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Made in us
Blood Angel Captain Wracked with Visions






http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/05/11/cnn-poll-should-obamacare-be-kept-or-repealed/

Washington (CNN) - A majority of Americans want to keep the federal health care law as is, or make some changes to improve it, according to a new national poll.

But a CNN/ORC International survey released Sunday also indicates public attitudes have been largely unaffected by news that 8 million people have enrolled in health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.

Despite a victory lap by the White House following the release of that number, only 12% of Americans surveyed consider the law a success. Nearly half say it’s too soon to tell, and just under four in 10 consider it a failure.

According to the poll, 61% want Congress to leave the Affordable Care Act alone (12%) or make some changes to the law in an attempt to make it work better (49%).

Thirty-eight percent of those questioned say the law should be repealed and replaced with a completely different system (18%) or say the measure should be repealed, with Americans going back to the system in place before the law was implemented (20%).


Two other surveys conducted earlier this year – Kaiser Family Foundation in April and National Public Radio in March – also indicated majority support for keeping and improving the law. Two others, (NBC News/Wall Street Journal in April and ABC News/Washington Post in March), suggested Americans were divided on whether to keep the measure or repeal it.

As expected, there is a wide partisan divide, with nearly nine in 10 Democrats saying the law should be kept as is, or improved. That number drops to 55% among independents and 38% among Republicans. More than six in 10 Republicans want the measure repealed.

"Your feelings about the law are influenced by your station in life," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "There is general support for the law among young people and among people who are approaching retirement age. Support for repeal is higher among people between 35 and 49 years old, and highest among senior citizens, who are roughly split on what Congress should do."

Battle over Obamacare

Opposition to the law, approved in spring 2010 when the Democrats controlled the Senate and the House, was a factor in the Republican wave that November. The GOP took back the House following a historic 63-seat pick up, and trimmed the Democratic majority in the Senate.

The measure was also a major issue in President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election victory over Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Democrats picked up seats in the Senate and House in that election. And the measure is in the spotlight again in this year's midterm elections, as Republicans make their opposition to the law a centerpiece of their campaign.

Last autumn's disastrous roll out of the HealthCare.gov website was a top story for months. Even though things have improved, the poll indicates 47% say the problems facing the new law will not be solved, with 51% optimistic things will eventually be fixed.

The poll was conducted for CNN on May 2-4 by ORC International, with 1,008 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's for questions regarding the Democratic and GOP presidential nominations is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

 
   
Made in us
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Keep the old thread buried

Saw somewhere only 67% have paid their premiums so far. Since I did not enroll in this goat rope. Is the payment the 30 days billing cycle right?

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 Jihadin wrote:
Keep the old thread buried

Saw somewhere only 67% have paid their premiums so far. Since I did not enroll in this goat rope. Is the payment the 30 days billing cycle right?

I thought that the old thread was locked

I have not enrolled because I get insurance through my employer. We'll see what changes when (if?) that mandate goes into effect

 
   
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Decrepit Dakkanaut





Biloxi, MS USA

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
 Jihadin wrote:
Keep the old thread buried

Saw somewhere only 67% have paid their premiums so far. Since I did not enroll in this goat rope. Is the payment the 30 days billing cycle right?

I thought that the old thread was locked

I have not enrolled because I get insurance through my employer. We'll see what changes when (if?) that mandate goes into effect


I haven't enrolled because I get insurance through the Gub'ment.

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My coverage through my employer is pretty solid and they pay 80% of it.

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Curb stomping in the Eye of Terror!

Just wait till when the insurance providers participating in the exchange reports on what the rate increase would be in June.

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I kill zombies for my insurance.

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Pleasant Valley, Iowa

According to the poll, 61% want Congress to leave the Affordable Care Act alone (12%) or make some changes to the law in an attempt to make it work better (49%).


............... wut?

 lord_blackfang wrote:
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Curb stomping in the Eye of Terror!

