one bullet at a time

One bullet at a time. Someone I work with piped up last night with the near legendary “Obamacare made Tricare cancel my son’s coverage!” Yeah, it did. This is someone who retired from the AF and I would expect to know better. I said something along the lines of, “you’re fucking crazy. You are the only one that this happened to…” Nope, he tells me, his not-yet 21 year-old son had his Tricare Prime cancelled because of Obamacare – he got a LETTER in the mail. Two to three minutes after I get online I discovered that the Tricare contract insurance companies (there are three) have been moving this way since…2007! They want to simply move people from Prime to Standard if they are more than 50 miles from a military facility. Or, you can waive the driving requirement and keep your Prime, or get Standard. Of course, I’m told his letter came just after October 1st (when Obamacare started!) so it must be so. The Tricare (and Government fiscal year) also happens to start on October 1st. What? After I send the link to the Tricare site he suddenly recalls that he got this letter like a year ago and completed the waived requirement for himself – just never did it for his covered child. These are the engagements I live for…

One bullet. At. A. Time.

 P.S. For those policies that are getting cancelled? The President seriously lied when he messaged over and over about keeping policies. But, the individual insurance market, which is about 15 million people, has a lousy record on continuing policies. All of them are sold on a one-year basis, and only about 17% of those buyers maintain their policy for at least two years. By my math, that means that 83% of policies are generally cancelled by the companies, or the insured, every two years. That’s about 12.5 million folks changing policies over a rolling two-year period. If even half of those are cancelled by the insurers (and it’s probably much higher than half), then we should normally see about 6.25 million cancelled. I think the reported number right now (per the endless Fox News at my work) is about 5.9 million. Seems about right for normal insurance operations.