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ACA was supposedly going to be repealed & replaced with something I recall being described as "much better". I don't remember hearing or reading what type of replacement plan would fulfill the definition of much better.
On a issue like this, in my opinion, there needs to be a bipartisan effort, thereby both parties have a stake in the eventual plan being workable in practice. But, Washington seems to be dysfunctional.....so, I am not all that optimistic
Are you sure about that? France for instance just lost the 12,000 individuals with a net worth of $1,000,000 or more because of the increased tax burden being placed upon them. Most of those individuals came to the United States. It seems like all France accomplished by embracing socialism and making "healthcare a right" is to hollow out their economy.
The economy of France has been stagnant for decades. French growth has exceeded the 3 percent mark in only five of the past 37 years. So, from 1980 to 2016, real GDP growth averaged a meager 1.78 percent – about two-thirds the U.S. rate.
See, that's the problem with proponents of "single payer", they never ever propose a payment plan that doesn't involve completely stagnating the economy.
It's easy for poor people to vote someone's else's money to themselves, but they never think of the consequences of stagnant growth for 4 decades. No one ever discusses that.
Yes, I am absolutely positive beyond a shadow of a doubt that not one single person we know from any of the countries I listed would be willing to trade their systems for ours.
Your "stats" are too simplistic to be of any value in this discussion.
You are ignoring the fact that the U.S. economy has already been devastated, with healthcare a major component of our problem, and that the middle-class essentially no longer even exists. It’s been mostly wiped out already.
You think social programs in Europe are new, so you can judge their successes by recent numbers? And that those numbers tell you anything of any significant value regarding the daily lives of their average citizens, including their middle-class that still exists?
Arguments like yours are the same old, same old rhetoric that’s ruined the quality of life for most Americans. Keep on shooting yourself and all of us in the collective foot because you let greed and "me, me, me" influence what you learn and how you interpret it. That’s right, keep falling for the propaganda that leads you to vote against your own best interests, the interests of your country, all so you can continue enriching only the few. See how well it’s worked so far?
Overall, Anthem is proposing a 35% rate increase for about 135,000 consumers who buy their own insurance in and outside the Covered California exchange. It’s the largest increase statewide and assumes that federal subsidies for copays and deductibles will continue to be paid. The second highest, also assuming the U.S. government will continue paying those subsidies, is 28.6% by Molina Healthcare.
That’s an example of a private sector industry enriching itself using the instruments of government, while also buying our government officials so they will allow it the unfettered ability to fleece the public paying for those instruments of government for our benefit (but then it benefits those industries instead of us because the government doesn’t stop them); AND spreading enough anti-government propaganda to convince the public that funding our own people’s government to provide services for ourselves is a bad thing, and to blame each other for all that is wrong instead of joining together against the very industry bleeding us dry to the point of killing us.
It’s so out of control now, I don’t even know if we can right the ship anymore. I’m very discouraged.
The problem is simply cost. I would be happy if everyone had health care and could afford it. Unfortunately that is not the case and a LOT of people still go to the ER for treatment and then pay nothing as they have no insurance. The problem is simply the cost and the way health care is handled.
An example of a change. No doctor can refuse to accept Medicare or Medicaid patients. If you are a doctor you must take them wit any insurance plan period. If money is your only goal, move. Then get rid of all the laws that drive up costs. If you do not get a dozen tests the doctor might get sued if he does not have a test done that you may need, even if the problem is 1 out of 1,000,000 patients. Lawsuits have driven costs through the ceiling and while some are justified many simply make money for attorney's. Then pharmaceutical costs. And finally are lousy food.
As to those who chose a stupid lifestyle, some "punishment" is warranted. Now should they get medical treatment, OK, BUT should they then be allowed to return to their stupid and dangerous life style that as we see with the Hep A problem, hurts others? Helping is worth it, throwing money away is not.
I disagree. When I was a medical social worker in Washington State, in the early 2000s physicians there started dumping their Medicaid patients and refusing to take new ones. They did so because Washington had some of the lowest Medicaid reimbursement rates in the country. All they had to do was give their patients 30 days notice. We had a lot of frightened, confused elderly residents in our longterm care center. They felt betrayed.
In Alaska, there were almost no primary care physicians who would accept Medicare. We knew an old woman whose family had moved her from Texas to Alaska to be with them, but once there they couldn’t find a doctor for her because none would accept Medicare. She also was very upset and felt betrayed by her country.
