"Mental health bills may limit young Americans' clout"
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High mental health costs for young adults threaten to undermine a key assumption of the Affordable Care Act: that insuring more young people will lower costs because they are healthier and require less expensive care."
The Obama administration estimates that 2.7 million people between the ages of 18 and 30 need to buy health insurance through the federal and state marketplaces to offset the health care needs of older Americans buying insurance as required by the Affordable Care Act. But while those younger Americans may not have physical ailments, they are more likely to have mental health issues that will now be treated the same as physical problems because of the law.
Treating a young person for depression costs about $7,000, the BeyondCore study showed, about the same as the cost for treating an older person for high blood pressure. But doctors diagnose twice as many people with depression as for high blood pressure, Sengupta said. (CEO of data analysis firm BeyondCore)
Some analysts have predicted the insurance market could go into a "death spiral" without enough young insurance customers buying into the market and driving down rates for everyone. If older and less healthy people dominate the insurance pool, they will end up costing more in benefits and insurers will have to raise premiums to compensate for the higher costs.
So far, however, that hasn't been the case, said Jen Mishory, deputy director of the Young Invincibles, a non-profit group dedicated to persuading young people to buy insurance.
Kelly Kennedy, USA TODAY
23 comments:
No problem at all.
We'll just print more money.
The solution is a campaign of public service ads telling young people that depression makes you cool.
Do the liberal arts majors who dreamt up ObamaCare not have access to actuaries? This is a total clusterfuck created by people with overweening egos and neither experience nor common sense.
Pogo, do you know of ANY medical professionals (not including Rahm's commie MD brother) who were consulted re ObamaCare?
They had access to WebMD, so...
"Mental health issues."
Yes, put yourself, because you're feeling a little down, in the hands of the sadistic freaks who are drawn to psychiatry like flies to rotting meat. Perfect recipe for a ruined life.
Maybe the young people wouldn't be so depressed if they were less oppressed by the Nanny State and are coming to the realization that their future is completely fucked.
When all hope for a future and any initiative has been beaten out of you and the blows just keep coming, wouldn't YOU be depressed. I'm just glad that I'm old and will not live to see the results of this socialist train to nowhere. I do feel very very sorry for my Grandchildren and their children as they will never know what it was like to be free.
Sadly, there are tons of leftist MDs around. They grew up suckling from the media and public school socialism teat, and were weaned on University collectivist cant.
The AMA and many other major MD orgs are all completely socialist.
In 2005 I tried getting a paper published criticizing a pro-single payer JAMA article, and it was rejected everywhere (I'd had about 40 other papers or book chapters published).
The JAMA editor who had written the article I critiqued had personally rejected my article, so I called JAMA and pointed out the conflict of interest, asking for a different reviewer.
That editor called me and screamed at me on the phone for about 15 minutes. At first, I seriously thought a crazy patient had called me.
Some of the reviewers suggest that I was 'immoral' for opposing single payer.
So a lot of doctors loooove Mugabecare.
When I mentioned to my co-workers that we had to reject Medicare patients because the reimbursements were below the cost of providing the service, they yelped.
Then I told them the solution is easy: take a 40% pay cut.
No one volunteered.
Young people are already in debt up to their eyeballs from student loans.
They cannot possibly afford Mugabecare rates meant to extract from the young and give to the old, the illegals, and insurance workers.
But Sebelius keeps chanting, "But it's got electrolytes!"
Pogo, I have a relative who is a primary care MD. Huuuge Obama supporter, hardcore leftist. He has been yelping about the need for universal, single-payer government insurance for two decades. He is hospital-employed and works in a clinic 20 miles from the hospital.
So. Last month he was informed (1) You're getting a $30K salary cut, (2) You can't waste time driving to the hospital to see your patients, we'll have a hospitalist do that; (3) You need to pick a staffer who will be let go (4) You need to see more patients each day and cut back on the 8 weeks per year you take off.
He's shocked. "I meant that other people should pay for this, not me" he moaned to me.
