RATE SHOCK: Obamacare causing 539% increase in health insurance costs for Texans

RATE SHOCK: Obamacare causing 539% increase in health insurance costs for Texans

(NaturalNews) It is crucial for the White House that the Healthcare.gov website continue to fail, because once the site actually starts functioning, Americans are going to be hit with such devastating rate shock that the Obama administration may never recover.

Obamacare is named the "Affordable Care Act," after all, and the President promised the rates would be "as low as a phone bill." But I just received a confirmed letter from a friend in Texas showing a 539% rate increase on an existing policy that's been in good standing for years.

As the letter reveals (see below), the cost for this couple's policy under Humana is increasing from $212.10 per month to $1,356.60 per month. This is for a couple in good health whose combined income is less than $70K -- a middle-class family, in other words.

That's a 539% rate increase!

$1,356.60 per month is not "affordable" health care. It's monopolistic price gouging mandated by the Obama administration and enforced essentially at gunpoint. This isn't health care; it's highway robbery.

To clarify: this increased rate policy is not "under" Healthcare.gov, but the 539% rate increase is being caused because of Obamacare's new rules and requirements. If Obamacare hadn't become law, this couple could have continued spending $212 per month. Instead, they're now going to have to spend $1,356 per month or sign up for Obamacare and hope to get a better rate there (if the website even functions long enough to enroll).

Here's a scan of the actual letter:



Millions are losing health care coverage thanks to Obamacare
All across America, people are getting hit with letters like these. Some letters inform you that you'll have to pay double, triple or quadruple the current rates; other letters tell you your coverage is being dropped completely. According to one health policy expert, 16 million Americans will lose their health insurance due to Obamacare.

This mass wipeout of health insurance coverage is already under way. So far 1.5 million Americans have already lost their health insurance thanks to Obamacare. That number is a large multiple of how many people have actually enrolled in Obamacare. (Far more people are losing health insurance than gaining it.)

Also, according to NBC News, Obama knew well in advance that millions of Americans would lose their insurance. This didn't stop him from lying to the public, however, and claiming, "You can keep your current insurance" if you like it.

Everything about Obamacare has been a blatant lie, it seems: the Affordable Care Act is not affordable; you can't necessarily keep your doctor; and you can't even shop for policies because the Healthcare.gov website continues to crash worse than a low-budget carnival ride.

It's so bad that even Saturday Night Live, which practically functions as the comedy mouthpiece for the Democratic party, tore into the fiasco with a blistering comedy skit that paints HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius as a delusional, out-of-touch Obamacare apologist. Watch it at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsT_q_MR7Xw

or

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx7Nwj5M1Kc

In the parody video, Sebelius says:

"If our site keeps freezing, we've also provided helpful links to other websites such as Kayak.com, where you can purchase airline tickets to Canada, where you can buy cheaper prescription drugs."

Obamacare has five critical, show-stopper problems, each of which could independently bring down the whole system
Problem #1) The disastrous Healthcare.gov website which still doesn't work.

Problem #2) RATE SHOCK as Americans realize they are going to have to pay up to 539% more just to keep their current health insurance plans.

Problem #3) The massive, widespread cancellation of existing health insurance policies because of Obamacare. Millions of Americans are losing their health care coverage right now...

Problem #4) Critical failures communicating insurance status to doctors, hospitals and health service providers (this hasn't even been tested, and once it is initiated, it will crash hard).

Problem #5) Massive hacker theft of personal data thanks to disastrous security engineered into Healthcare.gov. Expect to see widespread theft of personal data (social security numbers, bank account information and more) if the Healthcare.gov website ever starts to function. The only reason personal data hasn't yet been stolen from the site is because the servers crash too quickly for hackers to get through.

Bottom line: Obamacare is an economic apocalypse for America
Beyond the lies and campaign promises, the real ramifications of Obamacare are:

• Widespread job losses as employers cut hours and fire workers they can no longer afford to keep on the payroll thanks to Obamacare.

• Millions of Americans losing their existing health insurance coverage.

• Insane rate increases under a monopoly system that forces Americans to pay exorbitant fees to a cabal of insurance companies and drug companies.

• The widespread medical bankruptcy of American workers, families and employers.

This is all by design, and it was all made possible by the people who got suckered into voting for a President who deliberately seeks to utterly destroy America.

source:-
http://www.naturalnews.com/042703_Obamacare_rate_shock_health_insurance_costs.html

16 million Americans to lose health care coverage under Obamacare

(NaturalNews) Once upon a time, not so long ago, in an attempt to sell government takeover of the nation's healthcare system, Barack Obama played the role of serial liar.

While the bill that would later become known as Obamacare wound its way through a Democrat-controlled House and Senate in 2009-2010, Obama jetted around the country telling every crowd and every reporter one whopper after another about what would happen to their health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act.

"Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you," Obama said at one rally in New Jersey in July 2009. "First of all, if you've got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you."

That was then. As it is turning out, however, Obama's "promise" was just a lie - millions of Americans have now had their health insurance policies canceled by insurers, because they don't meet the requirements mandated by Obamacare.

