Tia came home for lunch and announced that our yearly health check for our health insurance has been canceled. Each year, we get our blood pressure, weight, cholesterol, and some other things checked. If everything falls into the healthy range, we get a discount off the monthly premium. If something is out of line, we can still get the discount if we work with a health coach to correct the problem. It was a savings of about $37 a month per person so by taking care of ourselves we were saving about $75 a month.
Were.
You see, along with all other great money saving tactics that are quickly becoming our new and improved health care "solution", Tia's insurance company is doing away with the program. There isn't going to be any discount for healthy people. I suppose that once it's a law that you can't drop the insurance, there's no point in trying to do things to keep the healthy people in your system. It's not like we'll be able to drop the insurance just because it's too expensive.
So far in the last two months, her insurance company has raised the premium, raised the deductible, and now gotten rid of the healthy incentive program. I don't know if I can afford to have the government make my health insurance any more affordable.
This has been the most interesting part the new health insurance bill to me. The cost is going to go up and people are going to be forced to participate, whether they can afford it or not, or they face the threat of a fine (where will that money come from?). The government is going to chip in and help people who can't afford it (where will that money come from?). How will they decide who can afford the premiums? I'll bet that a lot of people end up breaking this law.
Another interesting aspect is that there will probably be a battle down the road between the government and the insurance companies. I think the insurance companies are being lured into a trap blinding by their greed or arrogant in their belief to control the congressional puppets. Whether or not there is a public option at the outset, there will be one eventually. Costs are going to go up and people are going to demand that the government fix it. This will lead to a public option. It won't work of course and it will require further laws to try to fix it and eventually the insurance companies will have to become part of the government under a single payer solution.
I'm sure they realize this going into the deal and it's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out.
For now, there won't be much for us to do but grit our teeth and hang on for the ride.
It's too bad our system is so corrupt. We aren't even allowed to ask the right questions in order to get to the right answers. Our saintly politicians are asking themselves how they can get everyone in the country access to health insurance (while increasing profits for some parts of the sector and not decreasing profits for other parts).
If, instead, we were allowed to ask how we can make health care more affordable, things would be different. Unfortunately, we know many of the answers and they would all hurt the bottom lines of the biggest lobbying factions in DC. This obviously can't be allowed.
If we followed a whole host of good decisions (like removing restrictions on the number of medical colleges, allowing people lower on the medical scale (PA, RN, etc) to perform more functions, got rid of the FDA, lifted prescription monopolies, capped lawsuits, and on and on), we could probably reduce medical costs to 10% of what they are now.
There is a hospital in India that is doing heart surgery at a cost that is 10% of what it is in America so it's possible.
Can you imagine that? What if a doctor visit was the equivalent of today's copay? How many people could afford to go to the doctor? You wouldn't have to put a gun to peoples' heads and make them pay $15,000 a year for insurance while subsidizing the people that don't have that kind of money. Just about anyone would be able to afford medical care and how much cheaper would it be to subsidize the people that couldn't afford it?
If insurance premiums were $1,500 a year instead of $15,000, do you think we would see a reversal in the trend of businesses dropping insurance? Many companies would probably pick up the entire tab as a perk for their employees. Self employed people would be able to afford coverage.
It would be such a different world and this whole debate that's going on now would be moot. Instead we have to deal with government enforced corporatism. It will all change someday though. We just have to let enough people feel enough pain. The pain of not changing has to outweigh the fear of changing. I think our government is up to the task though, don't you?
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