So how do you expect those with high needs pay for health care, then? Die quickly, as lefty Alan Grayson puts it? Or maybe you believe Obamacare's the way to go and force me to pay for it, even though I don't have the resources either. Maybe you believe the health care workers should work as slaves, even as they're overworked as it is.
But no, anything that actually tries to neutralize this issue is "Entitlement! Squawk! Squawk!"
Face it: there's no good solution to this.
If there was a good solution, Obamacare killed it by wiping out insurance coverage for a multitude.
While some of the high risk (cost) pool will be people with birth defects, cancer survivors, those with rare diseases or genetic disorders, life-changing accidents, and the like, a significant portion (and likely the ones who have the 'juice' on K street) are AIDS/HIV patients, commonly either homosexuals or IV drug users or both. There are currently roughly 1.3 million people, whose medical care cost is estimated to be between $600K and $750K each, for a total of roughly a trillion dollars, and that does not count new cases going forward.
Unfortunately, in a sea of people with self-inflicted wounds, those bludgeoned by fate who were covered before will be the ones to suffer.
For a heavy dose of reality, anyway, we, the people would have ended up picking up the tab for the unfortunates, the malingerers, the people who were infected because of their "lifestyle" and others who were infected by virtue of anything from poorly sterilized surgical/dental equipment to misfortune. We would have paid for those injured in severe accidents, court-ordered treatment and rehab, and a host of other maladies that would have been covered by Medicaid or other programs, or simply tacked onto the hospital bills of those who could afford to pay or who had insurance. It's always been part of the cost of those $7 aspirin.
Unfortunately, now that the entire system has been damaged, the question is one of how can we, as efficiently and economically as possible, provide care to those we would have provided care to anyway, restore those who had insurance to being insured at similar prices, with reasonably similar benefits or plans they choose to mitigate costs, and restore the industry as efficiently and economically as possible.
Causing the generation of extra levels of paperwork and increased processing costs is not the solution, and unfortunately, the damage that has been done is largely a fait accompli, and in many cases not something that can be undone, at least on a personal level.
Medicaid involves means testing, and in this state, possession of $10K in assets renders one ineligible. The implication for older people who had insurance and lost it due to Obamacare is that they must divest themselves of all assets before qualifying, literally losing their life's savings. A single decent used vehicle can put them over the top.
The situation is one of people having done the right thing for decades now being kicked to the curb, and that is something that should be addressed as well.
