OK, I’m going through the obamacare thing again and I’m curious if anyone else here is going through this as well. I keep seeing ads for 'healthcare as low as $50/month or $9/week… but somehow the very cheapest thing I’ve found is $300/month and about $7k deductible.
Is there somewhere else I should be looking for health care plans than this &^$%&%%&%&$& website?
Anyone used a non-ACA broker or plan?
-Ian
The affordable care for me has just gone up by insane amounts. No chance of 50/month
I wish I could get $300 … mine is $1000/mo … but I’m obviously older so it higher, and it is not a Gold plan.
Prices are crazy. I may just pay the $800 penalty. My meds are only $125 or so a month. With deductibles and co-pays, it’s $18K/year for break even.
That’s where my wife and I are headed.
I did the penalty this year, and it’s $1500, not 800… well, at least for me… but just being covered would cost me 4500 for the year, and that doesn’t even include actually going to a doctor!!!
I’m also betting the penalty may be eliminated.
Reminder that a penalty may be assessed, but, unless something has changed I am unaware of, the law specifically does not provide for IRS to come after you…they can only withhold the penalty from any tax refund you might have.
And if you have a tax refund you are probably not managing your tax situation carefully enough.
Goddammitt…every time I start thinking about this stupid law/act, I get upset all over again. Thanks Obama Ian Obama Ian Obama Ian aggghhh!! I can’t even make up my mind now.
Can we at least all agree that there needs to be a law that the prices for services should be listed publicly and up front, and that there aren’t any “secret” negotiated prices?
Definitely agreed.
One of my main frustrations with PPACA is that it did virtually nothing to this effect, or anything to push healthcare prices downward or provide any transparency necessary for real competition. Or at least I don’t think it did…who the hell knows whats in the law, other than the lobbyists that wrote it.
Th fact that the IRS can’t really even enforce the mandate penalty sorta says it all.
Yeah, it tried. That is the reasoning behind eliminating-- or at least heavily taxing-- the Platinum level plans with 100% coverage. Because there is no cost incentive to shop around or be prudent about your healthcare, costs go up.
But I don’t think that by itself was enough to encourage shopping around on the money you spend on the deductible, because the prices are all unlisted – it just probably made people more willing to go to the urgent care instead of the ER, or the minute clinic instead of either of those.
If you want a non-ACA provider of healthcare, I can suggest US-Health. In particular the Agent Jarrod Halbert Phone # 469-337-9837. Jarrod is part of my business networking group and I personally seen the professional and caring work he has done. I looked deeply into his offering and wanted to switch to a Non-ACA plan this year, but the possible penalty from the variability of my income made this not feasible.
Also there are exemptions from an ACA insurance plan if you qualify. Here is a link to an article on Form 8965 where you would claim these exemption on your tax return. I’ve been warned that some of the exemptions require approval and can not just be claimed. So make sure you know the steps and follow them to the ‘T’.
Good luck on your plans, I just signed up for mine and I’m also in the camp of paying more than I think I should for coverage that doesn’t particularly excite me and if I wanted better coverage I would be penalized with fines to make it more expensive than acceptable.
You should be annoyed at Lawyers and the American Medical Association. The former has turned medical tort law into a nightmare for doctors and pharmaceutical companies, alike, and the latter artificially limits the number of doctors to keep them a scarce resource and prop up the prices they can charge.
https://www.aei.org/publication/american-medical-association-the-strongest-trade-union-in-the-u-s-a/
And the politicians who created this CF.
And the voters who put these folks in position to create this little piece of corporate welfare.
And the insurance companies that were complicit in its creation and implementation
And the judiciary who found a gerrymandered way to justify this CF as constitutional
And all of the people who allow their medical folks commit massive fraud every time they bill ‘somebody else’ (insurance) for their medical treatment.
You want to solve the problem? Then remove the third party payer system and require everyone to pay up front for their medical care and get reimbursed from their insurance, medicare, etc…
Walter’s got it. It’s pretty much everything/everyone from top to bottom, stem to stern, left to right.
Some other reasons why ObamaCare don’t work:
Politicians exempted themselves. Amazing how folks with 6 figure incomes - courtesy of us tax payers - “can’t afford it”.
