YOu haven’t proved anyone wrong. But you should be used to that by now as well.
Go to any website that racks medical pricing and then compare it to your insurance statement. You’ll find that your insurance pays MUCH less than the state price, whereas cashpaying patients don’t get any breaks unless they negotiate. This practice of a hospital deducting 35-40% off the bill without even being asked must be a custom in your area.
Also, your statement is absurd on its face. Insurance companies use the power of representing large pools to negotiate lower prices. That’s why people carry health insurance for routine care, rather than strictly catastrophic care. If you get charged MORE for having insurance, then there’s no point in carrying it for anything other than catastrophic care, so you’ve basically called the entire Democratic Party morons for wanting people to carry it.
Even with catastrophic care only insurance, you still get the benefit of your policy’s negotiated rates. For example, if you visit your primary care physician, and have a catastrophic policy through, say, Humana, they will still run your insurance, decline to pay, but demand that the doctor charge you the lower, negotiated rate instead of the cash rate.
In my experience, the only reason that uninsureds may pay less is the same reason that any other debtor might pay less: the creditor (in this case the hospital) figures that something is better than nothing, and the patient might be judgment proof. Take 50% instead of paying attorney bills and not collecting anyways.
Most US healthcare spending is governmental. So you are already required, through your taxes, to pay for most US health care.
Since 1986, when President Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, virtually all US hospitals have been forced to provide extensive care to the uninsured who then often don’t pay. The expenses are then pushed back on everyone else, though a combination of higher taxes and higher premiums.
If you actually refuse to buy food, you probably will collapse on the street and go to the hospital where, if you do not have insurance, you will be housed and fed on my dime. So these situations are not as different as claimed.
True financially responsible conservatives (do they still exist?) would support the Affordable Care Act, which is similar to GOP health reform idea of the pre-Obama era. In health reform, the GOP won on won on no-civilian-VA (was a great idea), and won on no-single-payer, and won on allowing for-profit throughout health care. And yet they still aren’t happy. The GOP has become the sore winner party.
Obamacare is coded by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office as saving the government money, in part, because it addresses the problem of health care freeloaders. Trying to de-fund it is just one more scheme to increase the deficit.
The CBO says it reduces the deficit, not that it saves money. It’s reduces the deficit simply because the cuts in Medicare spending and the new taxes bring in more money than is paid out.
Saving money implies spending less. The health care law costs $1 trillion over 10 years. $500 billion comes from Medicare cuts, $500 billion from new taxes and fees.
Saying something as “saving money implies spending less” is just going for a simple answer and as H.L. Menken said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
The savings can be seen by looking at the results so far and other expected effects when the act is implemented fully. And there is the item the incalculable benefits people and companies will get by offering them more freedoms. To the people that are in Job Lock situations and investors from overseas that will see now the USA as a place to set shop. In other words, more jobs are more likely to be created.
How do you determine what “actual costs” are in a service profession? One dollar over tangible costs of loans on equipment, minimum malpractice coverage, facilities rental, etc.? Or is the so-called actual cost a convenient arbitrary figure used to make a point?
Funny, I got a rebate from my insurance company this year. All because of Obamacare! there are now regulations in place to avoid the very thing you’re referring to. I don’t have the numbers at my fingertips, but insurance companies can only spend something like 20 percent on non-care activities. Oh sure, there will be scandals as corporate junkets are written off as medical expenses, but exceptions aside what you’re referring to is basically a lie perpetuated by those who have a political interest in obfuscating the fundamentals of the Act.
The GOP is doing whatever it can to fuck things up, including a full press misinformation campaign.
That would be more convincing if Democrats weren’t walking back their earlier promises. Pelosi just claimed she never said insurance would be cheaper for everyone.
it’s a standard Democratic tactic: pass an entitlement, claim that Republican estimates of cost are dirty lies and fearmongering, then when it turns out to be true, say, “Does it really even matter? People are happy with their entitlements!”
Well, clearly you believe this - and there is a line to that effect in the Wiki.
However, digging a little deeper into some real data leads me to conclude that the effect of high cost health care fees paid in cash by the uninsured is overshadowed by the uninsured who cannot or will not pay.
Here are a few paragraphs from Page 13 of a 46 page Kaiser Family Foundation (PDF) report that you might find interesting to study. About a third of uninsured health care services are actually paid for in cash - the remaining is paid for by taxes or increased insurance premiums.
Nowhere in the report does it indicate that the cash payments by the uninsured are subsidizing any other health costs. Actually, if you crank through a bit of simple math - it becomes clear that the uninsured Americans raise health care insurance costs for the rest of us.
So the difference is $27 billion. However, the article also points out that the uninsured only spend less than half of what people with insurance spend. Which means that if you insure more people, you pay MORE money overall, not less. So there is no savings.