Hundreds of thousands have already received cancellation notices

According to health policy expert Bob Laszewski, about 16 million Americans will lose their current plans because of Obamacare:

The U.S. individual health insurance market currently totals about 19
million people. Because the Obama administration's regulations on
grandfathering existing plans were so stringent as many as 16 million
are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next
renewal. The rules are very complex. For example, if you had an
individual plan in March of 2010 when the law was passed and you only
increased the deductible from $1,000 to $1,500 in the years since, your
plan has lost its grandfather status and it will no longer be available
to you when it would have renewed in 2014.

Millions of people are now receiving letters from their carriers saying
they are losing their current coverage and must re-enroll in order to
avoid a break in coverage and comply with the new health law's benefit
mandates--the vast majority by January 1. Most of these will be seeing
some pretty big rate increases.

Indeed, Kaiser Health News made phone calls around the country to various insurers and found that hundreds of thousands of Americans have already received cancellation notices.

"[T]he cancellation notices, which began arriving in August, have shocked many consumers in light of President Barack Obama's promise that people could keep their plans if they liked them," said Kaiser Health News reporters Anna Gorman and Julie Appleby.

Continuing, they reported that "Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people - about half of its individual business in the state. Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent."

We were lied to early and often

Continuing, Kaiser said, "Blue Shield of California sent roughly 119,000 cancellation notices out in mid-September, about 60 percent of its individual business. About two-thirds of those policyholders will see rate increases in their new policies, said spokesman Steve Shivinsky."

One of the other lies Obama and Democrats told regarding Obamacare is that everyone would have lower rates. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recently backpedaled on that claim, saying she never said "everyone" would get lower rates.

Only - she did. See that lie here: [http://www.weeklystandard.com].

It should be extremely apparent by now to all but the most partisan of Americans that, when it comes to the promises made about Obamacare, we were flat-out lied to, period. And we were lied to often.


source:-
http://www.naturalnews.com/042702_Obamacare_health_care_coverage_16_million_Americans.html

Doctors warn if they participate in Obamacare, they'll go broke

(NaturalNews) One of the things I hear most from supporters of Obamacare (yes, they are still there) is that finally, millions of Americans who previously did not have health insurance will get coverage and have full access to the nation's healthcare system.

When I hear such pie-in-the-sky rhetoric, I often ask this question: "Okay, so who's going to take care of all these millions of new patients?"

I ask that because the law that is Obamacare throws tens of millions of new patients into a system that was already a teetering mess. Think what has happened to the pathetic website (Healthcare.gov), except on a much larger scale.

Healthcare was an overburdened, overly regulated industry already; in most places, it already takes weeks to see your physician as it is. And Obamacare does not add a single healthcare provider to the system; it only imposes more requirements and makes more demands of it.

So I ask - who's going to take care of all these new patients?

Well, the dilemma posed by that question is about to get worse, because all over the country, many doctors have said that they'll quit - retire from medicine - because of Obamacare, some because they refuse to allow a bloated, massive, incompetent and inefficient federal government dictate patient-doctor relationships, and some because they just can't afford the mandates, requirements, rules and regulations the law imposes.

'Obamacare will send more patients than cut reimbursements'

This fear and loathing was summarized in a recent report by The New York Post, which said that area doctors were "feeling queasy about Obamacare," adding that "many won't participate in the new national insurance program because they fear they'll go broke."

How's that for reform?

"ObamaCare is going to send me more patients to see and then cut the payments to provide the care - that's what's going to happen," predicted Donald Moore, a primary-care doctor in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. "I will not accept it."

Moore makes a good point. You know how government "saves money?" It just cuts payment amounts. Now mind you, just because government agencies cut reimbursement amounts doesn't mean the cost of care goes down; that care still costs a certain amount of money.

The same is true for private health insurance companies. To save money - which they will surely have to do in order to compensate for having to now cover chronically ill patients with preexisting conditions - they, too, will likely cut reimbursement rates.

In the end, if a physician cannot be paid what it costs to perform the service, then that doctor goes bankrupt.

And patients have one less provider to see.

More from The Post:

Moore claims that President Obama made a big mistake by requiring uninsured residents to obtain medical coverage from for-profit insurers through the ObamaCare health exchanges instead of through public health programs like Medicaid.

Under tremendous pressure to keep costs down and profits up, Moore said he's concerned that commercial insurers will pay doctors less for patient visits and services than either Medicaid or Medicare.

Moore scoffed, "Who's going to sustain the losses? The insurance companies? It's basically going to be a race to the bottom."

But putting scores more Americans on Medicaid will cost taxpayers hundreds of billions more than anticipated.

It's a lose-lose proposition.

'I'm certainly not hiring anyone new'

"I have not spoken with anyone who has made a decision to participate in the exchanges. We simply don't have any information about which we can make a decision," Dr. Paul Orloff, president of the New York County Medical Society, told the Post. "We have no idea what the reimbursements will be or what the claims-form process will entail."

Indeed, insurance companies - as well as the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency responsible for rolling out Obamacare - haven't yet revealed what reimbursement rates will be, and that's got plenty of doctors and other health care providers spooked.

Such mystery and uncertainty is also affecting healthcare employment.

"I'm apprehensive. I'm certainly not hiring anyone new," James Reilly, an obstetrician who has delivered 4,000 babies and heads the Richmond County Medical Society, told the paper.

"We want to see the impact on the bottom line," said Reilly, who has a 12-member staff and who already pays a huge $200,000 annual medical-malpractice insurance premium.


source:-
http://www.naturalnews.com/042701_Obamacare_doctors_pay_medical_industry.html