I have already told you where they go--non-profit clinics and the emergency room. The hospital itself won't do non-urgent elective surgical procedures on medicaid patients. They have to be shuttled off to the UVA for those surgeries because they will still perform operations on medicaid.indigent people. It is one of the best ranked hospitals in the country so their top-shelf patients offset the loss.
Have you actually ever tried to shop for a major medical proceedure. First no hospital or doctor will commit to a firm price. They will give you an estimated range which is normally hugh and then add caveats. Try it sometime. IN response to your first question all you have to do is go back to pre ACA. Fifty million uninsured, phony policies that the purchasers found didn't cover anything, no provisions to cover pre existing conditions, and of course surging premium prices.
Of course they won't, they can't under the current structure and regulations of the healthcare system........this is the point of this thread.......please try and keep up. My wife just had a surgery and they gave us an estimate on the cost from the insurance company. Needless to say they were way off. If we were allowed to talk directly to the doctor, she could give us a price and stick to it, since she is doing the surgery. The first part can be addressed and as for the second.......ACA didn't help keep them stay at there level either. In fact we the people were told by then President Obama......it will LOWER premiums.
I am keeping up. You are the poster who claimed you could shop for hospitals and proceedures. Now you are admitting that shopping is useless. Now if you have proposals that would make shopping meaningful than your series of posts might turn out to make sense. And I am sure you know that the doctor's cost is a fraction of the total cost of major surgery. Usually the anesthetist costs almost as much and the hospital cost vastly exceeds both.
High risk pools don't solve the problem. If adequately funded by the government they just shift the costs from the insured pool to the taxpayers. Or if they are finded by the participants in the high risk pool they just make the cost of insurance astronomical so you could just make insurance companies cover pre existing conditions but allow them to set whatever rates they want.
Except many Americans who like those benefits, won't pay for them....pretty gullible, huh? Would you enslave others to take up their slack?? Confiscating money forcibly to pay for others is SLAVERY!
It is pretty serious business when individuals won't pay for healthcare until they themselves get sick. It has serious consequences. So what the leftists say is this...the rest of us, must, by force, shoulder the neglected responsibility and take up the slack. Why shouldn't we instead educate and encourage the need to be responsible and allow those that refuse, to experience the results of "natural law"? No one is killing them as Democrats propose.....they are killing themselves. Democrats and RINOs just are not pro-choice in this one area.
Come on man.......we are talking about Rand Paul's proposed healthcare idea. You are claiming it will wreck the healthcare system and not allow people to shop. I point out that I believe you are wrong and then give examples of how it can let you shop around. YOU then ask if I've ever tried to shop around for medical treatment. I then respond......no you can't right now because of the current system.......YOU THEN state this crap.......no you are not keeping up.
This is pretty interesting. My link wasn't about high risk pools, other than to mention that I didn't think they were a good idea. So you actually responded to this without even knowing the proposal.
Actually the way I read your proposal you had a separate pool for high risk coverage on addition to normal insurance . However you want to name it you did put the high risk peopke into a separate category or pool. If I read you wrong how were you handling high risk in the normal insurance marketplace. I reread your proposal and your plan appears to be putting pre existing conditions into a separate pool covered by state Medicaid for the first two years. After that you don't specify how that group is covered.
You did not make any proposal or recommend any changes to let people shop for proceedures. Your posts are disingenuous in thst you talk about shopping to save money and then admit it doesn't actually work. You can't despite your childish insults have it both ways.
Quite some time ago, my wife was arguing with our insurance carrier - they had a "reasonable and customary" amount they allowed for a particular procedure my wife needed. My wife said, "there are no doctors that will accept that amount - how did you arrive at it?" They told her to survey doctors and get back to them, so she did - calling doctors and getting prices. It was humiliating, but in the end, the insurance company raised their reimbursement amount. Now I think they'd just say "tough".
Government cannot reduce the cost of anything. The Health Care bill is a 'spending' bill, which provides additional consumption by increasing the cost to some in order to provide to others. The total spending on Health Care as a result will increase. Anything, everything, which is produced/provided by people who are paid along the process to the point of being delivered to someone has accumulated a cost which is the minimum price which must be paid for availability to continue. Government can only cut/eliminate the cost for some by raising the cost to others, some perhaps even a great many of whom may have to reduce spending on things which would benefit them more greatly. Government, by producing what we use as money has effectively become an all encompassing bubble which as it expands through inflation with the ability to produce more money to keep the bubble from bursting, acts like a vacuum on all the individual bubbles it contains occasionally resulting in some bursting which inflates the government bubble even more. I feel that eventually we will see the elimination of currency, and simply use a record keeping system for all transactions maintained totally by our government. Every product could be bar coded, and government could then manage our spending much more easily by denying or allowing a transaction to take place in the best interests of each consumer.
You are already seeing the beginning of the elimination of currency. It is called credit/debit cards and the Banking system and it is being done by private enterprise. One, I guess, could claim this is being done by the government since our government is becoming increasingly run by Goldman Sachs but that might be a bit of a stretch.
I didn't mean to imply that government was doing it, only that government will likely take full advantage of it.
Yes, covered by Medicaid secondary payer for two years. After that, the insurance company can handle it. At that point, they've already been paying into the plan for two years so the impact on premiums would be minimal.
No, government can't reduce the cost of everything, however the cost of pre-existing conditions is why in the pre-Obamacare era, people couldn't buy health insurance in the individual market. So you have to come up with a proposal that overcomes that issue. I'm interested in how you might do that.
Should you be able to buy a life insurance policy when you're on your deathbed or have been diagnosed with a terminal disease expecting to die in months or weeks? Health insurance should make available plans which would cover children born with preexisting conditions, pricing them accordingly. You insure to reduce risks from the unexpected, not to reduce costs you are aware of in advance. Government should not compete with or replace private charities.
Yes yes...I get all that. Which is why I came up with a plan to handle pre-existing conditions: http://www.politicalforum.com/index.php?threads/a-plan-to-deal-with-pre-existing-conditions.505943/
Why would paying premiums for two years make the impact on their premium minimal. After two years the risk to the insurance company goes up and the premiums go up accordingly unless of course your plan doesn't allow insurance companies to charge people differently.
I'm sorry Lil Mike, but people need to be held responsible for their own lives, including the lives of their spouses and non-adult children. Insurance is sold as a precautionary measure, while government in creating a health care plan is simply collectivizing the cost of health care. Pre-existing conditions should be uninsurable, unless they are discovered without pre-existing knowledge of someone who is insured. As an example, an insured couple who then have a child with a pre-existing condition could not be denied coverage, while an uninsured couple who then have a child found to have a condition requiring extensive long term care at birth could not then acquire insurance for care of the pre-existing condition, but only for not related treatment, appendectomy, broken bones, etc. People should be free to obtain or not obtain insurance, accepting responsibility for the consequences beyond what private charities and individuals within our societies are freely willing to provide.
Because pre-existing conditions won't be paid for by the insurance company for two years, so the impact to premium costs are a wash. HMO's used to do this very thing in the pre Obamacare era. You could by health insurance with a pre-existing condition, but you just couldn't use your insurance for any procedure or diagnosis related to the pre-existing condition for a period of time (it depended on the condition).
Well that's a minority position in this country, and by minority I mean single digits. The fact is, we either come up with a way to handle issues that people actually care about, like pre-existing conditions, within the current private health insurance model, or the Democrats will be swept back into power and institute a single payer. For me, I prefer the private health insurance model, but if you think that people with pre-existing conditions should be relegated to the dustbin of charity cases, you'll help bring in a single payer future.
