ABOLISH OBAMACARE

People have long been trying to figure out how to make health care affordable, a problem that seemed to be more of a non-problem back in the day of few medical options, doctors who made house calls and offered barter for services. Health insurance was supposed to make a difference, and it does, if you are an employee where the company provides it. The self-employed had to find more expensive plans. The poor have Medicaid (MediCal in California).

First Hillary Clinton, then Barack Obama thought they could solve the problem with a government solution. As you know, I think that almost every problem we have can be solved better by the free market and a saner, more hands-off policy of the government. What the Left really wants is a massive Medicare covering everyone for every single thing they want. Canada has it, and the results are NOT what most Americans want. In fact, Canadians who can afford it often come here to get the care they can’t get in a timely fashion up North.

Obamacare

Passed in 2010, it was the only plan that survived the political infighting. It wasn’t passed because it pleased people. Hillarycare was far more complicated and involved upending what most people believed was needed in health care, so it never moved forward. The Obama team knew they had to come up with something different. However, they forgot to consider that making insurance more affordable didn’t necessarily lead to making health care cheaper. But they did understand that people who liked what they had didn’t want a change. Thus, regular insurance and Medicare were largely left alone. Medicaid was expanded, even despite its bad track record for actual health.

Seen as a “starter package,” the idea was to get to a more socialist plan as time went on, but the law didn’t really fix anything. Since people thought insurance was too costly, the plan put around $500BB into subsidies for families making up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line, or a little more than $100,000 annually in today's dollars. But people thought it was still too costly. For someone with her own business (me), I discovered that none of my doctors would take an “affordable” Obamacare plan. Instead, what had been reasonable private rates skyrocketed to as much as $1,200/month with a $6800 deductible. Insurance companies gouged those who didn’t go with Obamacare to make up for the loss of money from those “covered.”

What really made no sense is that Obamacare covered way too much, a laundry list of federally-mandated “essential” health benefits. You couldn’t opt out. To make it worse, as people continued to complain about cost, Dems uncapped subsidies, so a family making up to $350K could get subsidized insurance, which cost another $30-40BB annually.

If You Like Your…

We were promised we could keep plans we liked and doctors we liked, but that wasn’t true. For the poorest working people, the plan was probably somewhat better than what they had, but they faced huge lines, the same problem seen in Canada. You could wait for a critical treatment until you needed a far more expensive solution. Or…you died.

Somehow, the actual total costs increased, burdening everyone, but especially taxpayers. Young people didn’t want to pay that much; they felt themselves invulnerable and, in reality, didn’t end up needing all that much care (until Covid vaccines started causing issues). Older people on a government plan needed the young to subsidize their higher costs. But they didn’t want to pay for the generous coverage when it didn’t all apply to them.

The Full Costs

The more innovative health care we create, the more expensive are the solutions/devices/medicines we innovate on, the more costly health care will be. And, you have to look at all sides of the cost equation. Doctors come out of medical school hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. If they set up an office, they have to rent space, buy/rent equipment, hire people and pay all that before they see a dime. And then, there’s malpractice insurance, a cost that can bankrupt a new doctor. Wonder why there are so few OB/Gyns anymore? They pay a very high cost in malpractice insurance as too many people sue because they are unhappy about the baby they bore.

Hospitals now have to acquire costly equipment to deliver on our expectations, but, even as they are charging more, the demand from those paying nothing has greatly increased. We are all paying more so that illegals can get free coverage. That adds to the problem.

Health care analysts, such as Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute have formulated market-based solutions. And instead of trying to “fix” Obamacare, the solution is to obliterate it. If your house is filled with dry rot, toxic mold and termites, you tear it down and start over. The same is true of this failed scheme. And in the end, we can probably come up with something less costly, when we stop trying to give elected officials more things to claim they have “given” us.