What This Investigative Report Just Revealed Shows How ObamaCare Makes Millions Sick
...middle-class workers on employer-provided plans are...
Avatar of Norvell Rose Norvell Rose — January 2, 2015
Heading into 2015, one of the bigger questions regarding ObamaCare is whether the latest Supreme Court case involving the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will lead to a ruling that sends the law into an insurance “death spiral.”
It’ll be many months before any ruling is issued on King v. Burwell, but already the liberal hand-wringing has begun over the fact that a decision from the high court could render ObamaCare unworkable.
As reported at nationaljournal.com, the basis of the legal challenge involves the subsidies — actually tax credits — offered to ObamaCare enrollees and whether Congress intended for that financial assistance to insurance premium payers to be universally available:
…the subsidies are part of a complex, interwoven set of policies that aim to balance out each state’s insurance market.
The vast majority of Obamacare enrollees are receiving tax subsidies, which are offered on a sliding scale based on income, and most of them live in the 36 states that didn’t set up their own exchanges.
But as that future ruling hangs over ObamaCare as well as the lawmakers and liberal advocates who support it, there is a significant present problem identified in a lengthy investigative report at usatoday.com.
With new ObamaCare rules, regulations, and requirements radically changing the healthcare marketplace, middle-class workers on employer-provided plans are “increasingly staying away” from doctors’ offices, largely because deductibles have skyrocketed.
It’s a deep and common concern across the USA, where employer plans cover 60% of working-age Americans, or about 150 million people.
Coverage long considered the gold standard of health insurance now often requires workers to pay so much out-of-pocket that many feel they must skip doctor visits, put off medical procedures, avoid filling prescriptions and ration pills — much as the uninsured have done.
While the USA Today investigation doesn’t entirely blame ObamaCare for the fact that more and more people are facing prohibitively high deductibles with their policies, the report does say that deductibles have risen dramatically since the ACA went into effect.
A recent Commonwealth Fund survey found that four in 10 working-age adults skipped some kind of care because of the cost, and other surveys have found much the same.
And a Mercer study showed that 2014 saw the largest one-year increase in enrollment in “high-deductible plans” — from 18% to 23% of all covered employees.
The result, according to the USA Today story, is that increasing numbers of Americans are avoiding or delaying health care, and are frequently not taking their prescription medications as their doctors say they should.
As to the prospect that time will heal the problem with runaway insurance plan deductibles, the USA Today investigation concludes that relief for those struggling with high-deductible issues — or their potentially negative health consequences — is nowhere in sight.
There are no signs high deductibles are going away.The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services last month cited these plans as one of the reasons health care spending hit a record low in 2013.
But CMS statistician Micah Hartman says his office is “not looking forward to what the impact would be going forward” if consumers who delay care need far more expensive emergency care later.
Given this bad news for so many millions of Americans, one might wonder exactly what President Obama really meant all those times he and his supporters claimed he has been working so hard to “protect the middle class.”
h/t: USA Today
Read more at
http://www.westernjournalism.com/what-this-investigative-report-just-revealed-shows-how-obamacare-makes-millions-sick/#CjPwoXE6E1kpXk2l.99
