Thanks to the ACA, a larger share of Americans have health insurance than ever before
because its compulsory. this shouldn't an argument for the ACAs effectiveness. I have to buy car insurance if i choose to drive a car on public roads. i have to pay income tax if i have income. now, by birth, i automatically owe the state. i'd like my freedom and right to choose back please.
the fact this isn't the main argument from GOP shows their incompetence.
You actually don't owe the state anything if you can't afford health insurance. So similar to income tax, you can choose not to work and you won't have to pay the penalty.
And of course, it's not by birth, you owe nothing if you're dependent on someone else.
If, you chose to gamble with your life, and end up not being able to afford medical treatment in the future one of two things ends up happening. You actually notify your doctors before hand that you don't have money, and will elect to not receive any treatment and follow through with your gamble, or someone else will pay for your treatment for you. Most likely every other person who can afford to pay for their treatment via raised prices (which will, in turn, remove more people from the market, more people will gamble, raising prices further in a spiral).
Which option do you think is more likely to happen?
Which is, of course, exactly what happens: those with insurance subsidize those without. Why do you think a simple bandage or ibuprofen costs so much on insurance? To cover those that walk into hospital ERs, uninsured. It's a hidden tax, highly inefficient, but quite real.
The fact that we have to buy such expensive insurance is what burns me. Before ACA my family had good options for an individual plan (I'm self employed). Now we must pay $20K/year, and don't even get much benefit until we've spent another $5K out of pocket. The scope is what I don't like.
That's not a sustainable choice for our economy, it leads to too many people living like nothing could possibly go wrong until they need a doctor. The point of insurance is to distribute risk, not participating in that effectively negates the effectiveness of the industry.
The whole idea of health insurance is backwards and inconsistent with a free market in my opinion (fraudulent). The problem is that the government has enshrined it as the gateway to healthcare.
Insurance is a useful product for mitigating risk, so accident insurance could be a very constructive concept (protecting against accidental injuries, broken arms, falls, car crashes, etc.). However, health problems are not a risk; they are a guarantee with probability approaching one as you age. The whole point of insurance is that you mitigate risk by paying more than you take out on average, but that doesn't make sense for healthcare, where almost everyone ends up going over their limit near the end of their lives.
If we didn't have all of these subsidies everywhere and inflated demand from Medicare/Medicaid/restrictive occupational licensing/FDA-granted monopolies/ACA, then perhaps we could pay everything out of pocket, which would make a lot more sense.
The basic concept of health insurance works fine. Yes, your probability of dying approaches 1 as you age, but the costs you incur along the way can vary enormously. Somebody who's wonderfully healthy until they instantly die in bed of a heart attack will cost the insurer basically nothing, while somebody with a chronic condition can easily cost millions of dollars over decades. Costs can vary enormously depending on your luck, which is just the sort of thing insurance is good for.
There are big problems with running the whole system using insurance, of course. It's fairly easy to predict future costs for a lot of people. Given free reign, insurers will charge completely unaffordable premiums to those people, effectively excluding them from the system. You see the same thing with other types of insurance: if you have a horrible driving record, or if your house is in an area that gets a devastating hurricane every ten years, your premiums will be huge. The difference is that those are optional activities, and if you can't afford the premiums then you can walk, bike, hitch a ride, buy a different house, etc. A sick person can't switch to a healthy body.
That's why the ACA has the mandate. If you require everyone to pay in, then you can also require insurers to ignore certain predictors of future risk when determining premiums.
Fundamentally, there are only two choices. One choice is to have lots of people dying of easily treated conditions because they can't afford the treatment, and the other choice is to have government step in and socialize the system to some extent. The system was already socialized before the ACA with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires hospital emergency rooms to treat all patients regardless of ability to pay. This was horribly inefficient, of course, but that's how it was.
So: choose your poison. If you think the advantages of going full free market in health care outweigh having poor people die of easily treatable diseases, then that's a valid opinion, but you should acknowledge the negative consequences. If you want poor people to be able to obtain treatment, then you'll need to accept some interference, the only question is how you'd like to have it be structured.
