Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[Duuvian]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/8/gop-preps-keep-your-plan-bill-after-obama-apology/

http://wendellpotter.com/2013/11/what-congress-didnt-say-obamacare-outlaws-policies-that-are-essentially-worthless/

Spoiler: Why Republicans want to 'allow' insurance customers who receive insurance through their employer to keep their plan (which is chosen by their employer) (click to show/hide)

Cigna, for example, marketed a limited-benefit plan to narrowly targeted prospective customers: mid-sized employers with high employee turnover, such as chain restaurants. The underwriting criteria was specific. The average age of an employer’s workers couldn’t be higher than 40 and no more than 65 percent of the workers could be female. (Insurers have long charged women more than men because in their eyes being born female is a pre-existing condition.) In addition, employers had to have a 70 percent or higher annual employee-turnover rate, meaning that most employees wouldn’t stay on the job long enough to use their benefits. Employees also could not get coverage for care related to any pre-existing condition during their first six months of enrollment.

Limited-benefit plans like that one, blessedly, will not be available next year, and that’s because of the Affordable Care Act. Neither will plans with sky-high deductibles. Another way insurers have shifted costs to patients in order to enhance profits: luring or forcing them into plans with such high deductibles they join the ranks of the underinsured the moment they enroll. When people in these plans get seriously sick or injured, they are on the hook for thousands of dollars in medical bills they’ll have to pay out of their own pockets.

Millions of Americans — including my son, Alex — got letters from their insurers in the years before the ACA was enacted informing them that their plans were being discontinued. Why? To fulfill the industry strategy of moving people out of plans with affordable co-payments and co-insurance obligations and into high-deductible or limited-benefit plans. Such plans are far more profitable.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear a politician railing against Obamacare because people are getting letters from their insurers. The truth these politicians want to obscure is that Obamacare is protecting their constituents from buying coverage that provides little to no shield against financial ruin. And that protection is something the insurance industry wants to get rid of.

Democrats should, in my opinion, vote against the Keep your Plan Bill or whatever it's called. So should everyone else, but I'm less than hopeful that would be considered as an option by most of the Republicans who will vote on the bill as it weakens the ACA.

[Sheb]

Will it have much impact? The policies that will be grandfathered in will eventually be discontinued anyway because people cannot sign up on them.

[mainiac]

Well the insurers would do anything they possibly could to keep people on the plans, including greatly bending the definition of the plan to keep people grandfathered.  If those plans were the only ones exempt from all the regulations that apply to other plans, they'd be massively, massively profitable.  They'd be getting all the upside of Obamacare while still getting to pick and chose people and deny them if they get sick.  Greed follows the money.

[Sheb]

You couldn't pick and choose patients, because no one could sign on those plans anymore. As people switch to other plans, their dwindling enrollment will mean insurer will discontinue them sooner or later.

[Pnx]

I wouldn't be surprised if they grandfathered in plans being sold to companies though, I mean they are people too after all. Which would mean companies could offer less than equitable insurance and still avoid the "tax" on uninsured employees.

[mainiac]

You couldn't pick and choose patients, because no one could sign on those plans anymore. As people switch to other plans, their dwindling enrollment will mean insurer will discontinue them sooner or later.

They've already did pick and chose, when they signed people up the first time.  The people who would stay on a grandfathered plan wouldn't be the unhealthy ones who are paying 3 or 4 times what they can get on the exchange.  They'd be the healthy people who don't yet know what "pre-existing condition" can mean when you are sick.  And they wouldn't move because the insurers would always have an incentive to price those plans below market since those are the only plans they'd be allowed to manage the old way.

When you buy car insurance and don't crash your car, your premiums pay for everyone who does crash their car.  That's the service you are paying for.  When you buy health insurance and stay healthy, the profits on your insurance pay for anyone who does get sick and keeps their coverage.  But a grandfathered plan would be able to keep the sick people out, meaning the profits are straight profit, with much less "medical loss".  The open enrollment plans on the other hand would have a slightly sicker average membership due to those healthy people being removed from the pool, driving up premiums for the general population.

The way it works is simple wealth distribution.  The members of the grandfathered plan get a small piece of the pie to get them to play ball.  The companies keep whatever they can convince those people not to.  And everyone else is legally unable to keep from footing the bill in terms of higher premiums.  Yes eventually those grandfathered plans disappear due to people moving on or getting dropped.  But the companies have an extremely strong incentive to keep them going as long as possible.

[FearfulJesuit]

Christie continues to shoot himself in the primary foot by not being a madman. Alas, he's probably the closest thing to an honest candidate the GOP is likely to see for a while.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

He'd be much better served by actually moving to a centrist position, though. I think he could win if he does it early enough, though obviously I hope he does not.

Although, Ted Cruz may win the primaries and make it all moot, but still.

[FearfulJesuit]

He'd be much better served by actually moving to a centrist position, though. I think he could win if he does it early enough, though obviously I hope he does not.

Although, Ted Cruz may win the primaries and make it all moot, but still.

That's the thing. If he clears the primary hurdle, he'll very likely win. But I'm not sure he can.

I don't think Cruz could win the primary. Right now I'd put my money on Rubio, although we haven't heard much from him recently.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I doubt Cruz's odds as well, but he's still a contender. It's possible, if unlikely, that he could win the primaries.

Of course, such an event would be followed by the Democrats inheriting the Union for several years.

[FearfulJesuit]

I doubt Cruz's odds as well, but he's still a contender. It's possible, if unlikely, that he could win the primaries.

Of course, such an event would be followed by the Democrats inheriting the Union for several years.

I'm not so sure...remember the disaster that was George McGovern? Carter (Christie being our probable analogue) won the White House four years later. Of course, Watergate was an exceptional circumstance...

[misko27]

I doubt Cruz's odds as well, but he's still a contender. It's possible, if unlikely, that he could win the primaries.

Of course, such an event would be followed by the Democrats inheriting the Union for several years.

I would pay through the nose to see a Ted Cruz candidacy. I would give my left pinkie for that. It is just too wonderful to imagine. The Democrats could simply put Ted Cruz's speech quotes on billboards and win.

I think the Moon might be as intimidating as Obamacare.
..
I will credit my father, he invented … green eggs and ham. He did it two ways. The easy way was he would put green food coloring in. ‘Green eggs and ham’ was my favorite book as a little boy. You can actually do it – the food coloring is a little bit cheating. But if you take spinach and mix it into the eggs, the eggs turn green.
..
I like their little burgers. … I’m a big fan of eating White Castle burgers.

The Democrats would need to field an admitted communist to meet the extreme in Ted Cruz, and even the communist would have the better odds because he simply wouldn't be as crazy.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'd like to see a polling center do that one. "If given the choice between the two, which do you prefer for the office of President of the United States: an unnamed radical communist, or Ted Cruz?"

[FearfulJesuit]

Huh. I wasn't aware I could reset the poll and make it votable again. We'll have to have more polls.

[Bauglir]

What kind of communist carries a card? Real comrades tattoo their foreheads.