I have a question for you. I get the sense from your postings that you aren’t poor and that you have a professional level job. So if an insurance plan with a high deductible is a problem for you, why not buy one with a lower or no deductible? I know that the government subsidies only cover bronze level high deductible plans, but there are plans of all varieties if you are a full pay customer.
My Obamacare insurance doesn’t have a deductible and there’s a 2K out of pocket max. For me, since I’ve had some issues this year including several outpatient surgeries, I’ll probably hit a point this year where I don’t even have to pay copays.
So if high deductible insurance isn’t right for you, why not buy a better policy?
Or are you just repeating a talking point without having any real experience?
I have very real experience with it. You are right. I am not poor. I am a consultant to mega-corps that works for an international consulting company based in Europe. When I first started 8 years ago, my consulting company prided itself on providing its American consultants with literally free (to us) health insurance to match what the European consultants have. After ObamaCare was passed, the creep began. We still got free insurance but we were switched over to a high-deductible plan (at that time it was about $1500 IIRC). Things went to hell every year after that. They explained that costs had risen so quickly due to ObamaCare that we would have to pay our share of the premiums AND the out of pocket costs would rise to the legal maximum.
That effectively means that I have health insurance but I can’t use it for anything unless it is catastrophic. I had to go the emergency room three weeks ago because of double pneumonia and you better bet your ass that I will be paying for that myself when I get the (presumably huge) bill. The irony is that I didn’t go to the doctor when it was just a common infection because I already spent my money on dumb things like useless health insurance.
You can say that is the fault of my employer but I don’t think that mostly true. High deductible plans have proliferated at an astounding rate since ObamaCare was enacted as costs have continued to spiral out of control. High deductible plans now make up about 25% of all plans and are especially common in the private sector. They used to be a rarity. I am caught in that grey area where I have employer provided coverage and make too much to qualify for any ObamaCare plan but a single trip to the doctor or the emergency room could still cost me the equivalent of a used car so I don’t go unless I absolutely have to. I would be better off with an old-school catastrophic plan and just pay for routine care myself if that was even possible (no one actually knows how much anything really costs until it is run through the insurance system).
The (not at all) funny thing is that I infected 7 other people at work including the head of the multi-billion dollar facility. He blew out his eardrum when coming in for landing on an important business trip. Several others ended up in the emergency room as well with pneumonia. The Director was pissed at me especially (from a safe distance) when she flew in for a meeting.
I told her that I didn’t invent the infection, I don’t have the option of not coming into work because I don’t have any qualified substitutes and I can’t just go to the doctor because my health insurance has been effectively disabled. There is your cost/benefit analysis for you.
That is not right. I am happy that people in the inner city and Appalachia have some form of (really terrible) health insurance now but it shouldn’t come at the cost of someone like me. I am paying much, much more to give other people low cost care while my own gets destroyed. That is not a reasonable idea.
I used to work in the medical benefits industry for 4 years to implement every version of medical insurance there is. I work in medical devices now. Trust me when I tell you that the whole thing was FUBAR before but it is FUBAR 10.0 now. We will have to have a new thread if you want to know the reasons for that but I know them and ObamaCare did nothing to address them and, even made things worse in many ways. There is no way to wallpaper over it.
I need to pipe in to say that my health care premiums (self-employed in NJ) skyrocketed for many years before Obama’s first inauguration. For some reason, this is rarely mentioned …
Are you really thinking this through?
Let’s say that as of today, I had the option of of going on the Nebraska insurance exchange and buying a policy that’s much cheaper than my New York State policy.
There’s a catch. All the providers would be located, you know, in Nebraska. Even I’ve I’m legally allowed to buy that policy, it would be an insanely stupid move. And if I’m buying a policy through a Nebraska insurer that is tooled to New York and covers New York doctors and hospitals- its probably going to have New York premiums.
In order for that idea to work at all, the insurance companies, which now pretty much operate on a statewide basis, would need to contract with providers in all 50 states and they might not feel that it’s worth it. And you would get a weird situation where Blue Cross of Nebraska is competing with Blue Cross of NY and every other Blue Cross company in the US.
So, pass that law and entire insurance industry would need to restructure. Or, more likely, the major insurers would decline to expand their networks - leaving Clothy with a 1000+ trip every time he needs to see a doctor ( guess which one he’s gong to sign up for? :D) but his premiums are lower because he’s a smart shopper or something.
But I can also see cut rate companies setting up in the most unregulated state and engaging in some sort of race to the bottom to see who can sell the cheapest )and most useless ) policies.
Liberals do have a plan they’ve been pushing, single payer. Single payer is cheaper and higher quality than our current system.
The gop plan, from what I can tell, mostly just reduces insurance rates and reduced insurance quality, then uses the savings to give supply side tax. Cuts. Some people will come out ahead, like healthy young people but sick or elderly people will have it far worse.
The real. Problem is how expensive our health care is. 18% of gdp vs 8-11% in every other wealthy nation. That needs to be fixed, the gop bill does nothing to reduce costs. Single payer does some by allowing bulk negotiations and bulk purchases, as well as streamlining administration.
What barriers to buying across state lines? And what would that achieve?
