[rebootthesystem]

I am sure my wife will be very happy to learn about this test. It will definitely make up for our insurance going from about $12K per year to $26K per year. That, along with keeping our doctor and saving $2,500 per year have been fantastic.

News Flash: Engineers think technology while, in the real world, the problem has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

It's like tuning your Ferrarri for more power while your reality is you commute on the 405. In other words, irrelevant.

But, hey, congrats, glad to see what I am paying for.

[guelo]

The goal of technology is to be so flawless that it dissapears into the background of our lives. When healthcare.gov was crashing the technology was extremely important and it made all the news and became a political controversy. Now that the technology is fine people like you can finger wag engineers and tell them that their work is unimportant.

[rebootthesystem]

You missed my point. I am an engineer. When I was younger I, too, wasted lots of time optimizing the irrelevant. Didn't fix a thing.

The ACA/Obamacare doesn't have a healthcare.gov traffic problem, it has a "it's a piece of shit" problem.

Of course, this is not the purview of engineers working on healthcare.gov. The point there is that we all get excited about building monuments to technology while completely forgetting the problem that had to be solved in the first place.

Someone will invariably say something like "20 million people have insurance now that they didn't have before!" or some other fabricated number. Let me address that now.

First. The President of the United States of America promised ME and my family that we could keep our plan, our doctor and, on top of that, we would save $2,500 a year. No need for a link, it's all over YouTube. He made that promise dozens of times.

I don't care of one or a hundred million people got insurance. The POTUS made a promise to families. If someone in business made such a promise and then reality was exactly opposite, in an unbelievably grotesque way, the smallest lawsuit for breach of contract and fraud would have them curl-up into a fetal position and cry.

Oh, yeah, and the rich part is that they stick the IRS on us. You know, the Gestapo-like, most-feared, we-can-ruin-your-fucking-life agency in the US now has hooks into your healthcare. And this is OK, how?

The POTUS lied to all of us. Period. The fact that there are people with insurance now is irrelevant. My family is playing the equivalent of a home mortgage for health insurance. How could anyone even remotely tolerate this from our elected officials.

Now, to address the "insured".

Most of these people have been shoved into Medicaid. The magic pill that solves it all, right?

I am not going to go into a long explanation. ACH/Obamacare represents the largest theft of personal property in the history of this nation. Why? Here, go learn something:

https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/eligibility/estate-recover...

Short version: These "insured" have signed over their personal assets to the government. All care they receive --by law-- requires reimbursement and the government is REQUIRED by law to recover costs.

Wonderful, isn't it? So many people now have insurance! So many people who have no clue the government just sunk their hooks into their estate. What a country!

I don't particularly like Trump but I hope he shreds Obamacare to little pieces, it is nothing less than the largest criminal act ever perpetrated on the American people.

[brightsize]

A few years ago, pre-ACA, and even without this kind of load testing, my individual high-deductible ("catastrophic") plan with a major provider had a 30%+ yearly premium increase with zero additional coverages whatsoever. They didn't say why at the time, but it was probably just system load testing costs. /s

[danso]

Maybe you should go complain to your legislators. Engineers don't have the Constitutional authority to enact policy willy nilly.

[honkhonkpants]

What did your premiums look like before? In my case I just didn't have insurance because there was no functioning market anywhere that would sell you a family health care plan including childbirth, at any price. Now I get health insurance from my employer which isn't affected by ACA so I don't know what the market looks like.

[rebootthesystem]

We were paying about $650 per month and a $4,000 annual deductible.

Obamacare forced our insurer to cancel our plan.

First lie: "If you like your plan you can keep it".

The new plan was $1,450 per month and a $9,000 annual deductible.

Second lie: "A family will save $2,500 per year".

Even at that, we lost many of the doctors.

Third lie: "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor".

There's more in the details (co-pays, etc.). The above would be enough to throw any business person in jail for fraud. Yet we somehow tolerate and rationalize our elected officials behaving this way.

I don't particularly like Trump but if anyone is wondering why he got elected, well, start by understanding the true depths of Obamacare and go from there.

[honkhonkpants]

Do you think it's possible that your prior policy was one of the garbage plans that got outlawed by ACA? Those are the ones that didn't survive the "you can keep it" claims. Those were plans with uselessly low annual or lifetime limits, too much small print, etc.

[rebootthesystem]

Impossible. Not garbage at all. We had the same policy for about 15 years. It was better than what we have now for three times the money.

[foota]

Fairly certain you're paying for the unemployed person down the street's insurance. (I say this not pejoratively toward's the unemployed)

[rgbrenner]

Insurance companies don't insure the unemployed for free. They're either paying their own premiums, or they're on medicaid/medicare. If they're on medicaid, it was paid for by the state/fed government from taxes... not from insurance premiums paid by someone else.

[maxerickson]

The cost of Medicaid and Medicare may show up in insurance premiums.

http://kff.org/report-section/uncompensated-care-for-the-uni...

There are other discussions of cost shifting that will make more aggressive claims; I've chosen to link Kaiser Family Foundation because I think they are pretty credible.

[rgbrenner]

the amount potentially associated with uncompensated care cost shifting is only 2.3 percent of private health insurance costs in 2013.

[maxerickson]

Sure, it doesn't explain the high cost of care.

But the $21.1 billion out of $84.9 billion is a pretty big chunk of the unmet costs.