What about pricing?
Does everyone have a different price depending on risk profile? And does this have any impact on hiring decisions and / or salary?
And also, what if I want to forgoe company sponsored healthcare as I aleady have private?
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I don’t think anyone does except you pay out of pocket.
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What do you mean? I really don’t know how it works (I’ve never had a job that offered health benefits), but my impression was it was generally a flat rate taken out of almost everyone’s wages. I am under the impression that a young, healthy 25 year old pays the same premiums as a 63 year old with heart disease. But I could be wrong, and some employers charge different premiums based on health parameters. However I am fairly sure single people are charged less than those with kids and spouses. I really don’t know.
There are several problems with the system though. You asked if it had an effect on hiring. Yeah, it does. One issue in the US is that employers do not want to hire anyone over 50 because of higher health care costs.
Another is that small businesses can see their premiums double if someone gets sick. So if you have a business with 50 employees and one requires a half million in cancer treatments, then insurance premiums for that business may double from $5000 a person to $10,000.
So employers (especially small business owners) are incentivized to avoid sick people, and/or to fire them if they get sick. There are tons of reasons our system is a mess.
If you want to forego employer health coverage, you lose some of the benefits but pay for them anyway. If a plan costs $5000 you might have $2000 taken out of your paycheck but the other $3000 is money you’ll never see. So you can opt out of employer coverage, but you are still paying for much of it.
Employer coverage is group coverage, and I think group coverage is mandated to cover pre-existing conditions.
The flip side of that is many people can’t purchase insurance on the private market due to pre-existing conditions, or see no reason since it’ll be rescinded once they try to use it.
The 12 month pre-existing condition exclusion is supposed to help take care of that issue of people not getting insurance until they get sick. Plus health care is so fractured that you may end up spending 10 years on a job and never have health problems, then get a new job and in 2 years have major health problems. So the insurance company from your first job got tons of premiums and no expenses while the second didn’t.
Either way, a mandate would take care of the issue.
I think the whole lot of them should spend less time in front of a camera and more time doing their jobs.
Except that Alexander was mostly right, and Obama was mostly wrong.
That aside, I watched a fair bit of it and I thought that Obama did fairly well, the Republicans did fairly well, and the other Democrats were atrocious.
This gives me hope. Because I think after the next election Obama is going to have to work with Republicans whether he wants to or not, and frankly I think they’ll make better legislative partners than the Democrats do - especially if more of the work is done by people like Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and Lamar Alexander.
I came away with the idea that the Republicans are not going to go along with any thing that Obama wants or suggests;I think they came into the meeting with the idea of not doing anything except saying they wanted to start over. I believe they were angry that Obama was elected, and have done nothing but criticize him or his ideas since he got elected.
I heard that the Republicans figured that Obama called this meeting just to make it look like he was interested in hearing the Republican ideas, which I do not think it was true, but that it did show that the Republicans had no intention of going along with any of the Bill.
I’ve had employee-provided insurance in the US that had pre-existing-condition clauses. Has the law changed since 2003?
Or not:
Specifically, here’s the overview from the CBO itself:
I think it’s obvious that the Note’s interpretation, and Lamarr’s interpretation, is pretty stupid. The note appears to have taken the highest estimated increase and decrease and averaged them, which seems pretty dumb, given the different proportions of the market and the different mitigating factors cited by the CBO.
My favorite voice in the room was that of Rep. Louise Slaughter. I was fascinated by what she had to say. Here is part of it:
(From the Washington Post)
All of what she had to say (it is brief) is worth a read.
As a good Democrat she did include the usual “sob story routine of telling the sad tale” of one of her constituents, as yorick73 put it. She knows that the issue is still about people and their pain and not really about dry statistics and reports and politics.
yorick, is it that these people, these constituents, don’t seem real to you? Have you never known anyone who suffered – really experienced anguish needlessly? For what reason should the people in that room NOT be reminded of the crucial nature of the reason they are there?
One last take on the issue of premiums, from Joe Conason at Salon:
The rest of his piece is worth a read as a summary of the event from a liberal point of view.
Frankly, your partisan interpretation of what happened is just as wrong as Alexander was.
You have to understand the context of the exchange. They were discussing the extent to which the bill bends the cost curve. Alexander pointed to the CBO language about rising premiums. The clear implication being that the bill increases costs. But that just ain’t so, according to the CBO. Obama correctly clarified that the CBO expects that premiums will rise because people will get greater benefits. However, because of the subsidies and the fact that the plans have greater benefits, the out-of-pocket costs will decrease even for people who get better coverage.
