By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - Politics Discussion - U.S. House Passes Bill To Defund Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

Medicare for all. Problem solved: http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/study-medicare-all-would-save-half-tr



Around the Network
Kasz216 said:
snyps said:


What's up with the replying in quotes? That's so annoying.

 

Outside of which....

 

1) Hording Billions of dollars.   Billions sounds like a lot I know... but it really isn't. 

I mean what, do you NOT want healthcare companies to keep money in reserve to make sure they don't go bankrupt? 

The article you are talking about is complaining about insurance companies having a surplus greater then state miniums.

Boy it sure would of been great if Banks had kept surplus' greater than what was legally required back when credit default swaps were skyrocketing right?


Sort of like going into a situation where the baby boomers are entering the age where they need the most health insurance, at the same time health insurance costs are rising?

No... it's far better to be at the state minium required levels and if you just go out of buisness because healthcare costs skyrocket, all those people will just be out of luck.

As for private insurance companies....

http://biz.yahoo.com/p/sum_qpmd.html

Health Insurance has a net proft margin of about 9%.   Which isn't exactly setting the charts on fire... and coincidentally is  a lot higher then the 4-5% it was at before Obamacare was passed.

 

2)   Your joking right?  So your point is, you don't want to pay for the cost of doing buisness?   That's like saying I want to buy a hamburger at Burger King but not pay for the oven that cooks it or the time spent training the workers.   That equipment and training is part of the cost of a product is common sense.  Without the training, equipment etc.  The buisness couldn't exist.   

 

3)  I'm not sure what your talking about.  Health insurance doesn't get more expensive as you use it.   It's not car insurance.   Everyone in the same age group pays the same rate for health insurance minus a few factors like smoking.  I can use my healthcare a dozen times, you could use it never.  We'd pay the same rate.  

 

4)  Only because healthcare statistics are mired by a ton of different confounding variablse like culture, crime, accidental deaths.

The US actually tends to perform worse on large scales... though mostly due to stuff like are ridiculiously large prison population, high stress culture, accidents/sucides and crime and obesity rates.

As fun a chart now as it was when the data was released...

(Note some countries decrease in life expectancy on the right because it's standarded not just removing fatal injuries.  The actual results aren't quite as neat, but this does illustrate the point failry well.)

 

If a Machine works    .5% better though.  For every 2000 people, it's saving 1.  Minor gains?  Sure.  Given the choie though... i'd rather have the best possible chance.

 

5) I never said that it was.  Simply that Healthcare costs are generally always going to rise, at least as long as we find new ways to save peoples lives.  This will be biggest in the US, because we focus the most on innovation?  Is it fair we're paying so much more for an increase in medical technology?

No, but i'd rather medical technology keep being refined.   In a perfect world, Europe would abandon their system to be like ours, and we could have medical advancmenets 2,3 maybe even 4 times as fast.

 

As it stands though, the US government even spends more per captia than other countries do towards healthcare research.  Why?  Because for them it's counter productive.  Every advancment they find only increases their bill, and the benefits they create are ones people didn't know where possible...

so they don't miss them.

I'm curious as to what your answer would be, however. Our system gets better results at an excruciating, financial-life-destroying cost in many cases. How do you patch the holes (the inability of the already sick to get insurance, companies' abilities to drop big loser clients from insurance plans, and the occasional unfortunate uninsured who suddenly find themselves in a bad situation) and lower costs in general without forcing down innovation?



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

snyps said:
Kasz216 said:
snyps said:
 

 

 


80% of healthcare costs go toward the administrative expense of using insurance.  That means if you don't accept insurance and cut the cost in half, you'll more than double your profit.  This guy brings home more money than other doctors and charges only a 3rd of the cost.  You said it's not true, well it is. 

Based on what?

Even the most biased studies i've seen going out of their way to put administration in a bad light never get remotely near that number.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2011/november/us-health-care-spending-where-is-the-waste

For example... which includes a hell of a lot more then simple compliance.

 



Mr Khan said:
 

I'm curious as to what your answer would be, however. Our system gets better results at an excruciating, financial-life-destroying cost in many cases. How do you patch the holes (the inability of the already sick to get insurance, companies' abilities to drop big loser clients from insurance plans, and the occasional unfortunate uninsured who suddenly find themselves in a bad situation) and lower costs in general without forcing down innovation?

I'm going to tackle these in a different order.

1) Drop big loser clients from insurance plans.   This is already illegal, so... just by actually enforcing it. 

If you want to be overly preventative force insurance companies to push the issue in a court or adminsitrative setting where they have to prove malphesance.

 

2)  Inability of already sick to get health insurance.   If you fix the first one you mostly don't have to fix this one.  Everyone has a chance to get healthcare.  People who go bankrupt getting healthcare will end up with government healthcare, or disability insurance.    It sucks to the people it happens to, but that's why your always told to get health insurane. 

The only real problem here is people born with defecets, or people who develop them at a young age before they make their own health choices.  A government plan for these people would be fine.  Or just a slight gap between childhood and adulthood to get treated.

 

Keep in mind too, this is just for people who want to BUY health insurance.  In reality, very few people with prexisting conditions actually have trouble getting coverage, because they got the coverage before the coniditions... or they get coverage from their workplace.

Which already couldn't discriminate due to prexisting conditions.

 

A good way to illustrate this is to look at the PCIP pools created for people with prexisting conditions until the Prexisting conditions mandate comes into effect.

Total number of American enrolled?   ~100,000... then they later closed the program down... but in 2 years, that's all they got. Then they burned through their 5 billion so fast they had to close enrollment.  Still 2 entire years for people with ticking timebomb problems to get insured is pretty telling.

So that's pretty much around the level of people that could afford healthcare normally that exist.  Around 100,000. 

 

3)  The unoccasional uninsured who finds themself in a bad place?   Pull a Donald Trump.   Say I end up in the hosptial due to a car accident, and am fine... except huge medical debt?   Well... I file bankruptcy.   That's the relativly minor, risk you tend to take when you don't have insurance.   If it's systemic and long lasting... well that sucks, but it's your own fault for not getting insurance.

 

4) How to lower costs?   You don't.   Innovation is more important than money, and healthcare costs will eventually level off.

For example, what few people know is that the increase in healthcare costs has been decreasing for a while now  

http://www.hschange.com/CONTENT/745/

( I think it went up again in 2005, but then has been down since 2006.)

The problem was sort of already self correcting before Obamacare passed.  Not really noticed because it's still going up, and in raw numbers it looks bigger.

 

While people want the best technology available when sick, they won't pay an infinite amount for insurance BEFORE they are sick.   We were already reaching a leveling off point. 

 

It's more then Europe, because in the US you are paying for your healthcare insurance... in Europe, it's more your just paying for everyone. 

 


Is it a perfect or an Ideal solution?  No.  Though as previously stated, there isn't a perfect or ideal solution for healthcare... it's all a matter or priorities.