Forbes
The first statistics are coming in and, to the surprise of a great many, Obamacare might just be working to bring health care to working Americans precisely as promised.
The major health insurance companies around the country are reporting a significant increase in small businesses offering health care benefits to their employees.
Why?
Because the tax cut created in the new health care reform law providing small businesses with an incentive to give health benefits to employees is working.
Found by Mr. Justin.
#17 Medicare/Medicaid/ and SS are not fully funded. They are all going broke and Obamacare is only fully funded by the wildest leaps of the imagination for 10 years by collecting revenue for 10 years with benefits running for six.
To the so called progressives, my issue is that, while I respect giving people who have done their best and need help as much aid as we can pay for, running everything into the ground and creating a completely predictable mega government and economic melt down that is going to terminate the entire social safety net is not exactly my idea of helping people.
It comes closer to being a mass suicide pact than help.
I’m also going to note that the amount of health aid offered is going to be limited. People will be told to take a number and left to die. People will be told that they only have these options when treatments not covered would be of vast benefit to the individual. This is inevitable in any system with finite resources.
Let’s be honest for once. If you actually had health insurance ObamaCare is going to make your life worse and most people had health insurance that wanted it.
There are a few minor good things in the bill but when you get down to it the only way this abomination computes is if your main objective was to increase the number of Fed gov employees and the amount of control the Fed gov has over people’s lives.
If your actual objective was to write a law to help people I could name some freshmen in high school that I think could have done a much better job.
#33
“a mass suicide pact”
Really?
Private health insurance gets the healthier end of the population. The government gets the old people. Why not put this into one big pool, where the healthier people offset the costs of the sick people?
Before you even suggest making it all private let me tell you: they have no interest in taking the whole pie. Taking actual sick people is bad for business.
Not only that, health insurance companies have broad powers to punish disloyal members of their provider networks and harm competitors. State insurance commissions are often corrupt, and many states only have a few big health insurance providers anyway.
Further, the whole business is segmented so as to avoid legal challenges. The national offices of the major groups are separate legal structures to keep the operational dirt away from the political payoff dirt.
It is pretty well done, if you can appreciate these sorts of things. The whole industry is set up for crime.
Its HEALTH INSURANCE folks.
Yes its a giant scheme to insure you, but you insure your car I hope, because if you don’t and you get hit, you’re SCREWED!
In fact, you have to get a license for your car to…
Its based on something called RISK ASSESSMENT. Unfortunately, risk assessment is NOT taught in schools in any realistic fashion. (Even the nouveau riches” who don’t learn it never become old money.)
Its should be SINGLE PAYER system because your health is no place for people to be playing games so that someone at place A doesn’t know how badly someone at place B got screwed for his/her treatment.
It should be SINGLE PAYER because you wouldn’t get differing “charge sheet” for the same disease depending on whether you come from a different direction or at a different time of day at a facility.
It makes me laugh when I hear these ignorant rednecks claim that “Well I AIN’T paying for ya” because its a reciprocal agreement between civilized people to look out for each other. While I wouldn’t invite them to dinner, I would pay for their health insurance.
The present system of “divide and conquer health care is akin to paying for your fire protection from a company which will watch your house burn to the ground if the medallion on your front door is the same as their medallion.
The gummint should be the administrator of the payment system AND NOTHING ELSE.
Let then catch the medical fraudsters (because they don’t have anything else to do,) and nail their butts to a wall. (In China, they’re turned into organ donors.)
They’ll be able to catch ’em all because these praudsters have nowhere else to go to for money except the ONE PAYER. (It would take a nationwide network of fraudsters working in concert across all 50 states and territories, wherever the payment offices and auditors could/should/would be located.)
This leaves the doctoring to the doctors (, like it is in the rest of the civilized world [, pretty soon, it will be “the civilized world” and we’ll just leave the US out of it.])
Some things are too important to be left to people on their own because it affects the ability of the rest of us to fight disease.
