Will Healthcare raise insurance costs?

Great Debates
1

There are many aspects of this that I have not seen anyone ask.

  1. I currently don’t pay for my Healthcare as it is provided by my employer. Whether or not my employer would choose to drop healthcare is irrelevant. In the future new businesses may not provide healthcare benefits as their employees are already covered to a large extent. With less money to be made will private/corporate health insurance become more expensive?

  2. Many of the companies that offer health insurance offer other insurance as well. For example vision and dental. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any that also do auto or life, but I think these must exist. If the profit margins fall for the health insurance from people or businesses not buying private health insurance because its another expense for their business and their employees are still covered or individuals feeling similarly. Will these companies raise the rates of other types of insurance to help keep up the bottom line or please their investors by keeping a stable profit level?

All in all any company wants to make profit and has to stay afloat. Other than the extra money that we (and yes ALL of us will pay money into healthcare even if you make less than 100k whenever they decide to restructure tax rates next). Will I be paying more for insurance as a category of my expenses than than I do now?

2

Of course the last question includes money that I would be paying in taxes (like we do on medicare) plus paying for life, auto, home. Also as a side question is medicare taxed as a base % of income or is it appropriated on a graduated scale also?

3

If your employer stops offering healthcare I think you will suddenly find that fact very relevant indeed.

4

It would be relevant to me of coarse, but not to the questions I’m asking.

5

The overall cost of health care would drop. The providers suck a huge portion of the health care costs into their own pockets.
The fear that the insurance providers would be unable to compete with a government system ,which would streamline the payment and covering options, just shows how expensive and inefficient they are.

6

You can be sure that if the bill is not passed, the insurance premiums will go up at double inflation until few can afford to have it.

7

No you can’t.

8

I’d encourage you to consider the idea the only person who pays for healthcare is you.

9

He can be at least as sure as any of the slippery slope arguments on the OTHER side.

10

We Must Stop the Rampant Fraud in the Health Care Industry | HuffPost Latest News Here is Bernie Sanders explaining we have to stop the rampant fraud of health care providers and hospitals. They have a license ti steal and they are .

11

The Medical Myth of "More Is Better" | HuffPost Latest News Here is deepaks's take on waste in the system. He has proposals to cut the overkill on procedures.

12

Historically speaking whenever employers can find a way to cut cost by shifting the burden to the government they will.

Pensions are a great example of this. They’ve been dying a slow death, first to social security and then to employee 401K and now bankruptcy is used to bust them.

I can see from my 30 years working health care has gotten less and less over the years. I started out in 1981 working with a great 20/80 traditional insurance plan. This even covered dental and mental and vision all at first $100 out of pocket, I pay the next 20% till $1,000 then 80% till $10,000 then after that it’s all covered. Everything was my choice

Gradually over the years these plans erroded. As recently as the mid 90s, the employers and job offers used to offer choices of at least 3 different HMOs. Now the job interviews I’ve been on have only one HMO take it or leave it type deal.

So yes healthcare is shifting even without Obama’s plan.

Even now you have companies providing two tiers, one for low or line employees and an “exec package” for the hard to fill positions.

You’ll see that if universal health care comes about, the cost will be basically irrelevant because the employer will offer the private health care to top line exec who make enough so that money isn’t that important to them.

I have a friend in NZ and that is how it works down there. She can go to the doctor or to the public hospital but her employer offers her insurance (her is called “Southern Cross”). When she had to go to the hospital to get a ovarian cyst removed, she could’ve waited a month to go to public hospital or use her insurance and go to the private hospital within a few days.

She just paid the $50.00 deductable from her Southern Cross work insurance, went to private hospital and got it over with.

So you see in NZ it creates a two tier system.

Now I must also say in NZ there is triage, if she had a heart condition she’d have been bumped into hospital immeidately. That is why minor things like cyst removal take awhile in those universal systems

13

Do you have a cite for that? As far as I know that is not allowed by federal law.

14

What’s really needed is health care simplification, which I don’t see happening.
It works for auto insurance, at least in this state, where every insurer has to offer the state minimum package, with the same fine print. By regulating what a “standard minimum” policy has to include, many people are protected from the industry’s bent for “creative exclusion creep”

15

I’ve not heard of it like that, but with the multiple options at various costs, it really does end up like that. Say there were two options, low cost/high cost. For the low paid employees, the high cost option is just not in reach of their salary. For the high paid employees, even the high cost option is a small fraction of their salary. You end up with the low paid employees accepting less health care coverage by necessity, while the high paid employees get the gold plated care.