 Ouze wrote:
According to the poll, 61% want Congress to leave the Affordable Care Act alone (12%) or make some changes to the law in an attempt to make it work better (49%).


............... wut?

It's statistical analysis dude! Make it what ever you want to support whatever you need.

From Mark Twain's Biography:
Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

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New Orleans, LA

 Ouze wrote:
According to the poll, 61% want Congress to leave the Affordable Care Act alone (12%) or make some changes to the law in an attempt to make it work better (49%).


............... wut?


Yeah, that 12% is out of place. The previous sentence has a 12% factoid in it. Typo? Editing error?

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Fort Campbell

 kronk wrote:
 Ouze wrote:
According to the poll, 61% want Congress to leave the Affordable Care Act alone (12%) or make some changes to the law in an attempt to make it work better (49%).


............... wut?


Yeah, that 12% is out of place. The previous sentence has a 12% factoid in it. Typo? Editing error?


12% of the 61 want it left as is, 49% want it to remain, and improved. 12 + 49 = 61%. Was a bit confusing for me as well.

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Pleasant Valley, Iowa

Thanks. You know, it's funny, when another news network posts confusing numbers like that, I presume intentional obfuscation to support entrenched bias, but when CNN does it, I just assume plain ol' incompetence. I'm not sure which is worse.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Respect to the guy who subscribed just to post a massive ASCII dong in the chat and immediately get banned.

 Flinty wrote:
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That is the most underhanded and dishonest way I have ever seen facts presented outside of a student essay.
If it's incompetence they need to fire whoever wrote it and then fire the people he worked with.
If it's done on purpose they need to shut down the company and have a long think about what a news organisation is supposed to do.
I know they aren't perfect but news organisations have a responsibility.

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Curb stomping in the Eye of Terror!

More stats!

New McKinsey Survey: 74% Of Obamacare Sign-Ups Were Previously Insured
One of the principal flaws in the coverage of Obamacare’s exchange enrollment numbers to date has been that the press has not made distinctions between those who have “signed up” for Obamacare-based plans, and those who have actually paid for those plans and thereby achieved enrollment in health insurance. A new survey from McKinsey indicates that a large majority of people signing up are now paying for their coverage. This is progress for the health law. But the survey still indicates that three-fourths of enrollees were previously insured.

Two months ago, I wrote about a prior McKinsey survey that found that the vast majority of people signing up for individual-market coverage in 2014 were previously insured, and that of the minority who had been previously uninsured, only 53 percent had paid their first month’s premium.

The upshot of that figure was that of the people shopping for coverage on their own who had actually enrolled in a new plan in 2014, the vast majority had been previously insured. Another way to say that is that for all of the talk about 7-million this and 8-million that, the Obamacare exchanges’ expansion of coverage to the uninsured was far smaller.

New data: 83% of previously uninsured have paid up

The new McKinsey report, authored by Amit Bhardwaj, Erica Coe, Jenny Cordina, and Ruchira Sara, indicates that the proportion of uninsured individuals paying for coverage has shot up, from 53 percent in February to 83 percent in April. For previously insured individuals, the percentage of payers increased from 86 to 89 percent.

The survey data was collected from 2,874 individuals whose incomes made them ineligible for Medicaid: above 100 percent of the Federal Poverty Level in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, and above 138 percent in states that have. (For a childless adult, this means incomes above $11,670 or $16,105, respectively.) 1,434 of those polled—roughly half of the sample—were previously uninsured, of which 83 percent were eligible for exchange-based subsidies.

53 percent of those who enrolled in 2014 coverage did so by renewing their 2013 plan or enrolling in a plan before the January 1 deadline that made many old plans illegal. The remainder of enrollees “selected a new 2014 ACA plan,” of which nearly two-thirds signed up through an ACA exchange.

The Forbes eBook On Obamacare
Inside Obamacare: The Fix For America’s Ailing Health Care System explores the ways the Affordable Care Act will affect your health care and is available for download now.

