Auguries Say: Implosion Impending
As usual, it’s hard to tell just what’s going on inside the administration regarding Obamacare, but I don’t think we can really take the steps announced by HHS yesterday as anything but a bright, red, flashing warning light about the internal expectations regarding January.
Some of what they announced is frankly bizarre and slightly crazy. Beside extending the high-risk pool program (which isn’t nuts, just a strong indication that they’re not ready for January at this very late stage), they are asking insurers to pay claims for consumers who haven’t paid their premiums, to treat out-of-network doctors and hospitals as though they were in-network, and to pay for prescription drugs not actually covered by the plans they offer.
The administration is trying to present this as a set of perfectly ordinary kind of transition measures that insurers normally make available to new customers, and some of the more reliable members of their amen chorus on Obamacare have echoed that. But that’s not what this looks like to me, and a few conversations today suggest it’s not what it looks like to the insurers.
To “strongly encourage” insurers to take these kinds of steps (to use the Orwellian phrase of the HHS announcement), and to do it just a couple of weeks before the new system is supposed to start, suggests that the administration’s health experts mapped out how January is shaping up and had a collective heart attack…
Nanny State, Politics | tree hugging sister | 
December 13, 2013 12:22 pm
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As an MD, all I can tell you is that I expect a super duper implosion. A lot of our patients are telling us that they can’t see us anymore, and when they find out what the service is really like at their new plan I believe they will revolt. (Tons of patients crammed into a small number of practices… that’s not gonna work.)
They seem to have lived.
Too bad for us.
I think Alice is right. I’m still hooked into the hospice grapevine a bit–and even that’s not pretty.
Pardon me. Dr. Alice – I usually try to give an MD the proper Dr. title. (PhD’s not so much…there should be another title for that; they aren’t medical doctors.)
No one has any respect for JD’s. No one ever calls me a doctor.
But soon it will be the JD’s deciding what kind of medicine you’ll get. Better start being nice to us now.
The way thing are going I’d best look for a good Potawatomi shaman as my doctor.
I guess the investment advise now is to invest heavily in WebMD.com. That sure seems to be the only medical alternative for the millions and millions who are getting screwed out of their health insurance.
@ Skyler – but you already HAVE a title – Esquire. You just use that and the patients you come in contact will know the want to hire you to sue someone rather than demand you fix them.