ACA Renewals

What is your point? Obamacare was passed with no republican support.

 

Typical right winger, perhaps of the type who call themselves "Christian", but could give a crap about the uninsured or the under insured in the private medicine world. To do so would be "collectivist" I suppose.

 

Competition does drive down prices, but so can pricing regulation. The market doesn't function properly in HC anyways due to information asymmetry and a lack of transparency. The lack of coordination also has an effect on duplicate services. The ACA has a lot of problems, but HC industry experts (and I've been studying this crap for a while now) will tell you the system in this country has had major flaws for a long time now.

 

how would pricing regulation reduce pricing without reducing the product? Can you give me an example?

Deregulation of drugs and medical licensing would reduce pricing. Not regulation.

You can't just decree something cost what you want it to cost without consequences.

 

Geeez

I thought my sarcasm was obvious but I guess you've banged your head against the wall too much lol

 

For any life saving procedures such as cancer treatment or drugs or ER treatment, demand is inelastic. Free market prices for those entities in a free market will always be inflated.

 

I am all for deregulating drugs. Screwed fda regulations and med school.

 

Not sure what u mean by 'Screwed fda regulations and med school'

wouldnt get rid of FDA (just remove its power to ban anything). Med school should be optional. A patient should choose what qualifications they demand in a doctor (5 yr edu, 4 yr edu, 2 yr edu, etc..) assuming the patient is capable of choosing. Keep the FDA and medical licensing for those patients incapable of speaking for themselves (unconscious, insane, etc..).

 

Off the top of my head, I know the US subsidizes the world's prescription drugs. As Americans we get the privilege of paying much more for the same thing. I know Japan regulates MRI costs. MRIs in Japan are still MRIs, just a fraction of the cost. Look, I'm not against competitive markets, but the HC system requires major intervention if you want it to be considered as such. It's been an example of market failure for decades now.

 

Please show me a recent example of a country or municipality or region that switched from a system similar to ours to nationalized healthcare. I would really be curious to read up on it.

Further, I would argue that it is hard to make an apples to apples comparison with other nations healthcare costs. In my opinon, our healthcare costs are higher than other nations for a few major reasons. Obesity (specifically morbid obesity is a major strain on healthcare and it has exploded over the past few decades), excessive unnecessary testing, and excessive spending on treatments and drugs with minimal effectiveness for basically terminal patients. In places with nationalized healthcare they simply will not pay for these extremely expensive treatments that are minimally effective for patients near the end of their life. I don't think this is a bad thing.

 

No country has a system like ours. We have parts of the Bismarck system (insurance funded by workers and employers, but for profit mostly), parts of the Beveridge system (VA), parts of the Canadian system (Medicare, and Medicaid in a convoluted way), and parts of an out-of-pocket system. Medicaid varies across states because of federalism, as state governments don't like being dictated to even though the funding is mainly federal. There's a coordination problem among states. There's a coordination problem between between hospitals in the same damn city. There are entrenched interests that gain from information asymmetry, but it's not one single sector. Some hospitals make out like bandits and others struggle.

When it comes to spending, I have no problem with the advancements and investing in technology. But it's been the wild west with a major lack of oversight and a wicked set of systemic problems. We're not getting nearly the same bang-for-your-buck that other systems are getting. I'm fine with spending the most, but the winners of the current system spread the myth that somehow we're the best because we're spending the most...sigh. We can just do so much better.

 

Just make Medicaid the national system already (which is more or less what Canada does). Medicare is actually a 100% federally run program which Americans never feel comfortable with. We've been somehow convinced that federal programs are automatic failures. The Canadian model is a joint federal-state program where the Feds provide funding in exchange for meeting minimum standards for the provincial health insurance program which is more or less the same model as Medicaid. States get plenty of flexibility as a result to experiment and tailor their health insurance program to the population. The only big challenge is that the unhealthiest states tend to be the poorest so there's a huge mismatch in health care costs. But even accounting for that, its still better than what we have now.

