Smile! You’ve Got Socialized Healthcare!

[gopher]

Hospitals See Troubles In RED STATES That Snubbed Obamacare's Medicaid Deal

While record numbers of Americans sign up for the larger Medicaid health insurance program for the poor, financial issues are emerging for medical care providers in the two dozen states that didn’t go along with the expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

Reports out in the last week indicate the gap between those with health care coverage is widening between states that agreed to go along with the health law’s Medicaid expansion and those generally led by Republican legislatures and GOP governors that are balking at the expansion.

Hospitals See Troubles In Red States That Snubbed Obamacare's Medicaid Deal - Forbes

The moves against expansion are “beginning to hurt hospitals in states that opted out,” a report last week from Fitch Ratings said. The U.S. Department of Health and Human services has said Medicaid enrollment in the 26 states and the District of Columbia that agreed to go along with and implemented the expansion by the end of May “rose by 17 percent, while states that have not expanded reported only a 3 percent increase,” HHS said in an enrollment update for the Medicaid program.

“We expect providers in states that have chosen not to participate in expanded Medicaid eligibility to face increasing financial challenges in 2014 and beyond,” Fitch said in its July 16 report. “Nonprofit hospitals and healthcare systems in states that have expanded their Medicaid coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have begun to realize the benefit from increased insurance coverage.”





!!more ACA success!!

 

[tay]

Patient shocked over $3,766 cold sore cream




Jim Miller couldn't believe his eyes when he examined his recent hospital bill.

A tiny tube of cream prescribed to him to treat a cold sore cost close to $4,000.

Miller, 59, of East Wakefield, has become somewhat of a local gadfly about burgeoning medical costs. The first time Foster's readers met Miller was last year when he contacted the newspaper about what he considered to be outrageous costs associated with his arthritis treatments. He was shocked when Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover charged him $24,286 for the infusion of arthritis medication Remicade — a procedure that in previous years had only cost $6,000 per infusion.

This time, Miller contacted the paper about the cold sore cream. He said he was amazed when the hospital billed his insurance company $3,766 for the tiny tube.


Regardless of insurance, Miller said high medical costs are something “we are all paying for.” Those with insurance, he said, are affected through higher premium costs.

After realizing how much his insurance company was charged for the small tube Zovirax, Miller met with a representative from the hospital's billing department. He said the process was frustrating, because the staff member told him she had no power to change the amount charged, and Miller wasn't given the opportunity to talk with someone who had that authority.





more




Fosters.com - Dover NH, Rochester NH, Portsmouth NH, Sanford ME

 

[JLM]

Patient shocked over $3,766 cold sore cream




Jim Miller couldn't believe his eyes when he examined his recent hospital bill.

A tiny tube of cream prescribed to him to treat a cold sore cost close to $4,000.

Miller, 59, of East Wakefield, has become somewhat of a local gadfly about burgeoning medical costs. The first time Foster's readers met Miller was last year when he contacted the newspaper about what he considered to be outrageous costs associated with his arthritis treatments. He was shocked when Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover charged him $24,286 for the infusion of arthritis medication Remicade — a procedure that in previous years had only cost $6,000 per infusion.

This time, Miller contacted the paper about the cold sore cream. He said he was amazed when the hospital billed his insurance company $3,766 for the tiny tube.


Regardless of insurance, Miller said high medical costs are something “we are all paying for.” Those with insurance, he said, are affected through higher premium costs.

After realizing how much his insurance company was charged for the small tube Zovirax, Miller met with a representative from the hospital's billing department. He said the process was frustrating, because the staff member told him she had no power to change the amount charged, and Miller wasn't given the opportunity to talk with someone who had that authority.





more




Fosters.com - Dover NH, Rochester NH, Portsmouth NH, Sanford ME

And here I thought a 60 gram tube of Dovobet at $100+ was steep! -

 

[EagleSmack]

Patient shocked over $3,766 cold sore cream




Jim Miller couldn't believe his eyes when he examined his recent hospital bill.