Only 22% of Obamacare sign-ups are paid, previously uninsured enrollees

However, the proportion of individuals purchasing ACA plans who had been previously uninsured remained low. In February, McKinsey reported that only 27 percent of those selecting a new 2014 plan were previously uninsured; in April, the proportion was 26 percent.

Combining that with the payment figures: of the people signing up for new ACA plans in 2014, only 22 percent were previously uninsured individuals who have paid for coverage and therefore enrolled in health insurance. That’s a meaningful improvement from February’s 14 percent figure, but it’s still low.

Combining all of this data: of the 8 million sign-ups on the exchange, we can only be confident that around 1.7 million are previously uninsured and enrolled. We can add another 865,000 or so for those purchasing coverage off the exchange, for a total of 2.6 million previously uninsured individual-market enrollees.

McKinsey data consistent with feedback from insurers

Earlier this week, representatives of the insurance industry testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee regarding enrollment trends in the exchanges. Four of the five witnesses stated that more than 80 percent of their sign-ups had paid for coverage. That’s consistent with what McKinsey found, and also with my own discussions with insurers.


Last week, the E&C Committee published a report indicating that only 67 percent of signer-uppers had paid; however, their data included in the denominator people who have yet to pay because their payments aren’t yet due.

Bottom line: Exchanges are having modest impact on the uninsured

Obamacare is beginning to expand coverage to the uninsured; however, it’s far from clear that the exchanges specifically are a primary engine. At most around 930,000 people have gained coverage from Obamacare’s under-26 “slacker mandate” (not 3 million, as is commonly suggested); another 3 million or so have gained coverage from the law’s expansion of Medicaid. Approximately 2.6 million previously uninsured individuals have obtained coverage through the ACA exchanges and the related off-exchange individual markets; however, the off-exchange purchases are mostly unsubsidized, and therefore can’t necessarily be credited to Obamacare.

What the exchanges appear to be doing is mainly helping people who were previously insured. If you’re 62 years old, say, and your income is $30,000, and you were paying for your own coverage before, you’re now eligible for plans that are much cheaper for you, thanks to taxpayer-funded subsidies and higher premiums for young people.


Of course that means that other people are paying more. “My old plan was canceled under Obamacare,” an exasperated Californian told me last week. “The new Obamacare plan costs twice as much, and the deductibles are higher. And yet Obama is counting me as one of his 8 million people!” But hey—at least he has maternity coverage.

* * *

UPDATE: In the original version of this piece, I described the McKinsey survey as only polling individuals with incomes between 100 and 400 percent of FPL. In a follow-up correspondence, the authors of the study have indicated to me that the survey did include individuals with incomes above 400 percent of FPL. The article has been revised accordingly.


So far... what the law has essentially done is rearranged the burden of payment among those enrolled while really not doing much at all in terms of reaching those for whom it was supposedly designed to help...

But hey! At least they have maternity coverage!

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YOu know, I read the numbers in the original survey and, well, excuse the ego but I'm left wondering why people don't just fething listen to me in the first place

I mean, that other thread went for like 60 pages, and now we have these survey results coming out and they just reinforce what I was saying the whole damn time.

Point 1 - Once ACA is in place and people see how its working it will quickly become an accepted part of the healthcare landscape. This can be seen in now just 39% of the population wanting repeal, which is a massive drop from where that number was a few months ago. Now just watch it drop even faster.

Point 2 - Even though ACA will become established as part of the healthcare system, it won't deliver great political results for Democrats or doom for Republicans. Because it's healthcare, and it will never be popular because nothing in healthcare is ever popular. The most perfect system will still be awkward, annoying and very expensive, because that's just the nature of healthcare. You can see that reflected in the poll result that just 12% consider the law a success, while 40% consider it a failure.

I mean, add on top of that me pointing over and over again that ACA enrolments were going just fine (established by the figures now hitting 8 million), and explaining that the individual mandate is needed if you want to remove the ability to deny coverage for a pre-existing condition (established by the New York situation pre-ACA), and that's all I was trying to tell people throughout that whole mess of a thread.


