Dems turn on ObamaCare amid premium hikes, Bill Clinton laments ‘crazy system’[W:81]

Fenton said:

And ObamaCare fixed that, right ? Nope. In fact it didn't even make Healthcare affordable.

Out of pocket expenses and premiums are higher now than they were in 2008.

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Out of pocket expenses and premiums are higher now than they were in 2008.

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chromium said:

glaring 20% cut stolen by the middle man insurance companies. That should be indisputably done away with and would impact hardly anyone going into medicine. You act like there's no doctors in europe or canada or every other part of the world that has single payer

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Roadvirus said:

You can't blame people for being very skeptical about the government running our healthcare system. They look at the disaster that is the VA and think "They want to do that for EVERYONE when they can't even do it for the military?".

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Opopanax said:

But 16+ million who didn't have insurance now have it.

And those people who couldn't get health insurance, who went years without it, didn't seek medical treatment because of it; do you think they care that you have to pay more now? Do you think that those people who saw their loved ones die early because they couldn't seek medical care give two bits that you have to pay more now? Do you think that those who died because of it care that you have to pay more?

And why should anyone care that you pay more (if you actually do), when we could have universal health care? You have no legitimate basis to complain about what you're paying unless you support universal coverage for every single person in this country.

My apathy for your situation is no way equal to your apathy towards those who have suffered tremendous pain because they were uninsurable. My position would give you free healthcare for life for you and your entire family, so I don't care about your situation in good conscience.

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Incisor said:

But they're capped now. They weren't capped before.

Higher deductibles and premiums make the patient "put more skin in the game". Isn't that what Conservatives have always wanted?

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Roadvirus said:

You can't blame people for being very skeptical about the government running our healthcare system. They look at the disaster that is the VA and think "They want to do that for EVERYONE when they can't even do it for the military?".

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Cardinal said:

Time for single payer health care.

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Fenton said:

Your'e position is based on a naive assumption. That Socialized Healthcare is " free ".

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Fenton said:

We're doing you people a favor by forcing you to pay more for Healthcare. Your putting skin in the game, now dont you feel better ?

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Greenbeard said:

The urge to shield people from the costs of their care is a liberal impulse.

You sound more like Bernie Sanders everyday.

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Fenton said:

Is that what we did for decades prior to ObamaCare ? " Sheild people from the cost of their care " ?

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Opopanax said:

Germany's model has been sculpted and worked since before the First World War. Copy it.

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Greenbeard said:

Emphatically yes. There's a reason price is a meaningless concept in health care.

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washunut said:

What exactly do you know about the specifics of the German model that allows you to say it has worked for a hundred years? Would Americans agree to live with the constraints Germans have been conditioned to live with.

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Fenton said:

Lol ! So we needed to not only expose people to their cost, we needed to increase their cost substantially whether they could afford it or not......got it.

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Two simple observations are key to explaining both the high level of spending on medical care and the dissatisfaction with that spending. The first is that most payments to physicians or hospitals or other caregivers for medical care are made not by the patient but by a third party—an insurance company or employer or governmental body. The second is that nobody spends somebody else’s money as wisely or as frugally as he spends his own.

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Employer financing of medical care has caused the term insurance to acquire a rather different meaning in medicine than in most other contexts. We generally rely on insurance to protect us against events that are highly unlikely to occur but that involve large losses if they do occur—major catastrophes, not minor, regularly recurring expenses. We insure our houses against loss from fire, not against the cost of having to cut the lawn. We insure our cars against liability to others or major damage, not against having to pay for gasoline. Yet in medicine, it has become common to rely on insurance to pay for regular medical examinations and often for prescriptions.

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The most important needed reform is an increase the fraction of total medical costs that come from out-of pocket expenses in the form of large deductibles and significant co-payments. Out-of-pocket spending accounts for only about 12% of total American spending on healthcare, whereas the share of out-of –pocket spending is over 30% in Switzerland, a country considered to have one of the better health delivery systems. Partly because of this major difference, health care takes 11% of Swiss GDP compared to the much higher American percentage.

