wdwmom0f3
Disney Bound!
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How much is YOUR Ins. going up in January?
- Thread starter wdwmom0f3
- Start date
perhaps a lower cost for the premium, but when the costs for the co-pays and deductibles are added in it can meet or exceed that figure.
in our case we are not eligible for a tax credit b/c when you look to our brand spanking new open enrollment info it states VERY clearly that the employee's cost is just below the 9.5% of what the employer knows is the max for just their pay (not the entire household's income), the rate for dependents skyrockets upward.
when I go to my state's exchange and plug in my figures I can disregard the first 10-20 plans because they are hmo's or preferred provider plans that DO NOT provide coverage outside their network, and when I plug in my zip code there are NO providers within the maximum allowable mileage range. so then I go to the first of the coverage plans we are eligible to that either actually has providers locally OR pays for out of network. GREAT-it reads that it's about $600 less per month than I pay through my employer BUT, it's got a $6350 per person/$12,7000 per family deductible that applies before I can get so much as one prescription filled. if I sign on for it, i'm paying between premiums and deductibles about $460 per month more than my already insanely high rates (so i'm paying out an even higher percentage of my income before my insurance pays out 1 cent????)
Marionnette
Children see magic because they look for it
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2009
- Messages
- 19,509
We offer A PLAN. The premiums are high and the benefits are slim. We pay 0% of the premiums for them. Only a couple employees have taken us up on the offer and that is because it was cheaper than COBRA when a spouse was between jobs.
As for the ACA, I cannot even create an account, let alone determine if there is a better, more affordable option for our employees thru the exchanges. They have to be insured one way or the other by Jan. 1 and their spouses' employers already have plans to offer them.
You know nothing if the dynamics if our workplace or the employment situation in my area, so don't judge. When I say that if we had to pay for employee health insurance they would be out if a job, it's because we would have to close our doors. We don't make enough money to pay tens if thousands of dollars annually per employee.
Found out this morning. For the same bcbs ppo we have this year it's going up $5 a week for the family plan. Dental is going up $1 and vision $0.12 per week. They have added several services as we'll. for example they now cover speech therapy for developmental delay (use to only be for medical reasons) and they cover ABA for children with autism.
We are hopng we do. We have two accident prone boys!
We didn't have to prove anything. They didn't even ask why my husband didn't want it. I'm assuming a lot of their employees didn't take it. If it's 39% of my husbands income, I'm assuming its a very large chunk of the other employees income. They can't make you take it if you can't afford to live after paying for it.
bettymae1121
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2010
- Messages
- 2,694
My boss heard a rumor that our rates are going up, but not because of ACA. Several employees had major claims this year so BCBS is increasing due to that. But this is our first increase in at least 3 years so we are "due" for an increase of some sort. I think open enrollment is in November so we'll officially find out how much (if any) increase there is.
The Obamacare Website Could Stay Broken for a While
New York Magazine
Posted on Sunday, October 13, 2013 6:34:46 PM by nickcarraway
While the government shutdown distracted much of the media from the troubled September 30 launch of the Affordable Care Act's national insurance marketplace, heathcare.gov, the site's numerous and ongoing issues have become impossible to ignore. The New York Times took a comprehensive look at the nearly two-week-old system, and it's not pretty. "These are not glitches," said an insurance executive who has communicated with federal officials who are trying to implement the new healthcare plan. "The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, 'It's awful, just awful.'"
At least 14.6 million people have visited the site so far, but the government has declined to say how many have successfully used it to enroll in insurance programs. Insurance executives told the Times that they have received only "a trickle" of enrollment files. Some forms have been sent to the wrong insurers because of company name mix-ups, while others are unusable because they are missing "crucial information." Meanwhile, a Times researcher who managed to register with healthcare.gov on October 1 was never able to actually log in to the site, despite 4o attempts to do so over the course of eleven days.
New York Magazine
Posted on Sunday, October 13, 2013 6:34:46 PM by nickcarraway
While the government shutdown distracted much of the media from the troubled September 30 launch of the Affordable Care Act's national insurance marketplace, heathcare.gov, the site's numerous and ongoing issues have become impossible to ignore. The New York Times took a comprehensive look at the nearly two-week-old system, and it's not pretty. "These are not glitches," said an insurance executive who has communicated with federal officials who are trying to implement the new healthcare plan. "The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, 'It's awful, just awful.'"
At least 14.6 million people have visited the site so far, but the government has declined to say how many have successfully used it to enroll in insurance programs. Insurance executives told the Times that they have received only "a trickle" of enrollment files. Some forms have been sent to the wrong insurers because of company name mix-ups, while others are unusable because they are missing "crucial information." Meanwhile, a Times researcher who managed to register with healthcare.gov on October 1 was never able to actually log in to the site, despite 4o attempts to do so over the course of eleven days.
skylizard
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2008
- Messages
- 1,276
Exactly. Chronic conditions (from smoking and obesity) have been the number one contributor to the increasing healthcare costs we've seen over the last several years. It's not a matter of politics. We just need to be healthier as a nation.
