It’s official: Obamacare debuts with more canceled plans than enrollments

[bsteadman]

It’s official: Obamacare debuts with more canceled plans than enrollments

The Daily Caller
Sarah Hurtubise
1/1/2014

Excerpt:

Obamacare may have promised health insurance for the masses. But on its first day, it’s left more Americans without coverage than before the law was passed.

More than 4.7 million Americans had their health insurance canceled as a result of any of the thousand-plus-page law’s new rules, The Associated Press reports, but the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed Tuesday that between federal and state exchanges, just two million Americans have signed up for Obamacare coverage. (RELATED: Obama administration announces net loss of at least 3 million insurance plans)

The Obama administration has yet to announce the final tally of full enrollments, which are only confirmed once customers have made their first payment, but Cato Institute health policy expert Michael Cannon warns that not all those who signed up will complete their purchases, potentially leaving the White House with an even lower bottom line.

Even without the full number of enrollments, Obamacare’s current net effect is clearly in favor of cancellations. Millions are already seeing Obamacare’s adverse effects — largely due to more mandates for more services.

The health-care law requires that all insurance plans cover 10 “essential benefits,” eliminating millions of plans that don’t fit the bill and boosting costs for consumers that have to purchase coverage for services they may not want or need.

All plans must include maternity coverage, for example — including plans for men and post-menopausal women. Even customers without children must purchase plans that cover pediatric services. Other newly established essential benefits include hospitalization, mental-health services and preventive and wellness services.

While a grandfather clause allowed plans purchased before Obamacare passed in 2010 to continue, HHS estimated that 40-67 percent of plans would eventually lose their status and cost millions of Americans their insurance plans.

The Obama administration eventually admitted Obamacare’s role in crushing many Americans’ coverage and has scrambled to belatedly make up for it. President Barack Obama first attempted to reinstate the canceled coverage for just one more year, but many insurers chose not to restart already-canceled plans.

The latest stopgap, announced just before the deadline to purchase exchange coverage, is to allow those with canceled plans a one-year “hardship exemption” from the individual mandate to have medical coverage, but insurance companies didn’t see this as an adequate solution either.
.............................................

View the complete article at:

http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/01/it...n-enrollments/

[bsteadman]

ObamaCare Debuts, #1

American Thinker
Mr. Ed
2/2/2014

A report from Indianapolis, from the first line of trenches facing the ObamaCare assault:

My wife just returned from Kroger, and she had a freaky tale to tell: she attempted to have a prescription filled at the Kroger pharmacy, but our MedCo rejected payment. They were informed that Kroger was no longer a provider. All of the pharmacy employees looked spooked out of their wits. The head pharmacist was trembling. It has been going on like this all day. They admitted that Medicare was doing the same thing, and for odd reasons such as the absence or presence of middle initials, or Ln versus Lane in the address. Other insurers reported systems down and network problems.

My wife asked one of them if any had been approved. The woman refused to answer.

If this is the case with the entire system -- and there's no reason to doubt it -- then it implies that ObamaCare lacks all but the most basic capabilities for processing even the simplest kind of claim. Which means that the worst is yet to come.

View the complete article at:

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/..._debuts_1.html

[bsteadman]

'They had no idea if my insurance was active or not!': Obamacare confusion reigns as frustrated patients walk out of hospitals without treatment

• MailOnline spoke with patients who were told they would have to pay their bills in full if they couldn't prove they had insurance
• One was faced with a $3,000 hospital room charge and opted to leave the hospital after experiencing chest pains
• 'Should I be in the hospital? Probably,' she said
• Another, coughing in the cold, walked out without receiving a needed chest x-ray
• Consumers face sticker-shock from medical costs under the new Obamacare system, made worse if they can't prove they're insured
• As many as one-third of new enrollees' applications have seen problems when the government transmits them to insurance companies

The Daily Mail / Mail Online
By David Martosko, U.S. Political Editor
1/2/2014

Hospital staff in Northern Virginia are turning away sick people on a frigid Thursday morning because they can't determine whether their Obamacare insurance plans are in effect.

