The main reason why I oppose Obamacare is the government just can't afford it.
Okay, that's different from saying that the poor or unlucky don't
deserve healthcare. This is based on ignorance, not on being a ****. Ignorance we can fix...
My wife has worked her entire career in healthcare (pharmaceuticals, healthcare-industry data systems, insurance providers), and she will tell you that you're
already paying for universal healthcare, you're just doing it in an uncontrolled way.
Follow along...
Everyone in this country is guaranteed emergency room care. If you walk into an emergency room at any hospital in this country, the
have to treat you until you are medically stable regardless of your ability to pay. That is an indisputable fact.
That is the law.When someone takes emergency room treatment and doesn't pay (for whatever reason), any costs the hospital can't recoup from various government programs for the indigent it then spreads among those who can pay in the form of additional overhead costs. These overhead costs go into everything: room costs, food costs, pharmaceuticals, supplies, etc.
So, you can see that you're already paying for healthcare for the indigent. You're paying in the form of hospital costs that go against your taxes and against your healthcare premiums via hospital charges.
Healthcare reform intends to do several things to solve this problem (and others).
First: By giving people access to non-emergency care, it encourages them to take well visits with a doctor to stay healthy, and to handle routine illnesses via doctor visits before they become emergencies.
Second: Since all the costs are being paid for, they hospital has to justify everything they charge, they can't hide actual costs in general overhead fees. Believe it or not: hospitals and doctors will actually
steal from insurance companies via overcharging if they can get away with it. This gives them less of a chance to get away with it.
Another interesting fact about healthcare: 90% of healthcare costs in this country go to 10% of people: the elderly and the permanently disabled. And the vast majority of that goes to the elderly. If you know anything about risk pools, you know that in order for any sort of insurance costs to be reasonable, you have to have a big pool of people, most of whom are going to be cheap to pay for.
That's why privatization won't work. We have a massive bubble of Medicare costs coming as the Boomers age. Unless pretty much everyone in the country is part of the insurance pool that supports their costs, we're going to have to let them die in the streets or break the bank.
Costs will come down, but only if the government has oversight on enough of a percentage of the population to make itself felt. My wife says that Medicare is one of the most cost-effective and cost-sensitive programs out there. They absolutely get their money's worth out of the providers!
There's a lot of bull**** flying around about government bureacracy and how the government can't run a healthcare system, but that's also smoke and mirrors. That bureacracy already exists, both within and without the government; we call it the health insurance industry. And the government isn't going to 'run' the system, they merely want to make sure that everyone is getting paid for. We have that today: we call it Medicare. And, there are a lot of folks and their families being taken care of my the DOD health care system, TriCare and the VA; the government has a
little experience doing this sort of stuff.
