… as a bulwark against for-profit health insurers and Private Equity. Of course, the vast majority of politicians on both sides of the aisle are already bought & paid for by the insurance industry.
{{ This presidential election marks the first in more than a decade in which no GOP candidates are pledging to eviscerate the landmark Affordable Care Act, ending a standoff between the parties over whether the government is responsible for providing access to healthcare.
When it comes to medical coverage, at least, the debate is largely settled: Americans want their government to help, rather than leaving it to insurers and market forces to try to provide the best coverage for the most people. }}
As one luminary said about the government, in general, and would probably be applicable to the ACA, “shrink it until it can be drowned in a bathtub”. iirc, the mandate that everyone buy coverage has been repealed. Now defund the program, so it is so hard to get any information, so hard to sign up, and so hard to find anyone “in network”, that people give up. Then, as people leave ACA programs, the opponents can say “see? no-one wants one-size-fits-all, big gummit, Communistical, health care”.
…because the “repeal and replace” thing always collapsed when it came to the “replace” part.
The biggest problem with Obamacare is that it leaves the insurance companies in charge and gifted them a 20% skim rate off the premiums collected. That’s a pretty big headwind against providing health care for anyone.
You get the best government that money can buy. In other cultures you get the best government that religion or weapons can buy.
One of the biggest mistakes the SCOTUS has ever made was to equate corporations to natural born citizens, to give then the same status as natural born citizens. Corporations are NOT humans.
Yet free markets are despised… Bring back the trust busters!
Thing is, most companies eventually fail, so an industry becomes dominated by one or two players, who can’t resist using their monopoly power to enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense. Solutions? Let the monopolists have their way with us? Break them up, effectively punishing them for being successful? Regulate them, to restrain their impulse to abuse their market power?
Break them up. Experience seems to show that they are more productive broken up but have less monopoly power. Witness Standard Oil and Ma Bell but don’t let them reunite, i.e. EXXON/Mobil and the mergers in telephony. Make them compete. That’s how you create free markets where giants play.
I remember when the CEO of SBC said something, in the 90s, about remerging with AT&T. The head of the FCC at the time went apoplectic. Now, of the original “seven dwarfs” and the rump T: SBC rolled up Pacific Telisis, Ameritech, Bell South, and the rump AT&T. while Bell Atlantic rolled up Nynex and US West was merged into Qwest, which was taken over by Century.
The one saving factor is that I seem to be the last person with a land line. Everyone else has gone cellular, which allows carriers to invade other company’s service areas.
One of my siblings JUST a month ago finally got rid of their land line. They were paying over $50 a month for it!!!
And nowadays you don’t even have to get rid of it, you just transfer it briefly to a cell account, and then transfer it to Google Voice and forward it to whichever device you please. So you get to keep that “number” and receive calls on it as usual.
I’m proud to say I got a check for $642 in 2021 since my insurer paid less than 80% of premiums in medical care during the COVID pandemic. Of course, I paid less than a total of $40 in Obamacare premiums in 2019 and 2000, the period covered by the rebate. Still, it’s better for me to get that $642 than have it lost to excessive Executive Compensation in the health insurance industry.
The problem with the 20% skim to private insurers is that Medicare only spends 1.3% of its program costs on admin fees. Why are we letting for-profit health insurers skin us for an additional 18.7% in skim to provide worse health care than Medicare? The only reason is America’s tendency to celebrate racism, ignorance and innumeracy. As long as black and Hispanics suffer more, 35% of the population thinks it’s a good deal.
That doesn’t work in for-profit health insurance. The larger the pool, the lower the risk to the insurer when one of the customer’s gets a $12 million illness.
If one of Medicare’s 64 million beneficiaries gets a $12 million illness, it’s lost in the round off in a $900 Billion budget.
There’s a teenager with a $12 million/year illness in the State of Iowa and 10 insurance companies selling Obamacare policies. Since the risk pool is split 10 ways, whichever insurer the teenager selects will be guaranteed a losing year for its Obamacare business. Thus, premiums would have to be much higher to cover the risk. That’s why racism, ignorance and innumeracy rules in America. We love free markets even when it’s costing us extra money for a crappier product.
You still don’t understand. Because of the unlimited price gouging, even a minor injury is a major medical issue once you get the doctor or hospital bill.
Given what the hospital billed for my heart valve repair versus what insurance negotiated, I’m now scared to have ANYTHING done medically w/o an insurance-negotiated discount. How much would a CAT scan cost me? An MRI? A simple ER visit for a finger cut by a potato peeler? (don’t ask for details on that last one, it happened is all you need to know…)
When Obamacare first came out, I checked my rates on the site. They were 10-30% higher than just going directly to the insurance company and buying it direct. Also, deductibles were lower going direct.
I still have no idea why Obamacare was created. It makes no sense. None.
There are massive subsidies for those of us who planned properly. My wife and I have been insured through the ACA for six years, and our total premiums for those six years were less than $1500.00. For six years of very high deductible insurance. Our total medical costs including pharmacy and doctors and premiums were less than $6000.00. We were lucky and are rapidly approaching Medicare, so far so good.