I sure hope one would argue it’s not a free market. I don’t know anybody that would argue that it is a truly free market with a straight face.
They aren’t even opposing the dems anymore. I’m old enough to remember when I (a republican voter) was supposedly going to get a shutdown over obamacare funding that would have hopefully resulted in some cuts. Nope, that never happened. But I got a long shutdown over funding for the wall. And for that I ended up with…
LOL, crickets…
Really? I was supporting your comment.
I don’t think glitch was saying they couldn’t “work” together. All glitch said was that capitalism is not a solution for a situation where there are entitlements. I think that’s the same as what you’re saying - they can both work at the same time, in spite of each other. But capitalism won’t create the entitlements.
I was saying ‘crickets’ in response to the comment asking what the R’s plan was to actually fix the system. In other words, there isn’t one and everybody knows it by now. All there is is knee-jerk rejection of anything the D’s propose.
See the thread on the Trump Administration requiring that medical providers post prices. With today’s high deductible policies there is a yuuge incentive for people to price shop. Once they can do this it would have a yuuge effect on medical costs once the President gets it through the Resistance of the medical industry and the Obama judges. The market does not require everyone to use it to discipline providers if a substantial part of their profits are affected.
Its a good change.
sadly as much as we’d like … It won’t even move the needle on healthcare pricing.
Democrats don’t oppose it.
Of course there is no official plan. The plan was repeal and they didn’t have the votes. I think after the repeal failed, the unofficial plan has mostly been just “give up.” Kinda like same-sex marriage. At some point, there’s really nothing you can do anymore and you move on to the next fight. Republicans were able to get rid of the penalty for not having insurance, so maybe somewhere down the line when a bunch of healthy people leave the exchange plans, people on both sides will wake up and see the current system is unsustainable. But whether anyone does anything about that… I’m not holding my breath.
The problem is that politicians are not willing to look at real solutions. Here are a few ways we could actually achieve meaning impacts:
Take lawyers out of healthcare: tort reform, limit damage awards, prevent frivolous lawsuits, institute a “loser pays rules”, etc. Sadly we have a conflict of interest with many of our politicians having made their fortunes at law firms.
Take the government out of healthcare: repeal laws and rating restrictions preventing consumers from buying any health insurance policy they want, regardless of which state they live in, without mandates on what is included in that policy.
Take the employer out of healthcare: I think it is fine that employers want to help with the costs, but lets let them contribute to the insurer consumers choose and not choose for the consumer. This allows anyone to change jobs without losing insurance benefits.
Encourage personal responsibility: car insurance does not cover oil/tire changes or other minor car repairs and neither should health insurance. Increase contribution limits of HSA accounts and allow contributions regardless of healthplan. High deductible plans will pay for the big stuff and the minor stuff will be easily covered by HSA contributions.
This one is optional, but for those that like to pick winners/losers you could give tax breaks to motivate good behavior: tax breaks for healthcare costs of healthcare premiums (first dollar), gym memberships, home gym purchaes, vitamins, supplements, It might save money long-term to encourage that consumers make healthy choices, thereby reducing the need for expensive doctor visits, medical procedures, or prescription drugs.
IMHO, high deductible plans need to die. I’ve seen good HMO/PPO style plans that cost no more than high deductible plans with a small HSA contribution. At a time when many Americans can’t afford a basic car repair, what makes you think they would voluntarily contribute to an HSA?
I know myself that if I have a medical condition, and I am going to have to pay for treatment directly from my pocket, I am going to wait until the last possible moment to go. This can make the condition worse and treatment costs to rise. Furthermore, people that are relatively unhealthy and the least able to work would be forced to contribute more to their own healthcare which exacerbates the problems we have now.
@storm Then you are basically saying that things are great the way they are, because a large majority of the current plans are HMO/PPO type plans. High deductible plans make up a small percentage (~10%) of current plans.
I’ve seen statistics that malpractice insurance and malpractice costs are ~2% of our total spending on healthcare.
Medical errors amount to ~1% direct costs.
Of course you can also find estimates that so called defensive medicines total cost is $700 billion. That is ludicrous and such exaggerations are just conjecture and speculation. Some people seem to want to grossly exaggerate the cost of lawsuits. Some doctors especially seem to like to blame the lawyers. Blaming lawyers is easier than admitting that you aren’t 150% perfect.
Medicare fraud is at least 10% (that they found), and more like 20% of the budget if you include the stuff they didn’t but speculate is going on. That’s an obvious place to start.
I’m saying a high deductible plan is nearly as bad as having no insurance at all. What is the point of paying for healthcare insurance if you have to be out of pocket several thousand dollars before it covers anything? I worked for a S&P 500 company that only offered high deductible plans, and it was a big reason why I left.
That’s what I did when I had a high deductible plan in 2007. I injured my hand, but I didn’t want to go in and spend hundreds of dollars if it wasn’t broken. I decided it didn’t hurt THAT bad, so maybe it was fine. Flash forward to a month later and it still didn’t look right, so I went to the walk-in clinic. It turns out it was badly broken and the bone was fused together in the wrong place. It’s still slightly deformed.
Thankfully, my most expensive health care costs occurred after implementation of the ACA, which has saved me over $30,000 thus far. Thanks, Obama!
Most plans have some kind of deductible, so you are faced with the same decision regardless. I wish I could lower my premiums further with an even higher deductible. I’m not going to go to the doctor with every cough just so that he can tell me “yup, you’re sick”, so I don’t want to pay extra for “better” insurance I will not use anyways.
I want insurance for what it’s intended to be - a backstop against life-changing medical costs. Covering the day-to-day stuff is a big part of why it’s so expensive.
It depends if you can afford a couple grand out of pocket or not. If not, you don’t want a HD plan. If you can, why pay the insurance company extra premiums and profit margin when you can insure the unlikely event of a $5k max deductible hit? Insurance is paying up for risk reduction, and if you can take the risk, don’t pay the extra fees to insure it.
I agree with xerty. There’s nothing wrong with a high deductible plan in lots of circumstances. More choices are better than fewer choices. My family is having a guaranteed expensive procedure this year that I knew about at our open enrollment last year (wife is pregnant). Even knowing that we would be forced to pay the deductible for her, it was still smarter to go with the high deductible plan in our case.
I asked this question previously, and one benefit of insurance is the reduced prices you pay so you don’t have to try to negotiate from an insane cash price.
The other obvious benefit is that if you have a 100k catastrophe, with a 5k deductible, you’re in debt 5k. Without it, you’re in debt 100k.
I can see your point, that for someone making 15k/yr, the 5k is extremely difficult to payoff. But 100k is impossible to pay off.
Same thing happened with Obamacare too though… People received subsidies for the premiums, great now they have insurance. A lot of plans had $1000 ind / $2000 family deductible. For someone making 15-20k a year, it is basically like not having insurance. If you go to the doctor for an xray, lab test or MRI, you end up with a $1000 bill that might as well be $10,000 when you only have $10 of disposable income each month.