Americans who are buying insurance plans over online exchanges, under what is known as Obamacare, will have limited access to some of the nation’s leading hospitals, including two world-renowned cancer centres.
Amid a drive by insurers to limit costs, the majority of insurance plans being sold on the new healthcare exchanges in New York, Texas, and California, for example, will not offer patients’ access to Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan or MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, two top cancer centres, or Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, one of the top research and teaching hospitals in the country.
Experts say the move by insurers to limit consumers’ choices and steer them away from hospitals that are considered too expensive, or even “inefficient”, reflects the new competitive landscape in the insurance industry since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s 2010 healthcare law.
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
2 Responses
And people scoffed Gov Palin for having the audacity to insinuate there would be death panels.
What say you now?
Obama and ObamaDoesntCare MUST go!!!!!!!!
Obama has nothing to do with this. The insurers and the hospitals could not agree on rates. Should the government forced the hospitals to accept a lower rate? Or the insurers to pay a higher rate? That is inconsistent with the desire of the Republicans to reduce the cost of health care, and of course with free market principles. In fact, the idea of letting insurers bargain with providers to reduce rates was a Republican idea, implemented with the Medicare prescription drug plan, and was bitterly opposed by Democrats at the time.
And as someone who have now been in the academic medical industry for 15 years, I can tell you that there are indeed many horribly inefficient hospitals that need to clean up their organization. The Republicans used to say that regulation was the wrong way to do this, that insurers should provide the incentive. Well, it is happening!