Here's how the system works:
- Medical schools up their requirements and costs
- Doctors are now saddled with exponentially increased student debts
- Doctors now have to charge more to cover those debts, which often leads to them joining big chain hospitals, leaving a critical shortage of care in rural areas
- Chain hospitals have to up their prices to cover the costs
- Insurance companies either balk and leave the network, or pass the costs onto the consumer
- Chain hospitals then pass the remaining deficits onto those without insurance
- Those with insurance then can't cover the cost of it
Obamacare's solution:
- Punish those who drop their insurance for cost reasons by taxing them out of the money they don't have
- Bloat the Medicaid rolls
- Set up cooperatives that would hopefully be more attractive to cost-conscious consumers... then tax them when they succeed in drawing the younger, healthier consumers and force them to collapse
- Distract people into thinking that insurance "coverage" is the most important part.
This, of course, didn't work.
The proposed GOP plan's solution:
- Uh...
