Phineas, posting over at Public Secrets, has videos up that are must-see TV, so to speak.
Something I have mentioned several times needs to be emphasized more by those of us in opposition to ObamaCare. Those “47 million” uninsured Americans will be forced to buy insurance. It will not be given to them. They will buy it. Or they will pay a massive penalty for failing to do so.
At the same time, the mandated “improvements” to health care will drive the cost of coverage up.
A “public option” will pay doctors less than market rates for any health care – as Medicare already does. As is the case today, people with private insurance will pay more to subsidize the sub-par payments of Medicare and that new “public option”.
How much are you willing to pay for your health insurance?
Companies will begin dumping their existing coverage because paying the mandated fine will be considerably cheaper than the premiums for ObamaCare. Privately insured people will get hit with even more costs as a result.
How much are you willing to pay for your health care insurance? How much are you willing to pay to subsidize other people’s insurance? How much are you willing to pay to cover people who are dumped into the public option because their companies made a cold-blooded decision that paying the fine is cheaper than paying the rapidly-escalating costs of the “reform” of health care?
If we do not stop this – stop it cold – you will find out how much it costs. You will not be happy.
Thanks for the link!
A “public option” will pay doctors less than market rates for any health care – as Medicare already does. As is the case today, people with private insurance will pay more to subsidize the sub-par payments of Medicare and that new “public option”.
Absolutely, and even worse than you may think when you follow it through to the logical results.
Consider: As the “public option” grew, so would cost-shifting onto a shrinking private sector. Right now, private insurance pays about 15% more than the average payment while Medicare pays about 13% less, a 28% gap. That gap would grow, and at an accelerating pace, as the percentage of people on “public option”/MCR/MCD expanded and the percentage on private insurance shrank. This is the crowding-out design that would lead to single-payer.
That cost-shifting is itself ALREADY a prime cost driver in the health care system, and perhaps the top driver of the “unsustainable” claim. Yes, the hidden subsidy of cost-shifting is an unsustainable one, all right, but it’s NOT caused by the private market.
Pretty obviously, that leads to the crowding-out of private insurance from the market, which means the inevitable eventual diminishment and then loss of that subsidization. The ONLY way that expanding public-backed insurance can “contain costs” or “bend the cost curve” while also slaying the private-insurance goose that lays the funding eggs is by rationing.
As the Brits have discovered, even that only works for a little while as a cost-container before the system itself becomes dysfunctional for the masses from resource shortages. (The leadership, of course, will continue to get decent care and wonder what all the fuss is about.)
As I said from the beginning – the so called ‘Public Option’ is nothing more than a back door attempt to completely destroy the health care insurance industry. That is the only possible result of the ‘public option’. Just ask Chris Dodd who has sais that it is the most practical route to a ‘single payer’ system. Sometimes they do slip and let the truth tumble out.