Replacing the Affordable Care Act

The insurance cartel buys the politicians that protect their parasitic activities.

 

I have worked in medical billing for years so I know that 33% is typical.

 

Mandated to buy insurance coverage means you pay even when you do not go to a hospital verses only having to pay the hospital if you need care is a big difference.

 

Hey...we gotta pay your salary ya know.

Oh and if you think middle class people can afford a hospital stay with out insurance...you are in the wrong business

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Exactly! And when you do go and don't pay because you have no insurance, the guy who has the insurance pays for the guy who doesn't. Which means, if you are not mandated to buy insurance, and you go to the hospital and do not pay, do you think the one's who have insurance who pay extra for you should be liable to pay for you, because you didn't want to be mandated to buy insurance?

All of us who have insurance, mandated or not, still have to pay for those who decided not to buy insurance, and not pay their hospital bills. That's the bottom line.

 

Read what I posted. That was just two of the many differences between the bills and they are HUGE differences.

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Because that's the policy most people have. And there on the hook for the remainder. Do you work for a hospital or private practice because there's differences there as well.

 

And big Pharma, the people who had every democrat in their pocket so they all voted for the bill big pharma wrote. Forget the Koch brothers, worry about the people who persuade the democrat sheep.

 

Special interest groups, like the insurance companies, often fund both sides in the hopes of influencing future legislation. We must remember a fundamental of politics which is that while the politicians always seek to increase their campaign contributions one of their greatest fears is to lose existing campaign contributors. Donating to a politician and then threatening to withdraw future contributions is far more effective than never contributing at all in securing favorable legislation in the future.

BTW - Remember that during the 2008 Democratic primaries Hillary Clinton was advocating a single-payer system that would have bankrupted many insurance companies. She's changed her position since the passage of the PPACA which relied on private insurance companies.

Obviously "Obamacare" isn't the same as "Hillarycare" that she was behind in 1995 but let's remember the resulting impact of Hillarycare from 1995. It was that proposed legislation that lead to the "conservative think tank" and "Republican" responses of the late 1990's that presented the overall right-wing political philosophy of "joint public and private insurance" to provide health insurance for ALL Americans and "Obamacare" was based upon that right-wing political philosophy.

As I've previously noted the Democrats were incapable of implementing a "right-wing political philosophy" of "joint public and private insurance" to provide health insurance for ALL Americans and Obamacare has demonstrated that they were incompetent in many specific cases. It embraced the "right-wing political ideology" but lacked the leadership from the "right-wing" members of Congress.

Of course the question remains if even the "right-wing" politicians could have fulfilled their "right-wing political philosophy" of "joint public and private insurance" for the tens of millions that lacked medical insurance and therefore lacked medical care. It's one thing to establish a "political philosophy" and another thing completely to implement that philosophy in the law and we know that Republicans didn't act for eight years under the Bush administration to implement the right-wing political philosophy of "joint private and public insurance" to ensure that ALL Americans would received quality health care.

Perhaps, in 2009, the Republicans realized that their previous proposals to solve the problem of tens of millions of Americans that weren't receiving proper healthcare were unworkable, they didn't have a clue about how to make it work, so they simply refused to participate in attempting to legislate their political ideology. Could that have been the case? We know that they haven't made any proposals since 2009 to provide health insurance/health care for the uninsured members of our society and that could be the real reason. It's possibly a problem they just don't have any solution to.

 

This is exactly like Obamaphones.

You don't get what a scam insurance and doctors have going do you? People go to the hospital now for bumps and bruises. They go for minor things like the sniffles. The hospital bills the insurance and you don't see price to pay so the hospitals charge the max they can to the insurance even if it doesn't come close to that cost.

BTW, there are still many people not on insurance because it costs too much but they make too much to get it for free. There is a grey area where they wont be charged anything for not having it either.

Socialize the loss while privatizing the rewards.

 

I try to be a realist, not a hyper-partisan dogmatist. Democrats are every bit as complicit in Big Pharma's gorging on the American people as are the insurance privateers.
Pfizer alone spent more than $10 million in lobbying efforts last year.

