Editor: Thanks for the article articulating some of the issues that are surfacing now that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is underway (“The Faces of Obamacare,” March 6).
I have been working with it via my job and I see the good, the bad and the ugly in it. As stated, there are many folks who have accessed health insurance that couldn’t before due to finances or prohibitive and inhumane rules like having a pre-existing condition (who doesn’t?). It requires insurance companies to cover areas that they might have not before.
However, this practice that is surfacing that allows insurance companies that are able to sell through the health care exchange to not reimburse providers adequately enough so that providers are not accepting the insurance purchased through the exchange is dastardly. Seriously folks, we now have to buy insurance and what they sell us won’t reimburse to the appropriate level. That should be against the law.
This underlines the real problem with the health care/insurance issue in our country. Medical care for profit DOESN’T WORK, at least for the people who need the care. Human need has to trump profit here (and in many other areas) and until we have a single payer system where all Americans are covered under a Medi-Cal or Medicare-like system, then we will be plagued by our well-being being thrown under the bus. We need to keep organizing and making our voices heard until they are!
Let your representatives and the feds know what your experience is with this coverage so that they can possibly remedy some of the issues while we press for universal care.
Lynn Kerman, Eureka
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The Faces of Obamacare
This article appears in Renewal.
Actually, I believe the low reimbursement rates are a requirement of Obamacare, not because the insurance companies are being “greedy”..
MediCal and MediCare have always offered among the lowest reimbursement rates in the country. My understanding was that, as part of the ACA, those reimbursement rates were recently being cut yet another 10%. Insurance companies choosing to participate in the ACA had to agree to pay the ACA’s lower reimbursement rates. That’s just one reason many medical providers aren’t accepting ACA qualified insurance while still accepting patients with non- ACA policies.
Trying to do some checking to confirm my understanding. While insurance companies aligned with ACA aren’t mentioned, the link below says that MediCal and MediCare reimbursements should be increasing through 2014 as a means of getting more providers to get on board with the ACA:
https://www.advisory.com/Research/Physicia…