There are physicians all over this country refusing Medicare and Medicaid patients. Before their reimbursements levels were squeezed so low, and private insurance companies had raised their costs of doing business (keeping up with all of the inefficiencies and intrusions forced on them by the insurance companies) to the point that they felt they could no longer afford to subsidize the lower government programs’ payments, Medicaid and Medicare were easy-breezy programs to work with and implement. When I was a social worker I’d rather have dealt with Medicaid over a private healthcare plan any day of the week, month, or year. The entire system, though, is now distorted by the influence of the insurance industry. Throw in the pharmaceutical industry fleecing Americans (like no other country allows them to fleece their citizens) and greedy physicians’ medical businesses, and our system is broken.
Finally, the idea that frivolous lawsuits have driven up our healthcare costs is a myth. It’s a successful myth fostered by the insurance industry. If you do serious research on the topic, you will discover the stats don’t back up that myth, but physicians believing it pay the insurance industry a lot of money in malpractice insurance (thus the motive in fostering the myth and keeping it alive), and it encourages legislators to take away the only avenue to justice that exists for average citizens when true malpractice does take place.
The one thing you point to to save money at the expense of billions of dollars didn't happen.
That’s because, before Obamacare was even passed or implemented, in anticipation of not making as much profit (not losing money, just not making as much profit), insurance companies started jacking up their rates and designing new healthcare plans that screw the patient at every turn. Because the insurance companies jacked up the rates, employers are offering the new horrible plans that limit access to readily available, quality providers, deny treatments and medications they will have to cover if the patients and physicians persist (but every day they create inefficient delays saves them money for higher profits, so what if it interrupts continuity of care and damages people’s health?). Now only the wealthy can afford to buy insurance privately. It doesn’t have to be that way. Insurance companies did it on purpose. They are making record profits, in the billions, and won’t accept anything less, no matter what it does to us and our country.
They are also preying on Medicare patients with their rip-off Advantage plans, thanks to George W. Bush turning a piece of Medicare over to those private sector sharks. He undermined the entire point of Medicare!
My own current employer-offered plan routinely engages in all kinds of intrusive, interfering "help" I don’t want, interfering between me and my doctors, and it does so because it makes money off of every little thing it does, no matter how useless and inefficient it makes implementing basic healthcare. It also routinely denies long-standing treatments and medications, and then after finally authorizing them, it keeps making me go through reauthorizations constantly. It also severely restricts my choice of medical providers. We are paying more toward premiums than we’ve ever paid, but it is one of the worst plans I’ve had in my entire life, and it’s because the insurance companies jacked up the prices while diluting the care they will cover. Not because they had to, since they were still profitable, but out of pure greed. Profits are not enough. It must be ever higher profits, no matter the cost to the rest of us and ultimately, our country.
The last employer plan I had got out of providing preventative care it was required to cover by not having any in-network providers within 100 miles or more of me. It did the same with my primary care physician (it had only one in-network for a population of over 400,000 people, and I wasn’t his patient), and for a cardiologist, cardiac procedure, and the hospital, plus an ER visit for my spouse. It didn’t have either a cardiologist or hospital in its network in the entire state so it didn’t have to count ANY of the care as in-network. It paid about $5000.00 and I will be paying off the other $40,000.00 the rest of my life. Oh, and none of it was applied to our deductibles or maximum out-of-pocket so despite the thousands I spent on care that year, I didn’t even come close to meeting any of the limits that are there to help us. I got to start all over trying to meet them the following year, but in CA. It turned out that in my new home in Santa Barbara county, there were almost no in-network providers of any kind within 100 miles of us. The closest in-network hospital was 30 minutes away if we had an emergency (an out-of-network hospital was five minutes away), and there was no in-network ambulance within 100 miles. The closest in-network place for a mammogram was 350 miles away. So, again, we paid out-of-network prices out-of-pocket, and almost no care was applied to our deductibles or out-of-pocket maximums. We could never reach them no matter how much we spent. The insurance plan got away with it because it was an employer-funded plan, and it turns out, those have all kinds of loopholes, the states have no authority over them, and although they are breaking the AHCA, the feds can’t do anything about it because the laws have no teeth for employer-funded plans. Thanks Congress! Especially you treasonous Republicans!
The Affordable Health Care Act is not the problem. It’s how the private sector is being allowed to get around it that is the problem.
We need to get rid of the parasites that have taken over our healthcare system.
