Comments on: There are Reasons to Worry About Insurance Exchanges – Just Not Ezra’s

By: lmcdonal

lmcdonal — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:07:10 +0000

These bills are developing – from bad to just plain silly. I can imagine some poor soul who has never had health insurance struggling to understand the differences between policies at this “exchange”. And the insurance companies will – as they do now – make it purposely as confusing as possible, in order to hook people who do not have a law degree.

No single payer discussed is an embarrassment to our government, from Obama on, well, on up.

By: supag32

supag32 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:18:26 +0000

I emailed Ezra about this a couple of weeks ago, calling his attention to the indexing of subsidies to premiums but received no response from him. He must know about this, I’m not sure why he doesn’t write about it more. It’s a huge problem for real reform.

By: LKN2

LKN2 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:30:34 +0000

All I got for Christmas was… a mandate to purchase a worthless product from a g** d*** insurance predator. Thanks, Dems – hope you have a health insurance job lined up because you’re about to be voted out of office.

By: tbsa

tbsa — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:20:09 +0000

I was informed today that I will receive a 6% raise and then told that my insurance is going up by 36%. Gotta fucking love working your ass off to watch your pay shrink every year. And I guess I am supposed to be lucky I even have an insurance company to fuck me over year after year. Because after all people like joe motherfucking liarman would rather I have nothing. FUCK!

By: TalkingStick

TalkingStick — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:10:49 +0000

You are right on. bmull!. Also tax credits are useless for breadwinners working at most small business salaries (at least here in the south).

Ultimately the only real change I see in any version is that it will now be a criminal offense to be too poor to purchase insurance at annually escalating double digit rates.

We need to stop this competition and choice garbage and change to collaboration to care for each other.

By: sixtysomething

sixtysomething — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:10:29 +0000

Deep sigh….. Can’t we just get single-payer. I can guarantee it will make my blood pressure go down.

By: bmull

bmull — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:49:42 +0000

This just shows there are major things about these bills that even smart people like Ezra don’t understand.

The bills do their best to obscure that premiums are not capped at a certain percent of income but as you said are based on a percent of the second lowest cost premium. If that premium goes up 8% a year, then your share goes up at 8% a year too–even if your salary is not going up at all. You could say this is no different than the situation we have now–but right now we aren’t mandated to buy insurance.

By: Synoia

Synoia — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:28:01 +0000

What we have left after the political manouvering is a piss poor “health insurance” reform.

Personally, I hope Lieberman kills these current proposals. The current proposals appear to be designed to impoverish us before killing us off.

The republican plam: Don’t get sick, if you do, die quickly.
The democratic plan: Become poor, don’t get sick, if you do die quickly.

Which makes the republican plan the less worse.

By: Raven

Raven — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:55:45 +0000

It’s hard even for firepups to stay pissed off and rage ALL the time!

By: demi

demi — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:49:38 +0000

Okay, whew! It’s just that the last posts got so few comments, and I was vacuming and then the dang vacumn cleaner broke and then I came here and, I just got afeared for a minute.
Thanks, Twain. We’re going to be okay.
What are you buffering?