What Healthcare Bill Would Work?
I am no economist but my job as a direct primary doctor has proven that the free market works. Even more importantly, it proves that the insurance companies are needed very rarely. They don’t need to navigate your care. They don’t need to negotiate prices for you. They don’t need be called “your healthcare provider”. They are there to be a safety net when a catastrophe happens. That should be all. Consumers can bring prices down if they are left to their own devices.
With all this I still don’t know what EXACT plan will work but I know we are in the right direction if the insurers are pissed off about it. Remember, they LOVED Obamacare!
This article in the Washington Post was titled Health insurers have been strangely quiet about undoing Obamacare. Until now. It went on to say:
Cruz and Lee’s amendment, called the “consumer freedom amendment,” would allow insurance companies to sell cheap health plans that don’t meet the Affordable Care Act’s coverage requirements as long as insurers also agree to sell a plan that does. For example, an insurer could sell a skimpy plan without maternity coverage or reject people with certain preexisting conditions — so long as they sell a plan that doesn’t do those things. The idea, endorsed by Vice President Pence, is that healthy people would be able to buy only the coverage they want.
But in a letter to lawmakers and a document circulating on Capitol Hill, health insurers’ trade groups said that policy would destabilize the insurance marketplaces, cause premiums to rise unsustainably for people with chronic health conditions and leave fewer and fewer insurers selling plans — all the hallmarks of a death spiral.
“I’m writing to make clear my view on how the ‘Consumer Freedom Option’ is unworkable as it would undermine preexisting condition protections, increase premiums and destabilize the market,” Scott Serota, president and chief executive of the BlueCross BlueShield Association, wrote to Cruz and Lee.
I call bulls%t on the insurance trade groups. They are worried about only one thing and that is their profits. I only hope that this plan would put them in a death spiral!
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I am no financial expert on the free market, but I am the grandmother of a nine year old little boy who was diagnosed with a rare cancerous tumor 2 months ago-the medication that he needs to take for at least 6 months is priced at $9,000/month, and is only manufactured by Pfizer. Even if it were manufactured by another company, do you really think that they would offer it at a lesser price? It seems to me that the entire healthcare industry needs investigated, as to why costs are so high.
No maternity care. Than they and the baby can go on medicaid. I saw this in my practice. The woman was not planning to get pregnant, the insurance was cheaper so she/they decide not to pay for pregnancy coverage. OOPS. I am pregnant with no insurance.
But wait why should anyone else have to pony up for birth control, pre-natal, or maternity coverage?
Because quality of life for the poor means you get better nursing home care someday, given by the children who are now growing up poor. Because otherwise somebody will pay for the NICUs somehow, probably you. Why should you pay for schools if you don’t have kids, same reason. Why should you pay for highways when you ride a bike, pretty similar reason.
The insurance mafia is starting to see the lugbolts loosening on the wheels of the gravy train they’ve been riding for the last 7 1/2 years and they’re pulling out all the stops to keep if from happening.
7 1/2 years? try 60+ years….
don’t forget that the rich and wealthy will not allow themselves to be voted out of their wealth.
Of course I was referring to just the latest insurance macia rip-off. They’ve been paying off politicians for decades. Employer-sponsored group insurance, the HMO Act of 1973, the list goes on.
Between them and big pharma, us little guys barely stand a chance.
Interesting that an industry would complain that being allowed greater freedom of action would “undermine” and “destabilize.” That is proof of crony corporatism. I hope we’ll hear from the pro-ACA readers, I can’t wait for them to try and justify this.
More proof, as if we needed more, that the ACA was a gov’t sponsored ripoff, nothing more. And now we can’t get the damn tumor resected.