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MattK said:
Nemont- I literally feel your pain with the cost of healthcare with high deductibles. I have a question for you and feel you are best qualified to answer it. Is the cost of health insurance due to the ACA or the cost of healthcare? If I remember right, there is a cap that was put on how much an insurance company can make in commission that scared many insurance companies but now I see a huge increase in premiums. It seems as though insuring more people would reduce risk and not increase risk (at least in other forms of insurance). Do you know why the premiums have increased so quickly and would this trend have still hit without the ACA?
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Matt,

I know it is easy to hate insurance companies but they are bleeding money. Just getting an insurance card into people's hands doesn't bend the curve. It was a perfect storm sort: pent up demand and attracting a pool of sicker people then was rated for, The use of Special enrollment periods to abuse the system and our stellar congress refusing to keep it's word and funding the risk corridors that are in the law. You add to the rapidly increasing cost of Prescription drugs and hospital charges and that translate to what we are seeing. It is unsustainable.

Nemont
 
Nemont- Magic wand time...as I have been asked quite a few times on facebook as well as other places...If there is a solution, what would be the best course of action to solve the unsustainable rates? Is it a cap on premiums, government subsidies for insurance, cap on healthcare costs, let people go without, or let the market shake out the problem, or no feasible solution at this time? I'm sure you have thought about it and dealt with this problem over and over.
 
Nemont said:
Robg,

Elections have consequences. Sanders may have won going away but the Democrat party used a king maker system of super delegates to make sure HRC was the nominee for them. The basket of deplorables came en masse to make sure she didn't sit in the Oval office. Maybe the Democrat party should have a discussion about the process that allows super delegates to pick candidate who may not have main street support.

I wish Laslovich would have prevailed. Rosendale is not a good choice of Auditor.
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I'm sick to my stomach Rosendale won and have nothing but disdain for those who saw to it he did. Dumbfounded a born and raised Anaconda, MT. quality young man lost to a loudmouth Baltimore transplant who hates public lands. Only in Montana, shit, shit, shit....
 
Nemont said:
Ummm...have you looked about the the country and seen what the rates have done since 2014? In 2013 I paid $535 per month for a $2,500 deductible for me and my three kids, their mom get coverage through her job. 2014 rolls around and I select a Bronze plan that has a $6,000 deductible, $12,000 for the family and pay $606, 2015 same plan $625, 2016 down to just two kids rates are $705, Renewal rates for 2017 with a $6,500 deductible, $13,000 for the three of us is $1,172, a $467 a month increase. I am into my plan $27,000 before I am getting any money back. I have shopped on the exchange for literally Thousands of people, know it inside and out. It is ugly out there right now. I know my way around the system and the lowest I can get is is $958 per month with a $6,500 deductible, $13,000 family and $14,200 Max out of pocket. If you are tax credit eligible it is all different but our AGI is too high to qualify for a TC. So I am again a subsidizer not a subsidee.

Nemont
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Here's the deal, Nemont: No, I haven't. I am doing what I see every whiner in this country doing, only I'm not whining: I am giving you my personal anecdotal situation that I know first hand. I am tax credit eligible because, like Trump, I know how to plow my money back into myself (business) and reduce my taxable income. Unlike Joe The Idiot Plumber who thought he was going to have his taxes increase if he bought a business because he thought he was taxed on gross, I know better. I'm taxed on net which I can control. And while you are a subsidizer now, how does it feel? Under the old system, where I paid taxes on all my income and then paid for health insurance, other people, working for major corporations, were receiving health care as income first, and not paying taxes on it. To that extent I was subsidizing them. And we've already discussed the giant sucking sound of money going to insurance companies who's premiums are not based on risk but are, instead, adjusted to cover stock market performance of their investments and the need to pay their shareholders dividends.

We've had this argument before and I'll not go over it again. I repeat, I'm just telling you how Obamacare has stepped up and helped me. After all, isn't that what it's all about? ME ME ME? If not, then let's have all these anti-Obamacare whiners STFU. I'm tired of listening to them bitch about premiums and deductibles on the one hand, and then supporting the health insurance industry on the other. All because they no longer have their sugar daddy employer or government covering their ass like it used to be, because it's now covering my ass.

