if you want to keep your doctor
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Posted on 02/22/2015 7:30:48 PM PST by Jim Robinson
The Supreme Court this June could cut off millions of Americans from affordable Obamacare coverage. The response from the nation’s governors gathering in Washington this week was an assortment of shrugs.
POLITICO interviewed more than a dozen governors, from both parties, this weekend at the National Governors Association winter meeting. Most said they’re in a wait-and-see zone. The Supreme Court will hear arguments next week, the decision is likely in late June and no one can foretell how the court will rule on its second major case that could strike at the heart of the president’s signature health law.
For some Republican governors it was a shrug of indifference. They say the onus falls on President Barack Obama and Congress to figure out what to do if the Supreme Court invalidates Affordable Care Act subsidies in their states. And if Obamacare falls apart, well, they say, good riddance.
For others — among them potential 2016 contenders Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio — it’s a shrug of uncertainty. Wisconsin’s own state health program for certain low-income people relies on the federal exchange, and Walker called for the feds to come up with at least a short-term fix. Kasich says he’s working on contingency plans to protect people in his state, but he hasn’t said what that would look like, or how he’d pay for it.
The Obamacare opponents behind King argue that subsidies are illegal in 34 states using HealthCare.gov instead of running their own insurance exchanges. A ruling against the White House could abruptly halt financial assistance to roughly seven million of the people who signed up through the federal exchange this year.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
What makes you think all that data mining will get shredded? Don’t hold your breathe on that happening. They have it now and won’t let it go.
Bingo.
What I have found incredibly annoying since the beginning of the whole 0vomitcare debacle is the failure of anyone (aside from a few lone conservative voices that never get any press) to point out that health insurance is NOT health care. The liberals blather on as if they were one and the same.
Its really just a pilot program at this point so things are being tweaked and studied for the best way.
I talked to my doctor about it and he likes it. He thinks it will be especially helpful for preventative medicine because people will get a yearly check up because they’ve already prepaid for it. If someone needs a flu shot they’ll obviously have to pay for it but the office visit is already paid. He wants to see a pay scale system by age and services rendered.
He says the insurance companies don’t like it at all because they’re afraid it will derail the Obamacare gravy train.
Not very likely of course, but it would be interesting to watch the federal government ignore and circumvent the ruling
I opened an office in a poor neighborhood in Boston in 1982. It didn't take long to figure out that it cost me $26 to do the visit that Medicaid was paying me $8 for.
It took a bit longer to discover that, if I did the same work in the hospital outpatient department, that they paid the hospital $192.
Aha! said the young me. If only Stalin knew!
So, I went downtown with a business proposition. Pay me $46 instead of $8, I keep $20, send me all the $192s, you save $146 every time.
Alas, I missed the key factor. Every penny of the $192 paid to the hospital stayed "in the system". The state could muscle the hospital to hire their friends, start "programs", etc, etc, whereas my $20 would be "profiting from suffering", but more importantly might be used to buy my son a baseball glove or some other socially useless purpose.
They would much rather pay the $192, as it turned out, as long as the most I could get was $8.
The $20 cash doctor visit is a mirage. Too many powerful interests are at stake to allow it to take root.
What does it matter? Barry will just do what the hell he wants, the AG office will refuse to look into anything, Congress will piss and moan and then do absolutely NOTHING. And we, the American people, will continue to get screwed.
Business as usual.
> What makes you think all that data mining will get shredded? Don’t hold your breathe on that happening. They have it now and won’t let it go.
Why do you think I never enrolled? Not that I could afford it anyway,..
I would say that there is a better chance of hell freezing over than of the Supreme court voting against obamacare. In theory, both or either could happen, but in reality, the chances of either happening are slim. Obama knew how the Supreme Court will vote is the reason he allowed to go to the Supreme Court.
There is no such thing as affordable Obamacare coverage.
Smart thinking, but we can be sure that the people of American will never catch on.
He's probably right in that regard.
Ah, but I assert that it cut off the “right” people from affordable healthcare,
as Obamacare was designed to do.
Never mind the “exempt” aristocracy.
It’s really ironic that the left is promoting a sort of Neo-Feudalism.
