| SamuelRSmith said:
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. --- 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. |
It is not actually as simple as the way you put it, as, in theory, the universal mandate increased the "supply" of low-cost, low-risk individuals in the health insurance risk pool.
The ACA took a three-pronged approach, because people wanted things like an extension of the age students could be on their parents' healthcare, and the removal of pre-existing conditions as a basis for denial of coverage. This is the first prong of the approach.
The second prong is to increase the risk pool. That's where the health insurance mandate comes in. Most of the people that couldn't afford health insurance previously were healthy twenty-to-forty somethings that felt that health insurance wasn't beneficial to them, since they were healthy. In a sense, by not having these people in the risk pool, health insurance couldn't pay for the much more costly people -- this is why health insurance companies adopted the pre-existing condition excuse. They didn't have the profitable people (the young, healthy individuals) to essentially pay for the unhealthy individuals.
That, naturally, leads into the third prong of the ACA. Of course, there are people who can't afford the mandate of Obamacare. Thus, subsidies for health care are put in place so that the low income individuals can afford it and join the risk pool.
I hope this explanation help to explain the theory behind the economics of the ACA.
Edit: Community rating for the ACA is also part of the first prong.
Edit 2: Here is an interesting read on health insurance rate increases under Obamacare. They are rising at a normal level. It should also be noted that 2015 is a really, really weird year and, from what I have read, the unusually low rise in costs in 2015 shouldn't be attributed to Obamacare. http://kff.org/health-reform/issue-brief/analysis-of-2016-premium-changes-and-insurer-participation-in-the-affordable-care-acts-health-insurance-marketplaces/
