Get ready to RUUUUMMMMMBLE!

Democrats and Republicans are meeting (separately) in Washington today with their managers and trainers to strategize for their upcoming "To Repeal Or Not Repeal Obamacare" heavyweight fight.

In this corner we have the "Oh Dear God, Save My Legacy" Democrats.  They want to keep Obamacare, pointing out 20M people now have insurance thanks to it.  (But they will quietly mumble that, yes, it needs some major "tweaking".)

And in the opposite corner we have the "Repeal and Replace" Republicans.  They want to kill Obamacare, effective on    fill in a date__.  In the meantime they will work on whatever it is they will replace it with, TBD.

Obamacare has helped many people for sure, but stories abound of people whose insurance premiums have gone from $400 a month +/- pre-Obamacare to $1,400 a month +/- after.  And even after that, deductibles and copays are still up substantially.

But "replace later" is a joke, too.  There are far too many vested interest "cooks" in the kitchen for that process to ever produce a tasty dish.  Doctors fear socialized medicine, insurance companies fear serious regulation and/or competition, seniors fear having their Medicare thrown under the bus, young people don't even think they need insurance at all, hospitals are for whatever will pay them the most (and don't kid yourself, "non-profit hospitals" are NOT "non-profit"), pharmaceutical companies LOVE the "charge anything you want" sweetheart deal they have now, etc.

And to make matters worse, BOTH sides agree that we need to preserve the "no pre-existing conditions", "no lifetime $$$ limits", and the "keep the kids on mom and dad's policy" provisions we have now, which are THE MOST EXPENSIVE parts of Obamacare.  We want to have our cake and eat it, too!

The other, not-talked-about option is to re-institute the laissez faire system we had before Obamacare, the one that was slowly-but-surely failing.  Every year a few million more people had their stable (?) corporate jobs and insurance benefits disappear as their jobs went overseas or they became "independent contractors/consultants" with no insurance at all.  These people had to either pay through the nose for private insurance, do without proper health care and be sickly, or depend on hospital emergency rooms for care they couldn't pay for, which often led to bankruptcy, none of them good options.

My opinion (whether you want it or not) is that both replacing Obamacare with something that keeps the strong points of it intact, or heavily amending the existing Obamacare scheme, amount to the same thing.  Both sides might as well sit down together and use that as their starting point.

Right now our society has developed to the point that for national security reasons as well as for business reasons, ALL Americans must have health care.  Leaving some without health care weakens us both domestically and internationally, and we can't afford that.  We're too compassionate to leave some behind to suffer, and our adversaries/competitors have become much too strong for us to go toe-to-toe with unless we work harder than ever and ARE HEALTHY.  We're not China....our workers are not expendable.

So let's suck it up buttercups.  We can either pay for it now, or suffer the consequences later.  (And we WON'T like the consequences!)

S

Mixed signals

Does anyone understand basic economics these days?  I'm thinking "no".  Consider this:  People say they like the parts of Obamacare that eliminate the $1M lifetime cap on insurance company's liability, they like the part about removing pre-existing conditions as an excuse for denying coverage, they like the part about seniors saving on prescription drugs, they like being able to keep their kids on their policy until age 26....but they are vehemently opposed to the idea of requiring everyone to purchase health insurance (the individual mandate).  "It's just un-American.  The damn government has no business telling me what I have to do.  This is supposed to be a free country!"


How do people expect insurance companies to stay in business if they take on unlimited liability, cover all the sick and infirm, and give away Rx drugs if they don't take in a lot more money to cover these costs?  There are only 2 ways to get more money....raise premiums 300-400% (?) or broaden their base of insured by signing up all those healthy 20-somethings who think they're bullet-proof and don't need insurance.  


You know people aren't going to stand for dramatically higher insurance premiums, which leaves only the individual mandate as a viable way to increase cash flow.  You can't have the perks without paying for them.  There's no free lunch. This is NOT an endorsement of Obamacare per se, but it does at least start the discussion about what needs to be changed and how we're going to pay for it. 


You want to get health care costs down?  Try this....I guarantee it will work:  Repeal the Emergency Medical Treatment Act of 1986.  That's the law that requires hospitals to treat anyone who walks in for "emergency" care, whether they can pay for it or not.  Doing that would save BILLIONS (trillions?) of dollars.  I'd love to see a show of hands of all those who would turn away a mother with a sick child or the innocent victim of an accident or a violent crime.  You can't pick and choose between the truly needy and those who can afford insurance but are just having too much fun to bother buying it.  You're the "death squad".  Anyone....?


S