Plus in Canada, hospitals are still private. And you can buy supplemental private health insurance. Granted the Canadian system is by no means the best in the world. In fact its one of the more poorest performing single payer programs in the western world but it still ranks well above the US in health outcomes and cost.

 

BTW can you please point to any of your past posts showing you give a crap about the uninsured or underinsured?

 

Were you on a group plan or an individual plan?

 

I've made posts in this forum offering solutions that build on the aca.

Furthermore, while you spend your time weaving a dream world on the Internet, I actually work to get vulnerable children medical care they need, often for no compensation at all.

While you offer up support for dictators and terrorists and live in fantasy land, I actually Work to make the world a better place for people who face significant challenges and lack advocacy.

You don't offer enough to this world to be as pompous as you are.

 

Actually I work in real life at my daily job to get vulnerable people without healthcare help also.

Unlike you I am not a fan of our health care for profit scheme and content with a little bit of pr industry charity to take the edge off a sihtty system that benefits primarily a few billionaires.

You can say it over and over, but national health care or Medicare for All is not a fantasy land proposal. See Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Japan etc.

Hey I do understand your angst as a relatively low level employee in the health care insurance bureaucracy who is captive to the internal industry propaganda and perhaps feels your job would be threatened by national health care eliminating most of the paper work/billing and marketing in healthcare.

As far as your claim I support dictators and terrorists, go stuff it and go back to idolizing Dubya/ Cheney or whoever your conservative heroes are

 

All valid questions that probably a google or two would shed light on.

One thing that we do know is that at least 25% of every dollar spent on healthcareis unnecessary overhead caused by the need for profit, marketing, billing, trying for eligibility (read excludability) etc. We also know that it is costly having millions either uninsured or underinsured and waiting till problems get out of control and going the ER route when they can't afford "free" access to primary physicians and drugs for conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, etc.

 

Eh - your posts suggest you're not exactly concerned about the uninsured or underinsured. You're much more interested in scoring political points or winning political arguments. This response from this thread is particularly illumnating:

Not surprising that giddyup would think it's fun, but the fact that you regularly post how you love to see a system failing and hurting people because it may ultimately lead to universal health care betrays your claims of actually caring about people. If you truly cared about people instead of policy, you'd want the current system to succeed and help people, even if its not the system you want. You're very similar to the people on the other side who try to make Obamacare fail so they can be right.

 

Well not really. We need to expand insurance to the uninsured asap. People are dying and suffering and committing suicide over this lack daily.

The ACA as passed left millions completely uninsured. Unfortunately this is not just due to the sadististic GOP governors denying Medicaid as we see in Texas.

The folks complaining about Obamacare going up and its problems for those it does cover are not all just confused or opponents of the law. As I said the ACA has helped about 50% of the previously uninsured somewhat and in some cases quite a bit.

In my work I deal all day long with the uninsured and the suffering due to lack of health care so this is urgent to me personally, though I have good insurance. Even I did not have such exposure as Pope Francis and Bernie Sanders among others have said this is an urgent moral issue.

We have a system Medicare (similar to what works in virtually all other advanced countiries) that would address virtually every last problem that the ACA failed to address. This is not an issue to be contentedly moderate about.

 

This is nonsense. Much of the opposition understood that it was going to fail. They understood it was full of flaws and many of the promises were nothing but misinformation and lies. It has done nothing it promised to do except help those who are in the fringe of poverty and those with preexisting conditions. Both of those could have been helped w/out a massive failure of an overhaul.

There were promises of cost control and decreasing the cost of health care. There were promises of keeping your doctors. There were promises that healthcare would be better for everyone.

Do you know why those of us knew none of this was true? Because there were no provisions in place to force this to happen. It expanded the power of the root of the issue, which are the insurance companies. It went the complete opposite direction in which we should have.

So do not get up on your soapbox and play the martyr. You bought into this garbage system. If the other party watered it down that bad, then it should never have been passed. This was nothing more than an ego trip for the president.