With one of its characteristic prepositional-phrase headlines, The - TopicsExpress

With one of its characteristic prepositional-phrase headlines, The New York Times reports today that New York’s professional and cultural elite are also seeing their health plans disappear thanks to Obamacare. For most cancellation victims in other states, their plans have been deemed “substandard” because they lack pediatric dental or maternity coverage or birth control or something like that. But for members of professional associations living in New York, who get their coverage that way, the plans often do include such things are being cancelled as well. And the reason they’re being cancelled is actually the same — an essential part of Obamacare’s design: The rationale for disqualifying those policies, said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, was to prevent associations from selling insurance to healthy members who are needed to keep the new health exchanges financially viable. Siphoning those people, Mr. Levitt said, would leave the pool of health exchange customers “smaller and disproportionately sicker,” and would drive up rates. As I’ve been pointing out here for some time, this is the rationale behind all of the cancellations, whether or not your plan is deemed “substandard” because it lacks some “essential” service you’ll never use. For Obamacare to work, all but the very sickest among us must pay substantially more and take substantially less out of the system in the form of care. Reimbursements plummet, provider networks shrink, and deductibles and premiums rise. This is not the only way the system can bear the costs of treating people with pre-existing conditions — in fact, there were programs for that in nearly every state before Obamacare — but this is the only way insurers can treat those uninsurables exactly like everyone else and not like a special case, the way Obamacare demands. New York’s individual market was already so bad that people there aren’t suffering nearly as much as people in other states’ individual markets. But now the Obama-loving professionals of New York City, who had been spared those problems, get to experience Obamacare first-hand and see what millions of people around the nation are facing: “I couldn’t sleep because of it,” said Barbara Meinwald, a solo practitioner lawyer in Manhattan. Ms. Meinwald, 61, has been paying $10,000 a year for her insurance through the New York City Bar. A broker told her that a new temporary plan with fewer doctors would cost $5,000 more, after factoring in the cost of her medications. Ms. Meinwald also looked on the state’s health insurance exchange. But she said she found that those plans did not have a good choice of doctors, and that it was hard to even find out who the doctors were, and which hospitals were covered. “It’s like you’re blindfolded and you’re told that you have to buy something,” she said. The piece estimates that there are about 400,000 people facing this situation in New York State. - See more at: conservativeintel/2013/12/13/nycs-professional-and-artistic-class-horrified-to-discover-they-are-just-obamacare-cannon-fodder/#sthash.lOSw4NjP.dpuf