Monday, April 28, 2014

Obamacare - Sign up and lose your favorite, trusted, and best physician. Oh, and...where is my $2,500


A New York woman suffering from a neurological disease that has required four brain surgeries has been dropped by all of her doctors and denied medications due to her Obamacare plan.

By Wynton Hall  16 April 2014  Breitbart

"I've been vomiting. I lost 22 pounds. The pain is unbearable," said Margaret Figueroa, 49, on Wednesday.  "My medication helps me function during the day."

Figueroa suffers from a disease known as Arnold Chiari Malformation and Syringomyelia. Even though the Obamacare plan she purchased assured her that she was covered, her insurance card was denied when she went to fill her prescriptions. Then she learned that none of her doctors accept her Obamacare plan. Figueroa says she cannot find a doctor who accepts her Obamacare plan; indeed, there are only six doctors in all of Staten Island who take her plan, none of whom she's been able to get appointments with.

Figueroa's congressman, Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY), intervened to help her obtain some of her vital prescriptions. Grimm says he's already received calls from at least a dozen Staten Island residents facing the same problem with Obamacare's "narrow networks" – extreme restrictions to doctor and hospital access imposed by Obamacare.

"Even though the insurance company cashed your check, it doesn't mean it (the policy) has been implemented," said Grimm at a Wednesday press conference with Figueroa. "That's the problem – that the back end of Obamacare hasn't been fully built. You can go on the front end of an application and look at a list of plans, but what they don't tell you is that many of those plans don't have doctors yet."

Figueroa is not alone.

As Breitbart News reported in January, the Washington Post warned that "Obamacare's narrow networks are going to make people furious – but they might control costs." Breitbart News contributor Scot Vorse learned the hard way about Obamacare's narrow networks when the nearest dentist who accepted the mandatory dental plan he was required to purchase for his children was over 100 miles away.

Obamacare's narrow networks have also shut out access to top cancer centers. The Associated Press says just 4 of 19 nationally recognized comprehensive cancer centers offer Obamacare access through all insurance plans in their state Obamacare exchanges, and a McKinsey and Co. study revealed 38% of all Obamacare plans only allow patients to pick from just 30% of the largest 20 hospitals in their areas.

Experts say the narrow network horror stories will only grow as more and more Obamacare customers attempt to use their Obamacare insurance only to realize its harsh realities.

Obamacare remains deeply unpopular nationally. The latest USA Today/Pew Research poll finds that just 37% of Americans now support Obamacare.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Obamacare sinks more Americans into the ranks of the uninsured!


So here is how the math works on Obamacare; I give you $3.00, and you give me $2.00. Now I am short $1.00, but you tell what a good guy you are because you helped me gain $2.00.

So scratch your head because the above analogy makes no sense. That’s okay! Obamacare makes no sense, so like the Obamacare administration and the HHS I can say (and write) whatever I please. That’s how it’s done now!

 Sorry state of affairs! Oh yeah….This your healthcare system!

Ten states where Obamacare wipes out existing health care plans

7:35 PM 09/28/2013

Sarah Hurtubise

President Barack Obama famously promised, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” He later got even more specific.

“If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have,” Obama said.

But as Obamacare’s rollout approaches, we have learned this is not true. Here are the ten states where consumers may like their health care plans, but they won’t be able to keep them.

1) California: 58,000 will lose their plans under Obamacare. The first bomb dropped in California with a mass exodus from the most populated state’s Obamacare exchange. Aetna, the country’s third largest insurer, left first in July and was closely followed by UnitedHealth. Anthem Blue Cross pulled out of California’s Obamacare exchange for small businesses as well.

Fifty-four percent of Californians expect to lose their coverage, according to an August poll.

2) Missouri: Patients of the state’s largest hospital system — which spans 13 hospitals including the St. Louis Children’s Hospital — will not be covered by the largest insurer on Obamacare exchanges, Anthem BlueCross BlueShield. Anthem covers 79,000 patients in Missouri who may seek subsidies on Obamacare exchanges, but won’t be able to see any doctors in the BJC HealthCare system.

3) Connecticut: Aetna, the third largest insurer in the nation, won’t offer insurance on the Obamacare exchange in its own home state, where it was founded in 1850. The reason? “We believe the modification to the rates filed by Aetna will not allow us to collect enough premiums to cover the cost of the plans and meet the service expectations of our customers,” said Aetna spokesman Susan Millerick.

