TheOneX wrote: ↑Wed Dec 15, 2021 1:31 pm
Half measures never workout, and that is what Obamacare is. The problem with using insurance to pay for general healthcare is that is obscures the prices. Without being able to see the actual cost normal market forces cannot act. There are only two ways to bring down the cost of healthcare, abolish insurance for anything except emergencies (i.e. how insurance works for everything else), or go to a fully governmental system. Option 1 allows market forces to work to lower the price. Option 2 allows the government, as the only healthcare customer, to dictate costs to health providers (effectively unionization). Anything in-between, and you give all the power to the insurance companies and health care providers. Healthcare is like energy, it is a requirement, people will pay whatever the cost. When that is the case you either have to go full free market or heavily regulated monopoly.
This is where most people are missing the point...There is a third option.
Allow the open market to provide insurance to the people, but if you want to control the cost, you don't go looking at the cost of insurance without looking at the reason behind the cost. This is because of the health care providers. When they are allowed to push 500% profit on top of actual services, we need to ask, who really is at fault here?
If you don't get state or federal demands that entities can't charge more than a specific percentage to make a "justified profit" (IE: Paying employees, keeping a roof over your head, paying bills, and making enough for retirement) then so be it. But there is no justification of increasing 200 to 500%... not when they have a rotation of people walking in and out of hospitals at a rate that would make whore houses blush...
The cost on insurance was never the problem it was the fact that now it's backed by the government and those charging insurance understand that the bill will always be paid... so why worry about costs?
The reason Romney Care worked is there was a limitation of percentage over actual cost that the state was willing to cover. So that meant that the percentage would have to be covered elsewhere, and the people were not going to tollerate that... so, in turn the cost dropped and everyone was "happy"....