Entry #1 2014

Hello, and welcome to the he Medicaid Pitfalls blog. You may notice a paucity of entry's over the last two years,  and for that I apologize. When I started the Medicaid Pitfalls blog, like many new and interesting things in my life's work, I worked at a frenzied pace. The goal was to have a place where consumers wanted to get straight answers about Medicaid, they would have a place to go.

After having the he blog up for about a year, I realized that the rules of blogging had not yet been established - the social etiquette rules and the rules of attorney ethics.  So I consciously decided to wait a while. Knowing what I now know, simply taking down the blog would not erase the existing entries from the planet's external hard drive that is the internet.

After exhaustive research and study, I now know "the rules."  So here we go, entry #1:

Understanding the Affordable Care Act:

For purposes of understanding the Affordable Care Act, let's break the law down into two parts.

Part 1:   Changing the Insurance Playing Field. Just the way a baseball team can modify the dimensions of it's field, the Affordable Care Act changed the insurance playing field.

The major changes are:

1. No pre-existing conditions exclusion.
2. No lifetime limits.
3. Uniform health insurance plans, with standard covered services.

Part 2: Giving people incentives to buy insurance.

The Affordable Care Act uses positive and negative tools in order to get people to buy insurance. The negative tool is a tax on people who do not buy insurance. The positive tool is financial subsidies for those who could not otherwise afford to buy insurance.

The final question is - What is the role of insurance companies? Insurance companies sell the health insurance plans directly to consumers.