 Jihadin wrote:
Saw somewhere only 67% have paid their premiums so far. Since I did not enroll in this goat rope. Is the payment the 30 days billing cycle right?


It was a junk number released by Republican house committee. They took payments as at April 15, then divided that by the 8 million enrolled. Except that of the 8 million enrolled by that date, only 5 million were actually due for payment (the rest had enrolled for the cycle beginning the next month and wouldn't be due for another month). SO basically their figure said that if you include people that aren't due to pay for 30 days, no many people have paid yet. Which was very, very stupid.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 whembly wrote:
One of the principal flaws in the coverage of Obamacare’s exchange enrollment numbers to date has been that the press has not made distinctions between those who have “signed up” for Obamacare-based plans, and those who have actually paid for those plans and thereby achieved enrollment in health insurance.


What? The last of the enrolments are only just becoming due for payment like, today. How on earth was it a flaw in the reporting to fail to report that people aren't due to pay haven't paid?

The only flaw in the ACA reporting in that regard was the spamming of nonsense stories that tried to mislead people in to thinking there was some meaning to the low payment figures, by not telling people that they were low because lots of people weren't due to pay yet.

As to whether there's actually any meaningful number of people who are due to have paid but haven't, well we'll find out shortly.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/05/13 06:23:52


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Curb stomping in the Eye of Terror!

I would like to direct your attention to reading this NYT article:
Hospitals Look to Health Law, Cutting Charity
Hospital systems around the country have started scaling back financial assistance for lower- and middle-income people without health insurance, hoping to push them into signing up for coverage through the new online marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act.

The trend is troubling to advocates for the uninsured, who say raising fees will inevitably cause some to skip care rather than buy insurance that they consider unaffordable. Though the number of hospitals tightening access to free or discounted care appears limited so far, many say they are considering doing so, and experts predict that stricter policies will become increasingly common.

Driving the new policies is the cost of charity care, which is partly covered by government but remains a burden for many hospitals. The new law also reduces federal aid to hospitals that treat large numbers of poor and uninsured people, creating an additional pressure on some to restrict charity care.

In St. Louis, Barnes-Jewish Hospital has started charging co-payments to uninsured patients, no matter how poor they are. The Southern New Hampshire Medical Center in Nashua no longer provides free care for most uninsured patients who are above the federal poverty line — $11,670 for an individual. And in Burlington, Vt., Fletcher Allen Health Care has reduced financial aid for uninsured patients who earn between twice and four times the poverty level.

By tightening requirements for charity care, hospital executives say, they hope to encourage eligible people to obtain low-cost insurance through the subsidized private plans now available under the law.

“Do we allow our charity care programs to kick in if people are unwilling to sign up?” said Nancy M. Schlichting, chief executive of the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. “Our inclination is to say we will not, because it just seems that that defeats the purpose of what the Affordable Care Act has put in place.”

But advocates for the uninsured point out that many Americans avoided obtaining coverage in the inaugural enrollment period of the Affordable Care Act this year because they found the plans too expensive, even with subsidies. Many uninsured people also remain unaware of the new insurance options, And immigrants who are in the country illegally are not even eligible to apply.

“Certainly we want to encourage people who have new access to affordable coverage to take advantage of it,” said Sidney D. Watson, a professor at St. Louis University’s Center for Health Law Studies. “But I think we’re all going to have to do a lot to get that message out, and there will always be people who won’t have the option.”

Beverly Jones, 51, of St. Louis, who has lupus, is the type of person targeted by Barnes-Jewish Hospital’s new policy. Ms. Jones, who already owes Barnes-Jewish thousands of dollars for emergency room treatment and other visits, said the hospital’s new co-payments for the uninsured would “throw my budget into a tailspin” on her annual income of $13,400, which comes mostly from disability checks.

She has enrolled in a subsidized insurance policy under the Affordable Care Act. But she worries that she will have trouble paying the fees and deductibles required under her new plan, even with generous subsidies.

