Cast your vote!

[dhyams]

We definitely have two different angles on this. My premise is somewhat based around the fact I feel healthcare cost are artificially inflated through inefficiency … as are most government programs (agreed) but it’s not in the governments hands. Obamacare isn’t perfect but it’s a start ….


I think the insurance industry is part of the group that is riding out the inflated dollars. I think insurance premiums are too high (bc they have to pay for people without insurance) and I think they can get away with spending caps and denying coverage. JM’s example for instance … 64,000 bill and 14,000 coverage … where is the 64,000 in cost and why is insurance only covering a small portion? I don’t have any factual information about the stock market but some thought … The stock going up dramatically means someone made money. Who were those people? Where is the stock price now? Was it an artificial jump? Wall street is always a daylight, the money makers profit from the mainstream wallstreet.
Also, look at what you know about insurance companies. Massive advertisement budgets and around here, the biggest buildings in town. Now, the part of Obamacare that puts limits on how much can be spent on “admin” cost really dives off into a grey area for me. There should be a way to encourage that behavior without any dictation.


I think the real cost of this thing still has some “to be determined”. My frustration from that articles comes from the fact I think small business owners will lay off employees for “their team” and their own agenda.
Preexisting conditions – guess who is paying for that now? You do. Using obesity as an example, someone with cardiac issues comes into the ER with no insurance. They get helped (it’s the ER) but can’t foot the bill. They don’t qualify for medicare bc they make too much money. There are not enough Bill Gates and Warren Buffets to pay the hospital bills for these people. So what happens, the hospitals are forced to artificially inflate cost to patients with insurance. Cost to insurance companies go up, your premiums go up. Meanwhile, this person gets sent home immediately (bc of no insurance) and receives no follow up care and more importantly no preventative care. He is back in two months bc of this and the cycle starts all over.



We agree on the core of the problem. Until you mentioned export laws I had not given it a lot of thought. The protections I feel are given to Big Pharma are in the way of patent laws. They are granted a monopoly over a drug until it expires, right before it expires they turn it into a continuous release and snag a new patent to keep the drug in only their hands and not letting a generic market form. Obamacare does address this issue. I’ll check out the export laws.


That is likely a system that controls cost and promotes efficiency. They don’t just run with an inflated system. If you looked at their pay structure, I bet it would be based on performance. The inefficiencies in the system now stem from a non performanced based structure. Doctors inflate cost on medicare patients and an insured patients in an attempt to cover for those they don’t get paid for. How do you cap the inefficiency from continuing to grow? I think there are attempts at this in the bill.
Wanted to go into more but don’t have time right now…. We do have a fundamental difference though. I have a hard time not lumping healthcare into “promote the general welfare” along with education, police, fire, etc.

Just a quick Re: on some points...

Re: business owners laying people off for "their team" or "their agenda": Business owners don't do this, except in some rare, weird case. Business owners make the calculation of how much benefit each employee provides to their business. If you pay an employee $50,000 per year but having that employee only brings in an additional $40,000 profit to the company, that's a net loss of 10K. If the owner has any sense, that person will get laid off. Either that or the business will eventually shutter. As the weight of Obamacare comes to increase the cost per employee, there will be people laid off. No way around that. The story I gave was just the quickest one I could lay my hands on; I'm sure that there are hundreds of others already, and will be thousands more to come. Not a good economic picture.

Re: patent laws. Yes, I agree that's part of the problem too, along with the import/export laws. I'll have to admit that I don't know what Obamacare does about the patent laws, but the cynic in me would guess that it pays lip service to the problem rather than really solving it.

Re: obese guy who shows up at the ER but cannot pay. This is why EMTALA must be repealed, and goes back to my point that health care is not a right. Who is government to force a service provider to provide a service irrespective of whether the client can pay? EMTALA introduces huge price distortions as the health care industry shifts costs to those who can, and then you end up with what we have now, that you describe above.

Re: general welfare. I'm not a constitutional scholar, but you are quoting a generic phrase from the preamble. The preamble is there to orient the reader to what is to come, not the law itself. The law is codified in the rest of the Constitution. I could just as easily justify my position solely on "the blessings of liberty" part of the preamble. But neither justification would be valid.