It’s even worse than a jammed website, canceled policies, and rising policy prices. The policies may also not be what they seem.
In the first place, exchange policies typically restrict the hospitals and doctors you can use. In New Hampshire, for example, 10 of the state’s 26 hospitals are excluded from exchange policies and this takes out all the doctors affiliated with those hospitals as well.
That’s bad enough, but there is worse. In many of the policies, doctors will be paid significantly less than what private insurance has previously paid or that would be paid in other private policies sold outside the exchanges. This means that if you lose your doctor because he or she is no longer included in the policy coverage, you will not only find your doctor choices limited. You may also find that the doctors who are included don’t want your business.
Medicaid and some Medicare patients have experienced this problem for years. The rates paid make them undesirable patients to many doctors. But now people outside Medicaid and Medicare will experience the same problem.
As we know, Obamacare was devised by assembling special interests behind closed doors at the White House. As in any crony scheme, everyone is gaming the system, starting with the president, Congress, and the special interests that wrote the legislation, extending to the administration regulation writers, who in many cases virtually rewrote the legislation, and then leading back to the insurance companies, which are now trying to work around the regulations.
This has zero resemblance to a normal market, in which producers compete on quality and price to win over customers. The customer has been completely lost in all the maneuvering and self-serving behavior.
