Finally, the evidence is in. Obamacare is significantly hurting a segment of the US economy.
From Bloomberg:
Early evidence suggests that the Affordable Care Act is working — at least in one important respect, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Analysts Nicole Dussault, Maxim Pinkovskiy, and Basit Zafar state that the primary purpose of this law “is not to protect our health per se, but to protect our finances.” And they’ve found a big difference between indebtedness trends in states that embraced the Medicaid expansion versus the ones that did not…
U.S. counties that had a particularly high uninsured rate prior to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act have seen the per capita collection balance fall if their state embraced the Medicaid expansion. If not, the collection balance continued to climb:
Will someone think of the debt collectors… Ohh the humanity.
robert thompson
Yeah it always causes a pause when I tell tell RWNJs family members that this is the only civilized country in the world where you not only lose your tiny plot of earth but also become impoverished when you get sick. And you will get sick. And yes I know I am fudging the truth a bit about us being civilized.
Luthe
Oh, they’ve just moved into collecting student loan debt and running scummy title loan companies. There’s always another scam.
Felanius Kootea
Hahahaha – suck it debt collectors. After that John Oliver segment, I can’t wait for them to vanish.
? Martin
I imagine that opposition to Medicaid expansion correlates strongly to all manner of other fuck-the-poor policies right out to high-end job creation, education access, and so on.
C. Isaac
When I was younger, fresh into my first apartment out of the parent’s house, a thief cracked open the community mailbox cover with a crowbar and stole credit cards, bills, etc. All to sell to others for identity theft purposes. Out of my mailbox was a fresh box of checks, and like a fool (I was much dumber back then), had my phone number and DL# under my name on the header, making them prime material.
What followed was a nightmare of ruined finances (my bank cleared all the fake checks) where my bank account was drained the week before Christmas and I ended up having to go to each individual PD around the D/FW metroplex (and there’s a lot) and provide affidavits about what happened in their jurisdictions as I was being reported for check fraud because not only were the bastards still writing bad checks under my name, but had printed a fake DL with my DL # on it thanks to my foolishness.
Once I’d gotten past the criminal part of it, and the police were mollified that it wasn’t me, then the debt collector swarm started. Once the bank had refunded me the lost money and then put me on the then, in beta, Visa Check Card program as Telecheck (which vendors used to approve/reject checks at the time) had essentially blacklisted me and no one would take my checks.
And oh my god was it relentless. Utterly, unceasingly relentless. There were times the debt went form one agency to another and they demanded all new copies of documentation I’d already sent out to the last one to prove my innocence. I’d get called at 11pm, midnight, 1am and all through the daylight hours. Often times different operators from the same company. They were rude, abrasive, often cruel, and downright miserable.
I was one of the first people I know to get rid of my landline for a cell phone only, and I still change its number every two years out of precaution because it took over five years for them to well and truly stop.
So, I can wholeheartedly say, without reservation, that debt collectors can all go to fucking hell.
Mike J
Foxhunter
Georgia might be rethinking their rejection letter.
Patricia Kayden
Thanks again, President Obama.
J R in WV
A good friend was able to retire the end of last month, because she was able to obtain reasonable health insurance from Obamacare. She’s several years away from Medicare age, but was otherwise all set to retire to join her hubby who retired quite a while ago from his heavy construction work.
I love our President, and will miss him when he has moved on to the civilian world. I hope he doesn’t have trouble adapting to the lower level of stress!!
And I’m contributing to Hillary’s campaign regularly. We won’t hit the FEC limits, not that well off, other things we support, too. But all we can afford! I agree that many women who seem Republican do change when they go into that voting booth.
My Mom was a life-long Republican who abandoned them the last two elections she could vote in before she died of her COPD. She said “Don’t tell your Dad, but I just can’t vote for candidates who don’t support pro-choice!” I think she lost either a relative or a dear friend to a botched “illegal” abortion many years ago, and wasn’t going to see that age come again if she could do anything to stop it.
