Comments by "silat13" (@silat13) on "Obamacare Hater Now Loves Obamacare After It Saves His Life" video.
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Keith Peters
still one of the top brainwashed right wing ideologues on the tube. He has no thoughts of his own. He recycles the talking points that the K0CH funded media sells him. He has not the brain capacity to actually research issues so he just uses his bigotry and hatred to fire himself up. And let us not forget that Keith like so many of his fellow right wing empty heads is one of the moochers that Robme was actually talking about.
So you say the ACA took your healthcare away
http://occupyamerica.crooksandliars.com/diane-sweet/obamacare-horror-story-debunked#sthash.3Flcr67w.dpbs
Deborah Cavallaro got a letter from Anthem Blue Cross which stated, “Because of the requirements of the new laws, we can no longer offer your current Anthem policy.”
Deborah Cavallaro was all over the news on Wednesday as an example of someone who lost her existing health insurance thanks to Obamacare. Except one problem -- the plan she qualifies for is better. Under her current plan, she is limited to two doctor visits a year, pays $293 a month with a yearly deductible of $5,000. Cavallaro says she was told by her insurance broker she would be paying $478 a month -- but she didn’t check the website herself. There, she would have found a better plan, with only a $2,000 deductible and all doctor visits covered by a copay...for only $40 more a month.
Cavallaro told CBS Los Angeles that she received a letter from Anthem Blue Cross which stated, “Because of the requirements of the new laws, we can no longer offer your current Anthem policy.”
“I was infuriated, totally infuriated,” she said. “It’s sort of forcing you to walk the plank.”
CBS:
"The letter also said that Cavallaro is being offered a new policy and her monthly payment will increase from $292 to $484.
“The president kept saying, you know, ‘If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Your premiums will be going down.’ But, in fact, the letter is completely contradictory to that,” said Cavallaro.
Jamie Court, the president of Consumer Watchdog, said major health insurance companies are simply taking advantage of the confusion surrounding the new health care law to engage in price gouging.
“This is not the fault of the Affordable Care Act or President Obama. This is the fault of the insurance company. This is a handful of insurance companies that have convinced a very gullible state agency, Covered California, to allow them to drop plans that could very easily…with a few little tweaks… be compliant under the Affordable Care Act, and people wouldn’t have to leave their plans,” said Court."
Michael Hiltzik at the LA Times talked with Cavallaro, 60, after her CNBC appearance:
"Her current plan, from Anthem Blue Cross, is a catastrophic coverage plan for which she pays $293 a month as an individual policyholder. It requires her to pay a deductible of $5,000 a year and limits her out-of-pocket costs to $8,500 a year. Her plan also limits her to two doctor visits a year, for which she shoulders a copay of $40 each. After that, she pays the whole cost of subsequent visits.
This fits the very definition of a nonconforming plan under Obamacare. The deductible and out-of-pocket maximums are too high, the provisions for doctor visits too skimpy.
As for a replacement plan, she says she was quoted $478 a month by her insurance broker, but that's a lot more than she'll really be paying. Cavallaro told me she hasn't checked the website of Covered California, the state's health plan exchange, herself. I did so while we talked.
Here's what I found. I won't divulge her current income, which is personal, but this year it qualifies her for a hefty federal premium subsidy.
At her age, she's eligible for a good "silver" plan for $333 a month after the subsidy -- $40 a month more than she's paying now. But the plan is much better than her current plan -- the deductible is $2,000, not $5,000. The maximum out-of-pocket expense is $6,350, not $8,500. Her co-pays would be $45 for a primary care visit and $65 for a specialty visit -- but all visits would be covered, not just two.
Is that better than her current plan? Yes, by a mile.
If she wanted to pay less, Cavallaro could opt for lesser coverage in a "bronze" plan. She could buy one from the California exchange for as little as $194 a month. From Anthem, it's $256, or $444 a year less than she's paying now. That buys her a $5,000 deductible (the same as she's paying today) but the out-of-pocket limit is lower, $6,350. Office visits would be $60 for primary care and $70 for specialties, but again with no limit on the number of visits. Factor in the premium savings, and it's hard to deny that she's still ahead."
Hiltzik notes that "The sad truth is that Cavallaro has been very poorly served by the health insurance industry and the news media. It seems that Anthem didn't adequately explain her options for 2014 when it disclosed that her current plan is being canceled. If her insurance brokers told her what she says they did, they failed her. And the reporters who interviewed her without getting all the facts produced inexcusably shoddy work -- from Maria Bartiromo on down. They not only did her a disservice, but failed the rest of us too."
Excellent journalism, Mr. Hiltzik.
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Keith Peters Read it again you fool.
5 Myths About Canada’s Health Care System
The truth may surprise you about international health care
By Aaron E. Carroll, M.D., M.S.
AARP Newsletter, April 16, 2012
Myth #1: Canadians are flocking to the United States to get medical care.
How many times have you heard that Canadians, frustrated by long wait times and rationing where they live, come to the United States for medical care?
I don’t deny that some well-off people might come to the United States for medical care. If I needed a heart or lung transplant, there’s no place I’d rather have it done. But for the vast, vast majority of people, that’s not happening.
The most comprehensive study I’ve seen on this topic — it employed three different methodologies, all with solid rationales behind them — was published in the peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs.
Source: “Phantoms in the Snow: Canadians’ Use of Health Care Services in the United States,” Health Affairs, May 2002.
The authors of the study started by surveying 136 ambulatory care facilities near the U.S.-Canada border in Michigan, New York and Washington. It makes sense that Canadians crossing the border for care would favor places close by, right? It turns out, however, that about 80 percent of such facilities saw, on average, fewer than one Canadian per month; about 40 percent had seen none in the preceding year.
