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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (893540)	10/14/2015 12:14:31 AM
From: FJB	Respond to of 1574199

Michelle Malkin: Obama Lied, My Health Plan Died … Twice! > Earlier: Obama Lied, My Health Plan Died, September 25, 2013 *It’s deja screwed* all over again. In the fall of 2013, our family received notice from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Colorado that we could no longer keep our private health insurance plan because of “changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA).” We liked our high-deductible preferred provider organization plan that allowed us to choose from a wide range of doctors. But Obamacare wouldn’t let us keep it. Reluctantly, and after great bureaucratic difficulty, my hubby and I enrolled in an individual market plan with Rocky Mountain Health, which offered a much narrower provider network than the Anthem PPO plan we had before the feds snuffed it out. Thanks to “reform,” our two kids’ dental care was no longer covered, and we had our post-Obamacare insurance turned down at an urgent care clinic — something that had never happened before. This summer came another bombshell. In August, we were informed of the “discontinuation of your Rocky Mountain Individual and Family plan effective December 31, 2015.” Over the past month, we have received several bold-faced notices alerting us that “IMPORTANT ACTION IS REQUIRED: YOU MUST CHOOSE A NEW INDIVIDUAL & FAMILY PLAN TO MAINTAIN YOUR HEALTH COVERAGE IN 2016.” The clock is ticking: open enrollment begins Nov. 1. The coerced choices are pretty damned crummy. Individual market PPOs have evaporated. We are being shoved once again toward the Obamacare government health insurance exchange vortex known as Connect for Health Colorado (which should really be called “DISconnect from Health Colorado). Or into a narrow regional HMO. So much for “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what,” eh, Mr. President? Obama lied and our health plan has now died — twice.** “Progressives” sneered at millions of us who received the first round of individual market health plan death notices. Mother Jones called it the “phony canceled health insurance scandal” when I first reported my 2013 health plan homicide by Obamacare. But it’s real, it sucks, and we know we are not alone among the estimated 22 million other Americans who purchase health insurance directly on the ever-shrinking individual market. In Illinois, Blue Cross announced it was eliminating its most popular individual plan with the largest network of doctors and hospitals of any of its offerings, Blue PPO. More than 170,000 enrollees will have to scrounge up an alternative. Customers are panicking, and insurance broker Mike Troha told the Chicago Tribune last week: “I wouldn’t be shocked if all the PPOs are gone in a few years in the individual markets.” Last month, the Maryland Insurance Administration approved premium rate increases for small group and individual health insurance plans effective next year, with some rates spiking by double digits thanks to “significant changes in regulation and market dynamics over the past two years.” Remember: One of the reasons for those rate hikes is that Obamacare’s mandated benefits provisions force insurers to carry coverage for items that individual market consumers had deliberately chosen to forgo. Americans who had willingly and willfully opted for affordable catastrophic coverage-style plans now have fewer and fewer choices. In Texas, some 300,000 individual health insurance subscribers are watching their plans disappear and their access to specialists. In New Mexico, the state Obamacare exchange ended all of its PPO offerings in favor of HMOs. And in Arizona, Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna and Meritus are all dropping PPO plans offered to tens of thousands of individuals and families. As the Arizona Republic’s editorial board noted this weekend, “Rosy predictions of cost savings bandied by advocates five years ago are now running into the harsh economic reality of unanticipated consequences.” Hospitals are consolidating. Doctors are quitting their private practices or hitching themselves to the big hospital wagons. “And bigger means fewer options. Only a handful of critics predicted in 2010 that one consequence of Obamacare would be the return of HMOs. But, in retrospect, no one should be surprised.” In other words: The destruction of the private health insurance market is going exactly according to plan and as many of us warned. Thanks, Obamacare.

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (893540)	10/14/2015 8:20:12 AM
From: Alighieri	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1574199

I PREDICTED this to happen the first day I checked out their web site in Nov 2013 and saw their rates . So now I (and 215,000 others) have no insurance for 2016 and I will guess I'll be looking at at least a 50% increase in premiums and a much larger deductible. So the gravy train is done for you...now you will be paying what you should have been paying all along...until Medicare Serenity that is...coming soon I gather...then you can start pissing on that too...it's what you do so skillfully isn't it? piss into your own coffee? Al

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (893540)	10/14/2015 9:09:39 AM
From: jlallen	Respond to of 1574199

Anyone but the true believers saw all these failures coming.....

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (893540)	10/14/2015 1:12:26 PM
From: FJB	Respond to of 1574199

Migrants Sue German Refugee Center For Not Coughing Up Free Cash Fast Enough (Video) Oct 14th, 2015 9:43 am by Jim Hoft Twenty migrants sued the Berlin State Office for not coughing up free cash fast enough. Dozens of migrants occupied a ...