Yup, that’s the chuckle I spaketh of.
if you want to keep your doctor
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You asked how, so here’s some possibilities that could be written into law:
1. Establish a one-time grace period of, say, 6 months during which every person could obtain a health insurance policy without taking a physical. In other words, every person of the same “class” would get the same rate for a policy as anyone else. That takes care of pre-existing conditions.
2. Convert all Medicare and Medicaid state systems to the private system by directing all funds spent on those programs toward helping those same people make the premium payments on their new private policies. That gets the government out of the doctor/hospital networks.
3. Allow insurance to be purchased across state lines and establish no minimum coverage requirements. That gets the state insurance departments out of it completely, other than enforcement of policy provisions and ensuring that insurers meet requirements of financial solvency.
4. Require all employers to convert current health insurance payments to wages. That gives employees access to funds with which to make their own insurance payments.
5. Forbid insurance companies from either dropping policyholders or raising their individual rates because of a new illness, so long as they continue to make their premium payments on at least a catastrophic care policy. That would return health insurance to a true insurance where those who need it collect and everyone continues to pay in at a reasonable level in case they too need it someday.
6. Establish a minimum deductible per person and a minimum out-of-pocket per person so that virtually everyone has skin in the game when it comes to paying a doctor or hospital bill. Index the minimums, say $1,500 deductible and $3,000 out of pocket, for inflation. That makes everyone cost conscious, something the healthcare system desperately needs, and it will bring costs down considerably.
7. Establish an HSA plan for every person, partially government-funded. This is covered in a separate post following this one because it takes a lot of explanation on how it should operate and has a lot of implications.
Regarding the structure of the Health Savings Accounts (HSA’s):
Insurance companies should be able to charge the young a lower premium than the old, so initially the old will have to be subsidized to an extent. Some provisions:
1. Each person gets a debit card with a minimum balance added to it each year by the government, for the purpose of making healthcare purchases.
2. Each person can contribute to their own HSA an amount each year that equals their insurance premium plus any out of pocket not covered by their policy. Example: Premiums are $4,000 per year, Out of pocket max is $3,000, totaling $7,000, but $1,000 is put on card by government, leaving the individual eligible to put $6,000 into the HSA, which adds directly to the balance on the debit card as it’s input by the individual.
3. When making payment on healthcare, as long as there’s money on the card, the insurance company is not involved in the transaction, nor is the billing department sending out monthly invoices. They just debit the debit card as authorized by the patient, and in the amount authorized by the patient. If the patient wants a record, he gets it when paying. (The paperwork burden would drop immensely.)
4. All HSA balances would be carried forward and could accumulate on the person’s account and be added to each year, to be reallocated to retirement upon reaching a certain age, and to be inheritable by heirs on death. (This creates an asset that could be considerable in old age and might be weighed against many of the useless medical procedures currently performed in a person’s last days. Also, the very fact that the funds are the individual’s property will ensure that they are spent wisely, i.e., that people will start checking prices and bringing down costs by doing so.)
5. Because the law would state that once insured, a person would remain insurable at normal rates, everyone would want to retain their insurable status by maintaining a policy. Medicare and Medicaid money currently spent could be diverted to maintaining the policies of those who can’t afford them so that they always remained insured. In the case of Medicaid, those funds could also go to subsidizing the higher premiums that will be demanded of older persons. (This is where it gets messy, but it’s doable.) Various welfare payments could also be diverted to pay healthcare premiums for the less well off. In other words, the role of the federal government would be to see that people were able to retain their private insurance as a primary goal, rather than worrying about how to structure the healthcare system, as it now does.
This is a start. It obviously wouldn’t be a 10-page bill, but it wouldn’t be 1,000 either, and it would be understandable, and effective, and put an end to the trend toward socialization of the medical industry.
And when people say the GOP doesn’t have a plan, they’re partly correct in that there is no single plan that’s been agreed upon, but the plans under consideration tend in this direction, rather than toward outright nationalization of healthcare. And we don’t want a tight knit group of insiders doing what they did with Obamacare anyway. We want open discussion and consideration of each proposal before it’s adopted.
If the supreme court actually upheld the law- Which is unlikely then I can tell you what would happen next.
The republicans would go along with the democrats and change the law so that the subsidies covered everyone.
You got it wrong buddy.
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