uh... my 'previous insurance' was certainly not substandard :2 cents:

"The ObamaCare Employer Mandate / Employer Penalty, originally set to begin in 2014, was delayed until 2015 / 2016. ObamaCareâ??s â??employer mandateâ?� is a requirement that all businesses with 50 or more full-time equivalent employees (FTE) provide health insurance to at least 95% of their full-time employees and dependents up to age 26, or pay a fee by 2016."

If he were paying for his OWN insurance plan...he would be singing a much different tune.

My insurance is the same I've had since 2002.

Only difference in it is that in 2002 it was $459 for me, my wife, and 2 kids.

It had risen to over $500 by 2009 for me, my wife and 2 kids. (about a 50 buck increase over 7 years)

Since 2009...it has now risen to over $1,200 a month for me, my wife and just one of our kids. (more than doubled since the beginning of ObamaCare)

Same EXACT insurance with the same company. (Blue Cross/Blue Shield)

The ONLY difference in my policy is that I (a man) am now insured for pregnancy (in case I become the first man ever to get pregnant).

Why do you think wages are stagnant in this country -- health insurance took the employee's wage raise.

So you have the conundrum, if there was a taxpayer paid universal healthcare would employers share the wealth and raise wages, or would the workers get stiffed with a new tax bill and the shareholders get the windfall of no competitive employer paid healthcare benefits?

3rd party payer healthcare is a mess.

I agree...it's fucked up big time.

In my humble opinion...what is needed is for the govt. to STOP allowing the healthcare industry (not insurance companies, but the actual big corporations that own hospitals and also Big Pharma) to price gouge the American people.

Bernie Sanders is right on the money when he talks about how we pay many times more for the same exact prescription medication as other countries do.

And hospitals overcharging? Fuck yeah they do. $50 for Dixie cup full of water? $10 for a Tylenol?

Obamapologists tried to say that those high prices were caused by NOT having something like ObamaCare and was because of all the people who skipped out on their emergency room bill.
Well...the costs have went UP dramatically instead of coming down.

It's a total ripoff that is facilitated by the lobbyists money from the big hospital corporations and Big Pharma.

In my humble opinion we need "no payer" solution. Prices should be where we don't need health insurance for everything.

What we need is for prices to be what they should be. So that people can and will pay out of pocket to go to the doctor (like I did my whole life, my parents did their whole life, my grandparents...and all the way back to the beginning of doctors).

We should all be paying less than $50 a month for CATASTROPHIC insurance (in case you get in a wreck or have a heart attack, etc.), instead of using insurance for every little doctor visit and visit to the pharmacy.

THAT is what should be happening.

Just turning on the Federal Govt. money spigot (when we are already 20 Trillion in debt) isn't going to solve anything.

The problem that needs to be solved is corruption and price gouging.

1. Providing insurance does not mean they pay the whole bill. Most employer paid insurance plans pay about 80% of the premium and the employee pays the other 20% and then their deductibles and copays. Obamacare does not change that.

2. Whether it is mandated or not it is still part of the overall pay/benefits package. So whether it officially comes out of the employer's pocket or the employee's pocket, the employee is still paying for it whether they realize it or not. I have been an employee before for many years and always negotiated the entire package, Pay/insurance/vacation/401K/Profit sharing, going in the door. Sometimes I did good, sometimes not so much but insurance was always part of the deal.

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I will bow to your knowledge of that. As I have never been an employee of anyone and always ran my own business.

I still say that people who have to actually write a check to the insurance company each month as well as write a check to the Feds for taxes have a much better feel for what is going on than employees who never really see it or feel the pain of it.

The system is simply broken, it was broken before Obamacare and it's still broken after Obamacare. The only ones it works for is those who are poor and those companies that get billions of taxpayer dollars.

Yes, and the same guy argues aginst a single payer system as all Republicans do.. because that's what the party propaganda tells them..