A tiny tube of cream prescribed to him to treat a cold sore cost close to $4,000.

Miller, 59, of East Wakefield, has become somewhat of a local gadfly about burgeoning medical costs. The first time Foster's readers met Miller was last year when he contacted the newspaper about what he considered to be outrageous costs associated with his arthritis treatments. He was shocked when Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover charged him $24,286 for the infusion of arthritis medication Remicade — a procedure that in previous years had only cost $6,000 per infusion.

This time, Miller contacted the paper about the cold sore cream. He said he was amazed when the hospital billed his insurance company $3,766 for the tiny tube.


Regardless of insurance, Miller said high medical costs are something “we are all paying for.” Those with insurance, he said, are affected through higher premium costs.

After realizing how much his insurance company was charged for the small tube Zovirax, Miller met with a representative from the hospital's billing department. He said the process was frustrating, because the staff member told him she had no power to change the amount charged, and Miller wasn't given the opportunity to talk with someone who had that authority.





more




Fosters.com - Dover NH, Rochester NH, Portsmouth NH, Sanford ME

LMAO.

How did they think this Obamacare was going to be paid for!

Hospitals See Troubles In RED STATES That Snubbed Obamacare's Medicaid Deal

And Massachusetts took the Medicaid and now our system is in trouble too. As well as the other blue states that took it.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapot...americas-worst-performing-obamacare-exchange/

 

[gopher]

Eagle,


Massachusetts took the Medicaid and now our system is in trouble too. As well as the other blue states that took it.

Here's what happens in a red state that doesn't do it:



Dana Milbank: North Carolina Republicans put ideology above lives - The Washington Post



Another innocent mother dead - even the local Republican mayor blames her death on failure to expand Medicaid. He says, "“I mean, that’s wrong,” he said. “Conservatives — everybody — should think that’s wrong.”

What will you say to her children and others like this family??

 

[EagleSmack]

Wait a minute... NC doesn't have Obamacare? Obamacare is supposed to fix all of this!

Say it isn't so!

 

[Grievous]

Wait a minute... NC doesn't have Obamacare? Obamacare is supposed to fix all of this!

Say it isn't so!

Depends on what the states do I guess.


Those who say Obama care is perfect are wrong.


Ask all the other modern Western economies.


Heck, my son went to the doctor today.....no bill and I had an MRI on my knee yesterday.....no bill.


Their are flaws but it is the better than before.


Pluses....


Tens of millions of uninsured will get access to affordable quality health insurance through the marketplace.Over half of uninsured Americans can get free or low cost health insurance using their State's Health Insurance MarketplaceMedicaid is expanded up to 15.9 million men, women and children below 138% of the poverty level.CHIP is expanded to cover up to 9 million children.You can't be dropped from coverage when you get sick or make an honest mistake on your application. You also can't be denied coverage or treatment for being sick or charged more for being sick. You can't be charged more for being a woman either.Small businesses can get tax credits for up to 50% of their employees health insurance premium costs.Young Adults can stay on parents plan until 26. 82% of uninsured adults will qualify for free or low cost insurance.Medicare is improved for Seniors including eliminating the donut hole, keeping rates down and expanding free preventive services.All coverage starting after 2014 must include new preventative services and essential health benefits. ObamaCare helps to curb the growth in healthcare spending.


Seems better than what the Republicans were offering when they tried to repeal the bill many times over.


What were they offering?


Status Quo.

 

[gopher]

Wait a minute... NC doesn't have Obamacare? Obamacare is supposed to fix all of this!

Say it isn't so!

Well, it should!

All NC needs to do is to expand Medicaid as should Mississippi:

MS Gov Blames Obama For Jump In Uninsured After Refusing To Expand Medicaid

By DANIEL STRAUSS Published JULY 28, 2014

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) blamed President Barack Obama for a reported increase in uninsured Mississipians. The problem is, Bryant didn't acknowledge that he's been a staunch opponent of expanding Medicaid under Obamacare and refused to encourage enrolling in private coverage through Healthcare.gov.