Do you know why health insurance policies in Kentucky cost less than the health insurance policies in NYC? Its not because there is so much more competition in the Kentucky health insurance market. its because healthcare costs are lower in Kentucky because everything is cheaper in Kentucky. if that Kentucky insurance company had to sell insurance in NMYC (and many of them do) they would charge about5 as much as every other fucking insurance company in NYC.
I thought we were talking about tort reform (e.g. stemming the cost of malpractice insurance. This is usually shorthand for capping damages.
I agree that best practices would be a good idea except when doctors got together to determine best practices it included a shitload of defensive medicine. Sure, it was probably an improvement from what we had now but its still not an answer to try and squeeze healthcare solvency out of 2.4% of health care costs.
Insurance companies absorb 15% of health care costs in the form of excess executive pay, corporate bureaucracy and shareholder profits? We pay twice as much per capita for prescription drugs? We lose about 6% of our health care dollars to the perverted incentive that insurance companies have to only reduce healthcare costs until you are eligible for medicare. Put insurance companies on the hook for someone cradle to grave and their coverage changes more than a little bit at the edges.
I wonder if the government would reduce medical costs if all of a person’s medical expenses were income tax deductible.
Do disgustingly rich people even bother to buy health insurance? I suppose I could ask one if I see them down at the Dollar Store…
Granted, Projammer’s original (and obviously false) statement was about “stemming the tide of malpractice suits”. But Buck Godot’s reply covered more than that, and included ancillary costs like defensive medicine.
You’ll never squeeze healthcare solvency out of any one thing. It’s just too big and complicated a system. The only improvements possible are in the single-digit range, because there are so many individual costs that none of them are an enormous fraction of the total.
Therefore, one should not be dismissive of 1% gains. We’ll need a lot of them, but there are a lot available to be improved. Single payer fixes a large fraction of them at once, but there are further improvements to be made.
Welcome to Clothahump’s Ignore list, Ravenman. He will, of course, pretend it’s because you called him a moron, but really it’s because you provided evidence that he is one.
Make a major change to something as complicated as American health insurance finance and of course there will be winners and losers. The problem is that the losers’ complaints get amplified by the GOP yelping turd-show of lies, drowning out the voices of those whose lives have improved with Obamacare.
You are “not a true conservative” but you promise us about their motives? 
And what does “not a true conservative” mean anyway? You voted for Trump, but only because Lying Killary was the alternative? Or you didn’t vote for Trump because you wanted Cruz or Huckabee?
What many people overlook — and Shagnasty overlooks it in spades — is that books balance: The money going into health insurance equals the money coming out. Work on imagining where the money is coming from and where it is going.
Much of the money goes to doctors, nurses and medical technicians of course, but a huge share of it goes to bureaucrats (and high-paid executives) associated with the insurance business itself. These people spend their days not studying how to help patients, but studying new ways to deny health to increase stockholders’ profits. How many people work in the health insurance business? Hundreds of thousands! Or even more when we count the full-time clerks hospitals and clinics need to interface with insurance companies.
Money is also spent on tests or treatments of doubtful utility. “Conservatives”, whether “true” or not will yelp and squeal like tickled pigs about Hussein Obama’s death camps if there were the slightest effort to reduce tests or treatments.
Much of the money goes to the stockholders of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, etc. I’m sure this is all Hussein’s fault too.
And, here’s a biggy — Well-off and healthy people subsidize the poor and sickly under Obamacare! Humanitarians view this as a feature, not a bug. Huge majorities throughout the world view caring for their fellow man as a virtue. In America? Oh we believe in Charity in America too, just keep the filthy govmint hands off it. We’ll donate to our favorite charities, the NRA and the Westboro Baptist Church, and let the funds trickle down to the deserving needy. Whites help whites; let the Nigras help their own kind.
Yes, the upper middle class takes a hit on taxes and premiums. This is due partly to their aversion to increasing taxes on the super-rich. “Not true conservatives” like Shagnasty would prefer to increase taxes on the poor, but are willing to accept tax hikes on themselves if the alternative were to raise taxes on the top 0.1%. The Walmart family has made $20 billion in paper profits just in the past few months? Chicken feed! Chump change! Rounding error! A few hundred thousand Americans have more wealth than the poorest 300 million Americans combined … but such statistics just cause the Right to double-down on their false facts: Robbery! Death tax! It’s just chump change anyway!
And listen to the prattle of “conservatives”, “true” or not: They hate Obamacare because they are forced (at gunpoint!) to buy insurance for their vaginas, even though they don’t even have one!
I hope one of these conservatives will explain what they think happens to the money that men pay to insure their vaginas (and women pay to insure their prostates). Is it surreptitiously siphoned off into the New World Order’s vaults in Switzerland? Or is it sent directly to Democratic Party campaign coffers so they can tell more lies about Trump? Is it payback for Hussein’s Nobel Prize? Hush money for the hired assassins who killed Vince Foster and John C. Stevens?
No; the money that comes in to the insurance coffers equals the money that comes out. If you want the underprivileged or sickly to just eat shit, or pound sand, just say so. Don’t pretend the liberals are at fault. Don’t pretend you even have a clue what modern American “conservative” values are.
This post oozes with several kinds of stupidity. It reminds of a pustulent sore.
Single payer would take care of that. 