Obamacare

Thanks to Obummers hidden agenda in the so called health care bill, Insurance rates will ultimately rise and cause many private businesses to go down! It’s the Socialist Liberal idiots who have no interest in America’s future that think O-Dumber Bummer’s plan is supposed to work. What these idiots don’t realize is all the hidden agenda our failure of a President stuck inside the healthcare bill that will only bring America to its knees, which seems to be Obummer’s ultimate agenda anyway! Our healthcare provider for my business warned us in advance that our rates will increase no less than 30% under the Obamacare plan once/if fully implemented. We expected a hike if the new bill passed, but 30%!.. Some idiot posted awhile back praising Obamacare, one key word they used was “FEDERAL SUBSIDIES” will help lower the costs even more. Gee, ummm, hmmm?, let’s think about that?.. The Federal Government stepping in again to support yet another liberal agenda, and where does that money come from? What an idiot!

Face it, Obamacare is one more piece of Obummer’s puzzle to ruin America!

It’s my OPINION that Obamacare is nothing but a payout to big pharma and insurance companies. Just like when Obama got elected Detroit got a nice payout by “saving” an industry that should have gone through bankrupty protection like any other corporation in the US. These are the Democratic payouts.

Just like the war in Iraq IMO was nothing but a payout to big oil and the defense industry. That was the Republican payout.

That really seems to be what politics is about nowadays. Once again this is strictly my opinion.

Universal healthcare is not exactly a new concept. It has been introduced to the western world in the 1940s and 50s. Regardless of what FOX told you, it will not bring the US to it’s knees.

Let’s take a look at any other industrialized nation on this planet, shall we? What a surprise, every single OECD country, except Turkey, Mexico and the US, have full insurance coverage of their population. Take any important health indicator and compare countries with and without universal healthcare, e.g. infant mortality: Here the US is Nr 34 of about 40 OECD countries, right behind Lithuania and the Slovak Republic. The only countries doing worse than the US in this regard also do not have universal healthcare. Big surprise.

Medical bills underlie about 60% of all US bankruptcies. That should be the real outrage. Just imagine being able to avoid the economic costs attached to this.

How about you take a look around to see what has worked for the world very well before buying into that tea party panic propaganda.

The public exchanges (one of the biggest parts of obama-care) released rates today

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/prices-set-health-care-exchanges-040600393.html

It shows that younger, healtier folks will see dramatic increases in monthly costs, which makes sense since obama care mandates you cannot reject pre-conditions, etc… This is actually a big problem for lower wage folks, many of whom are loaded with student debt, already living with parents, etc.

yet again, our govt doesn’t understand businesses are not dumb and will adapt to any law that’s unfavorable.

Result for employers? lower hours, more part time,

Result for medical insurers? charging higher premiums, with younger healthier folks that generally use less

that’s not the BIGGEST problem. If these younger folks decide: I really can’t afford the 163 per month and instead decide to pay the few hundred penalty instead, the public exhanges lose these healthy lives, get stuck with the sickly folks, and costs skyrocket. which in turn probably makes them drop out of exchanges, and thus the system collapses.

we’ll see

The assumption here is that rates weren’t rising anyway. Did you notice how health care insurance costs were rising before the bill was even introduced? And this was while insurance companies were still able to cherry pick who they would insure and disallow anything that there was any evidence you might contract and basically cut you off midstream if you ever got anything chronic or expensive, like cancer or diabetes.

Obamacare changes the way the insurance companies gouge us and how those costs are distributed among everyone else, but it doesn’t change the fact that they will gouge if at all possible. Medical insurance is not about providing for medical care in a cost effective way, it’s about earning more in premiums than you pay in costs, and if it’s publicly listed, any legal way to do that is to be pursued to the maximum.

And the mishmash of rules in Obamacare wasn’t the president’s first choice, which was a single payer system, which - for all the problems of that system -would at least have reduced the cost of insurance coverage by reducing the profit margin of gouging people, so the charge that Obama is trying to bring down America and this is is chosen method is really far off the mark. There are lots of problems with Obamacare, but it isn’t a secret plan to crash the economy.

But this isn’t universal healthcare… This is government mandated, and now soon to be taxpayer subsidized, forced participation in the private insurance marketplace. Big difference. The biggest issue in the US healthcare system is costs, and this bill will only fuel faster health care inflation by adding more demand and adding taxes and other costs onto medical devices and other parts of the industry.

I have a feeling this will be a gigantic disaster.

If there was universal healthcare in the US, there will be no Breaking Bad.

Ergo: Obamacare very bad, insurance-big pharma racket very good!

Yes, I agree, the cost issue in the US healthcare system is a huge problem but it always has been not because of Obamacare. For some reason even the simplest of procedures costs in the US a buttload more than in most other countries. No idea why. But as I said, that is a different issue.

I know, you guys don’t like big government but in some areas e.g. education and health, the benefits of this type of state involvement greatly outweighs the costs. Increased rates for everybody is a small price to pay if you can finally provide cover for the entire population and reduce the number of personal bankruptcies dramatically.

In my host country, Switzerland, for example they also have forced participation, as you call it, and it works very well. And after all, this is the most competitive economy in the world. Why do you think this system has worked so well for the entire industrialized world since the 1940s and it won’t for the US?