And you can say that only by ignoring what I posted, funny that. In another thread it was very clear that the difference in costs from the old system in several states and plans compared where the law is being implemented is a big one, clearly the costs in the current irrational system that we have are a big factor in preventing more people from working as the costs swallow many jobs.
From the point of view of someone living in a Parliamentary Democracy, I think that this is something that the Founding Fathers did not foresee- the speed of the political circus and the importance of government to the people in a 21st century world. In the eighteenth century with extended time lines and very limited government involvement in the lives of ordinary people, waiting two years to elect a new House might seem reasonable- it took months for information to spread throughout the area controlled by the US in 1789. Added to which, the regularity of elections make single issue elections difficult.
If a parliamentary democracy were in this position, the PM (who with the royal preogative has very similar powers to the US President) would dissolve Parliament and go to the country on a matter of supply- that Parliament would not authorise the money needed for government. A single issue election would then be held to decide (see Australia in the ?70s).
A modern state cannot go 2 years without supply. An eighteenth century one could wiothout serious harm.
And additionally, one of the advantages of an unwritten constitution is that it can develop organically in a way that a rigid one cannot do easily (unless SCOTUS bends the rules as above.)
“Obamacare is coded by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office as reducing the deficit, in part, because it addresses the problem of health care freeloaders.”
Now do you agree with the whole post? Didn’t think so.
Why is it fair that someone who could have afforded heath insurance, doesn’t take it out, gets in a motorcycle accident, incurs $800,000 in medical bills, then gets to walk away from the bills by going bankrupt or just not paying? And then I have to pay for his care through higher taxes and premiums. One answer of the rabid right is that the hospital shouldn’t have to provide care once it sees it won’t get paid. But, aside from the inconceivable immorality of kicking people out of intensive care onto the street, this has been illegal since at least 1986, and there is no serious possibility for going back on that.
Conservatives should like the Affordable Care Act for addressing the freeloader problem. Liberals should, and do, like it for addressing the human costs of families being bankrupted by emergency care while facing lack of non-emergency health care availability. Once in place, universal health care* is not controversial among liberals or conservatives (check out the politics of health care in not-so radically liberal countries like Germany and Switzerland).
In three months, after millions of Americans get Affordable Health Care, smart Repubicans know it will be, as this linked headline correctly states, too late to go back. This is because people want to have health insurance they can afford at their income level – just what Obamacare provides. The GOP has good reason to be scared of Obamacare, but mostly because they made the mistake of not supporting a plan similar to that championed by Republican wonks – until the Democrats were for it.
The Affordable Care Act is not 100 percent there with universal coverage, especially in states like mine with an obstructionist GOP governor. But it goes far towards universal care.
Republicans did support an individual mandate, but it wasn’t for comprehensive insurance. Catastrophic insurance is sufficient and is the source of unpaid medical bills, not doctors’ visits or broken legs.
Obamacare not only requires comprehensive insurance, but requires people to pay for services they don’t want or need, because some other group might want those services and that group i politically important to the Democrats.
Arguing with someone who can’t write more than one off-the-wall sentences by actually, you know, researching things and quoting expert sources is wonderful exercise - in the event you find anyone who is legitimately looking for answers.
And now, we have him revising the original GOP position.
Some folks are simply wrong and are quite happy to ignore reality and continuing stating WRONG nonsense.
I haven’t seen anyone so consistently and determinedly wrong since the late, unlamented Handy.
The problem with the ignore function is, that without critical posts, the thread seems to jerk from topic to sub-topic, back to original, then another tangent, without cohesive reason.
Unfortunately, it is the posts of WRONG people which cause those jerking subject changes, so we need to see them.
At least it isn’t like the poor Judge which has to read 100 pages of FMoTL/Sovereign Citizen crap in case there is a hint of a relevant word or two within.
Actually, you’re wrong, and you only make yourself more wrong by harping on other posters while being so, er, wrong.
The primary way that ACA is funded is through taxes and spending cuts. The money saved on solving the freeloader problem, which BTW doesn’t even come close to being solved due to the nature of the mandate and what the courts will allow, is tiny compared to the overall bill.
ACA does not save money. It costs money. There’s no way around that. The fact that there are bits and pieces of savings here and there(like the student loan reform that was a part of the bill) is nice, but it’s such a small part of the bill that it’s barely worth mentioning. It’s disingenous to sell health care reform as “saving money” because 3% of it or whatever is paid for by in theory solving the freeloader problem.
As one who has lived with catastrophic insurance for three years, I can tell you that it only works for those with the financial foundation to be able to pay the high deductibles and take advantage of the pre-tax HSA accounts that often are a part of catastrophic coverage.
With my policy, I am out $8500 before they pay half of the next $3000.
What has your experience been with catastrophic coverage? How well does it work for your friends of limited means?