extras' - costs could be driven down ...woulda been nice to let people "opt in" rather than box out private insurers from basic.
But we have a government that blocked cheeap drugs from canada for bullshit reasons, and literally prevented medicare from negotiating with drug companies - who absolutely fuck Americans while providing cheaper drugs most other places due to caps on excess profit taking in the health care arena - which everyone but idiots agrees with.
Big Pharma is truly evil - and they have been fucking Americans for far too long.
"Federal law adopted "under Tommy Thompson's watch" prohibits the government from negotiating for "better prices" on prescription drugs for senior citizens "
http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2012/sep/04/tammy-baldwin...
This was incredible, and absolutely a Republican fucking of the country because we live in a lobbyocracy.
We should be capping profits for vital drugs {check out cancer drug costs - fucking crazy} letting people buy across state lines policy wise and across national boundaries [caveat emptor, bitches] and generally looking long and hard at why drug prices in the US are way higher than elsewhere - and the drug companies still sell there, still profit...
on the backs of you and me.
And the fucking "me too" drugs - as some of you will know - are a HUGE problem a waste of time and money and development.
You slightly tweak a molecule and there are no fairly clear benefits you shouldnt even get patent protection, and yet...
you sir are an idiot.
It is the very existence of Third Party Payments systems that has destroyed the connections between the parties in a medical products/services transaction. When 3rd party payments began to dominate medical transactions, there no longer was any marketplace. Instead, it has become a protection racket shakedown, whether you, your employer, or "your" government pays for the protection, it is still a shakedown where the locus of responsibility (and information) is taken away from the parties directly involved.
Next time you are in your doctor's office, ask the doctor how much the procedure/treatment/test he is recommending will cost - he doesn't know. The ladies at the front desk don't know either, they can only guess based on your insurance until they actually call your insurer to find out how much they will pay, how much you have to pay, and how much the provider has to eat.
Ask the hospital nurse how much that aspirin will cost, if you can get her to stop long enough to answer a question, she won't have any idea and will laugh in your face that you even bothered to ask. She's so busy that she won't even stop long enough to tell you what she's injecting into that IV bag, and the prescribing doctor sure as hell won't tell you beforehand either. The lady at the admissions desk will have you sign your life away guaranteeing the hospital's payment of any fees they want to charge, though no one can tell you what those fees will be until the billing office has billed your protection racket provider.
It is not a market, and has not been one for a very long time. The Bammer didn't break the medical system, he just took a crappy system and made it even worse.
Third party payments for routine services and prescriptions should be unlawful, and catastrophic/major medical should be optional and paid for only by direct, unencumbered billing directly to the "insured" person or family in the traditional sense.
Oh, and there is no such thing as "Single Payer". The "payer" is the millions of taxed citizens. There is only a Single Market Distorter, and that is your government. It will create too much or too little of some service, and pay too much or too little for others, depending largely on political considerations (free contraception and abortion) or which industrial lobbyists have greased the right palms (or failed to do so).
Morons like you do not know how the system works but you want to shake your fist at someone. Government can and does use law to price products. Most everyone loses money on Medicaid for example. However, the private system in America subsidized the government systems. You doctor will see some Medicare and maybe even Medicaid because he/she sees enough privately insured to make his rent and staff.
Negotiating the price of meds nationally would be like negotiating with the mafia. It will not work out well for you. Prices are negotiated by plan and state. They are not the prices you see.
to put this logic simply : If you have hard ons at 70 you are young longer; so you OWE us moar!
Pay you young ectoplasms !
No kidding!
Joe Bonnano is on the job or we sleep with the fish!
"Obamacare" is useless w/o reforming the healthcare industry first...
Instead of just subsidizing health insurance to everyone and overwhelm the system, tackle the problem on why it's so expensive w/o it...
It still needs to be private given that anything US gov't run turns to shit.
All government reform is force and then becomes unadaptable. Options become zero and people become criminals.
Between Obama's screw ups in the Middle East with ISIL, Ukraine, the unchecked influx of illegal Hispanics across our southern border, the screw ups by the FED, etc I can not help but think that Obamacare is a sort of deadly Trojan Horse designed to assure complete financial obliteration/destruction of the middle class. At the rate things are going, health insurance(tax) will cost more than food and housing combined. It seems that Obama has employed a multipronged attack on the middle class.
I am still awaiting to see how much more he encroaches as far as government surveillance and 2nd amendment rights.
It's not Obama.. It's almost everyone believes in Governments.
Killing and wars for what more power.
Pretty apparent to anyone with any kind of compassion we should have very cheap if not free health care before we attack anyone.
or give any money to any other country.
It's almost like this guy is getting close to death and get God's going to be pissed.
http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/09/29/video-why-we-must-end-upward-pre-distributions-to-the-rich/
Listen to Larken Rose https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFeK8ZdHbCqAq3gekWs8aEQ
Have a open mind. Or keep hoping that you can elect someone that will change it for the good.
and by the way we are pretty sure the world is still flat if you thing you have a choice.
Peace
What if everyone simply stops paying their health insurance and pays cash to their doctors? Negotiate with them. Unfortunately hospitals are the worst since they will not budge even though they overcharge like crazy!
Hospital owners/admistrators need to be in line after bankers and politicans for "re-education."
Let's see:
Banksters wrote banking and financial laws because it's too hard for mere legislators to understand the complexities.
The healthcare industry and big pharma lobbies wrote the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).
Will someone kindly explain why they are costing us so much? I thought they were the experts? Aren't they supposed to be wonderful, trustworthy people and all that?
ACA
americans
can't
afford
is this your fathers socialism
fascism
This is not 'socialism' or 'communism' this is pure greed by private providers milking an essential system. Americans are THIRTY FOURTH in the world in terms of life expectancy.