Bryant directed his blame at Obama in response to a question about a WalletHub study that showed an increase in the percentage of uninsured Mississippians. The study found that the uninsured rate increased by 3.34 percentage points to 21.46 percent of Mississippi's population, according to the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.

"If statistics show that the ill-conceived and so-called Affordable Care Act is resulting in higher rates of uninsured people in Mississippi, I'd say that's yet another example of a broken promise from Barack Obama," Bryant said.

An estimated 137,800 people in Mississippi were left uncovered by health insurance because the state did not expand Medicaid.


MS Gov Blames Obama For Jump In Uninsured After Refusing To Expand Medicaid

 

[Locutus]

Failures in management led to ObamaCare website woes, investigation finds



A failure of management by the Obama administration led to the disastrous rollout of the ObamaCare website and has caused the government to incur tens of millions in additional costs, according to a congressional watchdog report released Wednesday.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded after a months-long investigation into the rocky rollout of Healthcare.gov that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ failure to establish “effective planning or oversight practices” was to blame for website’s myriad problems after it was launched.

Among the issues, investigators found that the administration kept changing the contractors' marching orders for the HealthCare.gov website, creating widespread confusion and adding tens of millions of dollars in costs. Changes were ordered seemingly willy-nilly, including 40 times when government officials did not have the initial authority to incur additional costs.

As a result, the government has spent $840 million on Healthcare.gov and its supporting systems, according to the report.

"(The government incurred) significant cost increases, schedule slips and delayed system functionality," William Woods, a GAO contracting expert, said in testimony prepared for a hearing Thursday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The “cost increases” include those for the glitchy computerized sign-up system for consumers, which ballooned from $56 million to more than $209 million from Sept. 2011 to Feb. 2014. The cost of the electronic backroom for verifying applicants' information jumped from $30 million to almost $85 million. A contract for fixes to the website, also grew from $91 million in January to $175 million as of last month.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, one of the lawmakers who requested the investigation, said in a statement Wednesday that the report “confirms our worst fears.”

“Millions of taxpayer dollars were wasted to build a website that didn't work, all because of bureaucratic incompetence,” he said.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman Aaron Albright told the Associated Press that the administration takes its responsibility for contract oversight seriously and has already started carrying out improvements that go beyond GAO's recommendations. The congressional investigators recommended a cost control plan and other changes to establish clear procedures and improve oversight.

According to the report, the two contractors that initially took the lead building the system were Virginia-based CGI Federal, which built HealthCare.gov, and Maryland-based QSSI, which was responsible for an electronic back office that helps verify personal and financial information.

The consumer end of the system locked up the day it was launched, Oct. 1, and was down most of that initial month. The electronic back office had fewer problems.

A few months before the launch, the CMS agency notified CGI it was so dissatisfied that it would start withholding payments. Then it rescinded that decision.

CMS ultimately paid nearly all of CGI's $12.5 million in fees, withholding only $267,000, the report said. The agency later ended its contract with CGI. Another contractor, Accenture, was brought in to make website fixes.

Confronted with a public relations disaster, the White House sent in a troubleshooter, management consultant Jeff Zients. He removed CMS as project leader, relegating it to a supporting role. CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner later personally apologized to Congress saying that "the website has not worked as well as it should."

Zients' rescue operation got the site working by early December. Eventually, some 8 million people managed to sign up, far exceeding expectations.

Nonetheless, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius stepped down amid complaints by White House officials that the president was blind-sided by the problems.

The original contractors testified to Congress that they did not have nearly enough time to test the system before it went live.

Indeed, Tavenner took the unusual step of signing the operational security certificate for HealthCare.gov herself, after CMS security professionals balked. The site has since passed full security testing.

The GAO's findings added to earlier conclusions in a report by Zients after his team got the website to work.

Beyond a maze of technical problems, Zients said he found "inadequate management oversight and coordination" that "prevented real-time decision making and efficient responses."

