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Your list excludes companies like Blue Cross and Blue Shield, i know it is state by state, but it is still technically one company with 50 subsidiaries. And its profits were in the billions last year.
You also did not mention UnitedHealthcare, who made 5 billion.
Aetna made 1.99 billion
Assurant made 545 million
Cigna 1.624 billion
WellPoint had 800 million in profits last year.
Who cares?
It's peanuts.
Even if you confiscated 100%, it would not make a dent in the costs of health care.
And those of us that have good jobs with great medical benefits have to pay for it so our employers don't have to pay the "cadillac plan tax." We expected it and it's happening, for us effective 1/1/2014.
and those of us with bad jobs with no medical benefits have been subsidizing you for decades.
and those of us with bad jobs with no medical benefits have been subsidizing you for decades.
Very true... my favorite comment about that is this:
Quote:
“When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
I would think it clearly will lower the cost of health care on average. And it may do pretty well overall. It has clearly limited the ability of insurance companies to take excess profits. And it may well provide great pressure to lower some costs.
We shall see.
Oh lookie here...it's a pay article so I can't access the whole thing, so here's a short summary/;
The Affordable Care Act includes four significant, permanent, implicit unemployment assistance programs, plus various implicit subsidies for underemployment. Every sector of the economy, and about half of nonelderly adults, is directly affected by at least one of those provisions. This paper calculates the ACA’s impact on the average reward to working among nonelderly household heads and spouses. The law increases marginal tax rates by an average of five percentage points (of employee compensation), on top of the marginal tax rates that were already present before the it went into effect. The ACA’s addition to labor tax wedges is roughly equivalent to doubling both employer and employee payroll tax rates for half of the population.
Pretty easy question really. Obamacare was never really intended to lower health care costs (one of the biggest downsides of the American healthcare system). It was intended to provide healthcare to most of those who couldn't afford it.
Right, and as long as 40% of the people get healthcare that the other 60% subsidize, they'll never admit or even care how much it's actually costing.
I don't believe Obamacare was ever meant to actually work as advertised. I think it was designed to be so bad, that the only logical cure would be the single-payer option. The politicians always intended to take full control of healthcare. From the cradle to the grave, the US Gov aspires to have control of.
Even if you confiscated 100%, it would not make a dent in the costs of health care.
You only need to look at these publicly traded corps and the govt CAFR funds to see that the govt makes a great deal from insurance and health care. That is aside from taxing and regs. Since the govt is the largest shareholder of these corps.
The reason cost are so high is because of govt involvement. This new system is intended for large revenues. The large funds are where all the action is.
The medical industry says "defensive medicine". Something that law industry fails to calculate can account up to 5-10% of total health care spending. Docs order too many GI procedures, too many echos, too many stress tests to look for heart disease, too many CT scans. But docs say if they miss a diagnosis and fail to order a test that results in permanent injury or death they are screwed. A kid who falls down on the playground and has a slight bump on head and there were no witnesses to the fall.
In other words, the medical industry admits that they order tests that are not medically necessary and then bill insurance companies for those tests. In other words, they openly admit to committing insurance fraud. Yet for some reason they fight as hard as they can to prevent injured patients from receiving any compensation and blame the lawyers who stand up for those injured patients for how much they charge for medical care.
Last edited by jackmccullough; 09-07-2013 at 03:51 PM..
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