4) Maryland: 13,000 individuals covered by Aetna and its recently-purchased Coventry Health Care won’t be able to keep their insurance plans if they want Obamacare subsidies on the exchanges. Aetna and Coventry canceled plans to offer insurance in the exchange when state officials wouldn’t allow them to charge premiums high enough to cover costs.

5) South Carolina: 28,000 people were insured by Medical Mutual of Ohio, SC’s second-largest insurance company, until it decided to leave the state entirely in July due to Obamacare’s “vast and quite complex” new regulations. Company spokesman Ed Byers said Medical Mutual’s patients would be switched over to United Healthcare plans instead.

6) New York: Aetna pulled out of New York’s exchange in late August in an effort to keep their plans “financially viable,” said Aetna spokeswoman Cynthia Michener.

7) New Jersey: 1.1 million Aetna customers are at risk in New Jersey, where the leading insurer also won’t be a part of the exchange. Just 2,600 patients purchase individual plans with the company, but any looking to take advantage of subsidies on the exchange for unaffordable employer-based insurance won’t be able to do with Aetna.

8) Iowa: Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Iowa’s largest health insurer, decided not to offer plans in the Obamacare exchange. It sells 86 percent of Iowa’s individual health insurance plans.

9) Wisconsin: Two of the three largest insurers in the state won’t offer plans on the exchange. United Healthcare and Humana patients will have to get a new health insurer to buy insurance on Obamacare exchanges.

10) Georgia: Just five insurers are participating in Georgia’s Obamacare exchange. Medical Mutual of Ohio left Georgia and Indiana as well as South Carolina, due to Obamacare regulations. Aetna, along with Coventry, also decided against participating in the George health exchange.

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Thursday, April 3, 2014

Hospitals plot takeover of Health Insurance Companies...Emanuel Brothers plot takeover of Health


The fact that Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (Brother of Rahm Emanuel mayor of Chicago) contributed and is quoted in this story means this article is not worth your time reading! Give it quick read anyway, and see how a select few morons (The Emanuel brothers) are running the U.S. Healthcare System. Our system is not broken….but Obamacare and the sycophants involved are in the process of breaking it!

Hospitals Plot the End of Insurance Companies


The Fiscal Times

March 27, 2014

 The problems with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act may be masking another major change in the way health care is delivered to U.S. consumers, experts believe.

At a conference in Washington on Thursday, health care and business professionals said that there’s an increasing trend in the industry toward cutting insurance companies out of the process entirely, as large, regional hospital systems move into the insurance business.

Dr. Kenneth L. Davis, CEO and  president of Mount Sinai Health System, the largest health care provider in the state of New York, said that starting next year, Mt. Sinai will begin offering its own Medicare Advantage plan. It will look for other opportunities to bring premium payments directly into the hospital system, rather than filtering them through insurance companies.

Davis said he expects organizations similar to his to move in the same direction. “Inevitably the large systems are going to move to take part of the premium dollar,” he said.

For both non-profit systems like Mt. Sinai and for-profit systems, he said, retaining more and more of the health care premiums paid by consumers is essential to providing a full spectrum of care. He said that his system’s St. Luke’s Hospital in New York runs a psychiatric program that loses $14 million per year.

It’s “not sustainable,” he said, so the system needs to cross-subsidize the money-losing services that it nonetheless must continue to provide, with income from more profitable services, such as orthopedic surgery.

The industry, he said, is facing “an entire reformulation of how we pay for services.” The point is not to squeeze more profit out of the system, but to preserve the system’s ability to provide care. “If we don’t put those dollars back into the underpaid discipline, you just end up with underpaid disciplines that can’t be cross-subsidized.”

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, agreed, saying that we’re beginning to see what he called the “Kaiserification” of our health care system.

He was referring to the Kaiser Permanente health care consortium, which combines a health insurance company with subsidiary hospitals and medical practices to create a fully integrated health care delivery system. He noted that large insurer Wellpoint recently completed the acquisition of a health care company in California, apparently with an eye toward replicating the Kaiser model in some form.

Emanuel said we’re witnessing “the end of insurance companies as we know them” and that if they want to survive, they “will have to get into the business of providing care.”

He predicted that in the world of health care, “the wave of the future is integrated delivery systems – integrating insurance with delivery function.”