Discussion for article #245506
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The insurance companies are true capitalists except when they may lose money. Then they want rigged markets. Canât have it both ways.
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I can speak only for myself, someone who in 42 years has never voted against a pro-choice Democratic candidate. It has been a financial disaster for me and my family. We are professionals who work for ourselves and because of that pay for insurance with aftertax dollars. Our premiums have literally doubled since 2014, and our deductible are up over 50% for medications. If we go into the hospital overnight we have to pay the first $3000. We live in a state with a health exchange, but the options are no better, and the group rates offered by our local professional organization are not either. If there is any regulating going on, it is not doing me and my family any good.
We could swallow this if, like persons, say government workers and people who work for large businesses, we could pay for insurance with before tax dollars, but we cannot. The pushing aside of the Cadillac tax and medical device taxes, which I specifically remember Zeke Emmanual saying was key to paying for this thing, was particularly galling. My short term, and by that I mean the next two decades (which may all I have left) economic interests would be met by voting for and contributing to Republican candidates. I wonât (though I I will have a real hard time voting for Sanders if he is the nomineeâ I think Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will make chopped liver out of him) but this sentiment is not uncommon in my increasingly disenchanted Democratic community.
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" We will take your money but you ainât getting anything in return " /s .
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Then fix your business plan like everybody else.
The truth is conservatives love welfare, and believe itâs the governmentâs duty to keep their business going even when they canât. The public good, they say, is to let them feed off the publicâs wealth.
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Same old, same old. Using the boogeyman, regulations, and saying that they are hurting their business is not fancy business talk. They are just saying that they canât gouge the public anymore and squeeze every nickel out of a business without providing the actual intent of that business.
They have less leverage but still, itâs leverage, and they are using it for sheerly their own purposes, âpurpose actuallyâ, and that is a bigger bottom line. Profits are what they do best, then they do that icky healthcare thing.
The industry is is in a weird position of supporting the ACA and gleefully taking the millions of new customers and denigrating the ACA and hoping beyond hope for a Republican Presidency that would gut it so that they can get back to business, which would start the cycle of doom all over again.
CEOâs and corporations have a purpose and Affordable Healthcare has a purpose, these two are not the same thing.
Universal Healthcare with itâs socialistic undertones is the answer to the problem and no matter what anyone thinks is light years better for the actual consumer than the profit first styled business approach. This isnât a secret, everyone knows but the fattest of cats arenât willingly going to go on a money diet.
Our system of healthcare is the equivalent of letting the ultra-wealthy govern a nation, it just doesnât come out as per the plan.
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Come out from under the bridge so we can see who your are.
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The devil is in the details. Aggressively regulated, ACA makes health insurance possible for many who would otherwise never have had it. Bend to industry, and the people become a captive market to exploit.
That we pay so much more per capita than the rest of the world for worse health outcomes is barely mentioned, much less addressed.
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Sorry for your problems. Seem like Iâve only heard of one self employed couple that are friends of my wife that vote republican and bitched about ACA having to change insurers, and although their rates actually went down they still bitch and moan about Obummer. Bernieâs single payer might actually be able to help you since it seems to work for seniors through medicare (i have two mid 80âs parents and they actually buy a supplemental on top of it), but like you I just donât think heâll get anywhere against congress.
Iâm in NC and my company had been with BCBS for years, but after ACA, BCBS was going to about double their rates for us so they switched to Unitedhealthcare and our rates actually went down a bit. Kind of funny since the management leans way right and B&M about any and every thing Obama or D. So, guessing weâre not actually running through ACA, just through UHCâs normal company insurance setup. This year my company quit subsidizing our premiums and put that money directly into our salary to offset the increased premium. Supposedly because of some ACA change. Be interesting to see if UHC starts jacking up our rates next year.
I think a good evolution to ACA might be to say insurance companies have to run as non profit, set the rates they can charge and they just have to be good at what they do to make it work. Kind of like what I believe German does based on a 60 minuteâs, or some other showâs report a few years back about how 5 other countries that had universal insurance/healthcare ran theirs.
Edit; when the interviewer asked what was the german companyâs motivation if they couldnât make a profit he said if we run efficiently we can make better salaries. So since it seems like most private run companies now pay the executive exorbitant salaries, that might be one thing that needs to be reined in.
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I remember when Lee Iaccoca complained in front of a congressional committee that mandatory seat belts would mean the end of the American Auto Industry. Corporationâs always whine about change in an attempt to keep profits maximized in the process.
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BS. If you are self employed , you pay with pre tax dollars. You or your accountant are incompetent or lying or both.
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They liked things a lot better when they could just raise rates as much as they wanted every year and exclude anyone due to âpre-existing conditions.â
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I have been in a union for over 25 years and gotten very good health care most of my adult life, but in fairness I hear this complaint from friends and relatives a lot. It seems ACA has been a real help for the very poor who have no insurance, but for middle class folks it âcanâ be a major pain in the neck.
Any large program like this is going to need refinement and tweaks, if Republicans would stop trying to abolish the program and everyone work on improving it we could get a lot done.
And I too agree medicine should not be for profit. We recently lost my father to Alzheimerâs and the sausage factory process of American medicine where you literally feel like you put your loved one on a conveyer belt that swoops them away until they land with a bill hanging from their necks. This is driving the really caring people out of medicine and leaving the ghouls.
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That what the corporate beancounters at Screw Cross did to me BEFORE the ACA!
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Our experience was that our premiums dropped $12/mo. So, $144 a year is not a lot it was nice that the premiums did not go up like they had every year for the past 30 years. We arenât sure why they went down. Our only thought is that they were not paying out 80% in benefits so had to reduce the premiums to met the new rules.
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They are for it and against it at the same time. I am sure that many of them would love to be able to kick the sicker people off the rolls and save some money right then and there.
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The health insurance companies shouldnât be able to whine and complain until theyâve made âzero profit or lessâ for 3 consecutive years!
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Big picture, the US has to settle back to healthcare spending on par with the OECD average of around 10% of GDP. The ACA was the first step in this trend from the world beating 18% Americans tolerate, which means you are still looking at about $1.2 trillion in free-rideship and inefficiencies in the system. Some services like paramedic, emergency response and ambulance probably need to be fully regulated and treated as public services. The public health system, much of which has fallen to county services level in the US, also need to be strengthened and integrated with the national model (e.g. Finland). The Swiss model on which the US model is based is pretty good in service delivery, but we should keep in mind that the top-performing in terms of cost-efficiency are either the mandated savings and payment as you have in Singapore, or the hard driving tax-based models of single-payer nations like Sweden, where the national delivery system can be monitored centrally, but refined at the local level to prevent bottlenecks to access such as long waits to see a doctor or overly long distances to travel to a care facility.
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This. Iâm not saying the ACA doesnât have its problems and that some people arenât getting a raw deal. But people tend to forget just how absolutely f__king awful our whole system was before the ACA. Many of the perceived issues now are just carry-overs that have always been present. Short term memory and the exploitation of this fact by ACAs opposition has muddied the waters enough to where too much blame gets placed on the ACA itself, rather than the fact that our biggest problem is and always has been a for-profit health insurance industry.
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It would be nice if I could purchase affordable healthcare, but my health, and my ability to maintain it, must take a back seat to corporate profits.
Itâs what the Founding Fathers intended, after all.
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