Whilst whiners do what they do best – display their ignorance – I guess I have to admit my Medicare coverage has expanded while cost has diminished 28%.
Poor me. Poor Republicans. Poor Insurance companies.
Bobbo said, “Silly to argue about the details of a program that by design won’t work.”
Kudos! After too much talk you state the one and only important fact.
Obamacare won’t work.
What would work, and would have been much less expensive, would have been cleaning up the inefficiency in Medicare so it would be affordable, and then allowing businesses and individuals to opt in.
Who would pass up $50/month for family coverage instead of the $500 for an individual like User7 under Obamacare?
Obamacare isn’t about affordable insurance for everybody, it’s a massive, corrupt payoff to the corporate insurance companies.
We do need better, more efficient healthcare and Obamacare is the absolute worse option. It needs to be stopped and replaced with something sane.
Now let’s balance this against the people who have lost their insurance because of Obamacare. The big companies that had lots of losses, they all got waivers, because the Democrats didn’t want the embarrassing headlines.
The unions got plenty of waivers too. So did the AARP’s insurance arm, including an exemption fr0m the $500k income for insurance CEOs, as well as the pay out 85%.
# 38 Ah_Yea said, “it’s a massive, corrupt payoff to the corporate insurance companies.”
I don’t DISagree with you but I do have some comments.
Insurance companies in the US have an intricate balance. On the one hand they quote you, say $500 per month. Six months later, you have a minor car accident and they pay out $10K in ER and hospital charges.
Maybe you’ve been with them for years when you come down with cancer and your doctor wants to put you on an experimental protocol that costs $8K per month and it’s a year long treatment.
They depend on tons of healthy people to spread the risk. Yet we are encouraged to go the doctor for every little bump or sneeze. Doesn’t cost anything. You’ve got insurance.
That’s one of several reasons why Obamacare cannot work. It depends on every citizen buying insurance but many won’t buy it until they get sick. The fines are a lot less than the premiums. So, the risk pool is smaller and a lot of people only join as soon as they need expensive care and are likely to drop out again once they’re better. Not a business model I’d like to invest in.
I’m not standing up for the insurance corps. I think they are obscene in their business practices. I also tend to think they should be relegated to non-profit status. But that’s just me.
>but you insure your car I hope, because if you don’t and you get hit, you’re SCREWED!
Actually, under Obamacare rules, if I get hit, I’ll just sign up for car insurance then, and they’ll pay for the repairs. For the insurance company to not pay would be evil, doncha think?
# 41 MikeN – “if I get hit, I’ll just sign up for car insurance then”
Likewise, I have left instructions in my will that, upon my death, my heirs are to buy a large life insurance policy for me. I’ll rest in peace knowing my family has been taken care of.
Speaking of health care. It was reported that the Pentagon had announced cost cutting, that would reduce health care to active duty soldiers and dependents. This was reported by two separate Tv news networks. Who, supposedly, both got it wrong, exactly the same way. They were informed the next day, by the Pentagon, as to their error. And they changed their reporting of it, as a cut in health benefits to retired military only. That’s a pretty big difference. And I have to wonder if it wasn’t the Pentagon that got it wrong, not the news networks? Perhaps a sudden reevaluation of plans and a quick change, by the Pentagon budget office, once the heated messages started coming in.
Obamacare has got to be far better than GOPcare. Which is “We can’t come up with any health care that’s as good as what Congress and the Senate enjoys. So we’ll just pass nothing along for another four years.” plan. And any thing that actually might work, and/or embarrass the GOP, gets called Obamacare. As the usual sour grapes response the GOP has for everything they didn’t do or think of. And they can’t think or hear what the people want, because they’ve got too much special interests stuck in their ears.
Actually, that’s being too kind. I believe the health care Lobbyists are stuck so far up Congress’ butt end, that they’re scratching their brains. What’s in their ears is another matter.