You'd be better off getting catastrophic coverage, then self-funding a health savings account and paying out of pocket and negotiating rates with your providers because "I'm paying cash, baby!"

Oh, wait, that violates the Affordable Care Act.

Wait...why is the 25 year old getting their own coverage? they can stay on their parents plan thru their 26th year.

Wondering if a parent somewhere who has not included offspring less than 26 YOA has been sued yet...

Wondering if an orphaned 25 YO is wholly subsidized by the State, no matter job or income, because family is gone...

Meanwhile, here's good news from my bosses at Savannah River Site (SRS):

"By 2018, a 40% excise tax would be imposed on health care plans that cost more than $10,200 for individual plans and $27,500 for family plans. SRS will need to carefully review existing plans, and the Prime Medical Choice will be in jeopardy."

You may be assured that this is correct; no health care plan may be better than the government allows. Isn't this interesting: if you have an existing medical plan and get divorced, then, depending at what time of the year the judge bangs the gavel it could cost you this tax, too.

As it is, I would have to pay $12,200 annually before I get a bandage from the plan.

Oh, yeah - here's the solution.

Fuck this. Fuck this so much. We used to have a "Cadillac" plan provider through employers, because they wanted to provide that for hubby, he was worth it to them. Now, we have a piece of shit that, after we've paid $7000 out of pocket, will cover 80% of our costs. It cost me $150 to have my twins, nicu and all. Now, new plan, I personally still owe almost $3k from my daughters 2 night stay for salmonella last fall. Another $4k for my hysterectomy.

So I hope you progressives choke on your fucking "free" birth control pills and die. Every. damn. last. one. of. you.

I need a like button for momof4's last sentence.

Wait...why is the 25 year old getting their own coverage? they can stay on their parents plan thru their 26th year.

Posted by: I R A Darth Aggie at July 27, 2015 6:37 AM

Unless their parents are covered by Tricare. In which case, the coverage until 26 doesn't extend to them.

Meanwhile, wage workers in Seattle who are now covered by that shiny new $15/hour minimum wage are begging employers to cut their hours. Why? So they can hang on to their welfare bennies!

"So I hope you progressives choke on your fucking "free" birth control pills and die. Every. damn. last. one. of. you."

worth repeating!

Who are all these morons who actually believed that government control of health care would make it cheaper and more efficient?

Years ago my college roommate espoused a theory that the nation as a whole would constantly get dumber. This was do to the fact that less intelligent people seem to have multiple children, whether they can afford it of not. People with initiative and intelligence tend to have smaller families that they are able to educate and provide for. (Yes I know this isn't true in all cases) Thus he reasoned that over the years the aggregate stupidity level would rise.

Sometimes I think we have gone well beyond that hypothesis.

More good news from AP on the health of the state exchanges. A taste:

Twelve states and the District of Columbia fully control their markets. Experts estimate about half face financial difficulties. Federal taxpayers invested nearly $5 billion in startup grants to the states, expecting that state markets would become self-sustaining. Most of the federal money has been spent, and states have to face the consequences.

@Jay, typical intelligence has gone up steadily for at least the last 60 years. It's called the Flynn Effect.

It's pretty clear now that the real intent of Obamacare was never anything more than yet another welfare program. Everything else was just bread and circuses to get the middle class, the working poor, and the Millennials to buy into it. The beneficiaries are all the usual Democratic Party faithful -- the politicans who further solidify their districts, the non-working welfare kings and queens, and the political graft class that gets paid handsomly to launder taxpayer money into the Party.

Wait...why is the 25 year old getting their own coverage? they can stay on their parents plan thru their 26th year.

Posted by: I R A Darth Aggie at July 27, 2015 6:37 AM

Divorced parents, where in divorce agreement kid is independent at 18. Sorry Dad, Mom kicked you out and moved her bf in, kids haven't spoken to you since they were 3. 20 yrs later you still want to be paying. I give it 1 more year before we see a push by feminists to force divorced Fathers to pay till kids are 26.Many already have to pay tuition.

Not sure how other divorces are worded, but when my parents divorced child support was required until age 18 or graduation from high school. My stepdad's was similar, but with a provision that if the kids dropped out of school he didn't have to pay support then either. This was eons ago since we are all in our mid 30s to late 40s now.