Edit: rather than "poor people," I really should say "people whom the hospital thinks are poor." If you get beaten up and mugged and left for dead, the ER won't know if you have money, and might decide not to take the risk. There are good reasons for even a selfish wealthy person to want some form of universal treatment.
That's not quite true. For instance, life insurance takes a varying times for it to kick in (varies depending on type and amount, as well as which state's laws apply.)
It's quite possible that your health insurance could be limited at first, and grows to cover more things and higher dollar amounts.
And before anyone says you can't do this, go look at your dental insurance. Odds are that your coverage increases each year so long as you have two checkups annually and don't let a lapse of insurance occur.
Note that as the ACA is __currently__ written, the situation the OP states probably exists.
And what happens when you're 18 and get cancer? Building up may work for dental because even in the most catastrophic case, the costs have a ceiling, but your overall health doesn't have these kinds of ceilings. Also, every dental plan I have ever had has lifetime maximums, something else that doesn't work with health insurance.
I've never heard of anyone getting hit with a million-dollar bill for dental work, so I don't think that's quite the existence proof you want it to be.
Actually that's not what makes it expensive. It leads to too many people making very poor health choices and becoming obese or engaging in palliative care to eek out 2 more miserable weeks of existence at enormous costs to healthcare providers.
Young people, and especially young, healthy people are the ones subsidizing the elderly and the unhealthy, including most of those who are unhealthy by choice through poor decisions.
> The point of insurance is to distribute risk
Perverse incentives. Insurance needs to be structured in such a way as to incentivize people to take part in preventive care, which costs a fraction of treatment and palliative care.
You're making the assumption that nobody could possibly pay for their health care out of pocket. That's just not true, even with health care as expensive as it is these days.
With the exception of the most wealthy (ie, Bill Gates), I guarantee that there is a health issue that would bankrupt you. Also, if you are that wealthy, why wouldn't you insure your health? It would be a pittance compared to your overall wealth and just simply a prudent thing to do. I bet you that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have health insurance.
Just to be sure - if you show up at the hospital w/o means of payment - even if in coma - are you going to be treated? If yes, then you have insurance and you're free-riding on the system. If no, then you're more barbaric than Reagan.
I'd like for you, along with everyone else, to pay an increased income tax to cover health care for everyone (the way every other industrialized country does it).
And before you reject that notion, try asking someone from one of those other industrialized countries if they'd like to swap their system for ours.
Furthermore all of us are consumers of health care at one time or another. I admit I am resentful against the many people that take terrible care of themselves but the fact is 40% of americans will get cancer. http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2010/05/06/41-percent-of-Amer...
I do feel it all needs urgent reform but I do feel the ACA was an attempt to expand competition and fairness while not leaving it completely unfunded like so many government plans seem to.
As long as the rest of us don't have the right to let you die on the sidewalk outside the ER, no, I'm afraid you shouldn't have the right to choose not to participate.
If you want to go off the grid, you need to go ALL the way off the grid. Otherwise you're just another moocher.
This is a false dichotomy, which assumes that the only possible alternatives are Obamacare and no insurance at all.
Not to mention that the majority of people who do have Obamacare are getting subsidized by the government (i.e., they're "moochers", in your terminology).
How does making this public subsidy pass through more sets of pockets before it gets to the doctor make it any less "mooching"? Please be specific.
Also, what about the people with expensive preexisting conditions? Virtually all of those people are consuming far more resources than they will ever pay in. Are they also "moochers"?
Note that I'm not saying that those people shouldn't have health care. I'm just objecting to calling it "insurance", because it isn't. Insurance is a bet.
> This is a false dichotomy, which assumes that the only possible alternatives are Obamacare and no insurance at all.
No it isn't, the parent poster made no judgement about the system available, just that one must participate. What that system looks like is an entirely different debate to the "I should be able to not have insurance" debate.
> Also, what about the people with expensive preexisting conditions? Virtually all of those people are consuming far more resources than they will ever pay in. Are they also "moochers"?
That is the entire point of insurance. Some will pay more than they take and others will take more than they pay, but in the end, both sides of the ledger for the collective is balanced and both individuals had the same* access. *for some loose definition of same.
