| 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.
