Larry

Love your definition of "quoting the part of the article which the poster chose to quote" as "cherry picking". Admiring your unsupported assumption that the amount which the company chose to give the employees was the same amount as the company chose to pay, before. (But you did point out that it's a made up number. And I certainly have no clue if the actual number was more, or less). But, let's just assume as fact the unsupported assertion that the Obamacare law mandated a 50% premium increase. I can see exactly two possible reasons that could possibly be true. 1). The law mandates coverage which the old plan didn't cover, and this coverage IS ACTUALLY WORTH that much. 2). Every insurance company in the market is using Obamacare as an excuse to grossly overcharge their customers. (And I have yet to see anybody come up with a third possible explanation). Why isn't this great coverage still available?

You certainly have not shown that it does. Does Obamacare exist? Yep. Have employers been cutting employees health care for years? Yep. Have you and your spinmeisters been pretending that every bad thing for the last five years was because of Obamacare, without any support other than the fact that it exists? Yep. "Wolf!!!"

And people are blaming Obama for this decision.

Agree with chip. At least, I think the problem people are talking about is: your subsidy to buy insurance depends on how much you THINK you are going to make, next year. But you don't KNOW, in advance, how much you're going to be making, next year.

It is, I think, a valid conundrum. How much subsidy people get, is determined by their annual income. But, they don't know what their annual income is going to be, till the year's over. How do you deal with this? I can think of several possible ways, none if them really all that good. Make people's subsidy based on LAST YEAR'S income? Seems simplest. Maybe an exception whereby somebody who, say, gets laid off, can get his subsidy recalculated, based on his new, lower, income? Maybe make the "Obamacare year" start on May 1st, or some such, so people can file their taxes, and then calculate their subsidy? Maybe have people ESTIMATE their income? I'm sure we can all see potential problems with that idea. Although the IRS already has rules in place for requiring people to do that, with estimated tax payments. And rules in place for enforcing it. Maybe make it so that, when people file their taxes, if it turns out that their subsidy was too big or too small, then they "fix it" at tax time? (Although, I could see a problem if they're handing out PENALTIES for too big a subsidy, without demonstrating that the taxpayer did something intentionally wrong). I agree. It's a tough thing to do, fairly.

Seem to recall, few years back, somebody (Cowboys?) brought in some multi-time Olympic Gold Medal winner in Greco-Roman wrestling, to training camp. (Didn't make the team).

Never watched any of them. Watched Criminal Minds, for a while. (Mandy Patinkin fan.) But apparently, shows like that don't sit well with my career as caregiver for Mom. (Recently tried watching Sons of Anarchy on Netflix. Same problem.) Too much drama, I seem to have problems with.

I'm a Mandy Patinkin fan, so I've been considering starting Homeland, which I think is on Netflix. Any advice? Also was contemplating trying to start the Clone Wars cartoons. But I don;t want to go out and buy a bunch of DVDs. Does anybody know if there's some online service, ala Netflix, that has them?

Wow. I'm shocked. Obama relaxes the rules that people are complaining about, and is immediately attacked for doing so.

Yeah, I assume that a lot of those pictures are taken during halftime, when everybody's hitting the rest rooms and stuff. (Just like I suspect that a lot of the scenes they show, just before kickoff, are actually recorded at least a half hour earlier, if not more.) But, the pic just kinda summed up my feelings, anyway.

Sigh.

Unfortunately, the "you can deduct half of your SE tax from your income", for example, doesn;t make the SE tax different from FICA. It makes it the same. Joe Employee earns $1,000. 1) He pays FICA on $1000. (call it $70) 2) He pays income tax on $1000. 3) His employer pays FICA on $1000. (Call it another $70) His employment actually cost the employer $1070. But his taxes, both FICA and income, are based on only $1000. The money that goes to pay #3 does not count as part of his income, for purposes of FICA or income tax, because (as far as the government's concerned), he never "made" that money. His employer paid it before he gave the employee $1000. The "employer's contribution" never counts as money which he ever received. (Whereas, the "employee's contribution", the part that actually shows up on his paycheck? That money which he pays, gets counted as income.) The self employed guy gets to deduce his "employer's contribution" from his income, because non-self-employed people don't pay income taxes on the "employer's contribution", either. (Non-self-employed people don't get to deduct it, because it never got counted as part of their income, to begin with.)