Half the whiners I know have not even tried to shop. Are rates going up? Yeah, so what? They were going up catastrophically before Obamacare, and with caps, high deducts and no pre-existing coverage. The old way sucked. The new way may suck, but is sucks less. The best way is universal single payer with health insurance company employees in the unemployment line with the buggy whip manufacturers. The private sector fails at MANY things and health care is one of them. Does the government suck? Yes, but if the private sector was all that then Uncle Sam would not have to step in. None of this government shit came about in a vacuum. It is all the result of a failure of . . . oh never mind.

I cede the floor and you can tell me all about your vast experience in health care: a system that everyone agreed sucked, except those who were making a killing off of it.
 
MattK said:
Nemont- Magic wand time...as I have been asked quite a few times on facebook as well as other places...If there is a solution, what would be the best course of action to solve the unsustainable rates? Is it a cap on premiums, government subsidies for insurance, cap on healthcare costs, let people go without, or let the market shake out the problem, or no feasible solution at this time? I'm sure you have thought about it and dealt with this problem over and over.
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The only solution that will be feasible is Medicare for all or some other iteration of single payer. We have no free market now and market forces do not bend the curve in Health Care. It is a place where more capacity doesn't lower the costs.

It is going to be interesting to watch the thing unfold for sure.
 
James Riley said:
Here's the deal, Nemont: No, I haven't. I am doing what I see every whiner in this country doing, only I'm not whining: I am giving you my personal anecdotal situation that I know first hand. I am tax credit eligible because, like Trump, I know how to plow my money back into myself (business) and reduce my taxable income. Unlike Joe The Idiot Plumber who thought he was going to have his taxes increase if he bought a business because he thought he was taxed on gross, I know better. I'm taxed on net which I can control. And while you are a subsidizer now, how does it feel? Under the old system, where I paid taxes on all my income and then paid for health insurance, other people, working for major corporations, were receiving health care as income first, and not paying taxes on it. To that extent I was subsidizing them. And we've already discussed the giant sucking sound of money going to insurance companies who's premiums are not based on risk but are, instead, adjusted to cover stock market performance of their investments and the need to pay their shareholders dividends.

We've had this argument before and I'll not go over it again. I repeat, I'm just telling you how Obamacare has stepped up and helped me. After all, isn't that what it's all about? ME ME ME? If not, then let's have all these anti-Obamacare whiners STFU. I'm tired of listening to them bitch about premiums and deductibles on the one hand, and then supporting the health insurance industry on the other. All because they no longer have their sugar daddy employer or government covering their ass like it used to be, because it's now covering my ass.

Half the whiners I know have not even tried to shop. Are rates going up? Yeah, so what? They were going up catastrophically before Obamacare, and with caps, high deducts and no pre-existing coverage. The old way sucked. The new way may suck, but is sucks less. The best way is universal single payer with health insurance company employees in the unemployment line with the buggy whip manufacturers. The private sector fails at MANY things and health care is one of them. Does the government suck? Yes, but if the private sector was all that then Uncle Sam would not have to step in. None of this government shit came about in a vacuum. It is all the result of a failure of . . . oh never mind.

I cede the floor and you can tell me all about your vast experience in health care: a system that everyone agreed sucked, except those who were making a killing off of it.
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I never said anything as such. So you can out Trump Trump, good on ya. For some of us who rape and pillage the tax code we can only hide so much in our business and that means I am not subsidy eligible.

I am not necessarily whining. I am was pointing out that for every story of people getting their preexisting conditions covered there is a story of guys and gals having to decide between paying the fine, breaking the bank or reducing their lifestyle because we are trapped in a system that has limited choices and rapidly rising costs. I used to be able find people different plans from multiple carriers and help them figure it out. I did it for over 20 years and the system was FUBAR no doubt. Uncle Sam stepped in and decided to pick the flowers and leave the weeds despite people telling them what would happen. Nobody has clean hands in the whole deal and now the question is where do we go from here?

So since it is all about you then I guess I will cede the floor to you and you can tell us all how we fix it and still get everything you have now.

Nemont
 
ACA was designed to fail. A simple grasp on elementary economic principles will lead you to that. It will become so painful that we'll plead for the government to save us, and swish...Single Payer.
 
Nemont said:
The only solution that will be feasible is Medicare for all or some other iteration of single payer. We have no free market now and market forces do not bend the curve in Health Care. It is a place where more capacity doesn't lower the costs.

