Glen Beck bonkers over Obamacare

Post Reply New Topic

To claim Obamacare is working because of how many enrolled is false math.

The system will only work if lots of HEALTHY people sign up. This, as far as we can tell, IS NOT happening.

The sick and uninsured are signing up, but that only ensures the system will implode from insufficient funding.

It's like saying you had a 500% increase in income when your starting income was $5. Not all that impressive if you know the starting point, but government likes to selectively report information so that it make itself look good.

The mind of Glen Beck has been melted and baked for a long time. I have no doubt there are some major Psychiatric stabilizers in his medicine chest.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/04/06 ... -meltdown/

To claim Obamacare is working because of how many enrolled is false math.

The system will only work if lots of HEALTHY people sign up. This, as far as we can tell, IS NOT happening.

The sick and uninsured are signing up, but that only ensures the system will implode from insufficient funding.

It's like saying you had a 500% increase in income when your starting income was $5. Not all that impressive if you know the starting point, but government likes to selectively report information so that it make itself look good.

Except you are not taking into account the massive tab the taxpayers pick up when the poor fail to pay their bills. You are not factoring in the long term savings of mandatory free preventive care. Also, there is definitely not enough data for either side to be very accurate about the demographics of those who have signed up. But the preliminary data indicates that the desired younger demographic began signing up in a massive wave as the deadline approached.

If you want a decent break down of the preliminary data, this is a decent link summarizing different groups' estimates, including who they counted and who they didn't:

http://www.vox.com/health-care/2014/4/10/5579430/vox-guide-obamacare-enrollment-numbers

By the way, the difference between $5 and $25 (a 500% increase) is the difference between a decent dinner for a family of 5 vs a dinner of 5 crapburgers from the McDonald's dollar menu for a family of 5. Seems pretty impressive to me.

Capped MLRs: Under the ACA, insurance companies must pay out at least 80% to 85% of premiums for actual medical costs, depending on the type of plan. These are “medical loss ratios” (MLRs). That’s the law. The other 15 to 20% is all they get for administration, advertising, executive bonuses — and profit. If they arbitrarily jack up rates, so that they are paying out a lower proportion in medical costs, they have to give the excess back to the rate-payers. The federal government has already forced some insurance companies to do this.
Those anonymous company officials who complained to TheHill claimed that “everybody knows” that higher costs imposed on the insurance companies by the botched Obamacare rollout will have to be passed on to consumers. Is this is true? Were there huge costs to the insurance companies? Doesn’t matter. Unless they plan to break the law and falsely report their MLRs, these alleged extra costs still have to be absorbed in that 15 to 20%.
So the only reason that they would be able to make premiums “skyrocket” is if the actual healthcare costs per person “skyrocket.” So how are healthcare costs doing?
Healthcare costs: Yes, healthcare costs (National Medical Expenditures) are continuing to go up — at a rate lower than 2%, the lowest rate that has been counted in the 50 years that they have been counting. Not a skyrocket.

Wellpoint, one of the nation’s largest health insurers (it operates many of the for-profit Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans) recently raised its earnings projections. Why? According to CEO Joseph Swedish, mostly because way more people signed up for its Obamacare plans than it expected. Think about that: This also clearly means that Wellpoint expects to make money off of all those new customers at the prices they were quoted. Absent some huge demographic or actuarial bump, they don’t expect that they will have to “skyrocket” premiums next year to make up for some mistake.
This is just the latest in a string of positive financial projections since the first of the year from all the big for-profit insurance companies, including Aetna, Cigna, Humana, and UnitedHealth Group. Swedish at least doesn’t think this is temporary. In the same analysts call, he predicted that Wellpoint is currently in a position to “drive profitable growth over the next several years.”