One of the great things about competition. Want to find out what's bad about an insurance plan? Just let his competitor tell you. one of the advantages you have, compared to a whole lot of people. Yeah, you no doubt get slanted information. But often, slanted information from multiple, competing, sources, beats the heck out of no information at all. (Which is what almost everyone else is stuck with.)

This is, perhaps, because it is the FICA tax. The "employer's contribution" of the FICA tax. (See, for every dollar if FICA that most people's employers take out of their paycheck, the employer is required to "contribute" another dollar. The self employment tax exists because, when someone is self employed, then he is both the employer and the employee. And, therefore, is on the hook for both halves of the tax.) Larry chose to let the topic drop, because Larry knew it was a distraction from the topic of the thread, and wasn't relevent to the question Larry asked. (Whether HSA contributions actually reduced said tax.)

I'm certain that lots of people's insurance costs have gone up. But how much of that is because the insurance companies doubled their rates, and how much is because their employer decided to cut back on the amount that he was chipping in? (And I absolutely guarantee you that nothing in Obamacare mandated that your rates double, two years before the mandates go into effect. Simply because, if there were such a clause in the law, people attacking it would be pointing at it, instead of finding people who's employer decided to eliminate their insurance (and pocket the money), and somebody claimed it was because of Obamacare.) ---------- It's one of the things that certainly makes discussing this topic tough. There's so much going on that the end user doesn't see. AND so many hidden things that it's pretty much impossible to compare apples to apples. (I've been saying for years that IF Obamacare can create an environment where it IS possible to compare apples to apples, then that might have more of a downward effect on health care costs than anything else in the law. But, I'm not certain that it can accomplish that goal.)

Pointing out that somebody in this thread (forget who) has made the claim that nationwide, health care costs have been increasing, but at half the rate they were increasing, before Obamacare passed. (I'm not at all sure I believe it, myself. But I haven't challenged it, and really haven't seen anybody else do so, either.) But yes, I assume that it's pretty much guaranteed that some increases are due to the law. (The law mandates coverage for some things. I understand that psychiatric treatment for alcohol or drug addiction, for example. You can argue about whether that mandate is good or not, but I think you'd have to be really divorced from reality to argue that said mandate didn't cost a dime.) (And other mandates, like mandating the same prices for men and women, I assume force rates higher for some people, and lower for others.) But I'll point out that there's a huge difference between "paying for benefits that have not been provided" (which, I will point out, is what insurance IS), and asserting that the money being paid in will NEVER be paid out. I assume it's certainly possible that all of the insurance companies are simply gouging people, and charging them vastly more than they intend to pay out in benefits. But it's not the first assumption I'd make. And it's certainly not proven.

Ah. I see we've fallen back on name calling. A tactic that seems inconsistent with trying to claim that the other guy is refusing to discuss the actual issue. But wait. Consistency is a word, therefore it's semantics. But let's leave aside the name calling, and see if there's actually a point, in there, to respond to. Really? You think that having a $0 deductible might cause people to spend more on health care? Let's examine that theory which might be true. Granted, I'm going from memory, but I seem to remember an assertion along the lines that 80% of your employees run through their deductible in three months or less, and that virtually all of them do so within the year. What percentage of the person in the "typical person buying the highest deductible plan on the exchange" profile, runs through $5000 in medical expenses, in the first three months of the year? Is it 80%? Or do their numbers differ from the numbers you're using your employees as examples of? Is it perhaps possible that your employees might have different health care spending, compared to the people signing up on the exchanges? Is it possible that these people aren't the average health care consumer? Therefore, is it possible that maybe we (let's be generous with the "we") could stop trying to use people with $0 deductible, fully paid, health insurance, to represent average people who are signing up for high deductible plans that they're paying for, themselves?

Ah. I see we've moved from "let's consider a hypothetical person under Obamacare, who has $12K in medical expenses, and pretend that Obamacare caused those expenses", to "let's assert that people are paying a thousand dollars a month for insurance which nobody will ever collect on". If the insurance companies never (or almost never) have to pay any money out, then why do the plans cost so much?

But who can afford $6000, without premiums. Yes, I understand that $6000, plus premiums, is more than $6000, without premiums. But Obamacare didn't make that person pay $6000. No, I will not allow you to play "let's compare a person who pays $6000, and premiums, against a person who pays no premiums, and doesn't get sick". Exactly. They aren't paying out "that kind of money". Not the kinds of numbers you keep trying to pretend are Obamacare's costs. They're paying out the premiums. Period. Every single dime of money, beyond that, is money that they would have paid, anyway. (And you have to engage in extraordinary levels of cherry picking, to make it even that bad.) When somebody signs up for Obamacare, they don't suddenly have to pay the premiums, and another $12K on top of that, that they didn't have to pay, before.

