Can YOU Explain This Health Care Bill To Me?
by Joseph J. Kusnell
First the benefits, some of which kick in next year and some in 2014:
1. Elimination of insurance company caps on medical expenses. Added cost for Insurance companies.
2. Elimination of exclusions for pre-existing conditions. Added cost for Insurance companies
3. Universal coverage: Everyone is insured. Millions to Medicaid at taxpayer expense.
4. Mandated insurance coverage required for ALL adults. Added revenue for Insurance companies.
5. Rules against dropping people who become sick. Added cost for Insurance companies
6. Single children to stay on their parents’ policies until age 26. Added cost for Insurance companies
Five of these six rule changes increase insurer’s costs and depress Insurance Company profits. Despite assertions to the contrary by the Democratic Party, the five largest insurers in this country in 2008 took home a 4.5% return on investment (ROI) which is hardly newsworthy. They have no sack full of money to absorb these new costs and without new revenues they would likely face bankruptcy. Rule #4 was added ostensibly forcing young healthy people to buy insurance to help offset those increased costs similar to what is done with Social Security where young working people contribute to help offset the costs of retiring older people. Will it work? Let’s see:
1. Eliminating caps is a no-brainer. That should have been done long ago. If they wanted cap limits they should have also offered premium limits, refunding money to people who did not get sick. Caps were an anomaly.
2. Eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions: Are insurance companies allowed to raise prices for people with pre-existing conditions? If they are not, how will insurance companies pay for this increased coverage? How will it affect the cost of employer-provided insurance? If they are who gets to determine by how much? Will we also drop pre-existing conditions when purchasing life insurance or car insurance? That would be nice even if would put those companies out of business. (Suppose I take a room in your rooming house and after I am there a week, I find out I have a serious disease that I picked up in the place I used to live before moving in with you. This is a pre-existing condition. Is it still okay if I sue you for my disease? Is it okay if they make you pay for me?) I don’t think so. Persons with pre-existing conditions should have been transferred to Medicare or Medicaid and that would have solved the problem. We didn’t need a new federal bureaucracy to take care of this problem.
3. 16 million people are now being transferred to Medicaid but if they qualify for Medicaid by reason of a means test now, why didn’t they qualify last year? The answer is, they did so again, why did we need this bill?
4 . Mandated insurance: If you don’t buy insurance, they say you will be fined. That’s to make young healthy people buy insurance so their money will help offset the costs of covering patients with pre-existing conditions. But there’s a problem. The fine for not buying this mandatory insurance is less than 25% the cost of insurance. So it’s easier to just pay the fine. Then if you get sick, you can go out and demand catastrophic insurance that is cheap knowing they can’t turn you down because of your new pre-existing condition because that’s now against the law. You win two ways and the insurance companies lose. Why was this set up this way? All this will do is drive insurance companies out of business, cost us jobs, and allow the government to take over the whole thing. Is that why this was done the way it was done? Wantta bet?
5. Kids on their parents’ policies. Kids don’t usually get sick before age 26 so this too is a no-brainer. Both these changes could have been accomplished with a one-page law. We didn’t need to create universal health care to do this. Anyway, who wants their kids to stay at home living off mom and pop until they are 26?
Which brings me back to the question: can insurance companies charge more for someone with a pre-existing condition and if so, who decides how much and if not how do they pay for extending this new coverage? Are we all going to chip in to pay it for them? Is someone going to pass a basket? Or is this designed to drive insurance companies to bankruptcy? You see, there are no teeth in Rule #4 so at this moment it is worthless; hence, with the new added costs, insurance companies will move toward bankruptcy. Another question concerns employer-provided health care insurance. If families cost more, will they tend toward hiring single people or people with fewer children in order to lower their costs? Will this be a reason not to hire workers with bigger families?
You know, no matter what the government says, government health care is going to cost more and provide less service than private insurance. That’s a fact. Do you think Washington is filled with geniuses? Look at everything they touch. Without an open taxpayer checkbook, they couldn’t run anything. That’s why everything they touch is in the hole BILLIONS or even TRILLIONS of dollars! The are paid too much, they work too little, they are inefficient, and they are deep into fraud, corruption and special interest contamination. Oh yea, they will lower costs. Right! If they do it will be the first time! No, we have been snookered. Expect higher costs, higher taxes and less and less service. Oh yea, and long, long waiting lines.