Uncle Sam barred from bargaining Medicare drug prices

"Since Congress approved the program, proposed by Bush, Democrats have groused that it was a huge giveaway for the pharmaceutical industry because it did not allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Obama vowed to change the program to allow Medicare negotiate lower prices. But he backed away from the pledge during negotiations over his health care reform bill, and no provision on negotiating drug prices was included in the bill that became law in 2010."

Uncle Sam barred from bargaining Medicare drug prices, Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin says, blaming rival Tommy Thompson | PolitiFact Wisconsin

Fiddy Insurance scams.


I have been both an employee and have run my own business, sometimes both at the same time.

Currently I work for myself and have worked only for me for the past 3 years.

Last time I was an employee I was making 100k/year. We got paid every 2 weeks so that was 26 pay periods. So each pay period I grossed $3846.00. From that, my take home was $2650.00 (before my 401K contribution) every 2 weeks. So, every 2 weeks I saw 1196.00 removed from my pay check to cover Fed withholding, Social Security, Medicaid and Insurance. That was 31% of my pay going to my 20% of insurance (covering just me) and the various taxes. In addition to that we carried a private insurance policy for my wife and daughter that cost me about $500/month. I did private because it was cheaper than it would have been going through my employer. The company was only 25 employees and there had been someone with cancer covered so the premiums we were paying were sky high.

As self employed, with self employment taxes and income taxes we pay about 30% each month. Then on top of that I am carrying a bronze plan for insurance that costs us about $400/month and is essentially worthless because of the high deductible. I also still have my daughter on a separate private plan that costs another $185.00/month,

Not much difference except that I write the check instead of someone else. believe me I knew exactly how much tax and insurance was costing me through out, didn't matter whether I was employee or employer, it is still coming out of my pocket and I am well aware of it.

And no, I do not get a Fed tax refund, I always owe.

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That would be dumb ass not dump ass
And i'm not the one crying on a board about my insurance premiums

I probably should have mentioned somewhere in there that my wife does also contribute to the income as she has been running her own business since we got married 15 years ago.

Can't forget the wife. She sometimes reads this stuff and would come back at me with "So, what am I, chopped liver?"

;p

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The amount of people getting insurance that didn't have it before has not kept up with the growth in population in the US

That's a FAIL

Yes I agree

In all honesty it is a very difficult and complicated issue I do believe however that this issue is solvable not by me that's for sure but I do believe there is enough intellect on the planet to solve this issue

Well said Robbie one area employees are see this though is in the businesses that are closing and failing everyday

Could someone please tell me the exact amount he pays a month for Obamacare after all the deductions? For a single person. Also it would be nice if you mention the plan and the state.

I'm not crying homie I'm just glad I make enough fucking money to pay for your insurance lol!!!

Here is some good info: Health Insurance Premiums and Premium Costs by State

No, I mean the real money you pay every month from you pocket after deductions. Not some abstract ones.

Numbers have already been mentioned in this thread a few times.

Read.

Numbers after deductions? Sorry but I don't understand this:

So how many a month (in raw cash)?

$679.00 a month there.

The deductible comes into play when you use some services but not always all (but sometimes all. depends on the policy).

So, the $1000.00 deductible means that the insurance does not pay out anything until the total expenses are over $1000. Then the insurance starts paying out at some % rate depending on the services rendered.

Often an office copay comes into play and that is often not subject to the deductible. So, say a person has an office copay of $25.00 that means when they go to their main doctor they pay $25.00 for the visit and nothing else (other than the monthly premium).

Copays though are also sometimes subject to the deductible so for some people they would start paying $25.00 per office visit after they satisfied the $1000 deductible.

The $1500 is a maximum out of pocket. meaning that once the user has paid in $1500 in expenses the insurance covers 100% of all covered expenses.

It all depends on the actual policy and it can get very complicated very rapidly.

It was already complicated before Obamacare came into play. But Obamacare as it was put into play is basically a boondoggle for the insurance companies. It has helped a lot of people get insurance that could not before but it forces everyone to purchase a policy whether they want to or not. The insurance companies love that part.