As it is, we are paying $1200 a month for family health insurance with a max out of pocket of $12,700 a year not including prescription costs. I've been hearing rates are going up 40% next year for Oregon. I'm not sure how we'll budget for that on top of copays. Our youngest is required to go to all sorts of specialist evaluations regularly to monitor his development because he was born at 30 weeks, despite there being no concerns. He scored at 94th percentile for corrected age, which is super advanced, and at 37th percentile for his actual age, which is totally normal and on target if he were a term baby. If we don't take him to all these expensive appointments we are likely to be reported for medical neglect.

"Our youngest is required to go to all sorts of specialist evaluations regularly to monitor his development because he was born at 30 weeks, despite there being no concerns"

Required by whom?

And if it is a requirement by some medical entity or government agency, why aren't they footing the bill? .

And what are they going to do to you, if you refuse to continue paying for medical professionals to test and monitor a perfectly healthy child?

The chief impetus for creating the ACA was that Americans were seeing their premiums rising at alarming rates.

So, we've traded a Chevy for a Pontiac and are surprised when we find out we just bought the same car.

"@Jay, typical intelligence has gone up steadily for at least the last 60 years. It's called the Flynn Effect. "

*Flynne

And I had no idea she was 60...

just hot!

If it's any consolation, I've been told that high deductible catastrophic insurance meant the same to the hospital as having no insurance so patients received a lower standard of care.

It's still screwed up, but you probably wouldn't like my solution.

@Amy, people with IQ falling around the median of the distribution see their intelligence rise in the past 60 years, as measured by comprehensive, standardized IQ tests. Your linked studies used creativity and reaction time as proxies, which I think is interesting, but not apples to apples in comparison. I only read the abstracts, though, and I'll admit the jargon was pretty dense. In any event, I'm having trouble believing that reaction time study at all really. Widespread use of automobiles, invention of modern video games and the internet, improvements in medical standards and nutrition since that era and the Victorians are beating us on reaction time??! Horse feathers. I suspect they measured differently.

"Were the Victorians smarter than us?" I don't know about inherent intelligence, but it's nearly indisputable that the Victorian middle class (and even some of the working class) was better educated than we are. And this continued through the first half of the 20th century.

This morning, on the way to work, I was listening to Switched-on Bach, an album of Bach pieces released in 1968, and performed entirely on music synthesizers. For a lot of the people who heard it, it was the first electronic music they had ever heard. As I listened to it, I though (not for the first time), "why Bach?" Given that this was going to be a milestone event for a lot of the audience, why not choose something more popular?

Then it dawned on me: at the time, most American and European had heard Bach before to at least some extent, either in church or in music appreciation classes in school, civic events, or movie/TV soundtracks. And so they were likely to be familiar with at least some of the compositions on the album, and would have a touchpoint for comparison to performances of the music on conventional instruments. Today, that would not be true; most of the music audience has never even heard of Bach, much less has any familiarity with any of his works. Note that Switched-on Bach was a huge hit at the time it was released; it was one of the best selling albums across all genres that year.

We have kind of gotten away from teaching classical music and art in favor of things that will more readily hold the students attention. So you see things like a university intro to the humanities using comic books or samurai movies as a vehicle. Probably not wise, wrt to cultural development, but looking at the bottom line, lib arts majors tend to get jobs at Starbucks and schools are judged on retention and graduation rates, so got to keep the students' attention. That album sounds really cool. If I had $80 lying around, I'd get a copy. :(

Satirist, Peter Schickele, made a 50-year career out of playing the newly "discovered" works of the forgotten member of the Bach clan, PDQ Bach.

I doubt he could do that today. No one would have a frame of reference for his satire.

AS to classical music many of my generation heard it mainly through Bugs Bunny background music. I'm not sure if that has continued with younger generations though.

My grandma used to refer to those cartoons as "Donald Duck quacking through the classics." She thought it dumbed things down.

"AS to classical music many of my generation heard it mainly through Bugs Bunny background music. "

That's true. Those of us of a certain age also heard a lot of it in the popular music that we listened to. I first started to seriously listen to classical music after someone a few years older than me started pointing out to me the sources of classical bits and riffs in Emerson, Lake and Palmer's stuff. Did you know that ELP used to fill up football stadiums? Concerts with 50,000 people attending to listen to a rock band play their interpretation of Musskorsky's "Pictures At an Exhibition", all the way through? True fact. Imagine someone trying to do that today.