The Obamacare Fiasco That Never Was

~ Laura

There is still lots of handwringing about the faulty rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Well, at least among bloggers and pundits. The weird thing is that I’m getting almost zero buzz about ACA from real life people. There was chatter in the first week or two and now… nothing.

Why is that? About 3/4rds of my friends get their insurance from the jobs, but that still leaves 1/4 who will probably use the government plan. And the remaining 3/4rd will also be affected in some way, though nobody exactly knows how yet. Still, no chatter at all. I think people have accepted the ACA — warts and all.

I think that the ACA isn’t a huge disaster and that pundits need to relax a bit.

Published by Laura

7 thoughts on “The Obamacare Fiasco That Never Was”

  1. Our family will experience secondary effects of Obamacare because we’re all covered by my spouse’s Cadillac plan. Our co-pays and premiums are going up substantially now so that the university can avoid having to pay the excise tax in a few years. I’m fine with it. It’s still a good plan just not the amazing plan it once was.

    About five years ago they tried to raise the co-pay from $10 to $15 and there was a huge uproar. People were incredibly pissed and the university held several rounds of public meetings so that people could air their grievances about the changes. The compromise ended up being a copay raise to $12. Now, copays are going up way more than that, to $30, and there is very little push back so it seems like most people have accepted that this is the way it’s going to be.

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    1. Only Nixon could go to China, and only Obama could raise health care costs considerably for a bunch of university employees. This is actually a fairly well-established political pattern.

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    2. Are you sure that is actually Obamacare and not just the general increase in health care costs and deciding this is a good time to pass more of them on to the employees? The excise tax on Cadillac plan is for those costing over $10,000 a person or $27,000 for a family of four. At this university, even the unlimited plan is below half that.

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  3. So far, it’s only affecting a very small percentage of policies in a big way. Next year is when pretty much everybody starts falling under it. Coincidentally, the administration wants to push next year’s start of enrollment all the way until Nov. 15. Given the rocky start we’ve seen this year, it’s hard to see why having only 6 weeks to do enrollment is a good idea. Based on the experience of the past two months, you would think that if anything, it would be a good idea to start enrollment substantially earlier next year.

    Megan McArdle says:

    “…the government is delaying the second-year start of enrollment for health plans until Nov. 15, 2014. Various rationales have been suggested for this, but to me the most plausible explanation is that the administration does not want consumers finding out their health-care costs until after the midterm elections. Practically speaking, this is a terrible idea: It leaves millions of consumers only a month to get on the website and select a new plan to cover them by Jan. 1, 2015 (to allow for administrative processing, you generally need to buy next month’s insurance by the 15th of the current month).”

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-22/is-the-latest-obamacare-delay-about-elections-.html

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  4. We’ve enrolled thru the ACA; I freelance and my husband quit his teaching job a few months back, so we lost our Cadillac coverage at the end of October. We’re on COBRA until Jan. 1 and ye gods, what a difference the ACA coverage will make: It’s literally half the price of the COBRA coverage. We’ll have a $4k family deductible but with access to lots of good providers. From what I’ve heard, here in Maine the ACA coverage is slightly less expensive than what was previously available in the individual health insurance market.

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  5. There are a number of mines in the water as the stately ship Obamacare moves away from the dock. The Gray Lady has just noticed what a god-awful idea it is to have slightly above middle-middle class people paying subsidy for lower- and lower-middle class people: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/business/new-health-law-frustrates-many-in-middle-class.html?_r=0. The website rollout was a bug, but this is a feature – because the authors didn’t think people would stand for the tax increases necessary to get the necessary subsidies for lower-middle income people, they hid the costs in within-health-plan subsidies. If the authors had had a little more sense of history, and remembered what happened to Rostenkowski, they might not have done this.

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