No, because at some point you will inevitable need care. We build care systems in place and pay into them to mitigate and distribute risk. You are effectively free-riding on everyone else's participation.
While I don't disagree in principle, this is impossible to enact. Consider the case where this person who has chosen not to have insurance is in a car accident and render incapable of communicating. Responders and those at the hospital must act under the assumption that the victim has insurance and do everything in their power to save them.
In this situation the person in the accident can later claim that they didn't want to be saved and thus owe nothing. We, that is the rest of us who participate, are then forced to carry this cost and they free ride.
You've now made this same point three times in this thread without expanding your argument. Please make each comment each add substantively to the discussion.
because i recognize the futility in expanding my argument which a philosophical one thats been going on for centuries. no ones going to change their minds. if you'd like my expanded argument you should start with 'the road to serfdom' by hayek but i wont attempt to summarize it for you here on HN.
It sounds like you do have something useful to contribute if you chose to do so. If you feel it's futile to contribute substantively, please refrain from doing so. Otherwise it's just noise and distracts from potentially useful discussion.
Looks like the article was first published prior to the inauguration:
This article was published on January 6, 2017, at NEJM.org.
Admittedly it's a bit confusing, given the online article is dated January 26, and includes "SOURCE INFORMATION: Mr. Obama is the former President of the United States." Likely inconsistency when repurposing content.
It's a pretty prestigious journal. It's likely that aides to senators and representatives in key positions, as well as it being forwarded from interested constituents will make sure that the article makes the rounds. And it's generally good political practice to keep informed on the moves made by major players. Likely people in the White House know about it as well.
When I say "read" I mean take the time to understand it and put thoughtful consideration into it. Repealing Obamacare is an idealogical imperative to most Republican legislators, it's intrinsic to their identity now. Awareness of what they probably consider propaganda is not the same as "reading" it.
While I appreciate the skepticism, and it is sad that there is an apparently increasing number of questionable journals out there, do you have any evidence that NEJM is one of them? They're currently run by the NEJM Group, which is controlled by the Massachusetts Medical Society.
They might not, but they are probably lobbied by doctors, hospital administrators, and insurance executives, all of whom are likely to at least skim the top medical journals.
A good chunk of the rich that foot the bill for a lot of the ACA subsidies[2], the same ones that pump money into PACs and would see money coming back into their pockets if the ACA was repealed [1], also have a vested interest in saying "meh, those journals are full of crap".
Our HMO we used at old job hated ACA. At least their representative told us that informally. Another doctor I know also does not like. Someone who is self-employed with a pre-existing condition really likes it. It was hard for them to get insurance before.
The US system certainly makes a lot of money for providers and insurances. Otherwise it would be cheaper. The money must be going somewhere. These people don't want change.
Some articles have suggested that ACA repeal poses an existential threat to rural hospitals and even the private healthcare industry, so those groups definitely care about remaining in business.
For 8 years, this man had the option to walk humanity back from the threat of hair-trigger, launch-on-warning nuclear armageddon. An armageddon that would either destroy humanity in a single day...or perhaps merely starve a few billion in the resulting nuclear winter. From these facts alone, I know everything I need to know about his, and all US presidents, commitment to the health of their citizens, and humanity at large.
It's a wonderful idea. Free healthcare for all. Sadly, it simply isn't sustainable financially. I think in the next 10 years alone it was supposed to cost tax payers 10 trillion and that money can't literally be printed fast enough and the debt our country holds, extremely unsustainable. If they did it cheaper or more cost effective, I would say yes, but financially, you can't.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it's definitely not the ACA/Obamacare. The ACA has has nothing to do with "free healthcare for all", and is only tangentially related to free healthcare for anybody (by its relations to Medicaid and Medicare).
If you're talking about virtually every major country besides the U.S., though, they do have something close to free healthcare for all, and it does work, and it's actually a lot cheaper for their societies than the system we have in U.S.
It's not free healthcare for all. It's healthcare paid for the taxpayers, by the taxpayers.
