“If we don't pass it, here's the guarantee….your premiums will go up, your employers are going to load up more costs on you,” he said. “Potentially they're going to drop your coverage, because they just can't afford an increase of 25 percent, 30 percent in terms of the costs of providing health care to employees each and every year. “
So if you don't pass this healthcare bill which is guaranteed to significantly increase your premiums then your premiums will increase? Okay. So why would your plan increase premiums less? Because government run programs are so efficient and have a tendency to come in under budget? Does he have any knowledge of history (or reality) beyond Howard Zinn's book? Now here is an even better one:
“Because if we don't do this, nobody argues with the fact that health care costs are going to consume the entire federal budget,” the President said.Again, this really makes no sense. In order to limit healthcare's impact on the Federal Budget we need to increase its proportion of the Federal Budget? This kind of reminds me of that famous quote from Vietnam about how they had to destroy a village in order to save it. Plus, I guess he never heard of even simple supply demand curves. If the price is high enough for healthcare, nobody will be buying health insurance, which will put massive downward pressure on healthcare costs (drugs and hospital stays are only this expensive because healthcare companies know that insurance companies and governments foot the bill, not individual people so they raise prices as high as they can. And as we all know, companies and governments can generally afford to pay more than normal people can).
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4 comments:
Max, they're just using Orwell 1984/Animal Farm aa playbooks.
Are you saying your health insurance has not gone up every year for the past 4 or 5 years? As a public service, could you please announce who your insurance company is?
Michael,
Did I say my premiums didnt increase? I said "So if you don't pass this healthcare bill which is guaranteed to significantly increase your premiums then your premiums will increase? Okay. So why would your plan increase premiums less? Because government run programs are so efficient and have a tendency to come in under budget?"
And it is very clear premiums would increase under this plan considerably. Health insurance companies have very low margins compared to other companies so all the increased regulations (like guaranteed issue) will make premiums go up even more than they already are.
Oh and your premiums are basically increasing for two main reasons right now. First, the end user has no idea how much anything costs the system (you know your copays but do you know the actual price of the drugs or the price of a hospital stay or the different rates different doctors charge for their services?) so unlike every other sector in our economy there is almost no price competition.
The second is that because medicare and medicaid reimburse service providers (doctors and hospitals) at a discount to the actual underlying cost of the service, the rates of those not on those plans inevitably go up. Otherwise the hospitals would go bankrupt.
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