Okay, but regardless of all that, how exactly are we going to pay for this mess? Well, to start with in 2011, expect a new national value added sales tax. Unfortunately this will effect working people (and those without jobs) a lot since working people spend most of their income just to get by. So it will all be taxed. Does that surprise you? Why, because they didn’t tell you? With politicians, words and deeds are seldom related and they hate the truth.
There will be other problems with this service as well. For example, people on Medicare or Medicaid. The government is going to continue to cut what they pay doctors for treating people with Medicare or Medicaid because those expenditures are getting so high. With that, the doctors will stop treating those patients. They’ll have to. They don’t make any money caring for them and even Doctors have to pay their bills. And so, the system will suffer.
If you don’t believe me, check the conditions in England and Canada where poor, old and sick people are exposed to universal health care services. Young people think it’s okay since they don’t get sick much. But check with the older people, they’ll tell you. It’s a lousy system. Some folks just die waiting to see a doctor.
We had the best health care in the world and we could have solved our problems. But no, we had to replace it with a government run social health care program installed by liberal Democrats and it’s going to suck. Should I rephrase that to say ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’? Ever noticed all these people like Kerry, Pelosi, Gore and the Kennedy’s working for you so hard just get richer and richer doing it? Is that why there are more Democratic millionaire Senators in Washington than Republican? And are they on this new health care service plan? THEY ARE NOT!
What do they care about you? Remember when the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, went to Copenhagen a while back? Our country was in deep financial difficulty, right? How many friends and family members did she take with her, 100? How many Government jets did she use, two or three? How much were the rooms and the meals, $500.00 a day per person or was it more? And who paid for all that? The taxpayer did. Enough said. Do as I say –
When all this stuff hits the fan a few years from now, you will be hard pressed to find anyone that will admit they voted for this bill. Like in Germany after WWII, when it became impossible to find anyone who had been a Nazi.
What do you think made America so much more successful than the socialist countries in Europe this last century? It was Capitalism and the freedom to make of yourself what you could. So why would we want to change that now? I’ll tell you why, to please the people at the bottom – to redistribute the wealth to people who say Capitalism held them back. Well, I disagree with them. Capitalism didn’t hold them back, THEY held themselves back. Now they have their hand out for everything they can get.
They say Socialism is where workers own the means of production. Okay, but do they? Look around at those countries. Look at the people who run them. What do you see? I see a new ruling class. I see new ‘rich guys’. While it once was the people that started and ran the businesses that got rich, now it’s the people that run the government who steal the businesses. How nice. But it won’t last long because these people don’t know how to tie their own shoes. They are leeches and when leeches are in control, everyone suffers. They will run this country into the ground. Oh my. What’s the use. A fool and his freedoms are soon parted. And we have a lot of fools in America today.
Kids on campuses who have never done anything never held a job, never supported a family, never have done anything much but live off their parents now tell the world how it should conduct itself. And they have no idea what the hell they are talking about or what they are doing to themselves!
How did this happen. Maybe we should shut down our colleges since all they seem to teach is sex, drug use and anti-Americanism.
Joey
Can YOU Explain This Health Care Bill To Me?
The Cunning Plan: BoomerYearbook.com
2. Elimination of exclusions for pre-existing conditions. Added cost for Insurance companies
3. Universal coverage: Everyone is insured. Millions to Medicaid at taxpayer expense.
4. Mandated insurance coverage required for ALL adults. Added revenue for Insurance companies.
5. Rules against dropping people who become sick. Added cost for Insurance companies
6. Single children to stay on their parents’ policies until age 26. Added cost for Insurance companies
If you don’t believe me, check the conditions in England and Canada where poor, old and sick people are exposed to universal health care services. Young people think it’s okay since they don’t get sick much. But check with the older people, they’ll tell you. It’s a lousy system. Some folks just die waiting to see a doctor.
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Tags: baby boomer, Elderly Problems, Psychological Articles
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