Unions somehow got themselves exempted. (along with certain large corporations)
The fines for not participating are a joke.
Been dealing with Blue Cross Blue Shield for past few years. PPO went away. HMO is a joke. Goes up ~27% for next year.
Not optimistic about how the next admin will fix/replace this.
Walter is right. I work at a software company that provides EMRs for doctors. I speak to a lot of doctors and I get a lot of feedback from them. One, who is a long time friend, just up and quite medicine because he was fed up with the bureaucracy and paperwork. More and more are considering doing just that.
The system is badly broken. From the payors, to the doctors, to the hospitals, to the government. All of it is just broken. The reason boils down to bad economics. Do you know what a doctor is paid in Plano if they are a fantastic doctor? The same as a doctor that is crappy one. That’s right the insurance claim is the same regardless of the competency or the quality of care. The government wants to change this through regulation, but they are going about it all wrong. Walter’s suggestion of having patients deal with the insurance payors for their claims and pay the doctor directly out of pocket would solve the problem for the most part. Then every patient would have an opportunity to experience the pain doctors go through every day. Doctors have on average 1 to 1.5 FTEs for every doctor just to handle the insurance claims. It is a veritable nightmare for most of them. Some have even gone to “concierge” medicine where you pay them a yearly fee and they take care of all of your problems. No more insurance required.
Then there is the government legislation. Whether it is O’care or Medicare the government wants to just pay less to doctors. This means in some cases the doctor loses money seeing a patient because it costs more to see them than they are paid. In which case they respond by not taking your insurance anymore. So there are fewer and fewer doctors O’Care or Medicare patients can go to. This in turn makes it more difficult on those doctors still willing to see you. Ultimately, you get lousy service and fewer choices.
Ask almost any practice what their cash price for a visit is? Most will tell you a price that is higher than any insurance price. Why, because they have to charge you the price they tell the insurance companies they bill so that they insurance company can discount from it. If their cash price were lower the insurance company would pay them the cash price. Seems backward doesn’t it?
Lastly, there are numerous inefficiencies in health care. All caused by litigious patients, greedy doctors and hospitals or just plain bad medicine. Why else would you pay for multiple tests, multiple imaging or multiple visits for the same exact problem? Each one of these cost into the hundreds or thousands of dollars, but are necessary according to the doctors.
If you want health care fixed here are a few things that I think need to be done and they are all pretty simple.
These suggestions will pull out all of the stops that make medicine so costly and inefficient. There are few incentives to improve their business, your quality of care or reduce the cost. No matter what a doctor does they get paid the same.
Free enterprise needs to be reintroduced to medicine. Better economics would force things into an equilibrium where prices would cause more to enter the market so that prices would then drop. One final thought. The second most expensive cost of a medical practice after labor is malpractice insurance. Tort reform, which Texas enacted several years ago, would encourage doctors to want to practice. I know of several docs from NY who moved to Texas specifically for the tort protection.
I’m sorry for the long post. I deal with this every single day. I have great coverage from my employer and my costs went up considerably this year even though the employer picked up some of the cost. Health care is just broken and O’care did nothing to fix it. IMHO it just made things worse.
This has not been my personal experience. I rarely even let my doctors know I have insurance. Most of the time I pay in cash (check actually) at the time of the visit. Since I have been doing this, the prices I pay are about half what they were charging me/my insurance before. My doctor is under the impression I don’t have insurance so they give me a ‘discount’ since they don’t have to do the insurance paperwork…
I have had this happen with every doctor I have done this with in the last thirty years…
My Dad bought a concierge package with his doctor. He pays the doctor $75 every month whether he goes or not (he’s very healthy, maybe sees him twice a year), then he pays another $25 for every office visit and that’s it!
This is true if you tell them you don’t have insurance. You are basically asking for a special discount. This is something a practice owner has to approve. It is not something that they will routinely do. This is NOT their cash or so called allowed amount. The fact they discount it is proof that they have another list price. Your discount is not equivalent to their list price. Furthermore, if their payors find out they do this routinely they will reduce what they pay the doctor for their claims.
Do you file your claims yourself? Or do you not really have insurance?