Salient fact: 83% of all doctors have considered quitting over Obamacare (http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/09/report-83-percent-of-doctors-have-considered-quitting-over-obamacare/). I don’t think further discussion is needed beyond this fact, but I am going to do it anyway.
1. Health costs are rising because more products are being offered, and because individuals are insulated from the costs by employer provided insurance. Such insurance is the only option in most Blue States, as keeping control over health insurance is a key component of the Union political agenda.
2. Such cost insulation did not occur 20 years ago when most plans were “major medical” (now called Catastrophic) plans with high deductibles, in which most medical visits were paid out of pocket. Those who claim that putting this back into the hands of consumers would increase costs simply do not grasp how expensive employer plans actually are, not until they are forced by unemployment to choose between COBRA and being uninsured.
3. If the unemployed are forced between choosing a Cadillac plan that pays everything and being uninsured, would it not be logical to grant them an intermediate step of Major Medical coverage, which would mean coverage never lapsed?
4. People with preexisting conditions are not buying “insurance”–which is risk pooling across large populations–but subsidies. Self evidently, subsidies are expensive, and if they are put in the hands of insurance companies, will inevitably be passed back to consumers, raising insurance premiums, as indeed is already happening.
5. Obamacare mandates that 80% of all premiums be spent on medical care. The goal is to bankrupt insurance carriers, who unlike government agencies cannot ask for budget increases. To make a 5% profit they must keep costs at 15% of their budget. Medicare operates with none of these constraints, and is in the process of gradually soaking up EVERY LAST FREAKING dollar of the Federal Budget. It cannot continue in its current form, and plainly Obamacare, as a vast increase in Entitlements, will make things much, much worse, either in cost overruns, or in healthcare rationing.
6. A free market option exists already to ensure no preexisting conditions: make all insurance premiums paid by individuals tax exempt, AS LONG AS they remain covered, with no breaks. This of course only will work if all individuals can buy Major Medical policies directly from the carriers.
7. Logical health insurance reform, then, will be to use the Federal Government to prevent States from blocking carriers from selling directly to end users, and from imposing unreasonable barriers to interstate insurance competition. The tax code will be modified to exempt health insurance as long as no lapses occur.
This option will over time lead to competition in healthcare, cost decreases, improved quality; and following reductions in insurance premiums, people who get sick without coverage, and the overall costs of our socialized medicine.
To be clear, preexisting condition people are charity cases. There is no logical free market solution to them, and if they are to be cared for, we need to do so directly, as an extension of Medicare/Medicaid, and not pretend that we are somehow helping everyone else by altering the system to accommodate them. They win, everyone else loses. If we want to invoke compassion, so be it, but for God’s sake not “prudence.”
Ideas that are good work. Ideas which are bad–like Obama’s plan, and like Romney’s to the extent he fails to reject it in toto–do not.
I find periodically the need to remind leftists that their STATED objective is helping people. They seem to forget this, and will turn a blind eye if Obama wins and Obamacare gets implemented when costs surge, access to routine medical care declines precipitously, and routine procedures get impossible to get scheduled.
NONE of this is necessary, and I have just shown why.