Northwest Indiana Discussion

The White House used a Sunday morning statement to admit that only 1.1 million people have used the federal Obamacare website to sign up for the president’s healthcare network by Christmas Day.

News reports and advocacy websites say roughly 1 million people have enrolled with health-benefit companies via state websites, including 400,000 in California and 157,000 in New York, by the Dec. 24 deadline, which allows coverage starting Jan. 1.

The 2 million federal and state signups are roughly two-thirds the planned goal of 3.3 million enrollments by Dec. 31. They’re also only one-third of the 7 million customers sought by March 31.

The total reported signups are at least 3 million fewer than the 5 million people whose health-insurance policies were cancelled prior to Christmas by President Barack Obama’s ambitious tax-and-healthcare scheme.

The minus-3-million score is only partially offset by the extension of Medicaid coverage to perhaps 2 million other people, few of whom earn enough to afford commercial insurance.

Hospital staff in Northern Virginia are turning away sick people on a frigid Thursday morning because they can’t determine whether their Obamacare insurance plans are in effect.

Patients in a close-in DC suburb who think they’ve signed up for new insurance plans are struggling to show their December enrollments are in force, and health care administrators aren’t taking their word for it.

In place of quick service and painless billing, these Virginians are now facing the threat of sticker-shock that comes with bills they can’t afford.

‘They had no idea if my insurance was active or not!’ a coughing Maria Galvez told MailOnline outside the Inova Healthplex facility in the town of Springfield.

She was leaving the building without getting a needed chest x-ray.

‘The people in there told me that since I didn’t have an insurance card, I would be billed for the whole cost of the x-ray,’ Galvez said, her young daughter in tow. ‘It’s not fair – you know, I signed up last week like I was supposed to.’

The x-ray’s cost, she was told, would likely be more than $500.

Galvez said she enrolled in a Carefirst Blue Cross bronze plan at a cost of about $450 per month through healthcare.gov, three days before Christmas.

‘No one has sent me a bill,’ she said.

A similar situation frustrated Mary, an African-American woman small businesswoman who asked MailOnline not to publish her last name. She was leaving the Inova Alexandria Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia with two family members.

‘I had chest pains last night, and they took me in the emergency room,’ Mary said. ‘They told me they were going to admit me, but when I told them I hadn’t heard from my insurance company since I signed up, they changed their tune.’

Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini told CNBC on Wednesday that Obamacare has failed to attract the uninsured, and he offered a scenario in which the insurance company could be forced to pull out of program.

The company will be submitting Obamacare rates for 2015 on May 15.

“Are they going to be double-digit [increases] or are we going to get beat up because they’re double-digit or are we just going to have to pull out of the program?” Bertolini asked in a “Squawk Box” interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Those questions can’t be answered until we see the population we have today. And we really don’t have a good view on that.”

He said that so far, Obamacare has just shifted people who were insured in the individual market to the public exchanges where they could get a better deal on a subsidy for coverage. “We see only 11 percent of the population is actually people that were firmly uninsured that are now insured. So [it] didn’t really eat into the uninsured population.”

For Obamacare to work better, it needs more flexibility and choice of insurance programs, Bertolini said. “We need to make it a lot more simpler for people. There needs to be more choice. When you get more choice, you make it more of a market and you get more people in the program.”

[color=#0000BFToo bad your fellow repubs refused to provide any input in writing of it/color]

Yeah, Chuckie, what a train wreck your leader caused. My daughter and son-in-law get to pay a penalty because of the lack of medical insurance.

Yeah, Chuckie, what a train wreck your leader caused. My daughter and son-in-law get to pay a penalty because of the lack of medical insurance.

Recently in his State of the State address, Governor Pence reaffirmed his opposition to expanding Medicaid in Indiana.1
it's hard to fathom why he is doing this—except out of spite—since expanding Medicaid would be a huge bargain for Indiana (100% of the costs would be borne by the federal government through 2016, and 90% thereafter), and 181,930 residents would benefit, according to an estimate from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Amazing how things never change.

Congressman Jim Moran (D-Va.) is voicing concern that the entirety Affordable Care Act could unravel because not enough young people are signing up.

More than 40,000 Virginians signed up for health insurance on the federal exchange last month. Only 27 percent of those were young adults — the group needed to fund the new system. Moran says he doesn’t think those numbers are going to get much better.

“I’m afraid that the millennials, if you will, are less likely to sign up. I think they feel more independent, I think they feel a little more invulnerable than prior generations,” Moran says. “But I don’t think we’re going to get enough young people signing up to make this bill work as it was intended to financially.”

If Moran’s prediction is correct, the whole law could unravel. He says there just isn’t enough incentive for healthy young people to sign up for insurance.

“And, frankly, there’s some legitimacy to their concern because the government spends about $7 for the elderly for every $1 it spends on the young,” Moran says.

Overall health rank
Mississippi: 50
Indiana: 41

Obesity
Mississippi: 49
Indiana: 43

Smoking
Mississippi: 44
Indiana: 44

Diabetes
Mississippi: 49
Indiana: 40

Air pollution
Mississippi: 33
Indiana: 49

Cancer deaths
Mississippi: 49
Indiana: 42

Cardiovascular deaths
Mississippi: 50
Indiana: 39

Infant mortality
Mississippi: 50
Indiana: 45

Lack of health insurance
Mississippi: 34
Indiana: 16

Physical inactivity
Mississippi: 48
Indiana: 41

Premature death
Mississippi: 50
Indiana: 39

Public health funding
Mississippi: 32
Indiana: 48

Heart disease
Mississippi: 38
Indiana: 43

High blood pressure
Mississippi: 49
Indiana: 36

Median household income
Mississippi: 50
Indiana: 37
Preterm birth

Source: http://www.americashealthrankings.org/rankings