217 voted
Yes; 213 voted No. It was necessary to pass this law, because Obamacare is
falling apart. The problem with this Healthcare Bill is that it doesn’t deal
with the root causes of ever higher healthcare costs, because healthcare defies
the laws of economics. Abusive prices do not decrease demand, because the
government is paying most of the bill.
Socialist
whiners have created this problem, because they want the US to become a
full-fledged Big Government, Socialist Republic rather than a free market
success. They have been stoking the entitlement scam to destroy the private
sector and they are winning.
Thinking
Americans have got to see this as a scam before we give up on returning to the
laws of economics. These laws are
already being enforced as more consumers refuse to buy overpriced health
insurance.
Cost
shifting in this bill also misses the mark.
Automobile insurance rates are determined by utilization. Bad drivers who have lots of accidents pay
more. But this bill increases the
ability for insurance companies to shift the cost based on age. It should be
based on utilization. Insurance
companies were restricted to cost shifting based on age on a 1 to 3 basis. The new law expands this to a 1 to 5 basis. That means that insurance companies will be
allowed to charge older customers up to 5 times more for health insurance. The assumption is that the older you get, the
more you spend on healthcare. This is not necessarily the case. The healthy 50%
of the population is evenly distributed.
I assume that Congress did this because older Americans have more
money. Nothing in the Bill so far
indicates that excessive government subsidies are the primary reason for high
healthcare costs.
If the
Senate passes this Bill, it will end cost shifting to healthcare consumers and
transfer these costs to the federal government. The passage of Obamacare
imposed cost shifting to the healthy and caused insurance premiums to become
unsustainable.
This won’t
lower healthcare costs. What will lower healthcare costs a bit is malpractice
reform, deregulation and attacking overcharges. 50% of our population will
probably continue to receive their health insurance from their employers. In these cases, these groups absorb their own
losses, so what government is subsidizing are really sick people who don’t get
health insurance from their employer.
They would get individual policies. Many of the healthy people who rent
won’t get any health insurance. The rest
of the population is already in government plans like Medicare, Medicaid and
Veterans’ Healthcare. These plans are also
impacted by higher healthcare costs.
Hospitals
will need to be able to refuse to treat patients who cannot pay in order to
reduce cost shifting to paying patients.
Counties will need to return to funding county health clinics and
emergency rooms for indigent patients. Many of these patients have their bills
paid by Medicaid after the fact.
The
addition of health savings accounts will encourage patients to fund their own
catastrophic and end of life costs and create a fund to pay high deductibles
for cheaper catastrophic plans.
The
addition of the ability to buy health insurance across State lines will
increase competition and should allow health insurance companies to customize
coverage to meet consumers’ needs.
What will
really lower healthcare costs will require the federal government to announce
that they will reduce their subsidies for healthcare over the next decade by 5%
per year. Only then will healthcare
providers have the incentive to begin to do cost reduction in their industries.
At this point they have no incentive to do this.
The
federal government is a single cell animal with no brain and 3 working parts.
It collects money, spends twice as much as it collects and destroys itself. It
needs to be genetically modified to spend less, restore the free market and
live longer.
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