And screw the debt collectors, all of them! We lost a book of checks once from our mailbox. Rural, didn’t even need a crowbar. At least we only had to make one police report, and that was hard as the state cop told Mrs J “How much did you lose? $7 for a box of checks?” Like he had no idea about the pain in the ass identity theft is…
Brachiator
@Foxhunter:
I wonder how many states will come to love Medicaid expansion once President Obama’s term ends. It’s just ridiculous how some people’s fear and hatred of Obama and the Democrats prevents them from embracing a program that actually helps them.
smith
@Brachiator:
They’ve been systematically lied to by both R politicians and the media for years, for reasons that have nothing to do with healthcare. It’s just a particular example of the more general fact that Dem policies poll very favorably when the connection Democrats is not mentioned, but poorly when it is. With Obamacare, though, I think we’re transitioning to a status like Social Security and Medicare. The Rs no longer dare to advocate simply abolishing it — they have to pretend to offer something better.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@C. Isaac: Damn. Word for word, in 1998 this is what happened to me, minus the DL number. They just made a fake license with my name on it anyway. The one smart thing I did was immediately file a police report – saved my bacon, it really truly did. Regardless, for a brief time I had warrants and the whole nine yards, and there was NO system in place for dealing with identity theft back then, so the collectors just kept coming. Took ten years for the last ones to throw in the towel.
Brachiator
@smith:
Of course, Trump has promised to repeal Obamacare as soon as he is elected.
The Democrats have an advantage. Obamacare exists, and has helped people. In theory, the Republicans must do more than simply offer a phantom insurance plan, as they have done in the past. But I suspect that they will just say that Obamacare costs to much and so has to be eliminated. They will also claim that it only helped poor people and illegal immigrants, and those people didn’t deserve health care in the first place.
rikyrah
Couldn’t happen to a better bunch of lowlife muthaphuckas.
Trollhattan
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
My credit union for many years used SSN for the checking account number. So “out there” on a gazillion microfiches are images of my SSN for all the world to see. Provided they can find a reader and have the time while chasing those darn kids off their lawns. Think I also had my phone # and DL# to get around all that pesky inking them in every time.
Iowa Old Lady
@Trollhattan: The University of Michigan used my SSN plus one digit as my student ID.
gene108
Too bad Obama did not bother to sign the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act that overwhelmingly passed in the House, in January 2011.
So many, many jobs could have been passed.
gene108
@Iowa Old Lady:
NCSU, when I went there in the early to mid 1990’s, used our SSN’s as our ID’s for test results and such for large classes.
Test results would be posted outside the lecture hall and your grade was next to your SSN.
At least I was forced to memorize my SSN. :-)
Reggie Mantle
@Iowa Old Lady:
University of NC just used the SS#. And you had to write it on damn near everything: checks cashed at the student store (ATMs were just starting to appear), exam books, etc.
RaflW
OT, but I’m taking liberties since it’s tagged as a “fuck the poor” thread: Trump is a deadbeat. I am not at all surprised that he fails to pay bills. I’m sure in his inflated self-regard, he has a petty, bullshit excuse for each and every bill he has failed to pay. Somehow I think if I failed to pay 3,500 plumbers, employees, lawyers and other assorted vendors and workers, I’d be in jail. But the uber-rich and uber-egoed seem to avoid that fate. Not just avoid it, but get fvking TV shows and (probably) major party nomination for President. Sad!
scav
@RaflW: I’m enjoying that his justification is that they were shoddy contractors, which is why he’s not paying them, as per the American way — where a contract is only a contract so long as he feels like it. Plus, so the marvelously yuugely successful businessman can’t distinguish good contractors from bad until after the fact? Just the guy to entrust with national economy and defense.
Mike in NC
@Brachiator:
Imagine what Drumpfcare would look like. Another con job like all his other scams.
lollipopguild
@Iowa Old Lady: For years the state of Kentucky used your Social sec. number on your drivers lic. as your lic number. They finally changed it.
gene108
@Brachiator:
Part of the problem was the Great Recession.
People were (and are) so worried about keeping their jobs, they just could not see why Obama was “wasting time” on health insurance reform and not focusing on jobs, jobs, jobs*.
I do not think most people bother to think about medical bills until they are actually faced with them. Medical bills are an existential issue lurking in the background for most people, who figure their chances of getting hit by a bus, getting cancer, etc. are low enough they do not normally lose sleep over it, unlike say, if they thought their company was going to lay them off in 2009, because so many people were losing jobs and no one was hiring.
Even people with insurance do not think much about medical bills. They just think most of their medical bills will not exceed the cost of (a) childbirth, (b) routine doctors visits, (c) some prescriptions for a throat infection or some generic drugs to control hypertension, for example, and (d) medications and doctors visits for kids.
People sort of know they are one bad traffic accident or cancer diagnosis away from losing everything, but it’s not something people worry about day-to-day, so they are not always worried about health insurance versus more pressing immediate needs.
I think this is part of the problem we’ve been faced with in selling the public on how important Obamacare is and why it needs to be strengthened.
