It will be interesting to see if the Republicans can work with the now humbled Democrats. A few months ago the Republicans, claiming that the Dems were "not listening" and "blocking their attempts to work across the aisle," had a few ideas. What did they propose? Here's the Republican Health Care Plan:
John Boehner, "a number of steps could be taken
1. letting people buy health insurance across state lines,
2. allowing people and organizations to pool together to buy insurance for lower prices
3. reining in malpractice lawsuits."
Really? What would letting people buy insurance across state lines really accomplish? Selling health insurance across state lines will allow insurers to drop mandated benefits. Additionally companies will race to relocate to whatever state has the weakest consumer protection and insurance laws. it would also guarantee that big insurers would be the only ones left standing.
So what about tort reform? Right now it accounts for about 2% or less of health care costs... If only the growth in health care costs were limited to 2%...
Pooling together? One change that would really affect cost is pooling together. Right now hospitals can negotiate charges and because there is competition hospitals can pick and choose which insurance to accept and for what fee. Larger insurance companies with more members have more leverage. If an insurer has a lock on a community then they can pretty much dictate fee schedules to the hospital. If you take pooling together to it's natural extension it sounds a lot like single payer health care.
so the republican's don't have answers... but that's no surprise.
"If only the growth in health care costs were limited to 2%..."
ReplyDeleteIf only healthcare providers and insurers would use the 2% they would save with Tort Reform to actually cover uninsured people. But that's not how it works. That 2% "savings" would be rolled into the 30+% overhead that these vampires have created and would effectively disappear into the ether as far as the average citizen is concerned. Tort reform is a joke and it is clearly designed to further benefit those that have created this broken system for their own gain.
As far as "pooling together"...well yeah, when done correctly that is single payer. Funny how the only system that has proven to work everywhere else in the world isn't even up for consideration in this country. We're the only industrialized nation in the world that has a mainly for-profit health care industry and we're the only industrialized nation in the world that has a "health care crisis." Also har-larious is the fact that "pooling together" is exactly what corporations do. It is the definition of a corporation: investors pooling resources together to minimize risk. It's a communist business model, and it is the modus operandi of the American upper class. It's okay for them to pool together resources and minimize their risk so that they can buy more yachts and summer homes, but when we want to use the same tactic for such basic things as health care or workers' rights we are un-American collectivist commies that hate individual freedoms etc. Pfft. Kind of interesting, considering we were the first modern nation that was founded as a Union.