America's Uninsured Rate Is Below 10% For First Time Ever

It's amazing how criminalizing activity can affect behavior.

 

And yet I have to get hit by a bus in order to meet my deductible in order for my insurance to mean anything

 

So does this mean people are healthier and saving money?

 

Well, yea, that's not that atypical, prior to Obamacare and post Obamacare.

However, it does mean something. The price you paid for medical care is lowered when you have insurance (pre-negotiated b/t ins and providers). When you don't, your price is jacked up. That's how our mess up system work. If you can't afford insurance, you have to pay more. r****ded before and still r****ded now.

 

^ and of course, most preventive cares are covered w/o needing to meet ded.

 

check back in 5-10 years.

 

You have terrible insurance then. Insurance generally negotiates down the rates you pay for everything from a doctor's visit to prescriptions to MRIs to surgery, regardless of whether you've met the deductible or not. They won't pay that lower amount, but they certainly reduce the price. And as noted early, many preventative things instantly become free and fully covered.

 

The lefties have won. Where can we move to?

 

He is probably aware of this already. you might have missed the sad face.

 

I hope it works out, but I still don't get the end game. I'm 35 and my business partner is 34. Today, we are at $982/mo total for health, dental, vision, and life insurance. When we started getting coverage two years ago the price for 34 and 35 year old men was $610/mo. Getting more healthy people on insurance doesn't solve the problems we have. All it does is give insurance companies money. Insurance is ****ed.

Physical therapy that insurance pays for is not sufficient for the most part. Proper physical therapy would have saved me and the insurance companies a lot of money if I would have had it years ago.

The rise of stand along ERs and urgent care clinics are not helpful due to their cost and due to the delay in treatment they can create. Places like Kindred Healthcare need to be burned to the ground due to their poor care and very high costs.

I know I'm ranting a bit, but I am continually frustrated by how underwhelming our healthcare truly is. We throw a ton of money at it, but don't get amazing care in return. I've found I have to be very educated on a potential health issue before I see a doctor.

Developments like Watson from IBM can't come soon enough.

/endrant

 

You are not alone. Private insurance with private hospitals/health care is fundamentally flawed. Couple that with record levels of mergers at both the hospital, pharma and insurance level and the industry is slowly becoming an oligopoly. In some cities a single company controls the entire health care apparatus (control of hospitals and insurance) which pretty much kills the incentive to engage in price control.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The solution will be a system of health insurance built on the Canadian model. The Canadian model is akin to Medicaid (as opposed to Medicare) so it is a state run system where the federal government provides 50% of the funding in exchange for setting minimum standards of coverage. In Canada, hospitals remain private (unlike say the UK where both insurance and hospitals are federally owned and managed)

The Canadian system is the only thing that'll fly here (even though it has plenty of flaws). It embraces federalism and only nationalizes one area of health care (insurance). We will not have true cost control until we embrace real reforms. The ACA achieved one big goal. It created significantly improved insurance coverage but did little to truly control costs (outside of Medicare and Medicaid).

At the very least, I'd love to see the introduction of a public option. It almost became a reality but failed at the last minute. I'd also love to see rules around hospital consolidation. Its been largely unregulated and has resulted in huge behemoths that are given near monopoly status in regions of the country. Also I think its insane that hospital systems get to call themselves non-profit. There's nothing charitable about non-profit hospital systems. They behave exactly the same as for-profit systems and charge the same prices to everyone.

Oh and for god sake give Medicare the right to negotiate drug prices. What an idiotic prohibition. It's essentially a government funded giveaway to companies with some of the largest profit margins in the world. I'm sick and tired of subsidizing the much lower prices that the rest of the world gets because we're too busy paying 10 times more.

 

The 1% rejoice.

 

Well if you do get hit by a bus at least you will have insurance to cover that versus not having it.

 

Obamacare reduced the number of insured from roughly about 20% to 10% with many having the relatively poor Medicaid insurance and many still not being able to afford the co-pays, so effectively uninsured compared to other advanced countries. All in all it worked great for let's say 1/3 of the previously uninsured.

Sophisticated Repubs should look at it as a victory as the complicated system might forestall reform that the other 2/3 of the uninsured need so desperately and it keeps their donations rolling in from the healhcare lobbyists who are left to make a lot. It works just as the Heritage Foundation and Romney envisioned.

Given the uproar that the unsophisticated conservatives have raised, the Dems can look at it as a great victory. Hey the 1/3 of the unisured who really benefit should view it as a great victory.