Free Market Health Insurance

[Aargh]

Great, put pressure on your congressman to drop price controls and back out of interfering with healthcare.

Are you saying that Medicare has established pricing levels that are higher than what they would be without Medicare? If that's the case, then put pressure on your Congressman to establish lower price controls for Medicare. If that happened fewer doctors and hospitals would accept Medicare clients. That seems to fit with what I envision of how you feel health care should be handled. Those with money get good health care, and those without get what they can afford - pretty much nothing.

Two doctor visits with tests didn't have to cost this much.

But they do, so don't tell me that's an option I have today. I will repeat - your 1965 health care costs would have put your mother - if she needed a hip replacement - in a wheel chair, with the pain associated with sitting on a ruined hip, for the rest of her life. Are you willing to accept that?

Alas. Not-for-profit hospitals exist for the purpose of bringing needy people the highest quality of healthcare that their budgets will allow. For profit hospitals charge a premium for their services. You'd think poor people would migrate to the lower cost alternative -- so why aren't they? Could it be the obvious answer that we have subsidized 16% our population and implemented price controls on private hospitals -- making the much more expensive alternative to not-for-profit hospitals too available (i.e. overuse/abuse)?

What do you propose when their budgets don't allow for health care? Minimum wage earners cannot afford health care. Not even at totally artificial costs based on 1965 adjusted for inflation. Minimum wage earners can't afford food and housing. Right now the government is pooling money from everybody else to give them health coverage. WalMart and probably most fast food chains rely on government assistance for their employees.

Could it be that Medicare/id is the CAUSE and the decline of the readily available not-for-profit hospital is the EFFECT?

Could it be that stockholders are the CAUSE and the decline of the readily available not-for-profit hospital is the EFFECT? Both arguments can be made. I cringed when I wrote the first sentence. I have trouble believing that business owners would put their profit margin ahead of the health of another human being, but that is a terribly naive thought.

Yes, it needs to be phased out for a model that is sustainable. I will rough out a model of what that looks like in a future post.

I'm looking forward to that. I've read that one of the indications of an intelligent person is that they are able to entertain more than one opinion on a single subject. I consider myself an intelligent person.

[SB Shock]

From Obama adivsor on the Obama Care (Jonathan Gruber)

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass… Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/11/video-stupid-voters-would-have-killed-obamacare/

[SB Shock]

“Economists have called for 40 years to get rid of the regressive, inefficient and expensive tax subsidy provided for employer provider health insurance,” Gruber said at the Pioneer Institute for public policy research in Boston. The subsidy is “terrible policy,” Gruber said.


“It turns out politically it’s really hard to get rid of,” Gruber said. “And the only way we could get rid of it was first by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people when we all know it’s a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.”

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/11/15/gruber-video-6-mislabeling-cadillac-tax-to-deceive-the-voter/

[SB Shock]

http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/02/pf/taxes/obamacare-income-tax-subsidies/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Obamacare enrollees who received subsidies to help pay for coverage will soon have to reconcile how much they actually earned in 2014 with how much they estimated when they applied many, many months ago.
This will likely lead to some very unhappy Americans. Those who underestimated their income either will receive smaller tax refunds or will owe the IRS money.


That’s because subsidies are actually tax credits and are based on annual income, but folks got their 2014 subsidy before knowing exactly what they’d make in 2014. So you’ll have to reconcile the two with the IRS during the upcoming tax filing season.


It won’t be surprising if many enrollees guessed wrong. The sign up period began in October 2013 and many people did not know what they’d earn in 2014. Some went off what they earned in 2012…


Those who underestimated their earnings could owe thousands of dollars, though there is a $2,500 cap for those who remain eligible for subsidies. The threshold for eligibility is based on income – $45,900 for an individual and $94,200 for a family in 2014.

[Kel Varnsen]

Good posts, SB. If people have to mislead the public in order to garner support for a bill like this, it should give everyone some sort of pause.

[Kung Wu]

So, if you have purchased insurance off the exchanges, how do you like your premium and your deductibles?

[Kung Wu]

So, if you have purchased insurance off the exchanges, how do you like your premium and your deductibles?

I'm still curious how you like your deductibles and premiums if you have purchased off the exchanges.

Regardless, here comes another wave of premium hikes ... Insurers warn losses from ObamaCare are unsustainable