The insured are finding their premiums, deductibles, and
copays are going up, and their spousal coverage is disappearing – and
they’re not happy about it.AP:
Americans who already have health insurance
are blaming President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul for their
rising premiums and deductibles, and overall 3 in 4 say the rollout of
coverage for the uninsured has gone poorly.
In the survey, nearly half of those with
job-based or other private coverage say their policies will be changing
next year — mostly for the worse. Nearly 4 in 5 (77 percent) blame the
changes on the Affordable Care Act, even though the trend toward leaner
coverage predates the law’s passage.
Sixty-nine percent say their premiums will be going up, while 59 percent say annual deductibles or copayments are increasing.
Only 21 percent of those with private
coverage said their plan is expanding to cover more types of medical
care, though coverage of preventive care at no charge to the patient has
been required by the law for the past couple of years.
Fourteen percent said coverage for spouses
is being restricted or eliminated, and 11 percent said their plan is
being discontinued.
“Rightly or wrongly, people with private
insurance looking at next year are really worried about what is going to
happen,” said Robert Blendon, a professor at the Harvard School of
Public Health, who tracks public opinion on health care issues. “The
website is not the whole story.”
Uninsured Americans have soured on the Affordable Care Act in the past three months – and that bodes ill for the law’s popularity and financial underpinnings.
Less than a quarter—24%—of uninsured
Americans think the health care law is a good idea, and half think it’s a
bad idea, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released
Wednesday. That’s an 11-point dive in support from three months ago,
when a September poll — before the troubled rollout of the HealthCare.gov marketplace –found that 35% of the uninsured thought it was a good idea, and 32% thought it was a bad idea.
Insurers said they had found many discrepancies and errors and that the government was overstating the improvements in HealthCare.gov.
In some cases, they said, the federal
government reported that the home address for a new policyholder was
outside an insurer’s service area. In other cases, a child was listed as
the main subscriber—the person responsible for paying premiums—and
parents were listed as dependents.
In some cases, children were enrolled in a
policy by the federal government and parents were left off, or vice
versa. In other cases, the government botched up the members of a
family: A child or spouse was listed two or three times in the same
application in late November. Such errors can have financial
implications, increasing the amount of premiums that a family is
required to pay.
While some of the problems were discovered in the last few days, insurers said that they had previously reported many of the errors to the “help desk” at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and that the problems remained unresolved.Federal officials, insurers and health care providers said they were concerned about confusion and possible chaos in the early days of January, when people try to use the new insurance coverage they believe they have.
Hear that? “Chaos.” We’ve got good seats with an unobstructed view of America’s Medical Armageddon.
Meanwhile, remember the worries from a few weeks ago about whether volunteer fire departments are required to offer health insurance to their firefighters? Those fire departments are still waiting for answers from the administration and IRS.(Click link below to read more)
READ MORE Sphere: Related Content
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment