health insurance bill

[LostInTheWoods]

Exactly... what also might have been adopted
1. Establish an insurance pool that all without prior health care would have to pay into.
2. Institute tort reform to help lower litigation and insurance fees for medical profession.
3. Lower health care provider cost.

It is ludicrous to have to pay $15300 per year for 3 people in a family and then be charged an additional $400 for a colonoscopy. If we were not paying for 3 other people who did not have it along with massive litigation liabilities, then perhaps #3 could more easily be done.

The largest problem with this bill? no one hardly knows what's in it. Add to that as to where it is coming from...pretty scary a proposition.

I think this is a pretty good summary, Arrow. It boggles the mind sometimes when you pay THOUSANDS all year, and still have to dig deeper all too often.

And you are right, tort reform would be huge. Look at the list of top ten donors to the current ruling party, and I think you can figure out why that wasn't included. Not a political statement, only a statement of fact. You can do the same for the other major party and find out who's pulling their strings, as it were.

 

[2manyrocks]

What this bill does for individuals that currently have health insurance is hopefully lower the increases in our health insurance premiums. It does this by adding 34 million paying customers to the health care pool. Now many of the 34 million uninsured are the healthy young people that have never been sick, so in the past they have not gotten health insurance. Problem is they eventually get sick or injured and incur medical bills that they are unable to pay.
.

Forget politics and look at the economics.

There's a study that estimates that the premiums of the young are going to increase 17%. I don't know how they arrived at this number, but think about what they have to forecast.

This is a huge actuary computation to undertake because you're forecasting costs for a larger group and forecasting to cover conditions that insurers used to be able to not cover because they eliminated them with the preexisting conditions exclusion. Maybe insurors benefit because everyone has to participate, but then what costs do they get stuck with now that they have to cover preexisting conditions? So they make all these calculations and now how much premium do I pay and how much premium do you pay and how much does the next guy pay?

A car accident or an unexpected illness can certainly result in huge medical bills at any time, but I think the statistical norm is that the bulk of healthcare costs come late in life for most people.

I tend to think overall the economic effect is that you'll see some cost shifting from the unhealthy onto the healthy. The heaviest users of healthcare will pass on a portion of their costs to the less heavy users. That's what I think---but if I could do the statistical computations to prove it all, I'd be making a bunch of money selling the numbers to the insurance companies.

 

[dmccarty]

A car accident or an unexpected illness can certainly result in huge medical bills at any time, but I think the statistical norm is that the bulk of healthcare costs come late in life for most people.

I tend to think overall the economic effect is that you'll see some cost shifting from the unhealthy onto the healthy. The heaviest users of healthcare will pass on a portion of their costs to the less heavy users. That's what I think---but if I could do the statistical computations to prove it all, I'd be making a bunch of money selling the numbers to the insurance companies.

This is exactly what the health bill does. There is a limit on how much more a senior can pay for premiums over a young person. I think it is three times as much. But the elderly are the major consumer of health care. The elderly are also the richest part of the population. And the receive the most government benefits.

The young in this country will be paying more to support the elderly. I guess having kids is so the children can pay for their parents and grandparents in retirement.

People say they spend too much on health care. But what they do not say is they want cheaper health care. There is a difference. In the UK the deaths for Prostate and Breast cancer is 30-40% higher than in the US because they do not use the latest drugs and treatment. Is this really what people want?

Do people really want CHEAPER health care?

We just had the head of Canada come to the US for health treatment. *** HE *** said he came to the US because he could get the treatment faster and with better quality than in Canada. :confused2: This is not the first time a leader of Canada came to the US for treatment.

In MA preconditions cannot stop someone from being covered. Insurance companies are seeing people get a policy. Keep it for a few months, rack up big bills, and then drop coverage. One company said that 40% of its new enrollees kept there coverage for less than five months and incurred costs of 600% more than expected.

Who will pay the higher costs of the people who jumped? The people who hold the insurance.

The head of the IRS and Congress critters who voted for the health care bill have said the IRS will NOT go after people who do not maintain coverage.

They are either fools or liars. Ok, they could be both.

If the IRS does NOT go after people for not maintaining coverage then the premiums WILL go up faster. If they do go after people this mean the IRS will have to monitor your health care policy coverage just like DMV does for car insurance. BUT DMV can pull your registration in NC. What will the IRS do?

The statements I have read said that the IRS will "bill" you based on your tax refund. But if you are half of the population that does not pay Federal Income tax this will be interesting. Will the IRS be putting tax liens on people for not having health care coverage?

The answer is that the IRS will have to go after non payers or policy rates will increase faster than claimed.

Later,
Dan

 

[mmurphy]

Exactly right...with 30 Million more folks getting insurance and not enough doctors...look for long waits for an appointment and then long book reading waits in the reception room at the doctors office. Look for rationing as well !

Yes just for the 15 seconds that you see them!:laughing:

 

[brin]

Yes just for the 15 seconds that you see them!:laughing:

That's the absolute truth !! Exactly right.:thumbsup:

 

[Bob_In_MN]

Canada's per capita spending on health is about half that of the USA. In fact we're 10th for spending but 30th in the World Health Organization's ranking for quality of health care - not great value for money but by no means the worst. France is first in the health care ranking and are 4th highest spenders. USA tops the spending league but is only 37th in the health care ranking. Italy appears to get the best value for money, being 2nd in the league table but only 11th highest spenders.

(WHO's ranking of health care systems - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Take a look at the criteria "The Who" used to rank the systems (who pays the bills gets quite a bit of weight in their ranking system). France's system is in trouble (cost)--do a simple search in google.

Compared to Italy, the U.S. has twice as many MRI units and 25% more Cat Scan units per million people. In Italy, the average waiting time for a mamogram is 70 days and for an endoscopy it's 74 days.

You can limit law suits, limit coverage. limit payments to providers and change behavior (lifestyle choices) in an attempt to help everyone become healthier as a means to control costs. The new bill/law (in my opinion) does very little in these areas. Under the new law an employer can choose to pay a $2000 per employee penalty for not offering insurance. Most employers spend much more than $2000 per employee to provide insurance--how many will dump their plans and pay the penalty?

 

[MikePA]

Under the new law an employer can choose to pay a $2000 per employee penalty for not offering insurance. Most employers spend much more than $2000 per employee to provide insurance--how many will dump their plans and pay the penalty?

Almost every one of them will dump their plans and pay the fine, it's a simple business decision. This will achieve the primary purpose of the bill which is to make the federal government the single payer and thereby make a huge number of people new dependents of the federal government.

 

[2manyrocks]

If you take an already inefficient market and then add more demand while imposing restraints on the market to adjust itself, one has to wonder where it ends up and how quickly it takes to get there.

I say the market is already inefficient because of the lack of consumer information. In many cases, the patient goes in not fully knowing (a) what's wrong with them (b) which service provider can best help them or (c) what it's going to cost. Even after identifying what's wrong and what service provider you want to use, I find it impossible to get a straight answer about what the services are going to cost.

What other business is run this way?

 

[bstrom]

Maybe if we Americans weren't a bunch of lazy slobs that never think about prevention and just want a doctor to fix us with a pill or a knife all the time, health care wouldn't be such a big industry and would be affordable for everyone and the government wouldn't have to get in it. Sure there's accidents and people that exercise and eat right have heart attacks too but come-on we are a lazy overweight country as a rule. No offense to anyone with a weight problem that is trying or can't help it.

Of course I am just an idealistic dreamer though, it will never happen - so we will just have to throw some more money at the insurance companies and cut the physical ed or nutrition programs in the schools. **** of a country ain't it?

 

[Murray B]

Canada's per capita spending on health is about half that of the USA.

How can anyone know this when there are hidden expenses everywhere? The federal government just dropped $1.5 billion on the H1N1 scare alone. Is there any reliable third party source that can tell us what the actual per-capita spending really is? All we have so far is reports written by lying weasel funding ******. They always say there is insufficient spending to deal with the current crisis no matter how much money they receive.

Finding the total cost of health care is like trying to figure out how much Nixon's "War on Cancer" has cost to date. The best estimates I have seen are between $1 and $2 Trillion worldwide, public and private. Amazing since the war was supposed to be won by 1981. Today it would take an entire army of forensic accountants to figure out what happened to all that money over the last four decades.

Anything less is just a guess just like the ones published about Canadian per-capita health spending.