Thought I'd come back to this one. Yes, those are the family deductibles. The deductibles per person are lower. But then, you're all about "let's try to make the numbers as scary as I possibly can". But you are quite correct. If we assume a head of household. If we assume that he had no insurance whatsoever, before Obamacare. If we assume that he signs up for the highest deductible he's allowed to sign up for. If we assume that, next year, multiple people in his family need medical care. If we assume that his total family medical expenses are $12,000. (Not more, because if it's more, then the insurance starts paying) But, we assume that no individual in his family has more than $6,000.(If one individual has more, then the insurance starts paying.) If we assume that no one in his family used any of the services which Obamacare mandates not counting towards the deductible . . . THEN Obamacare will have cost this person . . . . the amount of the premium. And that's all. All of the other expenses will be expenses that he would have had, anyway. That's a whole lot of cherry picking, just to come up with a worst case hypothetical, where the worst case is "the amount of the premiums"

Might want to check the question again. (I know that moving goalposts is a full time job, around here. So I'll quote it.) Note: The question was "before their insurance will pay". Not "Well, it we assume that a person knows in advance that the only medical expense they will have, this year, is a kid's ear infection, then is it to their advantage to have any insurance at all?" Yes, we all understand that the premiums for "insurance" are higher than the premiums for "no insurance". It's just that the "no insurance" option has some rather scary risks, too. (And the "insurance" option has some benefits, before you get to that deductible, too.) But yeah, we all get that it is possible to construct a person for whom he will "lose money" on Obamacare insurance. (That's true of all insurance, actually.)

Haven't you heard? Obama is gonna throw people in jail if they don;t sign up. At least, that was the basis for the claims that the law was unconstitutional. ---------- Having got that out of the way, though, . . . . As I understand it, they very well might not (sign up) this year. As I understand it, the insurance plans are kinda expensive (because of various mandates designed to make plans cheaper for some people, at the expense of making them more expensive, on others). And the penalty for not signing up isn't very big. (And I could also see some people deciding to gamble, and to hope that the penalty gets repealed, before it becomes effective. Or similar excuses being used to justify not spending money, right now.) I'm not gonna be surprised at all, if complience isn't rather low. At least for 2014. And I would expect young people to be the main component in that demographic.

---------- Funny. I was under the impression that the Medicaid expansion was part of Obamacare. Really? HSA contributions don't count as income for purposes of FICA calculations? I'm not 100% certain that's not true, but it sure would be surprising, to me. Funny, I was under the impression that pretty much all plans had to comply with Obamacare's mandates. Kinda thought that was the excuse being given for why so many people's insurance are being cancelled. Coulda sworn that, one sentence ago, you were asserting that such plans don't even have to be compliant. Even used pretty colors to try to make that claim.

Really? How much does this hypothetical person, (concerning whom we have been given no information whatsoever), have to pay, right now? Would it be silly for me to ask where you're getting this "deductible upwards of $12,000" from?

I will point out that if that were his point, that the lower class would likely benefit a whole lot more from a plan that covers ear infections (and broken bones, and colds and flu, and cholesterol screening, and vaccinations, and things like that), than from a plan that covers major medical events, but only after said lower class pays a third of his annual salary, first, then I'd be agreeing with him. (And have stated that position, previously, in this thread.) But then, I have trouble with the dual assertions that Obamacare doesn't pay a dime for anything until after the poor is bankrupt, AND that it's outrageously expensive. To me, the fact that these plans cost so much is an indication that they DO cover things, before the insured goes bankrupt. If they didn't, then they'd be cheaper. But I've been saying since this debate started that I think that, to the poor, the un- or under-insured, that no-deductible coverage for the basic (and cheap) things would be vastly more helpful than coverage for cardiac bypass surgery. Simply because people get colds a lot more often than they have cardiac bypass. I certainly haven't seen anything that says they can't. (Admitting that I'm on my way out the door, and haven't got time to read your links.) Now, as to how many of the (people who will be going to the exchanges demographic) have the money to put into such accounts, I suspect that's not that big a number. Unfortunately, you're looking at a "person who used to have no deductible, and now that have a high deductible (and somebody else is pocketing the savings from the switch), and they hate it" . . . . . . and applying those feelings to "people who didn't have insurance at all, and now they have a high deductible plan, and they are pocketing the savings from choosing that plan".