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Thanks, Mitt! No, really
By adamg on Wed, 11/09/2016 - 11:06pm
The Globe reports: Mass. seen as insulated from a Trump repeal of Obamacare. The reason has to do with our preexisting condition of Romneycare; the Globe quotes Gov. Baker (formerly head of Harvard Pilgrim) as vowing to keep the state system running.
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So a former health insurance
So a former health insurance executive thinks people should be mandated to buy health insurance? Wow. Just wow.
Serious question
How else do you make sure people with pre-existing conditions can get health insurance without some kind of mandate? Because without one, everyone can just wait till they actually get sick or injured to get insurance, which breaks the system. And if these people can't get health insurance, they wind up in the emergency room, which costs a ton more for everyone.
The market? Let's not kid
The market? Let's not kid ourselves about what the mandate did, it fixed the "free rider" problem health insurance companies were crowing about. Corporate welfare at its finest.
Answer the question.
Without single-payer insurance, you need a three-pronged approach to make universal health coverage work. If you're missing any of them, the plan falls apart.
1. Insurers must take all comers. No exclusions for pre-existing conditions. No caps. No rescissions if you get sick.
2. Because of #1, you must have a individual mandate. Otherwise everyone who is healthy will just wait until they are sick to get insurance because they can't be refused. If insurance companies must take all of the sick people, you need healthy people to even out the risk pool. The larger the pool, the lower the average cost for everyone.
3. Because of #2, you must have subsidies for those who can't afford the individual mandate.
Four
Stop allowing hospital mergers.
Under Romneycare
I didn't have a $3000 deductible. We can repeal the ACA fast enough.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
Romneycare without the ACA wasn't the reason your deductible was under $3000. The addition of the ACA isn't the reason your deductible went up to $3000.
Your deductible was going up whether the ACA happened or not. In most cases, people's healthcare costs were going up at a rate faster than when the ACA kicked in.
In other words, you should be glad for the ACA or your deductible might be $5000 right now instead.
http://www.factcheck.org/2015/02/slower-premium-growth-under-obama/
Great
Thank God we can keep paying 18000/year for family health ins
Thanks Barry!
$92/month, 0 deductible, $20 copay to $200/month, $1250 deductible and $40 copay. Goooooo Obamacare!!!
Being a young healthy guy
I opted for the more affordable $150 month/ $3,000 deductible.
Good for you
But many who had good cheap insurance through work and got shafted after BarryOCare went into effect don't qualify for any subsidies, so they're stuck with their work insurance that has gone down the crapper but is still cheaper than the cheapest BarryO plan.
Right
I take it that you never tried to file a claim on your "cheap" work insurance.
One of my husband's coworkers was denied coverage for appendicitis because he had gone to the doctor for Norovirus about 3 years before ...
Who is BarryO?
Who is BarryO?
Romneycare was working.
Romneycare was working. Obamacare not so much.
Bernie's plan?
Just curious to know what people think/thought of Bernie's plan to make us all pay a little more in taxes (but less than we currently do for employer health plans) and fund healthcare that way? Not saying I'm for, or against but wondering what the general populace thinks
I'm in favor
Single-payer would solve most of our problems, yes. Unfortunately, the option was DOA, since the window during which the ACA was passed didn't have a filibuster-proof majority in the senate, owing to the electoral shenanigans in Minnesota and Ted Kennedy's death. Lieberman refused to back it as long as there was a public option, and so we got the watered down version. The Canadian system and the NHS both have their flaws, but no one's going bankrupt and no one's paying tens of thousands of dollars a year in premiums/deductibles.
Now sit back, relax, and wait for the mob to start screaming about socialism.
Single payer like the VA and
Single payer like the VA and tricare has been great!
/said no one ever
That's the problem, we need a
That's the problem, we need a combination of both.
ACA will not be repealed, in my opinion, but certainly needs tweaking. Anyone with 20 somethings in their household having to pay out the nose for basically nothing can sympathize.
Paul Ryan and Trump have
Paul Ryan and Trump have pledged to repeal it within the first 100 days of their administration. Not sure why you think they won't actually go through with it. Are you one of those "Trump was really a moderate this whole time! In disguise!" people?
