When the news is slow, and the pundits are not on vacation, they must write about something. So I am left to point out where the GOP has gotten itself on Heath Insurance Reform. I am paraphrasing a Washington Post columnist who wrote about this and due to my limited free access to the Washington Post, I don't want to use one of my 20 articles to post a link.
Since ObamaCare is essentially the old Republican Plan for Heath Insurance Reform and was designed by the Heritage Foundation, a Republican think tank, if the GOP is going to repeal and replace ObamaCare, they need to develop a replace to convince the voters they are serious. But all the good GOP ideas are in ObamaCare. Yet, the GOP leaders have convinced the party faithful that everything about ObamaCare is BAD!!!! So nothing in ObamaCare can be preserved according to GOP dogma.
But if nothing in ObamaCare can be preserved, what can the GOP propose. It turns out to be a concept that only works for the wealthy. Catastrophic Insurance. Everybody will self insure ordinary medical care and people would purchase insurance for cancer treatments and other big expense items. The problem with that is three fold: (i) that would have to be mandatory for employer provided health insurance (which would change the nature of everybody's health insurance) so those people paid for all their basic care; (ii) it still would not help those with pre-existing conditions; and, (iii) it would not help hospitals with treating the uninsured and covering those costs with charges to those with insurance.
A variation of this proposal is that people not even have insurance. Everybody would pay their own Dr bills and there would be no risk sharing. Again, you would have to make employer provided health insurance fit the mold, in this case forbidding it, so everybody is in the same position. How the poor fit into this scheme is would be similar to the poor in the Middle Ages? How that would help hospitals who treat the uninsured would again be a problem for those can afford to pay.
In short, there is nothing rational the GOP can propose to replace ObamaCare except ObamaCare. That is not acceptable to the GOP primary voters, but anything acceptable to GOP primary voters is not acceptable to most independents, or anyone else who wants health insurance because having it is the prudent way to go through life.
The problem is that the average person never takes the time to do the math; i.e. how much am I paying in premiums versus how much am I getting in benefits? Everyone just thinks: the insurance company pays my bills! High deductible plans force people to understand the economics of health care and to be better consumers.
ReplyDeleteTrue, but if the structure of health insurance does not cover/incentivize everyone to be in the risk sharing pool, the cost of the uninsured is borne by those of us who pay. Who is not sick of seeing a list price of $1,000 for the uninsured and a contract price of $75.00 for the insured? That should provide incentive for everyone to get into the risk pool, but instead a sizable segment of society goes uninsured and then to the hospital and don't/cannot afford to pay the list price, putting their cost onto the rest of us. And the hospitals cannot turn them away without society doing away with the Hippocratic Oath. Is that what we want our society to be? I don't think so.
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