Thousands Of Doctors Dropped By Insurer After ObamaCare Funding Cuts

by JASmius

"There is a languor of the life more imminent than pain.  'Tis pain's successor - when the soul has suffered all it can."

I get that feeling a lot when we warn people of what the Obamunists are planning, then what they're doing, and what the horrific results will be, get ignored and savaged and ridiculed for our troubles, then get vindicated as our warnings are borne out in the most exacting detail, long after anything can be done about it.  The whole process, all of it, so tragic, so infuriating, so completely unnecessary, and yet our sense of patriotism and duty to the country that used to be compels us to stand and bear witness to it all.

Today's case in point:

UnitedHealth Group has dropped thousands of doctors from its networks in recent weeks, leaving many elderly patients unsure whether they need to switch plans to continue seeing their doctors, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

The insurer said in October that underfunding of Medicare Advantage plans for the elderly could not be fully offset by the company's other healthcare business.

The company also reported spending more healthcare premiums on medical claims in the third quarter, due mainly to government cuts to payments for Medicare Advantage services.

"Medicare Advantage, an alternative to traditional Medicare, combines hospital and doctor coverage and often includes prescription drugs and perks like gym memberships," the Journal explained. "Enrollment has more than doubled since 2004 to thirteen million in 2012, which represents about 27% of Americans on Medicare.

"The federal government pays private insurers a per-capita fee to manage the benefits. The rate is currently about 12% more than the average Medicare patient spends annually. The Obama administration plans to cut those extra payments to insurers by about $150 billion over the next ten years to help pay" for the [Una]ffordable Care[-Less] Act, or ObamaCare.

Some experts told the Journal that they expect enrollment in Medicare Advantage plans to decline sharply if that occurs.

The Journal report said that doctors in at least  ten states were notified of being laid off the plans, some citing "significant changes and pressures in the healthcare environment." According to the notices, the terminations can be appealed within thirty days.

To distill it down to its essence, the senior citizen version of "If you like your plan, tough lugnuts, suckers!"; a situation brought about solely, entirely, and deliberately by ObamaCare, as was warned of from the very inception of the "Health Wars" in the summer of 2009.

But the public response to UHC's decision?:

At least two ["blue"] state medical societies are seeking temporary restraining orders against UnitedHealth and other ["blue"] state attorney generals are investigating the firm.

Attorneys in Connecticut, acting on behalf of the Hartford and Fairfield County Medical Associations, filed suit Friday after UnitedHealth dropped doctors serving the popular Medicare program, The Courant reported.

Other ["blue"] states expressed similar anger over the changes. In Rhode Island, the state's attorney general and health department director on Friday sent letters to UnitedHealth's New England CEO, asking him to reinstate doctors until a full plan for such a transition could be put in place, Rhode Island Public Radio reported.

Don't put blame where it belongs - on Barack Obama and his ruling party - heavens, no; blame the victims for refusing to fulfill their intermediary role to the death-spiraling end, enabling them to be used as ready-made scapegoats.  What was that catch phrase of Emperor Palpatine's....?






.....well, not entirely:

The mass revolt by thirty-nine Democratic congressmen who supported a Republican proposal Friday to let Americans keep their health insurance policies for another year was a "repudiation" of President Barack Obama's pledge to "fix" ObamaCare, conservative activist Grover Norquist told Newsmax.

"He said he was going to take care of it, and they said, 'We don't trust you,'" Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said in an exclusive interview. "Wow!

"These are the Democrats saying: 'We're don’t trust that what you said you were going to do to fix this actually fixes it. We want to be on the record asking for a law,'" he added. "This puts a lot of pressure on Democrats in the Senate."

Norquist was among several observers who spoke to Newsmax about the 261-157 vote in the House of Representatives to allow insurance companies to sell for another year health policies that don’t meet the requirements of the Patient Pr[edat]tion and [Una]ffordable Care[-Less] Act.

Thirty-nine Democrats backed the proposal, sponsored by Representative Fred Upton, R-MI6, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. The House vote came a day after Obama said that he would grant by executive order a one-year reprieve for Americans whose health policies have been canceled.

Obama’s announcement sought to limit what could have been more Democratic votes for the Republican bill. The White House said that Obama would veto the House legislation.

Eric Erickson calls this a trap; I call it a calculated risk for the sake of hammering home a political lesson.  Policy wise, the idea is useless no matter who originates it; a temporary one-year extension of legality for existing "grandfathered" individual health plans after most have been canceled and aren't retrievable isn't going to avert "the death spiral" because insurance carriers revise plans and determine premiums on an....annual basis.  If anybody wanted this avenue of "treatment" to have a genuine effect, it would have to be for two years at minimum.

No, the purpose here is entirely political - not to enable ten to fifteen million Americans to keep the plans they liked, but to be seen as ostensibly doing so.  Which was why O cut the line Thursday with his illegal, unconstitutional, Article I/Section I-eviscerating Executive Decree; he knew, because they point-blank told him, that his congressional minions were slipping the leash and defecting to the GOP on this, with the vote coming yesterday.  In order to keep the credit for it entirely for himself, he had to beat them to that punch.

And that, in turn, is the underlying purpose of Chairman Upton's legislation: to stimulate more very visible tyrannical lawlessness on The One's part on the front end, and also compel him to veto whatever version of the bill comes out of conference committee (assuming Senator Pencilneck allows a vote on Landrieu-Feinstein) on the back end in order to cut Republicans out of the credit sweepstakes, despite the over three dozen Donks who made it substantially bipartisan.

And so, the Death Race continues.....