Uh..
My mother's on Tricare, she loves it. Just got her hip replaced, no worries about bills. My dad likes the VA, he needs two $20,000 shots every month to keep him from going blind (he finally seems to be breaking though, so hopefully that will end soon), and he doesn't have to pay for it. The problem is there's too little VA, meaning the wait can be a bit long, not that the VA is bad.
The regional Boston VA System
The regional Boston VA System regularly wins nationwide awards for quality of care. Competing against private hospitals, no less. They have some specialty programs that are literally world-class, enticing veterans back from halfway around the globe to see specialists that also work at Brigham, MGH, etc - but for free, because there is a commitment to taking care of them, period. VA patients are demographically older, sicker, more mentally ill, more likely to be homeless, and suffer from things like Agent Orange related problems that just don't show up in private medicine. And yet their outcomes are close if not matching private hospitals.
In places where the VA isn't as top notch, you can look at politically motivated leadership appointments and a lack of ability to hire baseline operations staff. There's too much demand and not enough to work with.
Did you see Bill Maher?
More specifically his interview with Obama. The Pres gave a pretty straight forward and honest answer regarding single payer. He basically said our current legacy system provides to many jobs and is to entrenched in our society to just give it up and start over, but that a single payer system would be his preferred way, if starting from scratch.
Ultimately I would argue that healthcare and insurance should not be a for-profit industry but this 'Murica after all so that's wishful thinking.
I would like to see something
I would like to see something like a national "basic" plan paid for by tax dollars with private insurance picking up the slack.
Like Medicare, you've got basic coverage and purchase additional from the private market.
That's how Germany's system
That's how Germany's system works, and it does very very well there.
I would give my left eye
For such a plan.
Check the details first
Ophthalmology coverage might be different, especially for intentional self-harm.
Seriously though, I would give up say a pinky finger but not an eye. No depth perception = no drivers license.
One eye is sufficient for a driver's license
At least, one of my friends has had only a single functioning eye since childhood, and has a valid MA license.
+1
I, too (or "eye, too") have a one-eyed friend with a valid MA driver's license. When we're walking together I have to make certain I'm on her good eye side so she can see me in her peripheral vision.
Single payer is THE ultimate
Single payer is THE ultimate answer and eventually we will have to get there, but there's a lot of people who are going to have to die (either of old age or otherwise preventable health problems) before people will accept it. American culture is so up its own ass about INDIVIDUALISM and SELF RELIANCE that it will be a long, long, tough sell. Possibly a better starting area would be to let people buy into the already existing Medicare system like any other insurance program - and as they receive more money, they can make large scale improvements to it that make it more attractive. Then we'll have an actual competitive market so the right-wingers can shut the fuck up, and people can see that no, government programs aren't out to murder grandma.
Legacy systems..
Are hard to just up and replace. What happens to all the people who currently work in that field?
Single payer systems aren't run by robots yet
They would work for new companies that grow around the new systems.
What happened to all the blacksmiths?
As a person with a pre
As a person with a pre existing condition and an immorally expensive prescription, this is reducing my anxiety. And also confirming that I actually can never leave Massachusetts.
Under ACA, the percentage of
Under ACA, the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare has continued to go up. Last I checked it was 17%. Until we find a way to make that value go down, we're doomed.
The only way I can see that value coming down is by either 1) highly regulating healthcare pricing or 2) de-regulating healthcare and allowing foreign trained doctors to practice here and non-FDA approved epipens to be sold here.
And for that to happen, you need campaign finance reform. A lot of that 17% is spent on lobbying to keep those dollars flowing.
GPD spent queston
So your complaint is that when insuring 20,000,000 more Americans, we should have seen overall spending go down?
Don't worry, when they are all thrown off of insurance next spring, you can take comfort in the overall decline in spending I guess.
Absolutely. To work over the
Absolutely. To work over the long term, the healthcare reform we need will focus on cost. ACA made health insurance affordable. It needs to make healthcare affordable.