It is going to be interesting to watch the thing unfold for sure.
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I'm all in for this.
 
 
noharleyyet said:
Kat...you ok with JayZ's pet words and Miley's characterizations for and of wimmens?
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I am not a feminist, I will get that out of the way now, nor do I feel anyone should have someone else's morality, based on their religion, imposed on another. I am an egalitarian. While I love diversity, and love to learn from other's cultures and experiences, that does not mean that I respect any culture's disrespect of the female gender, and thereby it's use to insult other men lower down in the caste system. For example, derogatorily calling men a "bitch" or a "c*nt" or a "p*ssy", a verbal castration, is not acceptable to me either. Most of the insults for men are actually related to women.

While I like some rap, I will boycott JayZ and other singers songs, regardless of genres, that are misogynistic. Having a daughter may have made a change? People can learn. And if the lyrics are addressing a cultural hypocrisy, like a political statement, I feel they are appropriate.

As to Miley, I may not choose her clothing choices or some actions, but I will not participate in "slut shaming" or dictating to any woman her choice of clothing or what is acceptable behavior for a "woman", as though what a woman wears has any bearing on how a man treats a woman. That is part of the patriarchal Indo-European rape/dominance culture. I feel each human being is responsible for their own actions.

Does the fact that I crawl under my suburban and do repair work make me less of a woman? Or my love of blacksmithing? In some men and women's eyes, yes. Hell, the dairy that I worked at in Kansas, the women were appalled that I would choose to milk, that was a man's job and always made snide remarks that I willingly milked cows. Does the fact that I have my hair long and loose most of the time, especially being older and grey, make me less of a woman? Or that I wear pants sometimes? To some cultures, absolutely. I have people give me sh*t that I hunt, or occasionally say f*ck (I have male friends that routinely use that word, yet they have an issue with me, being a woman, using it), or am not married with a man controlling me. As a woman, I will never make everyone happy. That's a given, but as long as I make me happy and can look myself in the mirror at how I treat myself, other people, animals and my environment - I'm good.
 
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Well, apparently I'm an idiot business owner then. And I have an idiot accounting firm since we can't figure out how to get my MAGI low enough to be subsidy-eligible. (Plus, if I destroyed my taxes that badly my ability to invest and grow my business would dry up too.)

Humana is leaving Utah after this year and the premium for my plan (just me and my wife, no kids) went from $208/month to $1236/month for an identical plan. I feel Nemont's pain. There are plenty of us that don't have the dependents or the expenses/deductions to qualify. And it sucks. Nobody I know would look at me and say I am rich, but Obama will say I don't pay my fair share.... and that right there is why the rural the American rose up and yelled, "Listen to me!"

I didn't vote for Trump (I wrote in John Huntsman Jr and this High Country News article explains why http://http://www.hcn.org/issues/43.22/jon-huntsman-jr.-a-pragmatic-westerner-for-the-white-house) but I can understand why there is a group of people that got sick of being constantly overlooked and ignored. Practically every other sub-group has been sought; from minorities to LGBTQ, poor, young, old, and women but nobody remembered the largest voting bloc and they finally stood up and were heard. Good for them. They've earned it.
 
To those that think ACA was actually intended to lower healthcare costs, I'd love to hear your thoughts...

1) Why did neither party propose repealing the law barring the Federal Government from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies for lower drug costs? (Source: http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/28/news/economy/medicare-drug-prices/) This "oversight" shows the Legislature, in both parties, was more worried about protecting corporate profits than lowering healthcare costs.

2) Why did the Dems not allow interstate competition of health insurance? The Republicans have sought this for years but insurance lobbyists want to prevent competition. Imagine a scenario where Wal-Mart couldn't allow its products/trucks to cross state lines and imagine the increased costs from a logistics and infrastructure standpoint. Even Sen. Wyden (D-Oregon) said with some minimum standards of consumer protection, interstate competition would help lower costs.

3) Why has neither party made an effort at tort/malpractice reform? I have never met a doctor that didn't bring up malpractice lawsuits as a major cost of doing business and cause of increased medical costs. A personal anecdote: I went to the local ER late one night after 10 days of a terrible chest infection. Prior to giving me an antibiotic, the MD ordered a chest CT Scan to rule out pertussis. After informing him that I was inoculated against pertussis, he said I may have a resistant strain. I then asked what the treatment was for pertussis and he answered "Zithromax". I asked what the treatment was if it was just a chest infection and not pertussis and he answered "Zithromax". I refused treatment due to the high costs of the test and he apologized and said he had to practice "preventative medicine". This was a highly-expensive test with absolutely no medical benefit and is only a small example of why our medical costs are so high.