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A second demand-related cost effect will result from the fact that insurance,(even with deductibles and copayments, drives a wedge between the cost of a service and its price, and so increases demand. (It’s like a restaurant with a buffet: the marginal cost of eating all you want is zero.)

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Advocates of consumer-driven health care reforms have focused on reducing the rate of growth in U.S. health care spending by increasing the share of out-of-pocket spending. This is based largely on evidence that in other markets (from consumer electronics to automobiles), suppliers fiercely compete for consumer spending; if one firm can offer a lower price for equal quality, consumers will flock to it because the consumer is price-sensitive. In a nutshell, the argument is that when health care consumers spend their own money—with every dollar of spending effectively competing with other highly valued goods and services—consumers tend to purchase health care goods and services far more prudently. Indeed, the idea that “skin in the game” is important to health-spending decisions was vindicated in the famous RAND Health Insurance Experiment, conducted by the RAND Corporation between 1971 and 1986. In the study, researchers found that an increase in cost-sharing, ranging from 0 to 25 percent, reduced spending by 20 percent, with little effect on health.

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A fully functioning marketplace requires active, cost-conscious consumers, but most Americans have been enrolled in subsidized, third-party insurance arrangements and thus have been largely unaware of the direct cost of their insurance policies or the services they receive. This is one very important reason for the rapid rise in health spending, which has created immense fiscal pressures for federal and state governments, as well as for households.

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Cardinal said:

Can you think of a nicer place for it?

View attachment 67208082

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Greenbeard said:

Like I said, you sound like a Democrat. If you're suspicious of the idea that cost-sharing is some sort of panacea for rising health costs, welcome to the left.

The conservative argument is indeed that people are too shielded from the costs of their care. It's been made for decades.

Milton Friedman



Gary Becker


Richard Posner


The Manhattan Institute


The American Enterprise Institute


Etc, etc.

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tres borrachos said:

The husband of the Democratic nominee bashing the signature legislation of the outgoing President of the same party whose support is desperately needed because his wife can't put away the single worst candidate in the history of the elections. This plays right into the Republicans' hands. Even that simpleton Trump will use this against Hillary and the Dems.

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ludin said:

Not really obamacare is the perfect reason as to why we shouldn't have universal healthcare. the government has proven 100% inept at running healthcare.

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Gaztopian said:

Nonsense. Universal healthcare is a tried and true healthcare system applied in different parts of the world to a great success. A failure of the ACA will only convince the population of the absolute wickedness of private insurance, thus aggrandizing the public option.

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Gaztopian said:

Nonsense. Universal healthcare is a tried and true healthcare system applied in different parts of the world to a great success. A failure of the ACA will only convince the population of the absolute wickedness of private insurance, thus aggrandizing the public option.

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Fenton said:

Sorry, massive Govt and incoherent intervention into the market place under false pretenses no less, is not a Conservative position.

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Greenbeard said:

You seem to have loaded the wrong pre-programmed response, as this has nothing to do with what I was arguing. Which is that virtually any "conservative" reform will necessarily rely on higher out-of-pocket spending than the historical norm. Because one of the central conservative critiques of the American health system has always been that it insulates the consumer from cost and price differentials and relies too heavily on decision-making by third parties, leading to less prudent spending decisions.

There was a time when there were concepts behind the slogans you trot out. But now as some of you use it, the language seems to have nothing behind it, it's meaningless drivel. Which is what puts people like you in a bizarre position: your heart and arguments are increasingly liberal, but the vestigial language you use without any apparent meaning behind it (and your self-image, apparently) remains conservative.

I've watched with great interest over the past 5 years or so as self-identified conservatives have increasingly adopted postures and arguments that I formally associated with the single-payer crowd on the left. It's been a bizarre and fascinating transformation.

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Cardinal said:

Time for single payer health care.

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