And someone else had mentioned nurse practitioners becoming the norm for basic doctor visits and I agree. I currently see one too and she is awesome.
Do you have an employer sponsored plan now? Are all coverages the same?
Unbelievable!!! With a deductible of $12,000 you may as well be uninsured unless you have a catastrophic illness. An insurance plan with a deductible so large you never actually get to use the insurance is useless - it's just a huge tax. I don't see how this is supposed to help people who are currently uninsured - instead of paying out of pocket, they pay out of pocket AND pay a monthly premium. How does that help?
I don't get it . . .
Looks like what might happen is some of the presently insured will become the uninsured.
just as a heads up-if your family's healthcare is tied to you (through and employer), you might want to start looking into what will happen when you get medicare-our premiums shot up (in addition to the premium medicare charges). reason being is some employers (and former employers who allow retirees to maintain coverage) require the medicare recipient employee/retiree to remain on the policy in order for their spouse/dependents to stay on. they might offer a nice lower premium medicare supplement plan but these generaly are not bundled together with standard plans to cover the rest of the family.
it kills me to see how little my insurance company pays out on my behalf each year (medicare pays the bulk) but in order to keep my family covered it's what I have to do.
MommyBryn
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- May 26, 2006
- Messages
- 1,053
Our private insurance goes up about $175 IF we drop to the cheapest, least coverage plan. (we don't have a lot of coverage as it is, so not THAT far to drop! LOL) Staying where we're at takes us up about $250 at least.
Via ACA it would be about $300 more than what we pay now, with less coverage.
Still a little confused and mind boggled by it all. Especially since we pretty much NEVER use health insurance. Could certainly be worse, but still rough as our income isn't large and DH just finished furthering his education to finally get a raise and all that income will be going to health insurance instead.
Praying we get something figured out, though.
Quoting myself here because I was "offered" another option...insurance through DH's employer jumps from about $600 to just over $1000 now. That's impossible! That's practically 50% of our income right now!
This is all just pretty crazy. We'll figure something out (pretty sure we're going with Samaritan), but like I said, the frustrating thing for us is that we've paid for our own insurance for our 10 years of marriage/4 kiddos and only rarely used it. The insurance companies were definitely proffiting off of us.
So it's just hard to be forced to pay MORE for something we don't really use much of anyway. But I guess that works out daintily for the other end.I'm just trying my darndest to find aspects of this whole fiasco to be thankful for. Thankful DH will be FINALLY be making more a little money- even if it IS all going to health insurance costs now- because now that this is all "required", at least we can hopefully work it into the budget now. Thankful that my family and myself are fairly healthy and HAVEN'T needed to deal with insurance much. Thankful that, even though they aren't great, we DO at least have options to chose from. Thankful that I'm not alone in dealing with this. (not that I am HAPPY others are!)
True but how is Obamacare going to help that? All it will do is put this nation into further debt and break the backs of our kids and grandkids. I heard on the news that all the money in the world from every country including all the gold and silver that exists will not be enough to pay back this enormous debt that this administration is taking on. Very scary unless you are uneducated about economics and don't realize how this debt affects everything from taxes, jobs, your 401K, social security, etc. The most frightening part is that many in this country think this cradle to grave entitlement society is free - there are actually people who think "just print more money". We don't just need nutrition education in this country, we need ECONOMIC education.
Eastern
I like Disney noise.
- Joined
- Dec 30, 2006
- Messages
- 7,322
Exactly.
daughtersrus
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Feb 26, 2002
- Messages
- 6,658
We also need to educate the insurance industry to use a little common sense. I will use a situation that we had with my DD. She is disabled due to a rare genetic disease. Whe. She was 2 (1996) she was diagnosed with bilateral sensory-neural hearing loss. Our policy wouldn't pay for hearing aids but they said that they would pay for as much speech therapy as she would need ( even 5 days a week). Hearing aids at the time were about $3,000 for both and a SLP was about $200 for a 50 minute session. So they would end up paying $1,000 a week forever. We wrote a letter of appeal and had to explain not only the cost benefit to the insurance but have doctors explain how wearing hearing aids compared to getting SLP services was not the same. The board of directors finally agreed with us and provided coverage for the aids.
