- Obamacare was created to insure individuals who can’t get employer sponsored health insurance and assumed that health insurance companies actually wanted to provide health insurance. In reality health insurance companies are happier pocketing a fee to negotiate bad deals with providers with no actual risk to themselves. So insurance companies have actually found a way to write themselves out of the risk they’re supposed to be managing and we’re all paying the price. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-belk/the-obomacare-paradox-the_b_8735042.html
- “Many Americans – some 8.2 million, according to an estimate from the Urban Institute – no longer need to worry about being unceremoniously dumped into the ranks of the uninsured. It has been estimated that a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs could have cost between 8,000 and 9,800 lives a year. How the case plays out with respect to ongoing Democratic and Republican political gamesmanship seems, in comparison, a piddling matter. Now, in other news yesterday, health care stocks were spiking on Wall Street: Insurers (UnitedHealth and Aetna) and corporate hospital networks (Hospital Corporation of America) were seeing strong gains. The link between these events is, of course, obvious: The Affordable Care Act’s premium subsidies are funneled through private health insurance companies, who take a cut. Corporate hospital chains, meanwhile, prefer a well-paying customer.Together, this might be a bit puzzling for those who’ve adopted that age-old mantra, “What’s good for the health insurance industry is bad for America.” Yet this corporate compromise was fundamental to the passage of Obamacare, as Stephen Brill documents in his book “America’s Bitter Pill.” As a result, Obamacare is, by and large, good for the health care business. A few years back, as described in a New York Times story headlined, “The President Wants You to Get Rich on Obamacare,” Thomas Scully – who comfortably alternates between working as a government administrator and a government lobbyist – tried to alleviate the concerns of a room of investors about Obamacare at the “21” Club in New York.“It’s not a government takeover of medicine,” he was quoted by the Times as saying, “It’s the privatization of health care.” As the Times put it, “Billions could flow from Washington to Wall Street, indeed.”Next question: Why should we care, if the insured are being covered in the process? Well, we should care because our corporate health care compromise comes at a serious cost.
First, it’s a waste of good money. Private insurers have notoriously high overhead: They spend perhaps 12 percent of your premium on administration and profits. Traditional Medicare, in contrast, spends about 2 percent on overhead. A recent analysis found that the insurance expansion under the ACA has been particularly costly from this perspective, with about $1,375 spent on overhead for each newly insured person.
Second, the mandate model of health care reform was never intended to result in universal coverage. “If you took George H. W. Bush’s health plan,” Scully told the investors at the “21” Club with some fairness (again as quoted in the Times), “and removed the label, you’d think it was Obamacare.” The problem with a mandate model – which used to be the conservative approach to health care reform – is that some people will invariably fall between the cracks: Indeed, some 27 million will remain uninsured in the long term under the ACA. http://www.salon.com/2015/06/26/americas_health_care_system_is_still_broken_why_single_payer_is_the_only_thing_that_will_ever_fix_it/
How We Can meet the Challenges of Authoritarianism
November 15, 2024 No Comments
This is not our first rodeo with authoritarianism. Americans have collectively risen to seemingly impossible challenges in the past, and we can do so again. By Maria J. Stephan Analysis