Posted on 01/06/2017 7:03:12 AM PST by Jim Noble
If you have to pay up front, how are you insured?
Its a scam.
The end result is that insurance companies and government-run insurance plans are actually covering more people now who are less healthy and need more care. Many healthy people are simply paying the penalty and biding their time. That's why insurance rates are going through the roof.
Obamacare will be easy to repeal. Standing up in the winds of popular discontent that will blow after it is repealed will not be easy.
You are right this is a political question now. But the horse has left the barn, IMO. Health care as an entitlement is here to stay. The day “health insurance” became “health care” it was over.
Giving expensive health care to those with preexisting conditions without some sort of mandate on the healthy to pay for it is a mathematical impossibility. Massive government subsidies are the only way to pay for it without a mandate.
The political reality is we can get rid of the mandate but preexisting condition stuff is here to stay. Therefore, a massive government program is here to stay.
Neither the NYT nor talking head doofuses on TV have been elected to the presidency, or Congress, nor appointed to any cabinet position,
So they can just STFU
and start giving us news...
Moving right along...
This may sound naive, but why not just go back to the way things were in the days of Bill Clinton? According to the lefties everything was beautiful then.
What was so-called healthcare like in the Clinton days? Had to be better than 0bamacare and the liberals had no problem then. Liberals LOVED Bill Clinton, right?
Then from that point they can make the appropriate adjustments - preferably free market adjustments - to the healthcare system.
I would be willing to bet that there is complete collusion between the corrupt MSM, Democrat operatives, and Soros types in a coordinated effort to save Obamacare.
The command and control of the Liberal globalists consistently use the NYTimes as the claxon to begin the battle for whatever war Liberals next intend to fight. You watch.
I know it sounds cold and probably affects some Freepers, but maybe nature should just take its course on people with pre-existing conditions.
Millions of Americas lost good insurance as a result of the NON-Affordable Care Act. Many lost their long time doctors. Many Doctors have retired early just to get pout from under the crap the the ACA dropped on top of them. The Government generally screws up pretty much anything it touches. In the case of healthcare it almost damaged it beyond recognition! Time to grow up be adults and fix this nightmare!
If they just repeal it without a detailed replacement Trump will veto them
Nothing.
If perfectly organized, perfectly implemented, and funded to the maximum extent that people are willing, they would pay between 3% and 5% of the money the system requires, every single day, to stay in business.
The other 97% has to come from somewhere else.
The insurance industry wants to have its cake and eat it too.
Palm off the sick and the elderly on the public treasury, and reap profits from the rest. Privatize profits while socializing losses.
If LBJ had not created Medicare they would have pushed for it, as it solves a major problem for them. How to dump patients who are a pure cost anchor on the P&L.
The same way Kraft and Kroger support food stamps. It solves the problem of how to sell your product to people who have no money.
Agreed, I've been seeing this personally for the last few years. Every year costs associated with my company plan have increased significantly. Every year, there have been fewer and fewer options/choices of plans. I think we're down to just 2 or 3 this year, where at one point we had 8 or more from three different insurance providers. Deductibles are way up, co-pays are up... obamacare has been a significant financial hit. But hey, we're covered six ways to Sunday on birth control! Yea! Given that I had a vasectomy years ago and then my wife ended up having to have a hysterectomy - that's not real high on our priority list. Nor is the gender reassignment coverage... But that's what you get when the government starts meddling in the free market and deciding they know best for everyone.
Their “vehicle to repeal Obamacare” budget cost 9.7 trillion dollars! 9.7 trillion! Wouldn’t it cost less to cut every taxpayer an one time payment for healthcare? Who, here voted for 9.7 trillion for a single piece of legislation?
This needs to be a REPLACE, then REPEAL so there is no gap in coverage. This means it will take time to implement and that’s fine. There are many thousands of “dead laws” still on the books that are not enforced by the executive branch. The PPACA needs to be one of them where a new existing healthcare act supersedes the PPACA. The the PPACA can be killed quietly without fanfare.
Because the arrangements that existed then were "dead men walking", and all the politicians knew it.
After 1986, Medicare has existed on money that was either borrowed or printed. The Federal government hasn't had a real budget for twenty years or more.
LBJ and Wilbur Mills thought Title VXVIII (Medicare) would kill the system within a few years. Using typical RAT static analysis, they failed to account for the fact that a government promise to pay without limit for all "necessary" things would erect whole new industries dedicated to providing (mostly) useful, but fantastically expensive, things that never, never could have arisen in a free market.
Take one example - the implantable pacemaker/defibrillator. It costs about $60 000/unit to put one in.
Sure, the price is inflated, and could be hammered down by 50% or so.
But go back to 1963. Suppose you are a young cardiologist, as my Dad was then, and you have this idea. You take it to Medtronic, or whoever. "It will save lives of patients with heart failure, but it will cost $25 000".
No company would invest in developing a product that needed free choice by the families of over-65s to spend $25K on something that might never be needed, to maybe protect grandpa from dying. Yes, there would be customers - BUT NOT ENOUGH CUSTOMERS TO JUSTIFY THE R&D.
Now, fast forward to 1966. Medtronic now knows that the taxpayers (Medicare) will fund all of the R&D, and provide a handsome profit per unit. It's no longer a curiosity for a few rich people. The government has provided the resources, and provided the customers! It's a miracle!
There are dozens and dozens of other examples.
The Democrats projected costs of Medicare based on over-65 spending from 1955-1964. They promised (and had the data to back it up) that spending in 1990 would be around $8 billion (this in the context of a $99 billion Federal budget in 1963).
Because of the effect of the promise to pay without limit, 1990 spending was in fact about $220 billion, about 28X predicted.
This effect of Federal taxpayer promise to pay without limit on health system R&D has accelerated since then. And the things the taxpayer has been providing are things that people want.
It's a huge problem. The "free market" is wonderfully inventive, innovative, and efficient. But hooked up to a printing press in DC, it can quickly get out of control.
Medicare created a monster. Obamacare (and Romneycare) were supposed to kill the monster.
But, this is a semi-democracy. People will, in the end, get more or less what they want.
In the health care sector, what they want is a never-ending succession of wonderful discoveries and inventions that are free or massively discounted when needed, while paying about 3% of the true cost in premiums or taxes.
It ain't going to work.
Pat Buchanan said years ago (it may have been during his 1992 presidential campaign) that people simply can't afford the standard of health care they've come to expect as their God-given right. There's a lot of wisdom in that, too.
Last night the MSN website featured a story claiming that repealing/replacing Obamacare will destroy 3 million jobs and drain more than 1 trillion dollars from the economy. My assumption is that they based this nonsense on the same type of rigged analysis that concludes North Carolina is not a democracy and global warming is entirely caused by anthropogenic CO2.
It seems to me that in the past “welfare” took care of the medical needs of those who couldn’t afford a medical plan prior to Obamacare. The money to pay for this came from the government funds from our taxes, etc. It always appeared to me that Obamacare, and the ever increasing costs and burdens placed on the working population who did carry insurance and paid for their medical care, just shifted the balance from the government paying all the fees, to the working stiffs having to pay towards the fees for those getting free medical care. Is that too simplistic? I live in California and we seem to keep having to pay for more and more via taxation for those unable to pay, and illegals, so that was the first thought came to my mind when I saw working people having to pay more and more for Obamacare...another government tax scam.
We used to have charity hospitals that took care of the indigent. Run by the Catholic Church and other religious organizations.
Pretty much they have all opted-out of this business and those hospitals are part of the crony corporate system.
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