More recently, DD needed some repairs to her wheelchair. Nothing major, just new tires, handle bars and a new backrest. The cost was right around $800. The insurance company woundn't pay for the repairs but since it had been a few years, they would pay for an entirely new wheelchair. I tried explaining that it was really needed, but the response wad " we don't pay what's costs effective. We pay what the plan covers". So instead of paying the $800 for the repairs, they paid over $12,000 for the new chair (non morotized chair) We donated the old one to Shriners Hospital so hopefully they were able to use parts of it for other children.
newtodcl
Mouseketeer
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- Jul 14, 2005
- Messages
- 270
The rollout of ObamaCare has been plagued by problems these past two weeks, as thousands complained they couldnt sign up for coverage due to a deeply defective website.
But this process could have been easier if a nine-year, government-backed effort to set up a system of electronic medical records had gotten off the ground. Instead of setting up their medical ID for the first time, would-be customers would have their records already on file.
Unfortunately for patients -- and taxpayers -- the long-running project has produced tangibly few results despite costing the government, so far, at least $30 billion.
Under a George W. Bush-era executive order, all Americans should have access to their medical records by the end of 2014, part of a concept referred to as e-health. President Obama then made electronic medical records (EMRs) central to the success of the Affordable Care Act
Health care IT providers were tasked with creating a system connecting patients, health care professionals, hospitals, laboratories and medical facilities. But despite being paid vast incentives by the governments Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), theyve dragged their feet.
Doctors have so far received $14 billion in sweeteners, and hospitals have been handed more than $16 billion. Officials indicate that incentives could eventually reach $45 billion, though there is no universally integrated system anywhere in sight.
Taxpayers lose here, but so do patients.
The system, if and when it is operational, could prove invaluable in an emergency. Consider a person being rushed to the ER, with the hospital having no knowledge of the individual apart from the name on their drivers license. The medical records system would immediately produce that individual's private medical history, helping doctors determine treatment right away.
Doctors, practitioners and hospitals, though, have been enriching themselves with the incentives to install electronic medical records systems that are either not inter-operable or highly limited in their crossover with other providers.
The electronic medical records system has been funded to hospitals at more than $1 billion per month. Apparently little or none of that money went to the enrollment process which is where the bottle neck for signing up to ObamaCares insurance exchanges appears to be, Robert Lorsch, a Los Angeles-based IT entrepreneur and chief executive of online medical records provider MMRGlobal, told Fox News.
Specified medical practitioners are eligible to receive up to $44,000 via the Medicare EHR Incentive Program and up to $63,750 through the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program.
According to the CMS website, as of August 2013 more than 320,000 health care providers received payments for participating in the incentive programs more than half of all those eligible.
The incentives [for doctors and practitioners] were designed to help small family practices because some of these record systems were getting very expensive, and they couldnt afford it, a California-based former health care IT developer told Fox News, speaking on condition of anonymity due their close relationship with some of the corporate incentive recipients. But there was a handsome windfall for those making decent money, she added. Why did all these other people get a windfall?
In the case of hospitals, the incentives run into the many millions. One example cited by a director at the Office of the National Coordinator, established to oversee the incentive programs, demonstrates one hypothetical hospital receiving $6 million for adopting an EMR system under Medicare. The presentation indicates even more could be received under Medicaid handouts
The incentives began in earnest under Obamas 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act. Between January 2011 and August this year, $15.8 billion to hospitals was handed out in Medicare and Medicaid program incentives. According to one prior estimate by an ONC director, $44.7 billion may eventually be available through Medicare and Medicaid payments.
A large proportion of the overall money paid out has gone to a group of leading health IT specialists, some of which have close connections to the Obama administration. Cerner board member Nance DeParle became the director of the White House Office of Health Care Reform. Epics CEO, Judith Faulkner, is a highly influential Obama donor and was given a key role on a federal health IT committee. While these big companies have tinkered with their systems, none has reached comprehensive inter-operability.
Last year, after Congress launched an investigation over why so little progress had been achieved, members of both the House and Senate called on Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to cease and desist EHR incentive payments and demand more scrutiny on those who had received money. Sebelius publicly disregarded their requests.
"I'm concerned that this program isn't focused on creating an inter-operable system that would allow unaffiliated systems to share medical information, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said in an emailed statement to Fox News. It is essential that CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT heed feedback from stakeholders and ensure the program they are creating is a wise use of taxpayer dollars," he added.
Lorsch, at MMRGlobal, offered the U.S. government what it describes as a user-friendly personal health record system for one dollar per month per family a fraction of what it has cost the taxpayer so far.
It would have cost less than $1 billion in the year versus more than $13 billion in handouts to hospitals with no EMR interoperability. Plus, unlike under ObamaCare, the patient would be in control of their health information and, most importantly, their privacy, Lorsch said.
MMRGobal already owns at least eight U.S. patents related to personal health records and e-health. It is currently suing or settling with big health care information users like Walgreens, AllScripts, WebMD. It has also informed hospitals they may be infringing its patents.
Before his recent departure, the head of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the ONC warned that hospitals are the biggest stumbling block in the adoption of EMRs.