Patients in a close-in DC suburb who think they've signed up for new insurance plans are struggling to show their December enrollments are in force, and health care administrators aren't taking their word for it.

In place of quick service and painless billing, these Virginians are now facing the threat of sticker-shock that comes with bills they can't afford.

'They had no idea if my insurance was active or not!' a coughing Maria Galvez told MailOnline outside the Inova Healthplex facility in the town of Springfield.

She was leaving the building without getting a needed chest x-ray.

'The people in there told me that since I didn't have an insurance card, I would be billed for the whole cost of the x-ray,' Galvez said, her young daughter in tow. 'It's not fair – you know, I signed up last week like I was supposed to.'

The x-ray's cost, she was told, would likely be more than $500.

MailOnline spoke to patients outside hospitals in Virginia's Washington, D.C. suburbs, many of them confused about the state of their insurance coverage

Galvez said she enrolled in a Carefirst Blue Cross bronze plan at a cost of about $450 per month through healthcare.gov, three days before Christmas.

'No one has sent me a bill,' she said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified in a December 11 congressional hearing that the federal government can't say how many new enrollees have written checks for their first month's premiums.

'Some may have paid, some may have not,' she conceded.

It's unlikely that a valid insurance card would have changed Galvez' fortunes, however.

Fifty-nine percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters that they have had negative experiences with the Affordable Care Act, according to the public opinion giant's latest survey.

Just 39 per cent said their experiences were positive.

Only 7 per cent called their Obamacare journeys 'very positive,' but 29 per cent said their interaction with the new system has been 'very negative.'

Gallup interviewed 1,500 uninsured Americans in December, 450 of whom said they had visited health insurance exchange websites.

As dismal as those numbers are, they represent a slight improvement: In November, Gallup found that 63 per cent of uninsured Americans had negative experiences with the president's new health care overhaul.

Her Carefirst plan, identified on the Obamacare website as BlueChoice Plus Bronze, carries a $5,500 per-person deductible for 2014 – an amount she would have to pay out-of-pocket before her coverage would apply to medical expenses.

The Inova radiology department wouldn't speak with MailOnline, and Carefirst did not respond to a request for comment.

A similar situation frustrated Mary, an African-American woman small businesswoman who asked MailOnline not to publish her last name. She was leaving the Inova Alexandria Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia with two family members.

'I had chest pains last night, and they took me in the emergency room,' Mary said. 'They told me they were going to admit me, but when I told them I hadn't heard from my insurance company since I signed up, they changed their tune.'

She told MailOnline that a nurse advised her that her bill would go up by at least $3,000 if she were admitted for a day, and her doctor told her the decision was up to her.

'Should I be in the hospital? Probably,' she said. 'Maybe it's one of those borderline cases. I have to think that if I were really in danger, they wouldn't give me the choice. But what if I think I'm covered and I'm really not?'

'The emergency room bill is going to be bad enough.'

The Obamacare system has suffered from a long list of setbacks since its October 1 rollout, starting with an inoperable website and ending with rampant uncertainty about whether Americans who enrolled are actually covered.

"We're telling consumers if they're not sure if they're enrolled they should call the insurer directly," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney old reporters on December 2.

The Washington Post reported that day that because of computer glitches in the 'back end' of healthcare.gov, enrollment records for as many as one-third of new insurance customers were corrupted or otherwise contain errors.

Given the Obama administration's latest claim that 2.1 million have signed up nationwide, that means as many as 700,000 Americans might falsely believe they have a current health insurance policy.

Mary and others like her, who took the time to enroll but may not follow the daily flood of news about Obamacare, likely don't know one way or the other.

'Why is this so complicated?' she asked. 'I had my own private insurance last year, but they cancelled me in November. I'm not sure which end is up.'

Private industry estimates put the number of policy cancellations as high as 4.7 million in the last quarter of 2013, mostly involving health care plans that didn't meet the Affordable Care Act's strict minimum standards.
.......................................

View the complete article at:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-walk-out.html