Blue Shield of California is shutting down for the four days after Labor Day to reduce its payroll-related liabilities, citing losses in California's Covered California Obamacare exchange and other commercial and individual lines of business.

The move will affect most of its 6,000 employees in California, except about 1,000 who work for Care1st, which it acquired last fall for $1.2 billion, and some staffers in customer service and related areas who will remain on the job. The exact number of workers involved hasn't yet been tabulated, according to the San Francisco-based insurer.

If you like your (health care) plan, you can keep your plan!

Where does it say people can't keep their plan?

Two of the state’s biggest insurers — Blue Shield of California and Anthem Inc. — asked for the biggest hikes. Blue Shield’s premiums jumped by an average of more than 19%, according to officials, and Anthem’s rates rose by more than 16%.

Where does it say people can't keep their plan?

1) Annual Reports: Plans that are effective after March 10, 2010 are required to send a report each year to the Secretary of Health and Human Services that explains how the company’s employer provided insurance plan would improve health outcomes. Grandfathered plans do not have to do this.

2) New Government Reports: Under the new law, employers are required to send to their state insurance commission certain information about enrollment, claim, and payment policies. This does not apply to grandfathered plans.

3) First dollar coverage: All new plans must provide certain preventative services free to enrollees. These services include mammography examinations, an annual checkup and blood test and other preventative or screening services. Grandfathered plans are exceptions to this rule.

Note that this requirement directly refutes claims of higher out-of-pocket expenses under an Obamacare plan, at least for routine preventative visits

4) Health Status: Under the ACA insurers can’t charge more or deny care based on health status (preexisting condition). Grandfathered insurance plans are exempt from this.

5) Guaranteed Access: This provision mandates health insurance carriers give insurance to any individual or employee that applies for insurance. Grandfathered insurance plans are exempt from this provision.

6) Any Willing Provider: Requires insurance plans to allow any willing provider of health care services to participate in the plan as a provider as long as they operate within the scope of their license. Grandfathered plans don’t have to.

7) Emergency Services: Requires that every new plan cover emergency services without prior authorization. Grandfathered plans do not need to meet this requirement.


Rule Regarding Establishing Premium Rates: A provision of the new act is the “Fair Health Insurance Premiums.” This provision only allows an insurance company to charge a maximum of a 3:1 difference for age difference and 1.5:1 for tobacco use. This does not apply to grandfathered plans.

9) Essential Benefits: When the law passed, new plans are now required to offer the essential benefits as outlined in the act (including preventive treatments and women’s services). Grandfathered plans are exempt from this requirement.

10) Claims Review: The new law expands the internal review process regarding denied services. There is no such requirement for grandfathered plans.

11) Clinical Trials: The new health insurance law requires that insurance companies continue to provide health insurance to enrollees in a clinical trial. Grandfathered plans don’t have to.

12) Annual and Lifetime Limits: Both annual and lifetime dollar limits are banned on all essential healthcare services. Grandfathered plans can have dollar limits.

13) Gender Discrimination: Women cannot be charged higher rates than men. Grandfathered plans can charge more to women.

you can keep your healthcare plan

google that.

Obongo said it at least 37 times.

Honestly, your ignorance is astounding.

When Obamacare went into effect in 2010, anyone who was already in a plan became exempt from most Obamacare requirement until 2017 (originally 2015 but then they extended it). This is what "you can keep your plan" means. The plans were "Grandfathered".

When the premiums increase by 19% that prices a lot of people out the program they're in and forces them to have to move to cheaper, less useful insurance plans.

http://www.latimes.com/business/



And given the dire financial situation for Blue Shield it's obvious that the 19% rate hike wasn't enough. They'll be shortly forced to raise rates yet again or else go out of business.

Obamacare is helping more poor patients get to the doctor even as political battles continue

Even as the Affordable Care Act remains a political flash point, new research shows it is dramatically improving poor patients’ access to medical care in states that have used the law to expand their Medicaid safety net.

After just two years of expanded coverage, patients in expansion states are going to the doctor more frequently and having less trouble paying for it.

At the same time, the experience in those states suggests better access will ultimately improve patients’ health, as patients get more regular checkups and seek care for chronic illnesses such diabetes and heart disease....

In Louisiana, the rush to sign up for Obamacare highlights a 'long overdue' demand for health insurance


Patients burst into tears at this city’s glistening new charity hospital when they learned they could get Medicaid health insurance.

In Baton Rouge, state officials had to bring in extra workers to process the flood of applications for coverage.

And at the call center for one of Louisiana’s private Medicaid plans, operators recorded their busiest day on record.

The outpouring began in June, when Louisiana became the 31st state to offer expanded Medicaid coverage through the Affordable Care Act, effectively guaranteeing health insurance to its residents for the first time.

Now, as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump promises to repeal the healthcare law, Louisiana is emerging as a powerful illustration of the huge pent-up demand for health insurance, particularly in red states where elected officials have fought the 2010 law.