The Associated Press contributed to this report


Failures in management led to ObamaCare website woes, investigation finds | Fox News


well done barry.

 

[Grievous]

Yes well done.


More people now have health coverage and somehow it pisses off the right.


The only good thing Obama has done.

 

[Ludlow]

Some money grubbers lost some profit.

That is the real problem.

ya hit the nail on the head

 

[gopher]

Krugman: Liberals really should be celebrating. California shows how Obamacare can and should work..

Stealth Single Payer

So it now appears that most of California’s uninsured — 58 percent of the total, or well over 60 percent of those eligible (because undocumented immigrants aren’t covered) have gained insurance in the first year. Considering the complexity of the scheme, that’s really impressive, and it strongly suggests that next year, once those who missed out have had a chance to learn via word of mouth, California will have gotten much of the way toward universal coverage for legal residents.

But there’s something else the Kaiser report drives home: most of those gaining coverage are doing so not via the exchanges (although those are important too) but via Medicaid. And that’s important as an answer to critics of Obamacare from the left.

There have always been critics complaining that what we really should have is single-payer, and angry that subsidies were being funneled through the insurance companies. And in principle they’re right; the trouble was that cutting the insurers out of the loop would have made the plan politically impossible, both because of the industry’s power and because of the unwillingness of people with good coverage to take a leap into a completely new system. So we got this awkward public-private hybrid, which I supported because it was what we could get and despite its impurity it dramatically improves many people’s lives.

But it turns out that many of the newly insured are in fact being covered under a single-payer system — Medicaid. And as I’ve pointed out before,

Medicaid is actually the piece of the US system that looks most like European health systems, which cost far less than ours while delivering comparable results.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/20...=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1&

 

[EagleSmack]

And up they go!!!

Florida Obamacare Premiums To Jump Up 13.2 Percent | The Weekly Standard

 

[gopher]

And up they go!!!

Florida Obamacare Premiums To Jump Up 13.2 Percent | The Weekly Standard

And what would happen if Florida expanded Medicaid?


GOP Refusal to Expand Medicaid Costs Florida 68,000 Jobs (UPDATED) | New Times Broward-Palm Beach



Geez, you make it so easy to win these debates. :lol:

 

[gopher]

Two red states see biggest drop in uninsured rate because of Medicaid



The two states with the biggest drop in uninsured people among all states are Arkansas and Kentucky, Gallup reports. These two states that voted red in the 2012 presidential election—but which have Democratic governors—expanded Medicaid, and that made a tremendous difference in getting people insured. Add in Colorado, which also had a big drop, and as Greg Sargent points out, you've got three battleground Senate races for 2014.
In Arkansas, the rate of uninsured dropped from 22.5 percent in 2013 to 12.4 percent now — a change of over 10 points.
In Kentucky, it dropped from 20.4 percent to 11.9 percent — a change of 8.5 percent.

In Colorado, it dropped from 17 percent to 11 percent — a change of six percent.

In Arkansas, Rep. Tom Cotton has nothing but gibberish to add to the healthcare debate, refusing to answer clearly what he'd do to protect the people in his state that have so recently gained health insurance if his vision of repeal is realized. And Sen. Mitch McConnell is, if anything, even more incoherent on Kentucky's Obamcare program, Kynect.
Seems like there's a pretty good opening there for Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Kentucky challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes. Their states demonstrate real success in this reform, and their Republican opponents want to take all those gains away.





America wins with ACA!

 

[Locutus]

Fake Obamacare pinup Chad Henderson meets an even bigger liar [photo] | Twitchy

 

[BaalsTears]

Bill Clinton isn't aging well.

 

[JLM]

Bill Clinton isn't aging well.

A few sessions with Monica might just perk him right up! -

 

[BaalsTears]

A few sessions with Monica might just perk him right up! -

I think rough sex with any sentient creature would be fine with Mr. Clinton.

 

[JLM]

I think rough sex with any sentient creature would be fine with Mr. Clinton.

Probably!