Useless and Unaffordable Care
The bastion of liberal reporting, the NY Times, seems to be surprised about how unaffordable the ACA is. In a recent article entitled Many Say High Deductibles Make Their Health Law Insurance All but Useless they discuss sticker shock because “for many consumers, the sticker shock is coming not on the front end, when they purchase the plans, but on the back end when they get sick: sky-high deductibles that are leaving some newly insured feeling nearly as vulnerable as they were before they had coverage.” Once again, I recommend you blame the government who was in cahoots with the insurance companies right form the start. The plans are not cheap and yes, the deductibles are unaffordable!
“Most Americans will find an option that costs less than $75 a month,” President Obama said.
Who is paying that?
Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, issued a report analyzing premiums in the 38 states that use HealthCare.gov. “Eight out of 10 returning consumers will be able to buy a plan with premiums less than $100 a month after tax credits,” she said.
Yes, same article and she has different numbers than the president.
But in interviews, a number of consumers made it clear that premiums were only one side of the affordability equation.
“Our deductible is so high, we practically pay for all of our medical expenses out of pocket,” said Wendy Kaplan, 50, of Evanston, Ill. “So our policy is really there for emergencies only, and basic wellness appointments.”
Her family of four pays premiums of $1,200 a month for coverage with an annual deductible of $12,700.
Does this matter to the gov’t? Nope!
Ms. Burwell said the administration had “seen high levels of satisfaction with the marketplace.”
Talk about lying!
Want the answer? Create competition. Remove the “must cover” preventive services like mammograms and colonoscopies and let people shop around for them. Make a competitive plan that is catastrophic or what was called major medical and let people shop for these ACROSS STATE LINES.
We must do something because what we have now sucks.
That’s right. If you don’t know what you’re treating, you have no measure of success. The Government way of doing business is to stuff all the expectations into the “IN” chute, turn on the sausage grinder, and package what comes “OUT.”
Two of the hardest things about any management chore are the questions – Who’s doing it? and Is it getting done?
The Golden Rule of modern corporate management is that one can manage without a clue about what “IT” is, as long as one has numbers pertaining to “IT.” Tire manufacture, women’s health – what’s the difference?
What we have now sucks, for the same reason that German and many other Europeans look over American manufacturing products for the purpose of ridicule. We have long been famous for things that are sh*tty, half-ass bolted together, and all-around suck. The Chinese make better stuff than us (a little) and way cheaper (a lot.) The Soviets used to produce worse – they’re not part of our 21st Century business model anymore.
Soviet civilian manufacturing sucked, because nobody was interested in the least whether the product pleased the customer – you get what you get, comrade. And that’s our health plan model, and it pretends to save money – when actually it’s become far more expensive to deliver care than the mean old days. Go figure.
It will suck worse, because nobody’s making it deliver. Go back 25 years, and remember that a lot of Eastern Europeans got fed up with the crap they got, and simply walked off the job. Is healthcare our final straw? Who knows.
Face it, it was a TAX. The super rich and the poor are the ones that wanted it. Rather than a sales tax like Canada, this tax hits the group that works to get ahead.
Try to work hard and make 150,000. If self employed you pay 20,000 for health insurance which is a 15% tax. This is better than a sales tax (that would catch all those underreporting income) or income tax. It is not regessive, if you only make 10,000 then you only pay a small fraction of your health, you spend a million then you pay a lot.
There is no point working to get ahead. Government employees get free health care, huge pensions, lots of sick time, now free college at elite universities, and ultimately make more. Hard working people through in the towel
The drug companies gave huge amounts to the politicians and now we have drugs costing a million for two months of life, and 70,000 hepatitis treatments.
Competition does not work in health care. At least when it is piecemeal. Note the specialties that control their field make the most anesthesia, radiology, orthopedics, cardiology. How will competition lower those costs.
The only solution is a budget. Each region gets x dollars and has to provide all the health care for those dollars. Decide what to ration. Million dollar chemo for 2 months of life for a 90 year old? Hepatitis treatment? etc.
Sorry, but the disease is systemic – a local treatment, such as rationing, can’t work here.
In fact, rationing can never work. Read the parable of the 20th Century Motor Company in Atlas Shrugged – it’s pretty brief. Ivy Starnes was the Rational Allocator. People with the kindest hearts don’t wind up as the allocator of sparse assets – it’s usually the cruelest people in the operation. (PS – ignore the Randians and Objectivists and other clingers-on to Ayn Rand- they’re bigger nitwits than the drug-addled Trotskyites and Maoists were in the ’60’s.)
The problem is that the productivity of America got thrown into Hard Reverse some 40, 50 years ago. One can’t have extra capital if one doesn’t PRODUCE extra capital, and we don’t. So there’s not enough money to run the Government Machine and do other things. Guess who wins? The problem is that 50 years ago, there was surplus productivity and prosperity enough to play loose and liberal with healthcare – it didn’t represent that big a sacrifice to the US economy. Now, we’re short on ‘extra.’
The Feds stuck their arm in this bear trap years ago. They looked at the billions of dollars sluicing through Healthcare every day, and figured – hey, if we can only rake off 1%, 5%, whatever, we’re riding the gravy train.
But they’re not improving management – not this bunch. They’ve figured how to rake off some, that’s true – but the cost of the rest has GONE UP. Some sucker has to pay more to get less. Guess who?
The story’s always been a threadbare one – who’s been saying that we need to make healthcare more efficient and perhaps spend more, because the healthcare of US citizens needs improvement? That’s a laugh – nobody’s ever pitched it that way. It’s all about getting into the cash flow, and people will cough up cash to stay alive. Your money or your life, sez the bad guy in the movies. People will cough it up for this, when they won’t for parks or roads or any other ‘luxuries.’ The other side of the coin is being dead – and sure, people will fight for that until the end. Read the story of the Warsaw Ghetto, where people fought for their lives – and thousands of other places, Cambodia, ’50’s China – if you put people’s life on the line, they’ll pay – or they’ll fight. So far, they’ve been paying. But for how long?
If you keep robbing Peter to pay Paul, Peter will eventually run out of money.