skippy the bush kangaroo: why the health insurance reform was rigged

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

why the health insurance reform was rigged

from the beginning. (youtube posted october 11, 2009)

yeah..."thanks" liz fowler.

Even the medical billing workers probably don’t like the new legislation. Doubt they’d see any benefits from it anyway.

Labels: corporations, democrats, lobbyists, public health democrats, youtube

posted by Cookie Jill at 10:33 PM |

1 Comments:

That said, health insurers aren't happy with this bill at all. The big problem to them is that there's no teeth to the mandate -- scared of the possibility of headlines about the IRS sending armed goons in to seize the homes and cars of people who refuse to buy insurance or pay the healthcare tax, the Senate gutted the IRS's enforcement power for the healthcare tax -- they can assess you the tax, they can withhold the money from any refunds due to you, but they're explicitly prohibited from doing tax liens / foreclosures / seizures. The problem is that you can't have a must-cover mandate on insurers without having a must-carry mandate on individuals -- otherwise only sick people will buy health insurance, and while sick people use 16% of the U.S. GDP for healthcare, sick people only make 3% or so of U.S. GDP, i.e., you end up with no insurance industry and a lot of dead people.

In other words, the insurers shot themselves in the foot by gutting the public option out of the bill, because that was the one thing that could have gotten the IRS full enforcement power over the mandate -- having the IRS seize your home at gunpoint for the benefit of Blue Cross is a PR nightmare, but if a public option existed, that removes the "IRS enforcing profits for private health insurers!" PR nightmare. Not that it matters too much, in the end. The insurers never were the real problem causing health care costs to spiral out of control, otherwise the uninsured -- who presumably can shop for the least expensive health care and have most motivation to do so -- would pay less for their healthcare than the insured do. Except that's not true. In the end the private insurers are like mall cops trying to stop Central Park muggers who are saying "your money, or your life". They need to be regulated because in their attempts to deal with the muggers (health care providers who say "your money or your life" -- the big money is in treatments for life-threatening illnesses where individuals are told exactly that) they're spewing bullets all over the place and harming innocent bystanders, but the whole cost thing isn't caused by them, and they shouldn't be blamed for it.

- Badtux the Healthcare Economics Penguin

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