In a discussion of whether the bill increases or decreases medical costs, pointing to rising premiums is completely disingenuous if not flatly wrong in implication without pointing out that they will rise because more services are being provided.
She is actually quite wrong in the details about NIH research on women as far as I can tell, though she is right in the sense that they passed legislation to mandate something that was previously only a NIH policy.
However, NIH made it a policy in 1986 to urge inclusion of women in studies, and did the same to encourage minority inclusion in 1987. The notion that women and minorities were not included at all prior to that is almost certainly wrong. Even though I would guess that they were vastly underrepresented or the policy wouldn’t have been needed in the first place, she could have made her point without getting the facts wrong.
Also, the legislation was passed in 1993, not 1991.
That’s unbelievable.
People must be misunderstanding the question.
What were the methods on this poll? Is it a formal scientific poll or an informal survey?
The only way I can make sense of this result is to think that people are thinking “If they pass it now it will be a bad bill because of all the stuff that’s going down right now. They should think about it some more first.” Or something.
Is there a question on the poll that simply asks “Is the health care system in need of major reforms”?
I think many people are just exasperated at how long it took and lost interest, which was the goal of the GOP all along. To slow it down until the public lost interest.
What I’d like to see on these polls of pro or anti HCR attitudes is how much the people answering the questions know about what is in HCR. What reforms are being done, etc.
Here’s Polling Report.com. That poll appears to be one of the Fox Polls presented at the top. What you’ll see is that the do nothing percentage represents a 4% decrease since December, when the last poll was taken, so movement towards doing something is evident, even within the Fox Poll.
What I find more compelling is this Newsweek survey:
Newsweek Poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. Feb. 17-18, 2010. N=1,009 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3.6 (for all adults).
“As you may know, Barack Obama has proposed a plan to change this country’s health care system. From what you have seen or heard about what he has proposed, what is your OVERALL opinion of Obama’s health care reform plan -– do you favor it or oppose it?”
Favor Oppose Unsure
% % %
ALL 40 49 11
“Now I’m going to read you some SPECIFIC proposals people have made to change the health care system. As I read each one, please tell me if you personally favor or oppose this change. Here’s the first/next proposal. . . .”
[…]
Please check Polling Report to see the favorability of the individual components. I’ll just point out one in particular:
"Creating a government-administered public health insurance option to compete with private plans"
2/17-18/10 50 42 8
[…]
“Now please think about the proposals I just described to you. ALL of these proposals are included in Barack Obama’s health care reform plan. Having heard these details, what is your OVERALL opinion of Obama’s plan – do you favor it or oppose it?”
Favor Oppose Unsure
% % %
ALL 48 43 9
So, when you tell people the actual elements of the bill, they pretty much like them, and the bill moves from being disfavored to favored.
There isn’t a lot of nuance in “Do you want Congress to pass major health care reform legislation…” Is your objection to the word “major”?
But let’s put that aside. Are you still standing by your claim that “Pubbie speakers repeatedly baldly stating that the American people don’t want HRC”? I’d like to see a cite supporting that.
Did you guys gloss over the part about “subsidies”? Who’s subsidzing what? Betcha $50 it’s the taxpayers, and while premiums may go down for some, it won’t for everyone. And, there is no accounting for dollars lost when taxpayers fund those “subsidies”
Not yorick, but I have an answer for this one…
The job of the government should primarily be about “dry statistics and reports”. We have a problem with health costs in America - okay, fine. But the role of government isn’t (IMO) to dry your tears and lift your spirit up. It should be to address issues that effect the citizens, with a clear eye and mind.
I have numerous people in my family who have “suffered” with pain, cancer, total disability, chronic conditions, no money for medical bills, etc. I still feel that way.
Sob stories have no place in that room, because good policy that benefits all interests need to be analyzed rationally. CBO numbers and market studies are the only types of things that should matter. Some people get all misty eyed about abortion or the death penalty - should we have to hear sob stories about those too? Why not just “make it a crime to lonely or sad” and then push money toward pink unicorns and caramel popcorn?
All rational people recognize that our medical insurance industry and Medicare/caid are out of control. What is your problem with doing this a step at a time? Start with one issue - say, pre-existing conditions - and then work that from beginning to end. Then, approach a new issue, like tort reform, and without distraction and grandstanding and sob stories, work through that. Once we put all that through the hopper, then put together real insurance reform that will work.
And that’s why everyone needs to pay – one way or another – for a basic minimum of health insurance. It could be by the government requiring everyone to have that basic minimum, or by taxes being used to supply a basic minimum, but it must be compulsory. Otherwise, healthy young people won’t buy insurance, because it’s not good value for money; and the insurance companies raise premiums, because they are only getting the expensive high-risk customers.