The Briefing Room
General Category => Editorial/Opinion/Blogs => Topic started by: Bigun on March 09, 2017, 10:32:52 pm
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What the health-care system really needs: A bulldozer
Published: Mar 9, 2017 10:05 a.m. ET
Obamacare and its replacement suffer from same malady: Getting the economics wrong
Chronic Republican kvetching aside, the underlying problem with the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, was always one of economics. The law increased the demand for health care with universal access. It did nothing to augment supply: the quantity or quality of health care services. The promise to reduce costs defied the law of supply and demand.
With an insufficient number of healthy people enrolling in the exchanges to subsidize the sicker ones, insurers began to lose money. An increasing number headed for the exit. Fewer choices and higher costs were not part of the Obamacare talking points.
The Republican repeal-and-replace alternative, unveiled this week, suffers from the same inherent flaw.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-the-health-care-system-really-needs-a-bulldozer-2017-03-09
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It needs much more than a bulldozer.
(http://favoritememes.com/_nw/45/45953680.jpg)
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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...
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Put a Flamethrower to it!
(http://1125996089.rsc.cdn77.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/scorpio-flamethrower1.jpg)