Apparently there have been no advances in dental care. It is just coincidence that Obamacare does not cover dental care!!!
I've always thought the insurer's distinction between medical and dental was a false one. Dental care is simply a specialty like thoracic surgeon, orthopedist, ophthalmologist, pediatrician,....
Yet they will usually pay these shamans called psychiatrists and psychologists to guess what your problems might be, assign a politically contrived number to them from the DSM, talk with you about them each week/month, and maybe let you have a script for some pills that cost you they-don't-know-how-much.
It's not a market - it is a racket.
Yeah, blame it on Obamacare instead of the frickin extortionists at the company itself
Death is preferable to life under Obummercare.
Wouldn't use this insurance company cause they are just lying in your face or just discovered death demographics so woefully inept.
whats the deductible $8000 dollars or such?
The last bastion of theives is insurance companies, all health related companies and at the end of it all the doctors too...
Here in NY Health Republic was established as a "co op" under Obamacare and funded with a few hundred million from the Feds, they just announced over the weekend they are insolvent and will cancel all the non small group polices as of 12/31/15. Their premiums were artifically low so Obama could brag about lower premiums.
And people wonder why I left the USSA ~4 years ago. Maybe I should say "used to wonder"? I guess a few understand now. This is just one of many reasons.
Where did you go that is better ?
Just one more comment from a fatty. I don't understand how insurance companies can jack my rates if I'm fat. I understand that if I was fat and unhealthy, therefore actually costing the insurance company money that they could jack my rate. But I haven't been to a doctor in 15 years. And when I'm old and fat, I may not be insured by this same company. I know plenty of thin people that are constantly at the doctors office for ear infections, sore throats, back pain, etc. These insurance companies have massive computer systems that know how much each insured person is consuming. Fat people are easy to identify by sight but for a computer system it is far easier to find the people "costing" the insurance company profits.
They know exactly what fat people cost them. You think they're stupid?
I thought technology was supposed to lower costs, make our lives easier. Guess not.
Whoevers bill that is they should count their lucky stars!!!! I have an 80% plan through my employer, and if I get laid off and I go on cobra where the employer doesn't pay their part of the premium, my total cost will be $3,000 for 2 months. In addition, above it shows $0 deductible, mine is $4,000 each and every year. Will add, when i started my career with the employer in the early 90's, they paid 100% of the premium, it was 90% coverage with no deductible. Oh boy how inflation and greed loves to destroy.
I got my insurance letter the other day. Mine is going up 44%. I'll be paying $670/month for a 5000 deductible plan for a 7 year old boy, 40 year old father, and 43 year old mother. Totally insane! This reminds me of when Bush gave everybody $300 or in the spring of 2008. Remember what happened then (oil $150/barrel), except this will be the reverse. If you think 2015 was bumpy. Wait for 2016 when all these insurance premiums take effect.
80% of health care cost goes to the last 5 years of life.
Technology helps us keep people alive much longer than normal
And it is real expensive.
So, the story is true.
Clue, most doctors do not die in hospitals.
Why? Because they know how miserable it can be to do what ever it takes just to stay alive longer when our bodies are failing naturaly
Here's another clue: the frightened person I ever saw in a hospital was a 15 year career nurse practitioner, my then girlfriend an ER coordinator.
I'm going to reprint because it flew over your heads.
Japan is 3x cheaper than the U.S. for medical care.
So, if an American is paying extra costs , how is his labor competitive?
It's not.
Think hard on it. Three times cheaper in an industrial modern country.
Not one commentor here noted that two income lifestyles have a profound effect on society.
If modern society produces with robots and high technology, then why the loss of leisure?
If one could go back in time and tell our ancestors the wonders of today, they would say, "Hey it must be an easy life." But instead women have entered the workforce, and children would be too if it weren't for laws.
Why? It is to pay ever expanding debts that are at the root of credit money system.
There are tremendous inefficiencies in the theft system, which forces most to work - and a lot of the work is shoveling papers and making heat.
For example, there are an army of bureaucrats at Dr's offices shoveling papers at insurance companies, who shovel them back and forth in a sort of warfare.
This is not efficient economics, and is high cost. Finance also extracts. When an economy is full of rents, it starts to malfunction. This rent seeking is the end effect of bad thought and bad practice.
Medical is A MIXED MARKET. a MIXED MARKET. a Mixed MARKET.
I bet NOBODY has heard it put to them that way before? Why am I the only person alive noticing these things?
A MIXED MARKET has to be approached as a MIXED MARKET.
When you are down for the count and unconscious, you cannot make logical decisions, and therefore the market has shifted from elastic to inelastic.
People should pay for their medical care, but there should be provisos for when it shifts into inelastic modes. That would be easy to figure out if we even had the right kind of debate to then port out the right system. But no, the parasites want their rents and will adjust any system so they can be privledged. Witness obamacare, where guranteed income for insurance companies and everybody else on the take.
So, NO RECOGNITION among ZH crowd that the money system has extracted rents, and forced two income families. This in turn has knock on effects, making people fatties as they eat fast food and have stressful lives. Children come home to empty houses and kids do not run around outside because it is not safe. No Mom's eyes are on the streets to prevent crime either.
This money system was jammed up Western Societies ass by our friends when they created bank of England in 1694. Debt spreading banks that host societies by hanging a national debt onto a population. Real Smart. And yet nobody is making the connections here?
Then the other knock on effect of debt money system is a medical system that takes rents and causes high prices, ergo two income familes to pay for it, in a vicious cycle.
It all begins and ends with the money system. Credit money system has to be tossed onto ash heap of history.
www.sovereignmoney.eu
Bank credit as money is a killer of advanced civilizations. The greatest amount of money pouring into Washington from Lobbyists comes from one zip code. That is the Wall Street Area.... no surprise.