Agree with kanuck. The real problem is healthcare costs. Bring down costs and it becomes much easier to offer coverage to more people. Three ways to at least start bringing costs down:

  1. Cap the cost of pharmaceuticals at the same prices paid in Europe and Canada. In case you didn’t know, the EU and Canada cap pharmaceutical prices and US consumers make up the difference between what the rest of the world pays and what the pharma companies want them to pay. 2. Cap medical malpractice payouts. 3. Make medical school and nursing school more affordable by deferring student loan payments if the doctor or nurse is engaged in primary or emergency care and forgive them completely after 10 years in primary or emergency care (this would have a dollar limit to encourage students to go to more affordable schools if they want to be debt-free).

Regarding the President’s true desire to have a single payor system, the rates released yesterday show pretty clearly that the states with the most insurers participating in their pools have the lowest average rates.

The uniquely US combination of stubborn citizens, wealthy special interests, and incompetent politicians will collide to make sure this system doesn’t work as intended. Look at every other large sweeping piece of legislation passed since 2008. Has any of it worked as intended? Dodd Frank? the stimulus? (I’m not trying to get off topic, just saying that the US government isn’t a very good steward of implementation).

Another thing to add that people often don’t realise is that the US is gigantic and has a significantly more economically diverse population (see I can sugar coat “inequality”) and so many more people. According to wikipedia, Switzerland has roughly 8 million people. The US has well over 300M. Its inherently going to be easier to manage care for a country that size, same with the northern European countries, vs. the US.

One of the most significant challenges in the US for healthcare costs is malpractice insurance, basically anyone can sue any doctor for any reason and the lawyers all get rich as a result. That is an oversimplification of the problem, but the bottom line is that our gov’t needs to address the issue of tort reform.

I don’t disagree that there is a problem in the US with personal bankruptcies resulting from huge medical bills, but Obamacare doesn’t address the costs in this regard. This new law does seem to suggest increased competition among insurance carriers, but there is also increased demand, different risk pools, etc., it is simply too early to determine if this law will cause healthcare costs to increase or decrease. Tort reform is the only sure way to lower medical costs for all.

To answer your final question, we can’t compare the rest of the “entire industrialized world” to Obamacare because they are not the same at all.

It’s much easier to implement a system like that in a country with the same population as NYC. A lot more difficult, if not impossible, when you’re trying to apply it to 300+ million. Of the 5 countries in the world with a population greater than 200 million, only Brazil has universal coverage. Perhaps some of AF’s Brazilian members can comment on the quality of care.

Respect.

higgy and I are apparently on the same wavelength this morning.

Not sure why population is so much an issue here. Sure, there are more people and thus more services to provider but you also have more points of contact and more doctors and most of the information systems should be scalable.

The other 200 million plus countries are China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil. Are you really saying that our health systems need to use those countries as the standard of comparison, as opposed to the other industrialized countries of the world - countries with similar GDP per capita and technological capacities?

I have an opinion, based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever, that insurance itself is responsible for a great deal of the burgeoning costs of healthcare in the US.

Before the days of insurance, people paid for their own costs. And like I told Higgs WRT his cheap wedding, you’ll be a lot more economical with your own funds than with somebody else’s.

But with insurance, there’s the “collectivist” mindset. (Insurance is, by definition, collectivist.) I’ll ask for a procedure or drug or other therapy that I otherwise wouldn’t, because the dollar isn’t coming out of my pocket. I’m certainly paying for it somehow, but I don’t see a real dollar-for-dollar reduction because of the collectivism of the insurance policy.

Additionally, the rates doctors used to charge was determined by local supply and demand. Now, we have insurance companies dictating what they will pay, and the doctors have followed suit by charging as much as they can get away with, and still conform to the letter of the law–in this case, the insurance policy. I think it adds an enormous amount of inefficiency to they system.

EG - I had to go to a doctor’s office a few weeks ago to pick up some medical supplies for my CPAP machine. (It’s a machine that you wear at night to help you breathe better.) They charged me a $25 copay, and I’m sure they charged the insurance company another $150. The only thing they did (literally) was hand me my new mask. There was absolutely no reason to charge me $25, nor to charge the insurance company $150. But they did, because they could. And while I wouldn’t pay $175 for the “office visit”, I was willing to pay $25.

Another EG - My insurance allows me to get a new CPAP mask every three months. I certainly don’t need it–they will last for well over a year. And if I had to pay for it, I’d only get one per year. But since somebody else is paying for it, I’ll get one every three months, whether I need it or not.

good ideas, although:

the biggest hog of medical spending is actually hospitals. Drug companies always get the bad rap, but in reality, they only are ~13% of total healthcare spending in the US. Shaving a few percentage off that isn’t going to move the needle.

Hospitals and physicians are around 55% of all healthcare spend, but hospital lobbies are very powerful. With tons of money to throw at politicians, they hold a lot of influence which unfortunately, is unliekly to change. And also, the national net margins of hospitals are mid-single digits, which is why their reimbursement doesn’t get cut as much as other reimbursement heavy sectors like home health

malpractice payouts I totally agree. In fact, I had once suggested the entire insurance industry have their margins capped. (stopping short of govt run, because govt sucks at running business)

Ok, but just because the unique combination that you mentioned will make the implementation difficult or impossible means you wouldn’t even try to improve the situation?

EDIT: regarding US healthcare a very interesting article from time magazine confirming itera’s point that hospitals are the biggest problem:

http://livingwithmcl.com/BitterPill.pdf

bchad, your objection to comparing the US to the other “large” population countries actually illustrates why it is next to impossible to effectively implement a universal healthcare system in the US. GDP per capita and technological capabilities differ dramatically across the US.

You try to improve the situation in a more incremental way, and you try to attack the core of the problem first, which is costs.