Farzad Mostashari told delegates at a California healthcare conference that hospitals are the biggest problem in getting inter-operability going and that the government will pay more to hospitals to get them to do what they were paid to do in the first place.
But this process could have been easier if a nine-year, government-backed effort to set up a system of electronic medical records had gotten off the ground. Instead of setting up their medical ID for the first time, would-be customers would have their records already on file.
Unfortunately for patients -- and taxpayers -- the long-running project has produced tangibly few results despite costing the government, so far, at least $30 billion.
Under a George W. Bush-era executive order, all Americans should have access to their medical records by the end of 2014, part of a concept referred to as e-health. President Obama then made electronic medical records (EMRs) central to the success of the Affordable Care Act
Health care IT providers were tasked with creating a system connecting patients, health care professionals, hospitals, laboratories and medical facilities. But despite being paid vast incentives by the governments Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), theyve dragged their feet.
Doctors have so far received $14 billion in sweeteners, and hospitals have been handed more than $16 billion. Officials indicate that incentives could eventually reach $45 billion, though there is no universally integrated system anywhere in sight.
Taxpayers lose here, but so do patients.
The system, if and when it is operational, could prove invaluable in an emergency. Consider a person being rushed to the ER, with the hospital having no knowledge of the individual apart from the name on their drivers license. The medical records system would immediately produce that individual's private medical history, helping doctors determine treatment right away.
Doctors, practitioners and hospitals, though, have been enriching themselves with the incentives to install electronic medical records systems that are either not inter-operable or highly limited in their crossover with other providers.
The electronic medical records system has been funded to hospitals at more than $1 billion per month. Apparently little or none of that money went to the enrollment process which is where the bottle neck for signing up to ObamaCares insurance exchanges appears to be, Robert Lorsch, a Los Angeles-based IT entrepreneur and chief executive of online medical records provider MMRGlobal, told Fox News.
Specified medical practitioners are eligible to receive up to $44,000 via the Medicare EHR Incentive Program and up to $63,750 through the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program.
According to the CMS website, as of August 2013 more than 320,000 health care providers received payments for participating in the incentive programs more than half of all those eligible.
The incentives [for doctors and practitioners] were designed to help small family practices because some of these record systems were getting very expensive, and they couldnt afford it, a California-based former health care IT developer told Fox News, speaking on condition of anonymity due their close relationship with some of the corporate incentive recipients. But there was a handsome windfall for those making decent money, she added. Why did all these other people get a windfall?
In the case of hospitals, the incentives run into the many millions. One example cited by a director at the Office of the National Coordinator, established to oversee the incentive programs, demonstrates one hypothetical hospital receiving $6 million for adopting an EMR system under Medicare. The presentation indicates even more could be received under Medicaid handouts
The incentives began in earnest under Obamas 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act. Between January 2011 and August this year, $15.8 billion to hospitals was handed out in Medicare and Medicaid program incentives. According to one prior estimate by an ONC director, $44.7 billion may eventually be available through Medicare and Medicaid payments.
A large proportion of the overall money paid out has gone to a group of leading health IT specialists, some of which have close connections to the Obama administration. Cerner board member Nance DeParle became the director of the White House Office of Health Care Reform. Epics CEO, Judith Faulkner, is a highly influential Obama donor and was given a key role on a federal health IT committee. While these big companies have tinkered with their systems, none has reached comprehensive inter-operability.
Last year, after Congress launched an investigation over why so little progress had been achieved, members of both the House and Senate called on Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to cease and desist EHR incentive payments and demand more scrutiny on those who had received money. Sebelius publicly disregarded their requests.
"I'm concerned that this program isn't focused on creating an inter-operable system that would allow unaffiliated systems to share medical information, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said in an emailed statement to Fox News. It is essential that CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT heed feedback from stakeholders and ensure the program they are creating is a wise use of taxpayer dollars," he added.
Lorsch, at MMRGlobal, offered the U.S. government what it describes as a user-friendly personal health record system for one dollar per month per family a fraction of what it has cost the taxpayer so far.
It would have cost less than $1 billion in the year versus more than $13 billion in handouts to hospitals with no EMR interoperability. Plus, unlike under ObamaCare, the patient would be in control of their health information and, most importantly, their privacy, Lorsch said.
MMRGobal already owns at least eight U.S. patents related to personal health records and e-health. It is currently suing or settling with big health care information users like Walgreens, AllScripts, WebMD. It has also informed hospitals they may be infringing its patents.
Before his recent departure, the head of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the ONC warned that hospitals are the biggest stumbling block in the adoption of EMRs.
Farzad Mostashari told delegates at a California healthcare conference that hospitals are the biggest problem in getting inter-operability going and that the government will pay more to hospitals to get them to do what they were paid to do in the first place.
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