Then, the researchers looked at how many Canadians were discharged over a five-year period from acute-care hospitals in the same three states. They found that more than 80 percent of these hospital visits were for emergency or urgent care (that is, tourists who had to go to the emergency room). Only about 20 percent of the visits were for elective procedures or care.
Next, the authors of the study surveyed America’s 20 “best” hospitals — as identified by U.S. News & World Report — on the assumption that if Canadians were going to travel for health care, they would be more likely to go to the best-known and highest-quality facilities. Only one of the 11 hospitals that responded saw more than 60 Canadians in a year. And, again, that included both emergencies and elective care.
Finally, the study’s authors examined data from the 18,000 Canadians who participated in the National Population Health Survey. In the previous year, 90 of those 18,000 Canadians had received care in the United States; only 20 of them, however, reported going to the United States expressively for the purpose of obtaining care.
Myth #2: Doctors in Canada are flocking to the United States to practice.
Every time I talk about health care policy with physicians, one inevitably tells me of the doctor he or she knows who ran away from Canada to practice in the United States. Evidently, there’s a general perception that practicing medicine in the United States is much more satisfying than in Canada.
Problem is, it’s just not so. Consider this chart:
Source: “2009 International Health Policy Survey of Primary Care Physicians in Eleven Countries,” The Commonwealth Fund, November 2009.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information has been tracking doctors’ destinations since 1992. Since then, 60 percent to 70 percent of the physicians who emigrate have headed south of the border. In the mid-1990s, the number of Canadian doctors leaving for the United States spiked at about 400 to 500 a year. But in recent years this number has declined, with only 169 physicians leaving for the States in 2003, 138 in 2004 and 122 both in 2005 and 2006. These numbers represent less than 0.5 percent of all doctors working in Canada.
So when emigration “spiked,” 400 to 500 doctors were leaving Canada for the United States. There are more than 800,000 physicians in the United States right now, so I’m skeptical that every doctor knows one of those émigrés. But look closely at the tan line in the following chart, which represents the net loss of doctors to Canada.
Source: Canadian Institute for Health Information
In 2004, net emigration became net immigration. Let me say that again. More doctors were moving into Canada than were moving out.
Myth #3: Canada rations health care; that’s why hip replacements and cataract surgeries happen faster in the United States.
When people want to demonize Canada’s health care system — and other single-payer systems, for that matter — they always end up going after rationing, and often hip replacements in particular.
Take Republican Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, for example. A couple of years ago he took to the House floor to tell his colleagues:
“I just hit 62, and I was just reading that in Canada [if] I got a bad hip I wouldn’t be able to get that hip replacement that [Rep. Dan Lungren] got, because I’m too old! I’m an old geezer now and it’s not worth a government bureaucrat to pay me to get my hip fixed.”
Sigh.
This has been debunked so often, it’s tiring. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, concluded: “At least 63 percent of hip replacements performed in Canada last year [2008] ... were on patients age 65 or older.” And more than 1,500 of those, it turned out, were on patients over 85.
The bottom line: Canada doesn’t deny hip replacements to older people.
But there’s more.
Know who gets most of the hip replacements in the United States? Older people.
Know who pays for care for older people in the United States? Medicare.
Know what Medicare is? A single-payer system.
Myth #4: Canada has long wait times because it has a single-payer system.
The wait times that Canada might experience are not caused by its being a single-payer system.
Wait times aren’t like cancer. We know what causes wait times; we know how to fix them. Spend more money.
Our single-payer system, which is called Medicare (see above), manages not to have the “wait times” issue that Canada’s does. There must, therefore, be some other reason for the wait times. There is, of course. It’s this:
Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
In 1966, Canada implemented a single-payer health care system, which is also known as Medicare. Since then, as a country, Canadians have made a conscious decision to hold down costs. One of the ways they do that is by limiting supply, mostly for elective things, which can create wait times. Their outcomes are otherwise comparable to ours.
Please understand, the wait times could be overcome. Canadians could spend more. They don’t want to. We can choose to dislike wait times in principle, but they are a byproduct of Canada’s choice to be fiscally conservative.
Yes, they chose this. In a rational world, those who are concerned about health care costs and what they mean to the economy might respect that course of action. But instead, they attack the system.
Myth #5: Canada rations health care; the United States doesn’t.
This one’s a little bit tricky. The truth is, Canada may “ration” by making people wait for some things, but here in the United States we also “ration” — by cost.
An 11-country survey carried out in 2010 by the Commonwealth Fund, a Washington-based health policy foundation, found that adults in the United States are by far the most likely to go without care because of cost. In fact, 42 percent of the Americans surveyed did not express confidence that they would be able to afford health care if seriously ill.
Source: “How Health Insurance Design Affects Access to Care and Costs, by Income, in Eleven Countries,” Health Affairs, November 2010.
Further, about a third of the Americans surveyed reported that, in the preceding year, they didn’t go to the doctor when sick, didn’t get recommended care when needed, didn’t fill a prescription or skipped doses of medications because of cost.
Finally, about one in five of the Americans surveyed had struggled to pay or were unable to pay their medical bills in the preceding year. That was more than twice the percentage found in any of the other 10 countries.
And remember: We’re spending way more on health care than any other country, and for all that money we’re getting at best middling results.
So feel free to have a discussion about the relative merits of the U.S. and Canadian health care systems. Just stick to the facts.
Aaron E. Carroll frequently blogs about this topic for The Incidental Economist and is the coauthor of Don’t Swallow Your Gum: Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health.
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