Some of the PRINCIPLES of Obamacare are worthwhile. For example - pre-existing conditions. I know a surprising number of people who are “trapped” in a job or basically cannot be hired full-time because of this, each one having a problem not of their own making or from bad behavior, just bad genes or bad luck. Labor force mobility USED TO BE a great advantage of the US labor force. “Business as usual” - with insurance working as it did pre-Obamacare - is not sustainable and is not the answer either. Health insurance and the medical industry have been going to hell for 30 years and anyone reading this who is more than 50 years old knows this to be absolutely true. Obamacare makes an already horribly inefficient system even MORE inefficient.
HIPAA prohibits pre-existing condition exclusions for anyone going from one group health plan to another, or from a group health plan to individual coverage. For the last 20 years, many folks who thought they were job-trapped by their health just haven’t been aware of HIPAA. (Not surprising, really, those provisions have gotten very little publicity)
“Health insurance and the medical industry have been going to hell for 30 years and anyone reading this who is more than 50 years old knows this to be absolutely true.”
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I suspect that the first step on that road to hell was the passage of Medicare in 1965. I can still recall reading a report shortly after the beginnings of medicare saying that a person who went into the hospital would have a medicare copay larger than the entire bill had been before medicare.
I recall a time when you could walk into a doctor’s office, sign in without an appointment and they would “work you in”, you could usually see the doctor within an hour or two and pay five dollars for the visit. I seldom needed to see a doctor then but when I did I literally paid with pocket change. Medical care, like nearly everything else works far better without government interference. It has been said that government is only good at two things, waging war and inflating the currency. These days it only seems to be good at the latter.