“There’s still a lot of stuff I can’t afford to do,” she said.

Many hospitals appear focused on reducing aid only for patients who earn between 200 percent and 400 percent of the poverty level, or between $23,340 and $46,680 for an individual. Many of those people presumably have jobs and would qualify for subsidized coverage under the new law.

BJC HealthCare, the nonprofit system that owns Barnes-Jewish and 11 other hospitals in Missouri and Illinois, gives all uninsured patients a 25 percent discount on the billed charges, regardless of their income. But the system previously provided additional discounts to uninsured patients with incomes up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Now, only patients earning up to 300 percent of the poverty level, or $35,010 for an individual, are eligible.

And for the first time, everyone who gets financial assistance owes at least a small co-payment. For example, patients with incomes at or below the poverty level are now charged $100 for emergency care and $50 for an office visit.

“We didn’t want to have a policy that would encourage people not to follow the mandate” to get health insurance, said June Fowler, a spokeswoman.

In the past, Southern New Hampshire Medical Center generally provided free or discounted care for patients who were at or below 225 percent of the poverty level, or about $26,260 for an individual. But starting this year, only patients below the poverty level will receive such charity care, said Paul Trainor, the system’s vice president of finance.

Patients “who refuse to purchase federally mandated health insurance when they are eligible to do so will not be awarded charitable care,” the hospital’s revised policy states.

Fletcher Allen, Vermont’s largest health care system, changed its policy on April 1, requiring many uninsured patients to pay a percentage of their bill instead of a fixed fee of up to $1,000. Patients earning 200 percent of the poverty level or less will not be affected by the change, said Shannon Lonergan, Fletcher Allen’s director of registration and customer service. But those earning between 201 percent and 400 percent of the poverty level will now have to pay between 15 percent and 45 percent of their bill, depending on their income.

Ms. Lonergan said the new policy would affect only about a third of its financial aid recipients. At BJC HealthCare, only about 3 percent of charity care patients in 2012 earned more than 300 percent of the poverty level and thus would no longer qualify for financial assistance unless there were extenuating circumstances, Ms. Fowler said.

Officials at both Fletcher Allen and BJC HealthCare said they had worked hard to inform patients about new insurance options during the recent enrollment period and to help them enroll in coverage. Both systems provide financial aid to lower-income people with high insurance costs.

The financial challenges are particularly daunting in the more than 24 states that have not yet expanded Medicaid, including Missouri. The Affordable Care Act reduces federal aid for uncompensated care on the assumption that hospitals would replace much of the lost income with payments for patients newly covered by Medicaid.

But the Supreme Court in 2012 gave states the right to opt out of the expansion. Now hospitals that treat the poor and uninsured in states like Missouri are losing federal aid without getting new Medicaid payments, a problem they say is threatening their bottom lines. Robert Hughes, the president and chief executive of the Missouri Foundation for Health, an independent philanthropic group, said BJC HealthCare was “in a tough spot” because of the state’s refusal to expand Medicaid.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows...

This one struck out to me:
Driving the new policies is the cost of charity care, which is partly covered by government but remains a burden for many hospitals. The new law also reduces federal aid to hospitals that treat large numbers of poor and uninsured people, creating an additional pressure on some to restrict charity care.


Yeesh... What's this saying is that most hospitals are not reducing charitable care (ie, "free care")to those who fall under the federal poverty level. However, for those who earn between 200-400% of the federal poverty level, they're fethed... this is where Medicaid eligibility ends and the mandate requires everyone to buy coverage and accept subsidies. With the new federal restrictions on charity, hospitals have to focus their efforts on the poorest patients and everyone else gets stuck with the bill.

This article struck close to home for me... ( I live in St. Louis )... and I'm hearing many of the smaller/independent hospitals are in dire straights. Either they'll be merged into another system (not likely to happen) or simply shutdown. Guess where those patients will go then?

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