 

Basically all you're saying is that for those that have enough income and can afford private insurance the government can just take that money from them in taxes and screw them with a lower quality "single-payer" system but the poor are still screwed because Congress is going to dramatically limit benefits because providing benefits costs money.

Here's the fundamental problem that must be considered.

Would you rather have highly paid insurance executives that are required by the market to provide "value for the dollar" for their customers or penny-pinching politicians that will "reduce benefits" to save money?

I had group health insurance my entire working career and the benefits were far superior to any benefits ever offered under Medicare/Medicaid. I'll take the benefits from private insurance over government provided insurance anytime understanding that "you get what you pay for" when it comes to everything.

 

Their designer attest to the shared, basic approach - their individual and business mandates, subsidies for lower-income households, state-based exchanges. And, quite clearly, they also share the failure to check the rising costs of medical care. The federal government being allowed to negotiate prices with Big Pharma is one essential step in that endeavour, a potential that Romney's model did not have.

The model for the Affordable Care Act recently celebrated its tenth anniversary:

 

Republicans are equally responsible if we take off our "partisan" hats.

For example many of the exemptions from the anti-trust laws for the pharmaceutical companies and the limitations on purchasing the identical drugs from Canada existed prior to the PPACA. It wasn't something "new" but instead was a continuation of "business as usual" when the PPACA was passed.

 

Trump is reputedly on board with Clinton and Sanders in advocating for Medicare's being empowered to negotiate discounts as the biggest buyer of prescription drugs, saving $300 billion annually.

 

Are you aware of the fact that the federal government generally doesn't "negotiate prices" when it comes to medical services based upon Medicare/Medicaid?

Instead of negotiated costs for services the federal government dictates what it will pay for the services and, based upon Medicare/Medicaid, the re-imbursement is generally less than the actual cost of the services. This is referred to as "under-compensation" where the service provider would literally lose money if they treat the patient. That's why (unsubsidized) private clinics won't accept Medicare/Medicaid patents today. They'd go bankrupt treating them. Highly (government) subsidized hospitals do treat Medicare/Medicaid patients (they're required to) but the costs of these huge government subsidies are omitted from the "costs" of Medicare/Medicaid so that it appears these programs cost far less than they actually do.

 

Big Pharma is licensed to Congress to fleece Americans. That license needs to be revoked.

http://www.ncpssm.org/EntitledtoKno...ating-for-lower-drug-costs-in-medicare-part-d

 

As the article notes this was a Republican backed law from 2003 (i.e. drug coverage under Medicare from 2003) that is completely unrelated to Obamacare.

Should there be negotiated pricing? Absolutely but we'd see the costs of Medicare/Medicaid go up about 20% if that was the case and the politicians don't want that either.

One thing we do know is that private insurance companies do negotiate with medical service providers. That's why private insurance policies have "preferred providers" or "network providers" where compensation has been negotiated by the insurance company and medical service providers that are "outside" of the network. We also know that private insurance companies will often only pay for "generic" drugs while declining to cover some of the trade name drugs.

Private insurance companies attempt to negotiate lower prices consistently while, as noted, in many cases the federal government doesn't.

 

No, I am not saying that. I can only assume you do not know anything about risk pooling.

 

No, it's exactly like the healthcare system we've always had, except those with insurance were mandated to pay for those who did not have it.

That has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with my argument about the mandate we were talking about. Are you capable of sticking to one subject?

BTW, there are still many people not on insurance because it costs too much but they make too much to get it for free. There is a grey area where they wont be charged anything for not having it either.

Not only are you incapable of staying with a subject, but your conclusion here makes no sense. Move along! You're a waste of time.

 

The point being is there are cheaper ways to get seen by doctors. The forced insurance law (obamacare) only leads to higher revenues for the insurance companies and hospital administrators and harms the middle class just like everything the democrats ever try to do to "help the poor".

Yet you responded. You cant refute what I said so you dismiss it. Good tactic.

 

Giving it to the gov is...lol. They are so efficient and have a substantial track record regarding their money handling skills!