Hey there - and Crid should enjoy this:

Federal contractor health-care deductions went up this month, right on schedule.

It won't fix anything - but this would.

That's not going to happen, because Congress feels a duty to distribute power, not benefits. Not really.

Our insurance crashed and burned at the start of the year. We're now on a high-deductable plan that only pays 50-80% after the deductable has been covered. For me, because I'm on a maintenance medicine, it guarantees that I will be paying at least $3000 out of pocket every year. And Obamacare included provisions cutting the amounts that you can put into an MSA or HSA -- go figure. On top of all that, our premiums went up substantially.

Plus, we changed to different providers, who are probably going to be more aggressive about challenging claims. Our prescription coverage has been changed to a company that is notorious for challenging everything and ordering doctors to change patients over to less expensive (and less effective) medicines. I don't know that they are going to allow me to stay on my medicine.

The other thing that it is going to happen is that a lot of employees in lower end jobs (fast food, convenience store, etc.) are going to get their hours cut.

At 28 hours the employer doesn't have to provide health insurance. So more people will now be under-employed. And I can see managers that will screw around with schedules so the person can't work two jobs.

Wendy's already has it planned out according to a somewhat reliable source via tweet. I hope that source is wrong.

When the ACA passed my insurance went up dramatically so they could cover the hit they will take in 2014. I had to dump my insurance because of it. Nothing about this will end well.

After ACA passed, my 12 year old son's health insurance premium went up by about 40% From $112 to $160 a month. A further increase to $180 a month was postponed. Reading through the provisions, I found this is the result of capping the price differential between the best and worst rates. The worst rates, usually paid by the elderly people who use most of the medical services, cannot be more then 4 times the best rates paid by the young and healthy who use little services. So while the highest rates do not go down, the lowest rates go up to meet the requirement. Neat huh?

I think a young person should be able to go without if they're willing to chance it. Plenty do. My husband tells me about the young or not so young dudes where he worked, who never signed up for any of the benefits because they want all their money NOW. One guy even had a wife and small kid, and didn't sign up. Another had a massive heart attack...he had never gone to the doctor so had no idea he was high-risk. Is was good insurance, too.

Yeah we pay for them, but we're still gonna pay for the guys who don't sign up and just pay the penalty instead. I doubt ER is going to turn them away.

As a military retiree now and recipient of Tricare, I am largley immune to the primary effects of this.

But we are already experiencing the secondary effect of doctors and pharmacies no longer accepting Tricare. I don't think it will be too much longer before Medicare is treated the same.

Walgreens used to be my family's go to pharmacy whenever we couldn't get a prescription filled on base. But they stopped accepting Tricare as insurance last year, and so we stopped patronizing them.

Pity too, as there was a Walgreen's across the street from the movie theater we usually went to that had those big theater style boxes of candy priced at a buck for us to stuff into my wife's purse before going to the movies.

Good to know about Tricare. We will be on it soon, but may keep the Blue Cross Blue Shield as a secondary plan, if Tricare acceptance is low.
I just stood in line for 30 minutes at the Pharmacy to find out that my mother's medicare part d plan which covered almost eveything last year, covers almost nothing this year (for the same 100 bucks a month) There has to be some form of consumer fraud here, because there was no notice during the open enrollment period to give you a chance to change plans.
I have a math problem ahead of me, to add up the retail cost of all the drugs my 88 year old takes, and where I can get them the cheapest, and see if we are better off just dropping the part d insurance all together. I pitty the people with low math skills. They are going to get taken to the cleaners.

I work for Kaiser and at least for the next two years our plans will still be good, but I'm sure after that it won't be as they want to switch us onto high deductible plans. Since the beginning of the year most copays for patients have gone way up and I always get to hear about it like it's somehow my fault. I wish I could just hang a sign out at my desk that says "Thank Obamacare for your rising health care costs and decreased coverage instead of bitching to me about it!" Kaiser is also talking about capping the number of Medicare and Medicaid patients they will accept because of all the changes and a bunch of doctors are starting to take early retirement. This does not bode well for the future.

"But we are already experiencing the secondary effect of doctors and pharmacies no longer accepting Tricare. "

Intersting. Where I work, a lot of the employees are either military retirees or spouses of retirees. At the end of last year, nearly all of them who had our company insurance bailed out and went on Tricare. I haven't heard anything about doctors around here refusing to take Tricare, but that may be because there are so many military here.