It Just Gets Better and Better …

By Allan Von Werder

As the Obamacare debacle unfolds it is beginning to look like the most massive consumer fraud ever foisted on the American people.
“If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period,” or so said President Barack Obama and the democratic congress. Neither, as it turns out, is true.
But wait, there’s more. Odds are your nearby hospital may be included in health exchange plans but it’s almost a certainty that if you have a major disease, the best clinics and hospitals specializing in severe acute care will be out of your network. People signing up are realizing that the best cancer care centers and cutting edge clinics are excluded from their policies.
Accounting snafus are spoiling holidays as healthcare.gov exchange payments not due until after Christmas are being drafted from checking accounts early, sometimes twice, leaving many consumers with negative balances as holiday bills come due.
Last week we learned that exchange plan formularies, the list of covered, scheduled drugs that many people depend on have narrowed too. Drugs that are not on the formulary list constitute a total out of pocket expense with no caps on spending and no declining impact on deductibles. For example a well utilized treatment for multiple sclerosis, costing about $1,100 a month is not in most of the formulary schedules.
Progressives are trying to lie their way out of this mess by shifting the blame to “greedy” insurance companies trying to maximize their profits. That’s false and would really be a neat trick, especially considering Obamacare mandates that 80 percent of premium dollars be expended on healthcare payments.
Obamacare legislative text and the regulatory text that accompanied the bill is very specific about what is and is not covered, included, offered and available.
Your federal government is why men have maternity coverage, women have prostate coverage, childless couples in their 50s have pediatric vision coverage and the truly ill have limited choices leading them to medical bankruptcy.
Progressives built Obamacare on a foundation of lies to begin with so the fact that they remain truth averse is no surprise.
For the record, health insurance of any kind before or after Obamacare, has always been structured within parameters established by either federal or state regulators. No plan from any company was or is available that hasn’t received the seal of approval from state or federal governments. Every plan that is or was available was there because that’s what the government, not the insurance company, wanted.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that insurance problems and dysfunction stem from government meddling. Speaking of government meddling, wait till Obamacare bureaucrats figure out that an insurance company’s “administrative” costs included reserves set-aside for years where payments going out actually exceed premiums coming in. Adequate reserves are no longer possible under Obamacare’s 80/20 rule.
Medicaid expansion is turning out to be no picnic either. The fine print in Medicaid applications in state’s that opted for Medicaid expansion contains a clause that if you’re between the age of 55 to 64, your Medicaid proceeds are a loan recoverable after your death by seizing any assets of your estate, including your home.
This is a new twist on an old Medicaid surprise.
In 1993, Progressives enacted legislation during the Clinton administration allowing the seizure of sick, elderly people’s homes after their death to satisfy Medicaid nursing home payments. Louisiana aggressively participates in this grave robbing.
It’s a fairly simple set of rules with odd qualifiers but here’s the Cliff Notes version.
Medicaid asset qualifications exclude the value of one’s home. Contrary to popular belief, Medicaid is not a health care program for the poor – about 67 percent of all Medicaid payments across the nation are made directly to nursing homes for the care of elderly infirm or demented occupants – most of them in the middle class.
At the Medicaid patient’s death, the state where the payments were made can seize and sell the home of the deceased unless there’s a spousal occupant or an immediate family member occupant on disability. The lien on the home remains until the related occupant dies and the home is seized and sold or heirs can pay off the judgment and keep the house.
And now with Medicaid expansion, they’re converting actual health care dollars expended into a loan recoverable on your home or estate at death.
Merry Christmas.

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