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February 19, 2014 at 11:55 AM
The people who love the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in a completely accepting way can cope with even the most bizarre problems by choosing to see what they want to see.
Does a PPACA public exchange qualified health plan (QHP) have just one hospital with a clean floor in its provider network?
Well, find an anecdote about a 63-year-old woman with gout who lives in a yurt under a highway overpass in Des Moines, Iowa, with her goats and now has coverage for the first time and look at that, not at that pesky provider directory. (Which, truth be told, probably doesn’t come up on HealthCare.gov properly, anyway.)
Some of the people who hate every punctuation mark in PPACA simply because President Obama signed the law can cope with the truly, catastrophically, immediately dumb stuff by getting out the champagne, or, if they don’t drink, the fizzy lemonade.
Agents, brokers, consultants and plan administrators occupy a middle ground: Whatever you, personally, think about PPACA, to be effective, you have to do your best to understand the law, its quirks, the programs it’s created, and the entities it’s created from every possible perspective.
Maybe you agree in your heart that the drafters of PPACA are the Spawn of Satan, but, in that case, you still have to try to get into the heads of the Spawn of Satan and see what they were trying to do, and why they feel so miserably misunderstood. Even the Spawn of Satan have feelings.
A case in point (with many details changed, to try to ward off the Hounds of HIPAA): A Florida broker wrote in to point out that PPACA-compliant plans give small employers no credit for enrollees over age 64 who have Medicare as the primary payer.
