Posted on 03/04/2017 3:32:28 PM PST by Brad from Tennessee
Pre-Obamacare deductible of 150/person, 500 for family. Full pay after.
Now 8k deductible for the family, then 80/20 to 15k, with 80% increase in the premium. Other people got worse.
Wow!
That is horrible. How do you survive?
Gruber made this point in his interview with Tucker Carlson week before last. Paraphrasing — Ocare was not designed to help everyone and will hurt some people so that others will have health insurance.
That is one of the reasons...but it is also not the point being discussed - which is that the premiums themselves consume a large portion of an individual’s or family’s available funds, creating situations where there is either not money available at all to expend within the deductible portion of costs, or the trade off is artificially and extremely high.
To your last point, yes, most people are not getting what they pay for in services - as risk distribution works that way - but it has been perverted to an extreme to where risk is not really being distributed, merely consequences invoked upon the masses (in this case, mostly the middle class).
However, there is one obvious benefit to having insurance: the patient gets the insurance negotiated price for all services. The negotiated price is substantially less in cost than the “list price” (for people wo insurance) for the same services.
That is an interesting thought, too — why is the “list price” way over inflated? Why does a procedure cost 3x if you don't have insurance vs if you do? It should cost approximately the same. I am not suggesting price controls either. Just asking an obvious question. Maybe there is a lot of padding in the “list price.”
Lastly, I wonder how many folks can no longer afford the “American dream” of owning a house because of the Ocare premiums? Healthy youngsters who might forgo health insurance so that they can afford a mortgage are now forced to buy insurance and poor all of their expendable income into an over-inflated, lousy value insurance premium.
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