Neither pre-ACA, nor ACA, nor any version of post-ACA being discussed in Congress addresses the underlying issue that health care costs too much in this country. We consume on average about $10,000 per person per year of health care nationwide. THEREFORE, as surely as night follows day, any healthcare insurance to cover $10K per year of consumption MUST cost at least $10K per year plus administrative costs plus profit.
The issue is NOT the price of insurance.
The issue is the underlying price of healthcare that the insurance pays for.
Factually incorrect. One of the provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a ACA, a.k.a. Health Reform, a.k.a. Obamacare) is that it limits the profits of health insurance companies.
You are mixing up health insurance with health care.
Most of the rest of the world consumes about $2,500 per person per year in health care vs. the USA where we consume about $10,000 per person per year. We spend 4x what other countries spend on health care, so the insurance for health care costs 4x as well.
This has NOTHING TO DO WITH ACA OR ANY OTHER FORM OF INSURANCE. It has NOTHING to do with Obamacare, pre-Obamacare, or any proposal to replace Obamacare. it has EVERYTHING to do with the underlying cost of medical care.
This has NOTHING to do with insurance.
Yes, that's true. The culprit in this case is we'eve seen a 10x reduction in productivity in the health care industry in the USA. Here is one tangible example: my personal doctor, a cardiologist, has about 18 staff people in his office. There are no other physicians -- just himself. Yet he has a staff of about 18. That includes some nurses, a couple techs for treadmill tests, a tech for echocardiograms -- but the rest are pure administration: scheduling, billing, insurance specialists, and the like who do not provide health care but are on the payroll nevertheless.
So he has a payroll of about 18 -- and he also has to pay for the capital equipment plus all the other expenses of running a medical practice.
That is an example of why health care costs too much -- and therefore insurance costs too much.
What a load of semantics baloney. Not even going to bother…
Except I do agree that healthcare costs is a major problem.
Oh, and the limit on how much per dollar can be spent on overhead does not prevent greater profits. Only new schemes were required. The U.S. government does not impose a limit on profits.
The culprit in this case is we'eve seen a 10x reduction in productivity in the health care industry in the USA. Here is one tangible example: my personal doctor, a cardiologist, has about 18 staff people in his office. There are no other physicians -- just himself. Yet he has a staff of about 18. That includes some nurses, a couple techs for treadmill tests, a tech for echocardiograms -- but the rest are pure administration: scheduling, billing, insurance specialists, and the like who do not provide health care but are on the payroll nevertheless.
So he has a payroll of about 18 -- and he also has to pay for the capital equipment plus all the other expenses of running a medical practice.
That is an example of why health care costs too much -- and therefore insurance costs too much.
That’s true of all medical practices now, but those admin staffs are required mostly to deal with all the added bureaucracy and interfering of the insurance companies.
The vast majority of surgery is not emergency in nature.
Price shopping setting s broken bone or where to get chemo treatments is complete reasonable. The vast majority of surgeries have more than enough times to price shop. Especially since the most people are in major metro areas with multiple hospitals. This isn't to say that emergency surgeries are never needed; but you are talking about less than a few percentage points of all surgeries completed.
Our family has never been in the luxurious position of being able to doctor and price shop before an unexpected surgery. Just like we don’t price and doctor shop before rushing to the closest ER, where we have no idea who is working there or will be sending us bills later. That is what is true for most people. Also, our "managed care" plans do it for us, telling us where and who we must go to for our care. There is no "free market" in healthcare. To suggest there is, is a big fat lie, as is comparing luxury elective surgeries to life and body saving surgeries.
The same thing happens in America in its social medicine programs. The VA has horrendous wait times that have caused national scandals and Medicare wait times are also experimentally longer than people in traditional health care programs. You can choose to keep your head in the sand if you wish.
None of that was true before the Republican led efforts to starve and cripple our successful public programs, from Social Security, to Medicare, to Medicaid. But that’s been the goal (and it is what is happening to England’s national healthcare system as the same forces have been trying to privatize it), starve and cripple programs so they falter, and then claim they are suddenly at fault so they must be done away with.
The same thing happens in America in its social medicine programs. The VA has horrendous wait times that have caused national scandals and Medicare wait times are also experimentally longer than people in traditional health care programs. You can choose to keep your head in the sand if you wish.
It isn’t we who are saying these things, "not admitting." It is people living in those countries. You really are uninformed about what it is like in other countries, and what they think of ours, aren’t you? That makes you an easy target for propaganda aimed right at you.
By the way, insurance companies have been rationing Americans' healthcare for at least 20 years now, and it is growing only more severe in its rationing.
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Am I sure?