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Wow, that's really worse than I thought. Actually I thought the government will return the part of your insurance payments which is over the deductible amount. Now I see I was wrong.

Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation.

To paraphrase what I was saying: Obamacare is a symptom, not a cause, of the fucked up US healthcare system. Fixing or repealing Obamacare won't fix the underlying problem.

I read an article a few months back that talked about why the premiums for insurance have gone up so much under Obamacare. The problem is that they were shocked by how many of the new people with insurance used their insurance thus costing them more money and causing them to raise premiums.

How could they not see that coming? The people who didn't have insurance before didn't have it for a reason. Sure, there were a small number of people who just didn't want to pay for insurance, but most of them were people either too poor to get it or with pre-existing conditions so now that they have it they are damn sure going to use it.

None of this will change. Obamacare does nothing to lower the actual costs of healthcare so premiums will continue to rise. I have said before and still believe this is just the first step in us ending up with some sort of single payer system.

Did you even read what I wrote?

For the past eight years I've had Kaiser and paid for it myself.

Insurance goes up every year. Like clockwork. My insurance didn't go up much of the past eight years.

I've always thought it was insurance itself that was causing costs to skyrocket.

I was a sick kid growing up, I was always at the doctor or in the hospital, my parents never had any insurance, at that time not many people did.

Cost were kept down because people just didn't have a lot of money to spend on healthcare. My care was relatively expensive but not even close to being catastrophic like it would be today.

As more and more people got insurance the cost of medical care started to grow... and grow.
I think there are a few reasons for that.

#1 If you have insurance you are a lot more likely to want to use it, this was something that really surprised the administration. More people have insurance under obamacare (a whopping 2.7% more) :1orglaugh but also they were USING it. People are running to the doctor for any little scratch or sniffle.
"Oh my god I broke a nail! Good thing my insurance covers emergency room visits!"


#2 People became divorced from the actual costs of their own healthcare. They're not paying for it so they don't care.

Doctor: " Well there is this treatment that has a 0.0001% chance of saving your live, the bad news is it costs $100.000, the good news is your insurance covers it"
Patient: "Fuckin' A doc let's go for it! It's not like it's my money"


#3 Healthcare providers and medical equipment and supply manufacturers saw an opportunity to increase profits because of #1 and #2 above.
I couldn't believe it when I saw on some news show a few years ago that a single bag of saline was around $400.

$400 for fucking salt water

Insurance has driven costs way past the level of service received, all the government regulation and interference in the market has only made it worse.
"Don't worry about what it's going to cost, the government's paying for it"

I believe if all insurance was cancelled tomorrow except a single, relatively low-cost high-deductible catastrophic coverage you would see healthcare costs plummet, People would be paying for all the little stuff out of their pockets and they may be a bit more interested in reducing the unnecessary treatments.
If they had to pay the $400 for the bag of fucking salt water themselves they may shop around a bit for a better deal, promoting competition in the marketplace rather than "Here is your only option sign here" system we enjoy today.

Medical corporations, equipment manufacturers and suppliers would go out of business.
But other more hungry and competitive ones would replace them.

Adapt or die.

This narrative that gets pushed by one of the parties (you guess) that if something happens to your health it's not your fault and it shouldn't effect you at all financially is going to end up bankrupting us all, I have medical issues and I expect to be the one to pay for them.

I'm a type II diabetic with high blood pressure and high cholesterol, all pretty well controlled now thank you.
I don't currently have insurance I looked at the numbers and said no thanks.

I pay for all my own doctor visits
I pay for all my lab work
I pay for all my other tests
I pay for all my medications

I spend less than $1000 per year on my care , obamacare took the low-cost catastrophic option away from me plus wants me to pay $8000 per year (in case Robbie gets pregnant) on top of that they also tax me for not joining up.

Retirement away from the US is looking more and more attractive.

What an amazing plan

/sarc

For once we agree on something.

THIS! Right on the money