Obamacare: Low Youth Sign-Ups; Big Aid to Wall Street January 15, 2014 10:06AM The regimes Health and Human Services Department yesterday finally released some demographic numbers for those who have signed up for Obamacare so far. In terms of Wall Street/cartel math, 40% of enrollees need to be in the young, healthy bracket, in order to guarantee profits to the insurers, but only 24% of enrollees are. Moreover, only 50% of new enrollees have paid their first months premium, as of Jan. 9, according to insurance cartel consultant Robert Laszewski, who further notes, realistically—how many can be expected to make good on their payment even by the end of the month? Bad for insurance companies? Not at all. Obamacare has a set of measures built in to subsidize the insurers under any circumstances. The intent of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) right from the start, is corporatist, that is to say, fascist: The government and the insurance wing of Wall Street are acting as one and the same. Brian Schweitzer, former governor (D) of Montana, denounced the nature of Obamacare again this week in a TV interview, saying that it guarantees profits and bail-outs to the insurance sector. In December, he said, weve had five years of Obama, [who], I would argue, in many cases has been a corporatist. A neat $1.071 trillion is to be funneled into the Wall Street insurance sector over the next 10 years, projects the Congressional Budget Office, cited in a Jan. 13 weeklystandard blog post, Bailing Out Health Insurers and Helping Obamacare. There are many kinds of special measures in Obamacare to guarantee profit-rates for insurers. For example, there is a Reinsurance Program, in which, for individual policies, the government steps in and pays for 80% of any expense the insurance company pays for an individual claim greater than $60,000; the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposes to lower this threshold to $45,000. Another support to insurers, is that Obamacare will grant them leeway for fraud in their calculatons of administrative costs and profit rates, which are nominally supposed to be regulated under the Risk Corridor Program. This simply limits losses for insurers. Robert Laszewski explains that if an insurance company expects its costs in a given year to be X, and those costs end up being more than X plus 2%, then taxpayers will come to that insurance companys rescue. Once an insurance company covers that initial 2% in unexpected costs, taxpayers will cover at least 80% of any additional costs the insurer accrues. A bill was filed in the Senate last November against this, by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), which would dis-allow a bail-out through the Risk Corridor Program. Such a bail-out was specifically proposed in November by the Health & Human Services Department in its annual ACA report (Proposed HHS Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters for 2015), and a public comment period on it just ended. See EIR Single-Payer Wall Street Bailout: More Fed Aid to Private Insurers, December 13, 2013. Other patterns of the newly-released enrollment numbers under Obamacare show that, of those who have signed up in the first three months, 55% are age 45 to 64. People 55 to 64 — the last decade before people become eligible for Medicare — represented the largest group, at 33%. Nearly 80% of those who have selected a plan qualified for Federal subsidies to reduce their premiums, officials said.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:14:31 +0000