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (893540)	10/16/2015 3:59:28 PM
From: FJB	1 Recommendation Recommended By locogringo Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574199

Obamacare's Latest Casualty: Largest Health Insurer On Colorado Exchange Abruptly Collapses Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/16/2015 15:26 -0400 This wasn't supposed to happen. With the mainstream media, at least the majority that is left of center, flooded with story after story touting Obamacare's success, the news coming this morning from Denver that Colorado's largest nonprofit health insurer and participant in that state's insurance exchange Colorado HealthOP is abruptly shutting down, forcing 80,000 Coloradans to find a new insurer for 2016, was a slap in the face for the Obama administration's crowning achievement. According to AP, the health insurer announced Friday that the state Division of Insurance has de-certified it as an eligible insurance company. That's because the cooperative relied on federal support, and federal authorities announced last month they wouldn't be able to pay most of what they owed in a program designed to help health insurance co-ops get established. Wait, wasn't the whole point behind Obamacare to subsidize health insurance for everyone, and especially the poor? Or was the whole point of the "Affordable" Care Act merely to herd as many Americans into the clutches of the few for-profits, after the non-profit cooperatives finally read the fine print and realized they have no chance of being profitable under the new regime? The plot thickens: in a statement announcing its closure Friday, Colorado HealthOP said it was "well on its way" to repaying some $72.3 million it has borrowed from the federal fund. The co-op reported a net loss of $23 million last year. In other words, the company burned through some $23 million in taxpayer funds and it didn't even get a lousy shirt to show for it. Ironically, on the company's website, we read the following about the Co-Op's business model: if our revenues exceed our costs, the surplus will be reinvested to directly benefit members—through lower premiums, expanded benefits, or quality improvements. Well, no risk of that ever happening now. What the insurer failed to point out is that if costs exceed its revenues, it will be promptly liquidated and massive corporations will be the sole beneficiaries. Naturally, the CEO was furious: Colorado HealthOP CEO Julia Hutchins called the de-certification "irresponsible and premature." She is not alone - as it turns out HealthOP was just the fifth casualty of a program which with every passing months is being exposed as nothing but a tax-backed piggy bank for the mega insurance corporations. "The Colorado announcement makes the co-op at least the fifth in the nation to collapse. Similar nonprofit insurers have already failed in Louisiana, Iowa/Nebraska, Nevada and New York. A health insurance cooperative in Tennessee announced this week that it would stop offering new policies. Expect even more failures ahead of open enrollment for 2016 starts on November 1. The Colorado Division of Insurance must first certify insurers before they're allowed to sell plans, so the de-certification essentially puts Colorado HealthOP out of business. Back to the HealthOP CEO who added that "the Division has let local and national politics hurt Coloradans' access to low-cost healthcare options and assessed Colorado taxpayers with significant avoidable costs," Hutchins said in the statement. Actually they became unavoidable the moment the deeply compromised and ideologically partisan Supreme Court imposed the Obamacare tax on Americans, with few if any realizing the monetary implications of the new insurance regime. While it won't provide much comfort to Colorado HealthOp, which is now winding down, its board of directors has requesting that the state allow a board-appointed independent consumer protection ombudsman to assist through the shut-down. In other words, even more millions in taxpayer funds will now be spent to liquidate the health insurer. And while the lame duck president hardly cared as his legacy achievement will soon be some other president's problem, Republicans quickly took to gloating and pointed to the co-op's closure as "a sad but predictable outcome." "Taxpayers are on the hook for millions of dollars in loans given out to the CO-OP, money that will likely never be repaid," U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner said in a statement after the announcement. "The years since Obamacare's passage have been marked by crisis after crisis in healthcare, and it's far past time for a new plan." But wait, there's more. Now that the numbers are being crunched, and hyperbole and propaganda are finally making way for math, someone figured out that Colorado HealthOP's closure could be bad news for everyone shopping on Colorado's health insurance exchange. A Republican state lawmaker who serves on an oversight committee that has reviewed Colorado HealthOP's finances, Rep. Lang Sias of Arvada, said "rates for everyone are expected to go up next year. Colorado HealthOP accounted for nearly 40 percent of the exchange's total customers." "They're all going to be paying more, on average, I would expect," Sias said. And as more Americans get letters in the mail such as the one below kindly informing them their health insurance premiums are rising by 60% crushing any desire to splurge modest "gas savings" on discretionary purchases... ... expect complaints about soaring health insurance prices, to hit - first in Colorado and then everywhere else.

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (893540)	10/16/2015 7:10:58 PM
From: FJB	1 Recommendation Recommended By locogringo Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574199

CO-OP FLOP: The Biggest Obamacare Disaster You’ve Never Heard About dailycaller.com It’s an Obamacare story with every imaginable outrage — blatant conflicts of interest, millions of tax dollars going to political cronies, thousands of Americans left without health insurance, lavish pay for incompetent executives, federal funds diverted illegally, multiple congressional investigations, insider trading convictions and big decisions made behind closed doors. Tragically, there is even a child abuser. But search the New York Times web site for “Obamacare co-ops” and nothing comes up. Just three entries appear for the same search on the Washington Post web site. Not so, Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group. Pollock has filed dozens of stories about the Obamacare co-ops since 23 of the tax-funded groups were created in 2011 at a cost of $2 billion. President Obama promised the co-ops would help lower medical costs by competing with profit-driven private companies. Seven of the co-ops have closed. A recent report by the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General said the rest of the co-ops are in deep financial trouble and more are expected to close. None of these dismal developments come as a surprise to those following Pollock’s byline for the past four years. Here are a dozen of his most significant co-op stories, some of which were reported when he worked for the Washington Examiner. One third of Obamacare co-ops have failed. New York’s Obamacare co-op drew the most consumer complaints. Feds admit more Obamacare co-op failures are coming. Obamacare co-op execs hid millions in lavish pay, consulting fees. House panel says Obamacare co-op illegally diverted $25 million. ‘Luxurious’ funding lets Obamacare co-ops undercut commercial rivals. Obamacare co-ops mostly not ready for opening day. Four investigations of Obamacare co-ops. Obamacare’s Louisiana co-op riddled with self-dealing, conflicts of interest. Groups led by insider trader, child abuser got Obamacare co-op loans. Obama political ally got $340 million Obamacare co-op loan. Obamacare co-ops being formed behind closed doors.