The media let us down yet again regarding Obamacare. The House was presented with a bill of over 2,000 pages and I think only about 24 hours to read it before they had to vote on it. So that means that no one who voted for or against the bill had anything but talking points to make their decision on. Fairly typical for the House of Nancy. Her most famous quote became "you have to pass the bill to know what is in it". How's that for left wing logic. The media could have had people reading drafts and reporting on it but no, that would mean the public would be too informed and might then put pressure on their representatives to vote against the bill since it would actually increase their costs rather than give them the $2500 per family savings that Obama promised.
Obama got up on national television and lied and lied and lied. And he knew he was lying because his advisors admitted that he knew how much the bill was going to cost the public but it was really good for insurance companies. I understand that Presidents and politicians cannot always tell us the truth but they should NEVER lie about things like this which affected all of us at a personal level. That was downright evil. Obamacare was downright evil.
Personally, the year before the bill was proposed my husband and I were paying $600 per month for really poor health insurance. We were on a Medicaid plan and paying the top rate because we were certainly not poor but we had lost our insurance and had two years to go before Medicare. A private policy was going to cost us $30,000 per year with an $8,000 deductible so being basically healthy, just getting old, we decided to risk bankruptcy for two years by using the state's Medicaid option. By the month before we were eligible for Medicare, our monthly bill for MEDICAID - which paid a maxim of $75,000 for any illness/accidents during any year was up to $1200. I can't imagine how poor people survived. I guess they just did without. My daughter's insurance doubled and of course went up every year from there. We were lucky to get to Medicare that year and have our insurance go back down to about $400 a month for the two of us with a drug plan.
So, who benefited from Obamacare - some people who didn't have coverage got coverage for free. Of course, the way hospitals work is they treat whoever walks in the door and then worry about collecting so in theory, hospitals benefited because they had fewer "free" patients to treat. The big winners were insurance companies as you can tell by how their stock prices rose after Obamacare became law.
-But the insidious thing about the way for-profit insurance works is that insurance companies have no incentive to lower costs. They work on a cost + basis so the more dollars they pay out, the more dollars they get in because 10% of $150 is better than 10% of $100 and they just raise the rates as needed to cover the actual costs. Once we went all in on the HMO model, people stopped knowing what providers were charging for any service. so they just cared about what their co-payment was. They don't know that the doctor is billing the insurance company $300 for a 10-minute visit. All they know is that it cost them $25. So people don't understand just how much we are paying for medical under the current system. Yet, there are parts of he country were doctors charge $125 for that same 10-minute visit. This isn't particularly relevant for PCP's because you're not going to drive to Arkansas to see your PCP, but it becomes really important when you get to important but not emergency services like knee replacements and cataract surgery. Some insurance companies are actually taking advantage of medical tourism within the US. It is cheaper by a lot for them to send you to Arkansas for a week with a companion so you're not alone than to have the surgery done in your local hospital.
Who was hurt, people like my daughter. Her premiums went up dramatically but she earned too much money to qualify for one of the Obamacare plans. Given that we live in one of the most expensive counties in the entire country and she's a single mother of two it's not clear how that could be true. I guess they used the average income for people in Alabama as their basis.
www.marketwatch.com
pharmaceuticalfraud.com
