OBAMACARE DEBACLE - Update 3/6/2014

[bsteadman]

Health insurance marketplaces signing up few uninsured Americans, surveys say

The Washington Post
Amy Goldstein
3/6/2014

Excerpt:

The new health insurance marketplaces appear to be making little headway so far in signing up Americans who lack health insurance, the Affordable Care Act’s central goal.

A pair of surveys released on Thursday suggest that just one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private health plans through the new marketplace have signed up for one — and that about half of uninsured adults has looked for information on the online exchanges or plans to look.

Taken together, the snapshots shown by the surveys provide preliminary answers to what has been one of the biggest mysteries since HealthCare.gov and separate state marketplaces opened last fall: Are they attracting their prime audience?

One of the surveys, by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., shows that, of people who had signed up for coverage through the marketplaces by last month, just one-fourth described themselves as having been without insurance for most of the past year.

The survey also attempted to gauge what has been another fuzzy matter: how many of the people actually have the insurance for which they signed up. Under federal rules, coverage begins only if someone has started to pay their monthly insurance premiums.

And, the survey show, that just over half of uninsured people said they had started to pay, compared with nearly nine in 10 of those signing up on the exchanges who said they were simply switching from one health plan to another.

The second survey, by researchers at the Urban Institute and based on slightly older data from December, shows that awareness of the new marketplaces is fairly widespread but that lower-income Americans and those who are uninsured are less likely to know about this new avenue to health coverage than other people.

The surveys are not a perfect way of showing who exactly is gaining coverage, and whether the marketplaces are reaching parts of the U.S. population that need insurance the most. But they begin to fill in blanks that both advocates and opponents of the sprawling, 2010 health-care law all say are critical to understand.

“If there is one point to the law, it is to lower the number of uninsured,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy organization. “Ultimately, that has to happen for the law to be judged a success.”
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View the complete article at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...22c_story.html

[bsteadman]

Obama Promises Illegals: Obamacare Sign Up Info Won't Be Used for Deportation

Admits "prosecutorial discretion" on immigration has already stretched his "administrative capacity very far."

The Weekly Standard
Daniel Halper
3/6/2014

Excerpt:

In a joint town hall with Telemundo and Univision, President Obama made a pledge that his administration will not use Obamacare sign up data to deport illegal aliens:

"Will we hear from you a pledge, a personal promise, that the information provided in the registration process will not be used for deportation purposes in this country?"

"Absolutely," Obama said, putting his hand down for emphasis.

"It's true that the undocumented are not eligible [for Obamacare], that's how the law was written, but if you are a U.S. citizen or you have a legal presence in this country, you are eligible," he said. "And none of the information that is provided in order for you to obtain health insurance is in any way transferred to immigration services. So that's something we've been very clear about. If you live in a mixed status family, then the son who could potentially be eligible for the children's health insurance program or some other mechanism to get health insurance, he needs to be signed up. And the mother should not be fearful that in any way that's going to affect -- of course I understand the fear."

Obama blamed Congress for deportations. And he said he has already stretched his "administrative capacity very far" by taking immigration actions using "prosecutorial discretion," but that he was "very confident that was the right thing to do."
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View the complete article at:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/...on_784228.html

[bsteadman1]

Obamacare blocks patients from paying for treatment

Needed help can be denied 'even if patient is willing' and able to cover costs

WND
Bob Unruh
3/6/2014

Excerpt:

A new report from officials with the Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics at National Right to Life warns that one of the things in Obamacare that ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised Americans would discover is that they will not be allowed to spend what they choose on their own health care.

The extreme position was revealed by a special report from the NRLC, titled “The Affordable Care Act and Health Care Access in the United States,” which analyzes four fundamental policy areas of Obamacare.

It finds several areas through which the federal health care law “will drastically limit access to life-saving medical treatment under the law.”

“These four areas include: the ‘excess benefit’ tax coming into effect in 2018, the current exclusion of adequate health insurance plans from the exchanges, present limits on senior citizens’ ability to use their own money for health insurance, and federal limits on the care doctors give their patients to be implemented as soon as 2016.”

“For pro-life Americans concerned about the impact on innocent life – both born and unborn – the policies of Obamacare couldn’t be worse,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, as the study was being released on Thursday.

