With the Supreme Court set to hear a ‘red state’ challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that could declare it unconstitutional after the repeal of the individual mandate penalty/tax, will SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts again ride to the rescue of Obamacare, or will it be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the GOP? The Trump administration just filed an unusual brief, backing repeal of the law.
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Bill Whittle Network · Saving Obamacare Again: Will Chief Justice Roberts or GOP Senators Rescue It?
6 replies on “Saving Obamacare Again: Will Chief Justice Roberts or GOP Senators Rescue It?”
The difficulty with concierge medicine is that it works best in a wealthy community. One in essence is buying a family doctor for yourself for a certain amount of money per month. However this does not of course cover surgeries or referrals to specialist and any testing and or procedures that are generated by the specialist. Insurance of course covers all of these things. All of these things drive up the cost of healthcare that much more. Especially in elderly people who frequently need to see multiple doctors on a somewhat frequent basis, the cost of all of this may be prohibitive and certainly would be more than Medicare even with a secondary insurance. As I see it, if one wants to drive down the cost of healthcare then, other than selling insurance across state lines which of course would obviously help, the other major thing that could be done is malpractice reform. If doctors did not need to fear lawsuits from their patients, the amount of testing that is currently done in the name of defensive medicine would go down vastly. The way to protect the public from bad doctors would be to form a state by state board of individual specialists who would evaluate complaints. If behavior by a physician was deemed egregious, then the doctor would lose their license. The physicians composing each individual board would only be allowed to serve so to speak if they did not know the position being reviewed of course to keep things honest. This is the only real way of truly knocking down healthcare costs. Unfortunately because the laws are made by lawyers and the attorneys get their income via these lawsuits, I do not believe these laws will ever change.
The first problem is that what we now call health insurance is not insurance at all. It is prepaid health care. True health insurance would be high deductible catastrophic health coverage – for unknown risks. Annual checkups, immunizations, minor illnesses, etc. would be paid directly to the doctor. Anything that can be reasonably budgeted for is not a risk worthy of insurance.
This concept of health insurance was born out of the wage and price controls of the New Deal and WWII. Fringe benefit competition was how companies competed for workers when wages and salaries were regulated.
Commercial insurance is regulated at the state level because the federal government is not constitutionally authorized to regulate it. The feds can only regulate health care that it provides – like Medicare and partially Medicaid.Selling insurance across states lines cannot happen because a state cannot regulate beyond its own borders. Allowing cross border sales would make all regulation void unless the feds somehow acquired authority to regulate commercial insurance. This is a small part of why Obamacare is incompatible with a free market. It is socialism.
Question: With pre-existing conditions not functioning in health insurance, how does “insurance” work when you cannot predict risk? Premiums previously were determined by calculated morbidity rates of the group members that were insured. Healthy members subsidized sicker members. The single market was always more expensive because there was more risk. Now add the unknown of how many sick people will demand insurance and rates go through the roof.
Obamacare was designed to bankrupt the commercial insurance industry or create so much discontent that a Single Payer System would have to ride to the rescue. It was designed to fail.
Going back to just paying the doctor will never happen because this generation and those before it was bred into dependency on the government. The sooner a majority of Americans reach herd immunity against government largess the sooner they can burn down the structure. But that ain’t happening because, as the sign in the picture at Drudge shows, “Abortion is a Human Right”. America is mentally ill. The Constitution does not give the Judiciary power to nullify/overturn/rescind a law. The answer is to make morphine over the counter.
I belong to a concierge style medical office. As a single adult, I pay $79.00 per month. For this fee I get as many office visits as I want with no co pay. In those visits, the doctor can diagnose basic illnesses, do blood work, treat minor wounds or bone breaks, and dispense many common medications. In the beginning of the year, they gave me a strep test for free as part of my membership (it was negative). I pay cost for any drugs they stock. If they don’t stock a medication, they have a list of local pharmacies with their prices for those prescriptions and they can send it to any I choose. Since I also have a Good RX card (which are free), I get my medications at pretty low costs. I know these medical practices aren’t available everywhere, but I think they should be.
Collapse is the only outcome possible. The only question will we kill it before it kills us.
Democrats will double down on it and make it grow to the point of ultimate collapse.
Depending upon Republicans has been, up to now, an empty hope. The ONLY thing most Republicans (spelunkers all) do is cave to their opposition. Now, as always, they want the Democrats to love them and stop saying bad things about them. This will NEVER happen. Unfortunately, most of the current crop of Republicans will never stop caving. They are not even worthy of the name RINO.
I’m still livid that after Obamacare was a tax that the Surrender Republicans refused to make Obama’s massive tax increase their #1 talking point on the campaign trail.
Or as Admiral Ackbar might have said…. It’s a Tax!