Consumer Reports on BushCare: "a world of pain"

A 2008 article from Consumer Reports shows how far removed from reality the corporate media is today...


http://www.consumerreports.org/cont...onsumer_Reports_On_Their_Own_January 2008.pdf


"The article also featured the resuts of a survey we did, which found that 76 percent of uninsured respondents said they couldn't afford an individual plan. And the ones who were "lucky" enough to have this type of coverage didn't like it very much because it was more expensive and had more limited coverage than health plans available through an employer.


Because of the new health care law people like these, who did nothing wrong except to have the bad luck to be stranded in the individual market, can now get health coverage at a price they can afford. Insurers can’t turn them down or exclude coverage of the treatments they need the most. They can’t slice and dice risk pools to drive longtime policyholders away. They can’t charge them more because of pre-existing conditions.


I’m not the only person to call attention to this. Jonathan Cohn, writing in the New Republic, points out that “The most egregious insurance company abuses—rescinding policies for people who get sick, failing to pay for services that beneficiaries assumed were covered—usually come from the non-group market.”


So the next time you hear about someone whose individual coverage is being canceled because of the new health care law, consider that the new law is making this market work better for the vast majority of people who are either already in it or need to be in it because they have no other place to get covered."


http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/11/health-insurance-before-obamacare/index.htm

 

Potter, Wendell. Deadly Spin, An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010. (H)

 

Consumer Reports disagrees. Their analysis is factual. Your rant is not.

 

Little Georgie and his friends, however, have everything to do with why the law is necessary, repub desperate efforts to change the subject or deflect richly deserved criticism notwithstanding. Two other things. Romneycare/Obamacare/healthcare (more accurately health INSURANCE) reform is, basically, the program the repubs have advocated for years. Also, the bill was written BY CONGRESS, WITH REPUB INPUT, as I have stated many times, backing up the statement by quoting REPUB sources.

As for being "written in haste," the debate was one of the longest in history, so that statement is out-and-out false. As for being "administered incompetently," while I cheerfully admit that the initial web site was screwed up big time, most of the provisions of the bill cannot have been "administered incompetently" because they have not yet gone into effect - another repub lie. As for "This act is infinitely worse than the status quo ever was," this is so much bull it goes beyond a lie.

 

and I like this one from the Bush era too

"Wal-Mart Memo Suggests Ways to Cut Employee Benefit Costs " 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/business/26walmart.ready.html?pagewanted=all

"Wal-Mart executives said the memo was part of an effort to rein in benefit costs, which to Wall Street's dismay have soared by 15 percent a year on average since 2002. Like much of corporate America, Wal-Mart has been squeezed by soaring health costs. The proposed plan, if approved, would save the company more than $1 billion a year by 2011."

"Ms. Chambers acknowledged that 46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart's 1.33 million United States employees were uninsured or on Medicaid."

an interesting Article, Walmart claims Healthcare raising by 15% a year back in 2005 under complete republican control...

 

And speaking of costs, the average health insurance premium doubled during the Bush years.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/mone...15-insurance-costs_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

Employer-sponsored plans had been consistently passing on increased costs to employee, "dropping" coverage in favor of plans with less benefits, more employee-paid premiums, higher deductibles, and/or higher out-of-pocket costs.

 

I agree, we need 100% National Health Care and cut out the middle men. For the GOP to sit on their hands for a year while 47,000 Americans died without coverage is unconscionable. Voters will be within their rights to expell the last of the GOP who did nothing to save Americans.

 

First of all, the Affordable Care Act was NOT written in haste.

Of course, the right wing narrative that was adopted right after the bill passed asserts that it was rushed through and that no one read it, but that simply ignores obvious reality. Of course, the consumers of right wing noise turn off their collective memory in service of the new talking point.

In reality, discussions about the ACA began nearly two years before the bill's passage.

There is no basis whatsoever in the claim that the ACA will leave 50 million people uninsured.

As one of the people who suffered under the old scheme faced insurance premiums that were bigger than my mortgage for no other reason than I was a sole proprietor, I welcome the reform

It brought me the same insurance that people like you take for granted (mainly because you don't have to write the check) for the same price your boss pays for you.

Right wingers go to great length to ignore this huge benefit.

But it's very real.

And as soon as a lot of small sole proprietors and small businesses realize how much better off they are because of it, the GOP is going to regret this noise campaign they've been mounting.

 

While I would like to have seen a single payer system with price controls on drugs and an end to private profit insurance companies, Obamacare is certainly better than the alternative, which is even more people dying for lack of coverage. It's still not good enough, though. In 2016 perhaps we'll have a real Progressive President and a Progressive majority in Congress and then perhaps our society can do better. We certainly won't do better by going backwards.

 

The fact that it was written before the ACA is irrelevant.

The point is that the old system, the one you're defending ,left very small businesses and sole proprietors paying the highest possible health insurance premiums.

