Yodabunny wrote:
Gbaji wrote:
Do that and the industry will be forced to lower its prices to a level that people can afford
Huh? No they won't. Not even a little bit.
Yes, they would. It's just hard to see this because we already exist in a system where health care costs are massively inflated due to government mandates (which existed pre-ACA, just to a lesser degree).
Quote:
The problem with health care being a private industry is you can't not get health care. It's a necessity and laws prevent you from getting your own medications without using that industry to get a prescription. If I can't afford to go to the doctor I'm going anyway because I have to. Then, because I can't pay the bill, your taxes are going to end up paying for my visit and everyone else's costs are going to go up because I'm a deadbeat.
Health
care is a necessity. But health
insurance is what we pay. The problem is that you pay for the cost of insurance based on the entirety of what that insurance covers, not necessarily what your actual direct health
care costs are. And since it's being paid in one big bucket, there's little incentive for anyone to keep costs down. I just don't think you realize how much of your costs have nothing to do with the actual cost of your care, and have a lot to do with those costs being spread around to pay for super expensive medical devices and pharmaceuticals. A company marketing an MRI machine has zero need to decrease their cost (and will in fact crank it up) because they know the hospital will just spread the cost for that MRI machine into the bills every patient has to pay. And the patient doesn't care because his insurance is paying it. And the insurance company doesn't care because they just pass that on to the purchaser. And the purchaser doesn't care because he's just taking that out of his labor costs for his employees and they don't see it, unless they're paying attention to their wages being flatter over time than they should be.
Of course, this screws over the self insured, or direct payers. But they're in the minority. But that's why those costs are so high. If *everyone* self payed, it would be vastly less expensive. You'd pay just for the care you received.
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There is NOTHING good about a private health care system. Money should not be the primary motivator in keeping people alive.
That has nothing at all to do with this though. Money is already involved. The difference is that we've created a system that effectively grants free money to folks who are 4+ steps removed from the patient seeking care. That's what drives up prices. Again, it's not about health care, but health insurance, what it must provide, and thus how that creates a cost inflating effect. Obamacare mandates that everyone must purchase health insurance. That's a doubling down on the problem, and not in any way a solution (much less anything that could possibly be expected to make healthcare more affordable).
TirithRR wrote:
If they really wanted to make Health Insurance more affordable to lower income brackets, wouldn't a very simple step to take just be making paid premiums deductible from gross incomes even if you get your insurance outside of an employer policy? I mean, for someone like me, my premiums are such a small part of my overall income that the deduction actually makes little to no difference. But for someone like my father, premium costs could approach 10% of their income.
In the end the whole "pre-tax" and "after-tax" stuff just seems like BS to me. I mean, to me, it doesn't really matter when the money is actually taxed. At the end of the year I deduct the premiums from my income and they are no longer considered "taxed". Seems like it'd be pretty simple to let another person do that. I'm aware that there would likely need to be a cap on how much could be deducted, but simplifying it into it's own straight forward deduction just seems like a simple step to me.
Ironically, that's exactly the issue that the GOP proposed as a counter to Obama's plan. Mccain had an whole plan back in 2008 to replace the existing pre-tax/post-tax inequity with a tax credit that everyone received equally. So whether your employer paid for your insurance on your behalf, or you purchased it directly, you got the same credit. The thinking was that this would reduce costs because people would seek out insurance plans that provided them just with what the actually needed, rather than the so called "cadillac" plans.
The GOP also pushed for things like allowing people to buy insurance out of state, thus increasing competition (so many more options for consumers which always tend to lower prices), and tort reform to prevent silly high malpractice insurance (which would also decrease costs for consumers of health care). But hey, we all know that the GOP didn't actually have any alternative ideas to Obamacare because that's what we were told repeatedly, right? Right?
Instead, what did we get? Um... The same broken system we already had, only now we're required to buy into it, even if we don't want or need to. That helps how exactly? The ACA doesn't change how costs are spread through the system. It doesn't remove the profit incentive for third party vendors to crank up their prices and profits at the expense of the patients wallets. If anything, it increases those problems since now even the healthy have no choice by to pay for it. All it does is increase the size of the pool of free money for those looking to enrich themselves from it.
It's a terrible law. So horribly flawed. Oh, and the kicker is that along the way, out of a desire to appear to be caring about the health of the people (or whatever) the law resulted in a horrible ruling by the SCOTUS, which has firmly established the precedent that the government can force you to do something you don't want to do, just because it'll benefit someone else. Um... Which is basically the opposite of individual liberty. So yeah, bad on so many levels that it's not even remotely funny.
Edited, May 26th 2016 6:10pm by gbaji