A huge piece of this puzzle is getting full participation and keeping it. Right now, there are 30 or so ways to get a policy after the enrollment period, and those are points of big abuse. People join when they need to, and drop when they don’t.
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Yep. It needs fixing. A single payer system funded by a payroll tax would solve the problem, but that conflicts with GOP Orthodoxy and would never, ever pass.
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If you’re over 40 and still alive insurance companies can find some basis to deny you coverage for some sort of preexisting condition. In the olden days, people would be denied for hypertension even if it was well under control with a prescription that cost $10 per month. Type II diabetes? Forget about it.
This begs the question how this can possibly be rammed through under reconciliation rules. I thought reconciliation was only for bills that would not affect the total 10-year spending.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
Dear liberals and EmoProgs: this is where your starting point is.
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When state-based high-risk pools existed, it’s not as if they were wonderful benefits. Even in states that ran relatively well-designed and funded programs it was still considered the insurance of last resort. The main constituency was upper-middle income and above self-employed and small business owners who had a definite need for ongoing care. Anyone else who needed it couldn’t afford it.
Repeal of the ACA will recreate the insurance market where the worst possible thing to be was middle class and self-employed. Not rich enough for the high-risk pool, too rich to qualify for Medicaid or some other program aimed at working class adults.
A few years ago my brother in law, age 46 at the time and in great health but self-employed and in need of family health insurance after my sister left her job that provided family benefits, was denied coverage because he had been treated for a toenail fungus. And the only way they knew was that he answered the application truthfully where it asked for “any other health issues that he had been treated for” and volunteered that he had been treated for the toenail fungus in the past year. Sounds unbelievable, but this is a true story. We were flabbergasted that they would deny coverage for such a benign little issue, but he went back for clarification and they stood by the denial.
We cannot go back to the pre-Obamacare insanity.
Naw… Ryan’s big problem is that his analysis of the healthcare problem is superficial. The real problem is that of all the billions that we, as a society, spend on healthcare almost 50% is wasted.
As a percentage of GDP we spend almost 17.8% on healthcare but there are 31 other countries that have a higher average life expectancy than we do. The other first world countries that we compete with all have a health case spend that is in the 10% range (of their GDP) and they all live longer than we do. And to put that number in perspective… That 8% delta in GDP terms is about twice what we pay for our military. If he can lower our 17.8% down to the 10% number and help us live longer it really does not matter how he does it. Our competition gets their 10% numbers paired with higher quality by some form of single pay. If we would just focus on these two metrics… the rest is bullshit. (and whose ox is gored)
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It seems to be something of a modus operandi for these guys: spend so much money that you break the budget, blame it on liberals, let democrats in long enough the clean up their mess, wash, repeat. I can’t forget that more than one of their leaders said they just wanted someone in the Presidents chair to sign what they offered without comment.
Basically, the ACA has nothing wrong with it that another 50 billion a year would not solve in bringing down the deductibles and costs of the insured populace.
Obama would have done this himself if Congress (see Senator Lieberman) would have passed it in 2010.
I love it.
We do and we’re glad.