...The state’s former governor, Republican Bobby Jindal, was a fierce foe of expanding Medicaid eligibility, however, calling universal health coverage a “liberal shibboleth” and warning that expansion would “jeopardize the care of the most vulnerable in our society.”

But Jindal’s mismanagement of the state’s budget helped Democrat John Bel Edwards sweep into office in November on the promise to reverse Jindal’s policies and expand Medicaid eligibility.

The outpouring since sign-ups began in June has surprised even the program’s biggest advocates.....

The truth about healthcare premiums: They'd be a lot higher without Obamacare

We’ve just entered the “sticker shock” season of healthcare reporting: News stories are brimming with reports of double-digit premium requests from insurance companies, amid dire warnings about the impact on consumers.

Public health expert Benjamin Sommers of Harvard calls this “a new U.S. healthcare tradition: headlines about proposed premium increases under the Affordable Care Act and predictions of the law’s demise.” This year brings an additional theme — the trend’s putative effect on the presidential election. Some of the figures are certainly eye-catching — some insurers in some states are seeking increases of more than 30%. In California, where the state exchange negotiated increases of only 4.2% in 2015 and 4% this year, rates will rise by an average 13.2% next year.

But Sommers asserts that concerns over rising premiums are “overblown,” chiefly for three reasons: Most of the cited rates are initial requests, likely to be pared down by state regulators; consumers have the ability and incentive to shop for cheaper rates; and more than 80% of Affordable Care Act customers receive premium subsidies, limiting the impact of any rate increases

In essence ... consumers received more coverage at a lower price.
— Loren Adler and Paul Ginsburg, Brookings Institution
An important new study by Loren Adler and Paul Ginsburg of the Brookings Institution adds another key factor. Their finding is that, even with an expected spike in premium increases for 2017, rates are still lower than they would have been without the Affordable Care Act. They calculate that premiums would have to rise by more than 44% for next year to approach where they would have been given the pre-ACA trend line. In fact, Adler and Ginsburg are being conservative — they calculated a rise of 5% a year from pre-ACA rates, even though the actual annual increases ranged from 11.7% in 2010 to 7-8% in 2011-2013.

The main reason for the finding is that rates dropped sharply when the ACA exchanges launched in 2014 — so much so that they still haven’t caught up to the pre-ACA trend. “That the ACA might have caused premiums to drop so precipitously when its marketplaces took effect may seem surprising at first,” Adler and Ginsburg write. “It was to us.”

Many analysts expected the ACA to drive up premiums in the individual market, though mostly because the law would improve the quality and breadth of policies. These factors included an end to exclusions or rate surcharges due to preexisting conditions and other health factors, mandates for coverage of a menu of “essential benefits,” limits on out-of-pocket costs, and the elimination of lifetime benefit caps.

Post-ACA premium increases through 2016 remained well below pre-ACA trends. Not shown are annual increases for 2011-13, which have been estimated at 7-8%.
Post-ACA premium increases through 2016 remained well below pre-ACA trends. Not shown are annual increases for 2011-13, which have been estimated at 7-8%. (New England Journal of Medicine)
Adler and Ginsburg observe that other factors were expected to deliver downward pressure on premiums, including the expansion of the customer pool by millions of persons and the introduction of competition, allowing customers to choose among several standardized plans.

“The small group market in the past was relatively small and not particularly competitive,” Ginsburg told me. Today, “in many areas, the exchanges are very competitive.” The premium subsidies make it even easier for customers to shop for plans every year, producing an incentive for insurers to maintain price-competitiveness.

The post-ACA trend in premiums has significantly outstripped expectations. Rates in 2016 came in 20% below the Congressional Budget Office’s projections in 2009, before the ACA’s passage. This reflects an overall slowing of healthcare inflation over that period. The reasons for the slowdown are imperfectly understood and may include the post-2008 economic slowdown, though the Congressional Budget Office agrees that the ACA deserves some of the credit.

Ginsburg told me that one of his goals in performing this analysis was “myth-busting, since everything is so polarized in discussions of Obamacare.” He’s gratified that the main reaction to the analysis is an effort to “get behind the data and examine what are the key factors” in premium trends.

Comparing pre-ACA individual plans with those in the post-ACA exchange market is difficult because the customer base and typical benefits are so different, Ginsburg acknowledges. But he and Adler calculated that average premiums for the benchmark silver-tier plan in 2014, the year the ACA exchanges began operating, were 10-21% lower than average individual market premiums in 2013 — and enrollees got significantly better coverage and greater benefits. Silver plans covered 17% more of the customer’s health expenses than the average pre-ACA plan, they note. “In essence, then, consumers received more coverage at a lower price.”

Yet mine and everyone else who worked for the company and had the plan were not EXCEMPTED we were forced to chose a new one at a higher rate with less coverage.

Yet mine and everyone else who worked for the company and had the plan were not EXCEMPTED we were forced to chose a new one at a higher rate with less coverage.

That's because BF is a retarded sack of shit who just spouts the official Obongo bullshit,
and refuses to recognize the obvious, that millions got fucked by the ACA,
and the Lieberals in the White Hut did nothing about it.

No class.
No shame.
No morals.