And it’s one reason Republicans can try to push through radical disastrous changes to Social Security, for example, because retirement income is not an immediate thought on the minds of younger folks.
* IIRC, one of the major platforms of the 2010 Republican wave was a promise to get people more jobs, though they failed to follow through once in office. But no one in the MSM really bothered to follow-up on why they were so vigorously ignoring what they ran for office on.
Rand Careaga
@C. Isaac: About a decade ago I ordered a Thanksgiving “turducken” online from an outfit in New Orleans. A few days later, some algorithm having been providentially tripped, the credit card folks called up to ask whether I was in the process of purchasing $1200 in consumer electronics from an outfit in New York. Indeed I was not. They reviewed the last few transactions. There were just two after the Thanksgiving fowl: a tiny payment for just two dollars, and then the electronics.
I thanked them for their vigilance, and they said that they would close the account and send me a replacement card. After a month, with a linked online payment coming up for renewal, I called up to inquire about the replacement. “We sent it to your new address,” they replied. “Do your accounts people even talk to your fraud people?” I screeched. It was eventually straightened out, including the reversal of the late charge that had accrued for non-payment of the bill sent to the hijackers’ address, but the next time my security clearance came up a few years later I was asked about the homes I maintained in Virginia Beach, where I have never been, and Riverside CA, in which I have not set foot since Nixon was president.
I’m guessing that the New Orleans outfit might have hired temps for the holiday traffic. The turducken was nothing to write home about.
Jack the Second
You know, the hilarious thing about a series of debt collectors coming after you after identity theft is that each one had to know the debt was bad before selling it to the next.
And yet none of them was honest enough to drop it and there was always another sucker willing to buy it.
ShadeTail
@Jack the Second:
Actually, I seriously doubt that. I think they’re too stupid and greedy to be bothered with keeping track of that. All they see is, “DEBT! LET’S COLLECT!” and don’t bother with the finer details of whether or not it’s legitimate.
Enzymer
@Rand Careaga: kind of off topic, but what was the terducken shop with the mediocre product. I had some good ones when I lived in NO, but my contacts have moved on. I do remember Breaux Bridge as being a source of excellent Cajun meats including turducken.
r€nato
@ShadeTail: no, they fucking don’t care. I was once hounded by a collection agency for a small debt (way < $100) I owed to Macy's. I paid Macy's after the due date, Macy's cashed my check… but then they sent my account to collections anyway.
Trying to convince the debt collection assholes that I had paid that bill – let alone finding out how to get it all straightened out – was impossible. Literally impossible. These cretins had no interest whatsoever in listening to my story, they would not let me talk long enough to tell them I had a canceled check and to whom should I fax this so we can straighten this out. They literally would not listen to me. They had been trained in very aggressive and predatory phone sales tactics of how to be confrontational and to put the other person on the defensive by changing the subject and so on. I swear I spoke to at least five of these douchebags before I figured out that their only job was to squeeze money out of people; they had no training whatsoever in how to deal with people who did not in fact owe any money.
All debt collectors should die in a fire… after being drawn and quartered.
Bean
Well, ACA didn’t kill my job. UHC did a fine job of that on its own. This week UHC finally released their final ACA state list. Harken Health will handle Illinois, and two others. UHC will have a presence in VA, NV and one more(I don’t feel like looking it up), and in the surprise move, will outsource the actual servicing of those accounts to Health Plan Services. The trend looked like they would keep about 40 of us on to service the few states we were staying in, so the outsourcing news was the bomb drop of the week. An entire department will be liquidated by the end of 1st quarter in 2017, and I and about 200 people will be out of jobs. UHC informed of this decision yesterday, and today my boss asked me about team morale and how to improve it. We still have 800,000 members to service this year so we need a team, but it’s going to be a difficult rest of the year jobwise.
To be fair, UHC is doing their best to place us internally, but for me at least it’s not going well. I telecommute and am over 75 miles in any direction of a UHC office which means I need to look for telecommute jobs to save on gas. I am either overqualified or under qualified for any jobs posted at the moment but eight months seems like a long way off to make plans for the future.
I am sad, I loved my work as a consumer affairs advocate. I am not sad to see UHC leave the market, losing a billion dollars created some opprobrious conduct such as the one they tried in New Orleans. After two weeks of trying to find solutions for members and other networks, UHC ended up negotiating the contract and staying with All Saints. Still, I don’t think I am cut out to be a company person, I never was good cheerleading for a company whose mission I can’t support anymore.
Ruckus
@efgoldman:
Had one of those last week at the VA.