| patronmacabre said: And regarding your assessment with health care costs, that is also undeniably true. There are many, many facets as to why the American healthcare system is terrible. That said, hopefully Obamacare, which is showing to be very effective in reducing the rates of the uninsured, can help with the problem you mentioned. But even then, there's also the problem with extremely high co-pays and deductibles, which make even cheap, small operations unfeasable to the poor if they still have to pay 1,000 dollars or more for a simple surgery. |
There's the big part of the problem with the US healthcare system. Insurance should not be used in the manner it is. Insurance should only be for major, rare, and uncontrollable instances like cancer.... or, apparently, rattlesnake bites.
The fact that you have to buy one plan to cover basically everything to do with healthcare is ludicrous. These small operations, doctor visits, and most pharmaceuticals should be paid out of pocket, or via some kind of medical savings account. Pushing them through the insurance model just explodes costs.
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Obamacare will cause the cost of healthcare to go up. It's simple math/economics. All Obamacare did was increase the amount of demand for health care (providing insurance to a greater pool of people) without doing anything to improve the supply situation. In fact, this has been the basis of just about all healthcare interventions in the US healthcare market in past decades: increasing demand, leaving supply static or actually reducing supply.
Increased demand and static/reduced supply = one thing. Higher prices. They may materialize in the premium, they may materialize in the deductible, they may materialize in somebody else's premium or deductible, or they may even materialize in your or somebody else's tax bill if the Gov't chooses to subsidize those increased costs. Point it, price will go up, and somebody will have to pay.
Prices will stop going up, and actually start decreasing, if the Gov't put in place legislation to increase the supply of healthcare: reducing or eliminating/reducing any taxes or regs, eliminating "certificates of need", legalizing medical marijuana, reducing length of medical patent life, reducing the AMA's grip on the control of who can work in the healthcare market.
