PNHP, from a story I saw linked over at Corrente Wire:
Insurers using high drug cost sharing to scare away patients with expensive chronic disorders
AIDS advocates say drug coverage in some marketplace plans is inadequate
The nation's new health-care law says insurers can't turn anyone away, even people who are already sick. But some companies, patient advocates say, have found a way to discourage the chronically ill from enrolling in their plans: offer drug coverage too skimpy for those with expensive conditions.
Some plans sold on the online insurance exchanges, for instance, don't cover key medications for HIV, or they require patients to pay as much as 50 percent of the cost per prescription in co-insurance - sometimes more than $1,000 a month.
The fear is that they are putting discriminatory plan designs into place to try to deter certain people from enrolling by not covering the medications they need, or putting policies in place that make them jump through hoops to get care," said John Peller, vice president of policy for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago.
As the details of the benefits offered by the new health-care plans become clear, patients with cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune diseases also are raising concerns, said Marc Boutin, executive vice president of the National Health Council, a coalition of advocacy groups for the chronically ill.
The easiest way [for insurers] to identify a core group of people that is going to cost you a lot of money is to look at the medicines they need and the easiest way to make your plan less appealing is to put limitations on these products,â Boutin said.
As I say in every one of these diaries about the ACA, it shouldn't shock us that insurers are making out like bandits because
they wrote the law. We keep finding ways they've pre-gamed the system to preserve and expand their obscene profit margins, from narrow networks to
paying out much less than they should.
Free markets, in my opinion, are never efficient. But they are especially disastrous when you're bargaining over a "commodity" that someone literally cannot live without: their health. Unless we eliminate the profit motive from the health system, we're never going to provide a truly equitable system.
According to a survey just released by Harvard's Institute of Politics, Millenials are getting increasingly fed up with the ACA status quo.
18-29 year olds believe the law will bring higher prices and lower care, whether you ask them about Obamacare or the ACA:
Whether you agree that they have a realistic view of the law (I would tend to think they're right), their perception that the Exchange plans aren't a good deal is going to affect their sign-up rate. That will have a major impact on premiums, going forward, unless a serious and convincing effort to sell the law is made for them.
Their negative view of the law has had a dramatic effect on the partisan identification of 18-24 year olds:
Thankfully, Republican support hasn't increased. This is an indication that they feel the Democratic party is to the right of them (a perception I again agree with). Their support for Congressional Republicans has plummeted:
This can probably be attributed to the government shutdown.
Now more bad news: black millennials report a much lower likelihood of voting from a year ago:
If I had to guess, I would say this probably has to do with the failure to do anything about the economy, which is hitting the black community especially hard (as always). The slight uptick in Hispanic likelihood to vote probably comes from the current focus on immigration reform.
The most surprising statistic is that 52% of 18-24 year olds would vote to recall Obama, if the United States, like more democratic countries, had that mechanism in it's constitution:
They still hate Romney, though.
I think this clearly indicates that the ACA is a major flop with Millenials, and is likely to hurt the party long term. I think we should follow Bernie Sander's lead and push for the Exchanges to be replaced with a single payer system. That would be a winning platform for 2014.