Guaranteed - Why Obama's plan will not work, look for the Obama Healthcare Plan Summary.
I already mentioned that Obama's plan leaves 15 million US citizens lacking affordable medicare. The main thing is, I suspect Krugman is wrong . My analysis is that Obama's plan leaves most US people uninsured in the end.
His plan relies on folk voluntarily purchasing medical insurance or signing up for public health programs to receive medical care. The final remit in Obama's plan is a mandate that health insurers are not permitted to drop folks from their rolls at renewal time.
O.K, so here's a question: with a remit like these, why would anyone voluntarily sign up for healthcare insurance *before* they got sick? I mean, health care insurance is pricey, right? So then the healthcare death spiral that I discussed back in Sep 2007 kicks in. As healthy people back out of paying for medicare, that means the leftover folks end up paying more, which causes more folks to drop out, which causes healthcare insurance to become more expensive, and then yet more people drop out.
The end result is that only sick folk end up paying for medicare -- which is not a viable choice, as the small proportion of sick folk simply can't pay for current levels of medicare. 15% of the nation's GDP is tied up in health care today, and sick folk do not generate 15% of the nation's GDP.
briefly without a mandate that healthy people subsidize the care of sick folk, there's no universal health care, just lots of dead sick folk. The medical care insurance industry is in a death spiral, merely a slow one because currently they can kick the sickest folks off their rolls. that takes the sickest of the sick off the health insurance insurance company's rolls -- but I'm not sure that this would end the death spiral that otherwise results from mandating that insurers accept all comers, but not mandating that everyone buy insurance.
The point I've been making all along, is that unless *everybody* is needed to participate either thru buying private insurance or participating in a public program ( and remember, at least 5 million of the uninsured *CURRENTLY QUALIFY FOR PUBLIC INSURANCE PROGRAMS*, they've just never gotten around to signing up ), we end up with a system where only sick folk pay -- and, in the end, with a lot of dead folk. Without remits, we end up with dead folk. I see a heap more, if Obama's plan were passed as-is -- which, naturally, it won't be, since as a plan this would have such horrific effects that when the CBO works the numbers the entire Congress would flinch in horror and send it to the shredder.
http://obama-healthcare-issues.blogspot.com/
http://obama-healthcare-plan-summary.blogspot.com/
http://obama-healthcare-info148.blogspot.com/
http://obama-healthcare-information.blogspot.com/
http://obama-healthcare-issues148.blogspot.com/
http://obama-healthcare-issues.blogspot.com/
.
