But the point you are missing is that it isn’t free. Nothing is free in the world. By covering 25 year old “children” other policy holders will be subsidizing the cost of providing health insurance by increasing premiums across the board. And while it is great for your family, I don’t think it is good policy to mandate yet another government redistribution program to pay for people who are in every way, shape, and form, grown adults.
Remember, this isn’t means tested so you couldn’t even justify it as a welfare program. Hard working people might be paying for John D. Rockefeller XI, age 24, because it saves him $11/mo to be on Dad’s plan instead of the plan where he works and has insurance fully available to him.
The fact that people in their early 20s cannot get jobs that offer health insurance is the problem that needs corrected. Don’t put a bandage on it that let’s them stay on Mom and Dad’s insurance. Do something to control the costs so that businesses can afford to offer their employees health insurance at reasonable rates.
Frankly, if we just quit referring to it as “insurance” it would help frame the debate better. You can’t insure against known quantities. You can’t “insure” against a woman needing birth control.
Like with cars, we don’t insure against gasoline usage, oil changes, and new tires. We all need those and pay out of pocket. Just like regular doctor visits, birth control, and common medications. Let the market negotiate rates for those.
Insure against unknowns like cancer and heart disease. Pool the risk for those type of illnesses. The one-sized fits all under the umbrella of “health care” is too broad of a thing to be governed by the same set of rules.
We also don’t insure for the need for roads for our cars, we share the cost of those regardless.
Although I have the insurance you describe (high deductible catastrophic coverage). I can’t see how the free market helps me- either I pay a higher price than those with regular insurance or when I try to shop for the best price, I can’t get a simple answer from the provider.
Where in the world has ‘free market’ health care really succeeded?
I never said it was free. It’s cheap enough that adding 18-26 year olds is unlikely to make a significant difference in premiums I pay for family coverage.
You don’t like extending childhood in theory? Fine. Does your company hire fresh high school grads? Mine requires a college degree at a minimum, and usually looks for an advanced degree and certifications requiring 3-5 years’ experience. Whether you like it or not - I sure don’t - “childhood” these days extends well into the 20s. In the time it takes to fix that problem a lot of current 20 somethings will die of old age.
In any case, if we want to reform how health care is paid for in the US we can’t let the theoretical “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough to try out”. Health care was on an unsustainable path. Within 20 years the health care market would have been 350 million people going to ERs when they were on death’s door, and Bill Gates. Unsustainable, inefficient, and unworthy of an industrialized nation.
I’ve been following this for a while. Basically, lawmakers in Arkansas have been juggling how to accept the Medicaid expansion while still decrying the ACA. Their solution?
The compromise allows the state to spend Medicaid expansion dollars on private health insurance for individuals who would have otherwise qualified for the program as it was originally intended. I remember reading that when Arkansas’s Dem. governor first floated the idea to the Obama administration, nobody in his state seriously expected HHS to go along with it; now that it’s been given (provisional) approval, a whole slew of conservative states are considering a similar pathway.
The rub with this, of course, is that nobody is entirely sure how this idea will work. The private insurance has to have comparable benefits to what beneficiaries would have otherwise received in traditional Medicaid; because private plans aren’t typically as generous as Medicaid, it’ll be interesting to see the kinds of policies that are ultimately phased in.
That’s my understanding of the situation anyway. If this works in Arkansas, then expect a whole bunch of red southern states to go down a similar path.
No. Scott was just interested in a [del]meaningless waste of taxpayer dollars[/del] principled stand against the eeeevil PPACA. Nobody is really sure how the state exchanges will work, either, so I don’t think the public/private Medicaid expansion is necessarily doomed on those grounds.
Hope this isn’t the wrong place to ask. I’m curious about something, especially with all the state Medicaid issues going on. If the ACA says that you are supposed to be covered by Medicaid, but your state refuses to cover you, how are you supposed to comply and what is the point?
That’s unclear at this point. The administration believes you’d then be eligible for subsidies to buy private insurance on the exchange, but the text of the law says you get nothing.
However, if you are eligible for Medicaid then you probably are exempt from the mandate anyway. But even if you are subject to it, enforcement is illegal beyond seizing your income tax refund.
First of all, I’m going to say that the earliest reference I’ve seen to nationalized health care was a statement by FDR in 1932, and I don’t see the issue being resolved 80 years from now either. :rolleyes: :o
And second of all, the ACA is NOT a Constitutional amendment, no matter what some people seem to think.
They attempted to rush it through. Debating the broad outlines of an issue for a century does not give license to put anything related to it in a bill and avoid messy hearings and public debate. For example, the medical device tax and individual mandate were far from settled issues, and the likely effect of ACA on people’s current insurance was not a settled issue either, despite the President’s dishonest assurances.
That was because the GOP slowed things down. They wanted it done in July. And what happened between March and July wasn’t debate, it was negotiations behind the scenes with various interest groups(insurance companies, drug companies, the AARP, the AMA…). Much like the immigration bill being done now, there has been no debate yet over an actual bill, just behind the scenes negotiations between 8 Senators, business, and labor.
By July there were actual bills to debate, and that took until March 2010. The President wanted the bill on his desk the same month they were drafted. A bit quick for such a hugely significant reform.
Even earlier, it was 1912. It was shouted down as “socialism”, I guess because it was modeled after the German system created by that noted socialist Otto Von Bismark
I’m not going to derail my thread, but I have to chime in on this: Your statement is very, very true.
I really, really want Mr. Schweitzer to run for President, and if he becomes a Senator then he’ll have even more credibility to actually go for the nomination. Plus, if he decides to run for Senate at all then he’s a likely shoe-in for the spot anyway.
