Who is Helped and Who is Hurt by Obama Care: The Blood in the Water

Among the health insurance contract aspects, a few things were fixed by Obama Care (at least fifty years late; what took the Democrats so damn long?) but many more were not fixed. For example, insurance companies can still deny payment for unusual and novel treatments even if doctor requested and doctor approved. If the new or unusual treatment is not in the Government mandated health insurance package, you don’t get coverage for it whether it is approved by doctors and scientists or not. The new health insurance policy management system will be quite inflexible, slow moving, bureaucratic, and financially conservative due in part to the overall economic context.

Also, insurance companies can still deny payments and rescind policies if they declare fraud. Unlike before when whatever the insurance company said was automatically worshipped as gospel and dutifully obeyed by every governmental and judicial official, the companies may now have to "prove" fraud at a hearing IF the consumer actively contests the fraud. But with huge staffs of extremely high paid attorneys, the insurance companies will be able to prevail in most hearings when they decide to kick someone off the policy they don’t want to pay on by declaring fraud.

The concept of fraud, which is still alive and well with Obama Care, is vague and wide ranging enough to allow for a lot of successful attacks on consumers by the insurance companies. (And no, there is nothing you can do to eliminate the chance that your insurance company will falsely declare something you filed was fraudulent. Along with the huge staffs of highly paid shark type attorneys, they have plenty of legal tricks up their sleeve with which they can successfully accuse anyone of fraud.)

As I have said before, all these new laws do is rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. The system will eventually go to the bottom of the briny blue, but in the meantime, some people will enjoy a better position on the deck than they have now. In particular, here are some who will be helped:

--Higher income people who know how to "do health insurance" and have a big enough and dependable enough income to back up those skills and make all the right payments at all the right times will be helped by Obama Care.

--Those who have been hammered by the “donut hole” (that big gap in Medicare Part D prescription coverage) will be better off in about ten years when it is finally gone (assuming no repeal).

--Those who simply can not get health insurance under the status quo but have enough resources to pay for premiums, deductibles, co pays, uncovered items, prescription drugs, dental care, and vision care in full and on time year after year after year. These would be fairly rich people by definition and it is no surprise that the right of center Democrats are strongly behind them.

Here are some of the groups of people who are harmed:

--Those who are ignorant about the many complexities and consumer traps of private, for profit health insurance. Such people will still be subject to disasters caused by such things as lapsed coverage due to missing premium payments, for example, interrupted health care, incomplete health care, and inadequate health care.

--Lower income people in general, especially those between 133% and 250% of the federal poverty line. Those with less than 133% will get Medicaid, but actually getting quality treatment with Medicaid (especially in a quasi depression when states are completely broke) will be at best a very dicey proposition.

--Some people who would have declared one or more bankruptcies pre Obama Care will now never have to declare bankruptcy. But lower income people (mostly among those with incomes less than 500% of poverty) have been often avoiding medical bankruptcy by not attempting the impossible (for them) task of feeding the private health system beast year after year, but now they will be induced to feed that ever growing beast, and numerous bankruptcies among them will inevitably follow. In other words, medical bankruptcy is moving down the income scale. Going forward, the people filing medical bankruptcy will be lower income and will perhaps have a smaller gap between assets and liabilities than the prior group of bankrupts. But this is obviously a key way in which Obama Care does nothing but rearrange those Titanic deck chairs.

--Those who become unemployed due to a bankruptcy filing. Many professions and employers become very negatively disposed to employees who have filed bankruptcy in the US and they start looking for pretenses to get rid of such employees.

--There will be a good number of people who get so totally carried away by "their responsibilities" under Obama Care that they will end up homeless when they would never have been homeless under the status quo. These people will ironically end up in much worse health than they would have been with no Obama Care since homelessness is usually devastating to a person's health.

--Medicare Advantage enrollees, since that program has been heavily cut. My understanding is that many will simply drop out of that program in the wake of the big cuts to it.

--Existing Medicaid beneficiaries, since the demand for service among the big influx of new Medicaid people will be much in excess of new resources for the program. The number of people on Medicaid is supposed to increase by roughly 50%.

--Small businesses, especially those with roughly 50-250 employees, which operate with their heads just above the waterline financially speaking.

--Employees of those small businesses who are fired so that those small businesses can offset the new health insurance mandate they must take on, or so that the small business can reduce it's workforce below 50 employees and thus escape the new regulations that target small businesses.

--People who harbor a lot of resentment about being denied health care freedom. Different people come at this from different perspectives but end up in the same place: very much in opposition to the Obama Care “mandate”. Generally speaking, everyone but especially right of center people very much resent being told by the government to buy a particular product. (This is of course unprecedented not only in the US but world wide.) Rather then being told what they must do, people want the freedom to buy it, to buy something different, or to buy nothing.

Progressive people are more often most resentful of being indirectly blamed for the mess when a health system is a governmental responsibility that the government should discharge with ordinary public and progressive financing methodologies, and/or they are very resentful of having to help pay the massive salaries, massive perks, and massive profits of private health insurance companies.

--In my wide angle view, probably the most outrageous thing of all about Obama Care is that it is a slap in the face of basically the entire rest of the planet on the issue, which has decided that health care is ultimately a societal and governmental responsibility rather than an individual responsibility.

Coming next is a complete exposé focusing on this last aspect.

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