Smeagol
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Jun 14, 2012
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I spoke with a good friend yesterday about Obamacare. This is a really smart guy especially with numbers and holds degrees in economics and accounting. He's also a diehard Tea Party supporter who breathes Fox News Channel and sends me about 25 or so Obama bashing emails a week, always something he forwarded from somewhere else or copied and pasted; never anything he wrote originally. That's fine and I know he's busy. He just does not like the President and is in deep in the current right-wing political culture. I'm pretty sure few actually write their own original anti-Obama stuff and I'm not complaining; just giving some insight on where he is politically.
He presented a good case for health insurance premiums going up factoring in the tens of millions of people who will soon have their healthcare expenses including but not limited to pre-existing conditions and no lifetime limits added to the gross national healthcare costs that will inevitably force everyone's health insurance premiums to go up. This is somebody I highly respect when it comes to money so I cannot just dismiss what he says. However, I asked him what factor would the tens of millions of new people now paying monthly premiums to a health insurance policy would play who previously were simply showing up at the ER for free, the most expensive place to get healthcare. This often after their condition has reached advanced stages and is more expensive to treat and then those costs were previously passed onto the hospitals to absorb who pass it on to insured patients who end up paying larger premiums or taxes to cover the costs of the uninsured who will soon be paying for their own insurance. He was almost completely lost for words and seemingly forgot that under Obamacare 50 million new people will soon start PAYING premiums every month and hospitals will no longer have to factor into their business model the costs of a load of expensive patients who show up at the er with no insurance. He eventually came up with something to do with gold, silver and bronze plans and the people with the more expensive plans will have to subsidize people with low budget plans and the government costs of hiring some incalculable number of federal workers to regulate the American healthcare industry but the question did seem to catch him off guard.
My thinking is even if the 50 million presently uninsured are paying less than what the most expensive gold plan cost, wouldn't paying into a less expensive plan still SIGNIFICANTLY CONTRIBUTE to the overall costs of healthcare? I just ran the math (admittedly not my best subject) and if 50 million people all of a sudden start paying health insurance premiums of just $75 a month each and I suspect that's a really, really, really low estimate; that's a new almost $45 billion a year to underwrite the costs of healthcare, most of whom are healthier younger people who won't require expensive treatment.
Do those who don't like Obamacare due to concerns over costs consider the fact that a new market of 50 million people will soon be paying premiums or are they only thinking 50 million people will get to go to the doctor?
He presented a good case for health insurance premiums going up factoring in the tens of millions of people who will soon have their healthcare expenses including but not limited to pre-existing conditions and no lifetime limits added to the gross national healthcare costs that will inevitably force everyone's health insurance premiums to go up. This is somebody I highly respect when it comes to money so I cannot just dismiss what he says. However, I asked him what factor would the tens of millions of new people now paying monthly premiums to a health insurance policy would play who previously were simply showing up at the ER for free, the most expensive place to get healthcare. This often after their condition has reached advanced stages and is more expensive to treat and then those costs were previously passed onto the hospitals to absorb who pass it on to insured patients who end up paying larger premiums or taxes to cover the costs of the uninsured who will soon be paying for their own insurance. He was almost completely lost for words and seemingly forgot that under Obamacare 50 million new people will soon start PAYING premiums every month and hospitals will no longer have to factor into their business model the costs of a load of expensive patients who show up at the er with no insurance. He eventually came up with something to do with gold, silver and bronze plans and the people with the more expensive plans will have to subsidize people with low budget plans and the government costs of hiring some incalculable number of federal workers to regulate the American healthcare industry but the question did seem to catch him off guard.
My thinking is even if the 50 million presently uninsured are paying less than what the most expensive gold plan cost, wouldn't paying into a less expensive plan still SIGNIFICANTLY CONTRIBUTE to the overall costs of healthcare? I just ran the math (admittedly not my best subject) and if 50 million people all of a sudden start paying health insurance premiums of just $75 a month each and I suspect that's a really, really, really low estimate; that's a new almost $45 billion a year to underwrite the costs of healthcare, most of whom are healthier younger people who won't require expensive treatment.
Do those who don't like Obamacare due to concerns over costs consider the fact that a new market of 50 million people will soon be paying premiums or are they only thinking 50 million people will get to go to the doctor?