I've been telling him for four years that this was going to happen and he was totally in denial. Now he wants to retire at 50 because doctoring "isn't fun anymore". But he has four kids in college. And six cars. And a boat. And a farm in another state.
Welcome to the reality you wanted.
Mental health issues and anguish that arise after the shocked awakening hits. They can't find full time employment and are now forced to purchase expensive health insurance.
ACA - you promised it was affordable!
@Michael Haz
I've seen the same thing. Math is a cruel teacher.
Yet amazingly, these guys still cannot make the connection between Mugabecare and how their job is changing for the worse.
They think their bosses are just being mean or capitalist or something.
And next year, when we all lose our good employer-based health plans, they're gonna bitch about 'leaving'. But where?
Christalmighty, there isn't a big enough palm or a big enough face.
@Pogo Oh yeah. He whines about "Why does the hospital get to keep all the money it makes? WE send OUR patients there. WE should get that money."
Then he bitches about how unfair the AMT is.
It's amazing some people can pick out their own socks in the morning.
It's like only one part of their brain works, the one that lets them take care of patients.
Everything else is mush.
On a happier note, we actually have a committee aimed at -I'm not kidding- entrepreneurship!
I lose respect for medical doctors when we converse about anything political, and I suppose they lose respect for me.
And it happens every time.
It convinces me repeatedly, that yes, they are really smart people. About medicine especially, and a good many things besides, but just as dumb on other things, or worse than that because they are used to being the smartest in class and such. They know where they stand academically relating to other people generally.
So it surprises them when challenged by a regular bloke. And I notice tend to go straight to fallacious argumentation. Straight to rhetoric. As if that will not be noticed.
I'll say something like, "If 17 trillion acknowledged on the books, closer to 100 trillion for real doesn't lift one out of their partisan fog *asl lifting up motion* then nothing will."
A brief pause denoting processing, his response to that apparent challenge, "If Krugman's not alarmed..."
My immediate impulse is to punch him in the face for appealing to authority like that, and one I reject already, I must attack that, and employed by an authority I reject in advance, I must attack that, and authorized by an authority (Nobel) that I already reject for the political nonsense they continually pull, I must attack that. Right there, an appeal to a stack of pre-rejected authoritahs and I'm automatically infuriated. I cannot be civil. And considering he has a needle in my arm I must be careful speaking, "Even Keynes doesn't believe Keynesian economics" and left it at that.
Then it occurred to me later, that not knowing Krugman is simply not to be listened to, and not knowing the NYT is unreliable source of political information, he might also not know who/what Keynes is or how that relates to Krugman. It might have sounded completely nonsensical.
Pity. Any further political discussion, and it will happen, he is that antagonistic, will start with why relying on NYT for information and considering that sufficient is ridiculous. It cannot be a frontal attack, so a side attack by ridiculing the crosswords with one remark and suggesting that is characteristic of its decline. Hit him where he'll feel it. The place where he touches it and plays back and forth with it. A surprisingly high number of doctors do. Surprising to me.
I just hope that all those depressed millenials don't do anything rash when they find out that the deductible on their fancy new subsidized Obamacare policy leaves them on the hook for the first 5k of their 7k depression treatment.
I'm gonna need them around to pay my Social Security.
"A surprisingly high number of doctors do. Surprising to me."
Sad to say, but doctors have long been known to be financial fools.
We're nearly idiot savants.
Great at one small technical piece of the scientific world, but unaware that singular skill does not transfer to anything else at all.
If you weren't a little loopy before, ChoomCare will make you that way.
Michael Haz said...
Do the liberal arts majors who dreamt up ObamaCare not have access to actuaries?
Who needs actuaries?
Obamacare opens the door to fraud.
Too much discretion given to HHS head.
ANY govt. program is very susceptible to fraud. The bigger the program, the bigger the fraud. It's not complicated.
I like that, Mugabecare. Truth on so many levels.
You are right 70% people suffering from depression. They can not afford the expensive treatments.Thank you for depression symptoms information.
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http://www.whywaitintheer.com/
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