“Americans are just as concerned with the law’s impact on our ability to access life-saving medical treatment for ourselves, our family members, and our loved ones as with Obamacare’s funding of abortions. Obamacare is bad medicine for America,” she said.

Pelosi famously promised that Congress would have to pass the law before Americans could find out what was in it, and its unpleasant surprises have been shocking Americans ever since.

The study finds, for example, that the “Independent Payment Advisory Board,” which starting next January is supposed to make “recommendations to slow the growth in national health expenditures” will set “quality and efficiency” standards for hospitals, and demand that doctors meet government minimums in order to contract with any qualified health insurance plan.

“Essentially, doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers can be told by Washington just what diagnostic tests and medical care are considered to meet ‘quality and efficiency’ standards. These standards will be enforced not just for health care paid for by federally funded programs like Medicare, but also for health care paid for by private citizens and by the health insurance they or their employers purchase,” the study explains.

“These standards are specifically designed to limit the funds that Americans may choose to spend on health care so that they cannot keep up with the rate of medical inflation. Treatment that a doctor and patient deem needed or advisable to save the patient’s life or preserve or improve the patient’s health, but which runs afoul of the imposed standards, can be denied, even if the patient is willing and able to pay for it,” the study warns.

The study said that means that Washington “bureaucrats” will set a national standard for care, “that is designed to limit what private citizens are allowed to spend to save their own lives. On its face, the law maintains that this limitation does not amount to ‘rationing.’ Indeed, the [law] states, ‘The proposal [by the IPAB] shall not include any recommendations to ration health care…’ However, the law never actually defines what it means by the word ‘ration.’

“Obamacare authorizes federal bureaucrats to impose limits on what life-saving medical treatments Americans are allowed to get. It may not call this ‘rationing.’ But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t,” the report said.

The report addresses several other limits on life-saving care inside Obamacare, including the 40 percent excise tax on some employer-paid premiums.

“Consequently, insurance companies will be forced to impose increasingly severe restraints on policy-holders’ access to medical diagnosis and treatment – limits that will make it hard to get often-expensive treatments essential to combating life-threatening illnesses.”

Third, “Under Obamacare, consumers using the exchanges may only choose plans offered by insurers who do not allow their customers to spend what government bureaucrats deem an ‘excessive or unjustified’ amount for their health insurance – regardless of whether the insurers offer such plans…”

And fourth, there are provisions “allowing Washington bureaucrats to prevent [senior citizens] from making up the Medicare shortfall with their own funds by limiting their right to spend their own money to obtain insurance less likely to limit treatments that could save their lives.”

“Obamacare authorizes Washington bureaucrats to create one uniform, national standard of care that is designed to limit what private citizens are allowed to spend to save their own lives,” said Burke Balch, director of the Powell Center. “We are convinced most Americans do not believe that the government should limit the right of Americans to use their own money for health care necessary to save their lives. Yet, that is exactly what Obamacare does.”

In the study, Dr. Marc Siegel warns that Obamacare is threatening the future of health care, and consequently, the lives of Americans.

“The kind of insurance that is growing under Obamacare’s fertilizer is the exact kind that was jeopardizing the quality of health care in the first place: the kind that pays for seeing a doctor when you are well, but where guidelines and regulations predominate and choice is restricted when you are seriously ill,” he said.

“How can quality of care not be affected if the antibiotic or statin drug or MRI scan I feel you need isn’t covered under your plan?”

The attack on Americans’ health care often is done in Obamacare through trickery, the report said.

It reported that the Health and Human Services can “negotiate” premiums to be charged by private Medicare plans, but that the government had no power to impose a premium price control on private fee-for-service plans.

“Thus under the law before Obamacare, senior citizens could choose, if they wished, to add extra money of their own on top of the government payment in order to get health insurance less likely to ration, and Washington bureaucrats could not limit their right to do this,” the report said.

But that’s changed. Obamacare has a new provision that says “Nothing in this section shall be construed as requiring the secretary to accept any or every bid submitted by an MA organization under this subsection.”
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View the complete article at:

http://www.wnd.com/2014/03/feds-to-c...wn-healthcare/