Something good about the health care bill that neither side will tell you

Since it now appears one more Senate vote will yield a health care package, it is reassuring to know that there is a simple economic reason why you don't need to worry about anything bad happening as a result.

Even with Democrats close to a supermajority the matter has been ferociously fought and was almost stopped at several points, at a point where everything said about its good or bad effects is speculative and neither side can offer any omiscient forecast of its consequences.

Insurance companies hate this bill. They provided much of the funding for lobbying against it. It cuts into the windfall profits that soaring health care costs have provided them. If anything negative that has been predicted as a consequence of passage of this bill should actually come to pass - or something unforeseen - insurance companies may be counted upon to mount a powerful effort to undo it that will probably succeed even in the current Congress, never mind one with more Republicans in it.

Republicans won't say this because they don't want to telegraph their future strategies, and Democrats won't say this because they don't want to even think about going through this battle again.

Nothing will save it from future repeal but clear evidence that it is having good effects, and those must include good effects for doctors and seniors, so that the AMA and the AARP will provide lobbying efforts to counter efforts that the insurance industry will make.

The bill appears to solve two very big problems that contribute a lot to the cost of health care:

1. Some companies have learned how to evade their responsibility to provide their employees with medical coverage by hiring "independent contractors" instead of "employees." There are some companies in Hawaii that "employ" scores if not hundreds of people but have only a handful of "employees." The contractors, many of them young and healthy, are responsible for their own medical insurance, and often choose to skate by with none. The problem is that the entire health care system is based on the idea that premiums paid by or for the young and healthy help to cover the costs of medical care for their grandparents. So requiring health care coverage for everyone spreads out the soaring cost of modern medicine.
2. People without medical coverage who can't get care from a doctor, when they have a problem, go to the emergency room, where they are treated for free. Anything done at the hospital costs several times more than it costs in a clinic or doctor's office.

The bill also has more federal funding for home-based health care, which is much cheaper than nursing homes and therefore analogous to the second factor above. AARP Hawaii thinks this will contain Medicaid enrollments going forward, so watch to see if that happens.

Something needed to be done. The health care premiums paid by most businesses were going up as much as 10% or more per year, year after year. It threatened to bankrupt many companies. In fact, many of the biggest bankruptcies of recent decades in the manufacturing sector were really caused by pension and medical responsibilities to retirees, more than problems with the actual businesses.

Comments

[jerseygirl]

Thanks for the optimism but we're all screwed to say the least because too many people listen to what "they" say is on the bill & haven't bothered to do any research.

One of the stupidest things in it:
Ins. companies can't refuse to pick you up if you have a preexisting condition - you know what this means? Your neighbor can smoke & treat his body like crap & when he gets lung cancer, he gets on YOUR insurance that you've been paying into for years.YOUR rates go up because someone's gotta pay for his chemo & treatments. (Not to be confused with people who pay into it & told to "screw you" when they get a serious disease that's all of a sudden considered pre existing).

It's the same thing if I was driving around without insurance & I get into an accident & come to your Ins. company asking them to give me money!

[I've been thinking about this, and two things occur to me: first, most people who don't take care of themselves already have insurance and a lot of the uninsured are reasonable healthy people whose premiums will help cover soaring medical costs; and secondly, very few Americans qualify as being totally healthy. HMD]

[hi]

I agree with Howard. :)

However isn't it also true that smokers on average cost a lot less to the system than a healthy person because they tend not to live as long? ie less of a need for very expensive nursing home care.

I know it's a dark way of looking at it but it's all about the numbers right? :P

[A high-ranking executive in local health care once told me that one hidden cost of saving us from formerly fatal illnesses of middle age is that more of us live long enough to have catastrophic collapse of our health in old age, ending our lives with several costly weeks in the hospital. But... that way lies madness. HMD]