Pledge To America!Follow

In theory, this will be the purpose of the government overseen pool option once that gets off the ground. To provide an option for people who can't otherwise afford it.

There is a provision in the bill that limits the only factors insurance companies can vary individual consumer cost by to age (max 3:1), tobacco use (max 1.5:1), and individual vs family rates (effective starting Jan 1, 2014), so in order to raise coverage costs on persons with pre-existing conditions to cost prohibitive levels they would have to raise coverage costs on everyone to cost prohibitive levels, which would drive customers away and destroy their business.

That's because it costs them a lot more to cover someone with a pre-existing condition. The insurance industry is able to provide coverage on the basis of a large number of people buying insurance. The assumption with insurance is that most of the people buying it are healthy right now, but are insuring against a potential future medical expense.

Let's take a simple example: I buy insurance to cover a broken arm. It costs $500 to treat a broken arm. The insurance company calculates that the average person will break 1 arm every 20 years on average. Thus, it can charge $25 per year in insurance and break even. Let's say it charges $30 so it can cover it's expenses and make a profit. So if I fall down and break my arm, I'm covered. If I *don't* fall down and break my arm, I'm losing money on my insurance (but I'm healthy, so there is that).

If I get to wait to buy insurance until after I break my arm, and the insurer charges me the normal $25, the insurer loses money. If the government passes a law which mandates that the insurer *must* cover someone with an already broken arm, then why would anyone ever buy insurance ahead of time? They'd all wait until they had a broken arm and then show up and demand coverage, right? Who wouldn't? And the insurance company goes bankrupt because it can't possibly afford to pay for all those broken arms.

They have to charge more when people do that. The whole point of insurance is that you're supposed to buy it ahead of time to cover you *if* the covered event(s) occurs. There's no way around the cost issue here. The proposal to use government funds to pay for it just makes the government (the taxpayers really) the ones who end out paying for all that extra cost. That's why conservatives opposed this. It's just socialized medicine with a bit of misdirection applied.


At the end of the day, Americans need to decide collectively whether they want the government to just pay for all their health care, or not. Up until now, US citizens have rejected that idea on principle. So sneaking it around the back way isn't really the right thing to do. It's dishonest, and frankly it's designed to make our health care system even less efficient and more expensive. Some of us argue that this is by design. If you make the existing system so bad, then just having the government do it all starts to look better in comparison.

That whole "we're going to punish you if you don't have insurance" thing?

Healthy people without insurance are ******** over the average too, it only really works as a "fair" system if everyone participates (by whichever means) and pools risk. The healthcare bill accomplishes this by decreasing barriers to entry, eliminating forced exclusion once included, decreasing justifications for not entering, and punishing those who don't enter.
Other than the "we trying to put it in in the first place, but got pared down" part?


Conspiracy theorists need to pay more attention to order of events.

Let's say it charges $30 so it can cover it's expenses and make a profit.

Let's say it charges $150 so it can make more of a profit then denies 85% of broken arms to further increase profit. Then let's say that it refuses treatment of a second broken arm based on a lifetime arm break maximum to further increase profit.

Then lets say people frequently die from broken arms.

Then we'd have a Pollyanna best case picture of the current state of managed health care in the US.

Acceptance for a "Medicare like option" was 59-36 in July 2009 (PDF to Kaiser poll). Acceptance for a universal option in which all citizens would be covered by a government plan was essentially the same (58-38).

This is where you start hooting that that poll doesn't count because it didn't use the magic Gbaji language that'd give you the answers you insist are true. I'll let it sit with that since watching you cry about how the polls you disagree with don't count is pretty tedious.

Consistently rejected! A mere 50% support. Boy, I hope no one was undecided because otherwise that would actually be the winning opinion!

Hahaha... so fun :D

Most doctors in Canada operate their own private practice.

But if they all die, or quit smoking who'd buy the tobacco?

I don't think Varus realizes what is meant by "private practice." I think he's confusing that with "private insurance" somehow.

Obviously the majority of people in the US are "pretty small number", you just have to be soo big picture that minorities in the US are an even smaller number of people.

You missed the part where I pointed out the gov. already has specific language to charge them more I take it?