When we tried to insure my wife in 2010, the monthly premiums we were quited were four digits, nearly a mortgage payment. And this is typical. Small businessmen pay far higher premiums per capita than corporations do.

The insurance companies price risk based on the size of the group, even though thier risk is actually the risk of the sum of their groups.

The ACA breaks this chain by creating exchanges in which people who would never be eligible for group insurance, can be insured in groups.

Most right wingers don't seem to be able to get this through thier heads, no matter how many times it is explained to them.

 

Perhaps you'd prefer this recent Consumer Reports article (cited also in the OP) that backs the conclusion of its 2008 article.

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/11/health-insurance-before-obamacare/index.htm

Oops.

In order for right-wingers to claim the sky is falling, they need people to forget how truly awful the status quo was.

 

A poll done by a liberal institution focusing on college students who are traditional Democrat voters finds that most millenials will not in fact purchase Obamacare because they feel that it will provide worse care and is of course more expensive.

http://iop.harvard.edu/blog/iop-rel...e&utm_medium=hero&utm_campaign=Fall2013Survey

This entire OP is on pathetic attempt at deflection. Clearly the OP never took a logic class because it isn't even valid. The left is stuck in a toddler mentality of binary choice,Obamacare or nothing. The juvenile argument from the left is literally that they had no choice but to pass Obamacare as is.

The Democrats could have put forth a bill that included the more popular items that even the Republicans would vote for such as preexisting conditions and annual caps and left out the horrid ideas that even a grade schooler would question. Instead the Democrats shoved a 2,500 page bill that including complete bat (*)(*)(*)(*) ideas like requiring everyone to have pregnancy care and other situation specific items that many people, either because of age of gender will NEVER utilize..........EVER. Single guys and people in their 50s and 60s are NEVER going to use pregnancy care so why is it required in every policy? Why the hell am I paying for someone else's birth control pills. They are freaking $60 a month and even less if you get the generics. Get you own damn pills and quit making other people pay for it. Health insurance is supposed to be like any other kind of insurance whether its auto insurance of homeowner's insurance etc. It's supposed to take care of those large unexpected costs not the daily maintenance. Homeowner's doesn't pay for new flooring in the kitchen any more than auto insurace pays for new head light bulbs.

 

Interesting, if true. I see one source cited for that part about auto accidents and homicides (suicides was mentioned too, I believe, we could quibble about mental healthcare, but I won't), and it is definitely a suspect source. Could still be true.

But if so, does that mean we still have to let tens of thousands die every year for lack of proper healthcare that wouldn't have otherwise died?

And I'm not saying we should strive to equal Europe. We're America. We can beat the pants off Europe's healthcare system and become immortal and yada yada go USA. Anyway, you get my snarky point. We are needlessly allowing people to die so that other people can make money. Capitalism has its place. It doesn't belong in our most essential goods and services. Pay the people who do the work well, the doctors, nurses, and everyone else. Get the people who make money by investing out of medicine. They don't belong there.

 

LOL. With Republicans, it's been Chicken Little rhetoric since 2009, and people are finding out the sky is not falling.

The policies have hit the marketplace though.

 

For Individuals, but for employers, their mandate has been withheld. A crucial point in which distorts the HC debate, just as the original holding point from 2009-2012 distorted the debate. If the Dems were confident in this plan to force 300 million Americans to comply, they wouldn't have held back whatsoever.

In the next 1-2 years, when the employer mandate is put into effect we'll see the true outcome of the ACA and at that point the Dems cannot point to the few successes as some kind of saving point. It has to work for the majority of Americans, not a select few.

 

Incorrect. For example, note that life expectancy at age 65 (something that isolates factors like more youth homicides) is higher in many other countries compared with the United States.

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1340.pdf

Your claim on cancer survival rates is sketchy as well. Some fact-checking reveals several countries with universal coverage do as well or better.

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/08/cancer-rates-and-unjustified-conclusions/

Several other problems with this typical right-wing claim.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...oct/31/rudy-giuliani/wrong-numbers-off-point/

The U.S. spends way more per person than any country on health care (even with tens of millions uninsured or underinsured) and gets marginal benefit with results over some countries, and still lags behind others.

Now the U.S. does have universal coverage for those 65+, which is a good thing. Extending coverage to the rest is also a good thing.

 

Way back when before premiums shot up. The good old days. But I guess outrageous premiums are just one of the features of Obamacare.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...macare-will-cancel-80-100-million-plans-nope/

Not sure how long Republicans think they can be successful at scaring people.

 

Premiums rose 131% from 1999-2009.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/mone...15-insurance-costs_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

The good ol' days...

And employers have passed more and more costs onto employees, cutting benefits, a trend that began well before ACA was signed into law. Under BushCare, employees "lost coverage" every year.

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stories/2009/september/15/kaiser-survey.aspx

 

Over a decade - a decade with doctor shortage caused by government medicine.

Now they have gone up 40% this year, and all because of government meddling.