And if the costs go up - it's because perhaps healthcare is better as a not-for-profit system rather than a for-profit system. Pretty hard to negotiate which hospital gives you the better deal when you're having a heart attack.
And I say this from a position of love in New Zealand - I wish you had normal government healthcare, like most other countries in the world. America spends 3x the amount on healthcare per capita compared to NZ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...).
An ACA thread always seems like a good time to throw in a plug for socialized medicine, but I do want to remind everyone:
Many people think that without ACA, the US healthcare market is free, which is why it has so many problems. This could not be further from reality. We have more government distortions in our healthcare market than countries with completely socialized healthcare. For example:
Medicare: socialized medicare for the elderly, which alone creates more distortion than a universal program would cause by inflating demand/prices for non-qualifying citizens.
Medicaid: socialized healthcare for specially qualifying poor people, which creates the same distortion as Medicare.
An oppressive FDA: which, coupled with overly-powered IP laws, grants de-facto monopolies in the medical product industry. We have an incredibly expensive and subjective medical equipment pre-approval process (as compared to a less-terrible FDA that would just be in charge of labeling, preventing fraud, and maintaining accountability in the event of incidents). Then there's the length and flexibility of patent protections in our current system (maybe we could cut those protection times in half, and patent trolling would not be a lucrative industry).
Oppressive occupational licensing: It's way too hard to become a doctor of any kind, even the kinds that don't manually put things into your heart. This will be a major battle as AI comes to the point where it can better diagnose conditions and largely replace generic/non-specialized pediatrics. Of course, the government will not make this easy.
Plus a slew of more minor things like malpractice regulation, and now the ACA (which is not so minor, and which will apparently be replaced with something similar).
If we cleaned up/removed all of the problems in the above and replaced it with single payer, it would be OK and we would have something similar to New Zealand/other countries with long wait times, not as much access to specialists, slow innovation, and a system where the government gets to decide who gets the last liver transplant and who dies. That would be a less distorted market than we have today, but ONLY if accompanied by fixing the aforementioned problems.
Or we could try going the free-ish market approach and try to find a much freer balance with the FDA/USDA/occupational-licensing/scrap Medicare/Medicaid,etc., which we do not currently have AT ALL. And maybe even declare health insurance fraudulent and pay everything out of pocket (accident insurance makes more sense as a hedge against risk, which is what insurance is supposed to be, whereas all people are expected to develop health problems at some point, with a probability approaching one).
Other countries manage it fine, and the costs here are overblown. Aetna claimed last year that it was pulling out of the ACA over costs, but it has emerged that this was a purely strategic decision after the FTC or the SEC declined to support a merger the firm wanted to enter into.
I reject the claim that 'we just can't afford it', and claim instead that the economic loss of not doing it is far greater, just not properly accounted for.
They are not. With 50-70% income tax on It's citizens, they are not just fine. Do your research. Long waits, little access to specialised docs. People are dying waiting in line.
I come from such a country and your complaints are hyperbolic. I was in hospital a lot of a child and if we didn't have public healthcare it would probably have bankrupted my family. Public health systems are far from perfect, but they're still pretty damn good.
Entirely silly. Free healthcare is cheaper than what we have. If we could reduce the portion of GDP spent on healthcare to the level of what all other rich western countries have spent on their unsustainable universal healthcare for decades for better outcomes than what we have, we would be running surpluses.
Our crap healthcare is one of the biggest drains on the economy. What the US government spends on healthcare disregarding spending by individuals is still more per capita than any other universal health service.
Please point me to the non-partisan, non-hack, non-goldbug study that tells you that the US cannot support its current debt load. The feeding frenzy at every new treasury auction tells me that there's plenty of space yet for us to issue debt.
It isn't that no one will buy the debt, it's that the interest on the debt hurts the country. Every dollar in interest the government pays is a dollar it has to take from taxpayers and then not spend to the taxpayers' benefit.
because its compulsory. this shouldn't an argument for the ACAs effectiveness. I have to buy car insurance if i choose to drive a car on public roads. i have to pay income tax if i have income. now, by birth, i automatically owe the state. i'd like my freedom and right to choose back please.
the fact this isn't the main argument from GOP shows their incompetence.