…that don’t ask the right questions. It’s pretty clear that the agenda of these pollsters is to try to persuade us that we actually support the monstrosity that the Dems seem to remain determined to foist on us.
16 thoughts on “Health-Care Polls”
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The problem with Bainbridge’s unasked questions is that they are based on assumptions of what might happen, as opposed to what’s actually in the bill.
I’ve been part of some polls recently, and my insight into the process only served to decrease any faith I had in them. I’m thinking they’ll just get tired of my comments at the end and boot me off their lists eventually…
Forget the polls, we now have a new meme that makes sense; “It’s my health, it’s my choice.” And we now know that having that choice means traveling to a none fascist healthcare system that doesn’t have waiting lines and crude standard medical practices it inflicts on its patients.
The one reform everyone would really like is to remove the preexisting conditions limits on insurance, the problem is this does not work without a mandate requiring everyone to have insurance. So you need to provide the whole picture.
The problem is that this simply won’t work. You’re trying to do one simple thing: tax people who are healthy and at least middle class to pay for the medical care of people who are poor and sick. The problem is that you want to launder the process through the private sector.
Not only is this illegal, but it adds an extra degree of freedom which will increase adverse selection and make an excuse to impose single-payer once it inevitably fails. If the stated goal above was approached through legal channels, not only could the problem be properly addressed, it would also allow for genuine health insurance reform.
I still like my approach. Simplistic, but it at least gets the right framework in place for everyone’s charitable giving or redistributionist tendencies to aim at. By “donate-to-able”, I mean the account has a separate number for ‘deposits’ and ‘withdrawals.’ You could publish your ‘deposits’ number anywhere: bumbersticker, NAACP listing, Church, VFW, union, etc.
1) Mandate insurance companies to return 5% of premiums directly back to a tax-free, inheritable, giftable, donate-to-able, individual medical account.
2) Mandate that every level of service shall have the entire gamut of reasonable deductible levels.
No, individuals still won’t shop when they have anything acute happen. (Note that there’s still a catastrophic coverage plan in place!) But chronic condition spending swamps acute spending. And people will shop for compression stockings, prescriptions, etc.
And many times when I publically disagree with something that’s actually in “the bill”, I’m told that it’s just a proposal, so I can’t know that the portion I oppose will actually become law.
That’s ridiculous.
The problem with Bainbridge’s unasked questions is that they are based on assumptions of what might happen, as opposed to what’s actually in the bill.
After all, the bills might not become law. That’s the only “might” that matters.
The part that’s baffling when discussing this is how unwilling people are to use their own judgment on how things will progress beyond the strict words. The term “Death Panel” gets people up in arms, but beyond the weaseling with the ‘end of life counseling’, there is a section on forming a ‘Fed Like’ commission.
Basically a rationing board. Yes, we have something somewhat similar in the private insurer’s we’ve got – but if they’re acting particularly egregious you get lawsuit-of-century.
Much tougher to do to government, or even pseudo-government.
“The one reform everyone would really like is to remove the preexisting conditions limits on insurance”, said the person who doesn’t understand what insurance is, or what “everyone” really wants.
The problem with Bainbridge’s unasked questions is that they are based on assumptions of what might happen, as opposed to what’s actually in the bill.
That’s based on your assumption that what’s actually in “the bill” (which one, the House version, the Senate version, or what Obama is pushing?) actually has anything to do with economic reality. It doesn’t.
As Obamacare supporter Jim said here:
There are times when a piecemeal approach is better; this isn’t one of them. Health care reform is more like building a stone arch — you can’t just put one stone on another and hope to eventually complete an arch — it will all fall down before you finish.
Similarly, if you stop the insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions (something both parties claim to support), but do nothing else, the insurance companies will have a sicker pool of customers. So they’ll raise their rates, which will drive away the healthiest customers, the ones most likely to think they can make do without insurance. That will make the pool sicker still, and the cycle will continue until there are even fewer people with health insurance than we have now.
So if you are going to require that insurers cover people with pre-existing conditions, you need to do what Romney and Scott Brown did in Massachusetts: require that everyone get insurance. And if you are going to require that everyone get insurance, you have to have subsidies for people who otherwise couldn’t afford it.
How is that different from the questions Bainbridge is asking?
Paul Breed writes:
I’m pretty conservative, but even I think requiring insurers to cover “pre-existing conditions” is not just a good idea, but a requirement of justice. I think it’s fraudulent for an insurer to take your premiums but refuse to cover catastrophic costs because you had some condition before you contracted with them.
Keep in mind the most likely scenario here is not the twenty-something deadbeat who goes uninsured until he breaks an arm, but rather a middle-aged employee whose company switches insurers to mitigate costs and who finds the complications of their diabetes are no longer covered. The “deadbeat” meme is a red herring to keep you from focusing on who benefits from a universal mandate (which is likely unconstitutional anyway).
And I dispute that the lack of an individual mandate would break the system. The “deadbeat” income stream, though likely measurable, would in no significant way mitigate the rising cost of health care for most of us. The reason is that 85-90% of Americans are already covered by some plan or another, and a good portion of those are already in the government plan (Medicare/Medicaid).
You want to control costs? Some Econ 101: a mandate to acquire coverage will increase demand. So premium prices will go up. Having the government cap premiums will drive some insurers under and force others to cut benefits. The decrease in supply will make it easier for insurers to slash benefits and raise deductibles. So insurer profit margins will likely go up under a premium cap. So how do you cut costs? Make the process more efficient and more competitive. Open the insurance market up to nationwide insurers. Sharply curtail the authority of state insurance boards to set policy standards. Force malpractice suits into binding peer-reviewed arbitration instead of the courtroom. Trial lawyers will desert the malpractice arena when it becomes sharply less profitable, doctors will practice less defensive medicine, and insurers will follow.
Of course, this only makes sense if you accept classical (“supply and demand”) economics. Obama is apparently a Marxist and thinks that you get results by ordering them with enough specificity.
Keep in mind the most likely scenario here is not the twenty-something deadbeat who goes uninsured until he breaks an arm, but rather a middle-aged employee whose company switches insurers to mitigate costs and who finds the complications of their diabetes are no longer covered.
That employee’s diabetes is not a preexisting condition in this context.
Several people in CA have had their coverage canceled when they got sick….Insurance co says because they lied about preexisting conditions.
The left wing media says its unrelated….
There is no such thing as unrelated, IE have diabetes and your much more likely to have heart disease….
The best way to resolve this is make it a national market.
Require the contract to not exceed 1 page of non lawyer ease and
let the market sort it out.
The problem with Bainbridge’s unasked questions is that they are based on assumptions of what might happen, as opposed to what’s actually in the bill.
That’s backwards. The problem is that the wording of the poll questions assumes the legislation will do what its proponents say it will do. But there is no reason to expect that this will be the case. So the poll questions are inherently loaded and the answers don’t accurately reflect popular opinon.
The whole thing is a scam. The proponents try to bury the details so people won’t see what’s going on, and they keep changing the details. Then, when opponents argue against the bill in general terms, proponents say that opponents can’t fairly criticize it without citing specifics.
Several people in CA have had their coverage canceled when they got sick….Insurance co says because they lied about preexisting conditions.
FWIW, I’m sure several people did lie about preexisting conditions. California is a big state with a lot of insurance and worker’s comp fraud.