Guaranteed - Why Obama's plan will not work
I already discussed economic guru Paul Krugman's statement that Obama's plan leaves 15 million US citizens lacking affordable medicare. The thing is, I believe Krugman isn't right. And here is why :
His plan relies on folks voluntarily purchasing medical insurance or signing up for public health programs in order to receive medical care. Obama combines this with a couple of fascinating twists. First is a remit that health insurers must accept all comers, in any case of how well or how sick they are. 2nd is that insurers must cover existing conditions.
okay, so here's a question : with a remit like these, why would anyone voluntarily join health insurance *before* they got sick? I mean, health care insurance is pricey, right? So then the healthcare death spiral that I discussed back in September 2007 kicks in. As healthy people back out of paying for medicare, that means the leftover folks finish up paying more, which causes more folks to drop out, which causes health insurance insurance to become more expensive, and then yet more people drop out. 15% of the nation's GDP is tied up in health care today, and sick people do not generate 15% of the nation's GDP. There just ain't no'there' there.
in short , without a mandate that healthy people subsidize the care of sick people, there's no universal health care, just a lot of dead sick people. Now, Obama adds a slick little move to his health care plan -- a'reinsurer pool' sponsored by the governing body that takes the sickest of the sick off of the health insurance insurance company's rolls -- but I do not know that this would end the death spiral that otherwise results from mandating that insurers accept all comers, but not mandating that everyone buy insurance. When I work the numbers, Obama's plan simply doesn't work -- the health care insurance death spiral gets even worse.
The point I have been making all along, is that unless *everybody* is needed to participate either thru purchasing private insurance or participating in a public program ( and remember, at least 5,000,000 of the uninsured *CURRENTLY QUALIFY FOR PUBLIC INSURANCE PROGRAMS*, they've just never gotten around to signing up ), we finish up with a system where only sick people pay -- and, in the final analysis, with a lot of dead folk. Without mandates, we finish up with dead people. Krugman is an optimist. Krugman sees 15 million uninsured. I see a heap more, if Obama's plan were passed as-is -- which, of course, it won't be, since as a plan this would have such terrifying effects that when the CBO works the numbers the whole Congress would flinch in horror and send it to the shredder.
- http://obama-healthcare-issues.blogspot.com/
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