My liberal neighbor is the head of trauma at one of the top trauma hospitals here in Utah. As a proud liberal, and practicing physician, he finally admitted that he was wrong and that the ACA was never supposed to work and was merely a stepping stone to its eventual collapse bringing on Single-Payer. That is only one man's opinion, but he is certainly qualified to have it.

I need to sign off now, I just saw a commercial that said if I, or somebody I know, used talcum powder that I may be entitled to a financial reward.
 
I very much agree with Grizzly that this was about protecting corporate profits. The data that I found that United Health Care's profits from 2014 to 2015 went from 10.3 Billion to 11 Billion does not seem to indicate that they are bleeding money. They may be losing money in the exchanges, but their increase in revenue from the expanded Medicare coverage seems to be making up for it.
 
While having had a TBI, spend alot of time researching neurology of TBI's, as well as the interconnecting issues of growing Alzheimers and dementia in our first world populations, I do not believe in subsidizing a private business with MT taxpayer dollars, while they privatize their profits, so I voted against that Montana ballot initiative. If the government wants to deal with research for the exploding human problem, that is one issue, but I don't want fearmongering of an issue to be used for privatization, with no or less oversight of what is being done with the funds, than if it was a federal or private grant.

Moreso, I would hate to see what is already public become privatized, for a segment to profit from, whether it be our public lands, on a state or federal level. So imagine my concern and eyebrows going up when I saw this news article a few days before the election, While You Weren’t Looking, Donald Trump Released a Plan to Privatize America’s Roads and Bridges. This includes water systems.

Under Trump's plan—at least as it's written (more on that in a minute)—the federal government would offer tax credits to private investors interested in funding large infrastructure projects, who would put down some of their own money up front, then borrow the rest on the private bond markets. They would eventually earn their profits on the back end from usage fees, such as highway and bridge tolls (if they built a highway or bridge) or higher water rates (if they fixed up some water mains). So instead of paying for their new roads at tax time, Americans would pay for them during their daily commute. And of course, all these private developers would earn a nice return at the end of the day.
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From the Plan
Remember too that with the decline of manufacturing in our country, infrastructure projects are one of the few high paying jobs that could employ the less well educated segment of our population. At present one-sixth of the 18 to 34 year old prime working age population is either unemployed or in prison and the minority group statistics are even worse. Infrastructure could help solve this sociological tragedy.
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Are they proposing chain gangs like in the South? I can see the privatized penal system hiring out workers to the privatized infrastructure businesses, benefiting the wealthier areas of course.

To encourage investors to commit such large amounts, and to reduce the cost of the financing, government would provide a tax credit equal to 82% of the equity amount. This would lower the cost of financing the project by 18% to 20% for two reasons.
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I can see this Trump privatization model spin being applied to all sorts of public interests, oh, let's say our public lands management ...
 
James Riley said:
Remove the mandate and the insurance industry: socialism for all sick, wounded, weak costly people.
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Sounds like you (and Nemont) are talking a government takeover of the insurance industry, which is a toxic idea right now. I think a good number of republicans understand the need for such a thing, but it would cost them their job. It seems like a socialized high risk pool to give the insurance companies some predictability and keep the free market aspect. It's a total gift to the insurance companies, but it is a viable path forward. Rosendale was blasting Bullock for getting rid of this socialized high risk pool... I mean talk about hypocrisy bringing that back, but it's a possible solution to save face.

I believe truly "repealing" Obamacare would subject all us 50+ year old white men who own businesses to underwriting and we'd be in for epic increases. I doubt if the Republicans would do that to their base but I don't rule out much these days.
 
I cussed myself for shooting a bull in a stupid bad canyon just before dark on Monday. But, after reading my Facebook feed, with entire spectrum of gloating/ranting/hope/despair, I think every election year I will shoot a bull in a location requiring a two day extraction.

Usually happy to get to a connection and catch up on emails. Tonight, not so sure about that.

Fortunately, the Hunt Talk crew is a good group of citizen activist the 1,460 days in between elections. Those airing their opinions on FB seem to be heavily weighted toward the mindset that citizen government only requires one action every quadrennial.

No matter who won, for me, public lands remain a "Cold Dead Hands" issue, both locally and nationally.

No matter who you voted for, the fact that you voted gives you grounds for an opinion on the direction of this nation. Those who did not vote, your opinions have no use here.
 
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