14 thoughts on “Obamacare”

1. Obamacare creates a lot of new bureaucracy, thus adding new costs to the health insurance industry. Obamacare was sold as a cost-reducing act. How is it supposed to reduce costs?

2. Oh, and my health insurance deductible tripled as a result of Obamacare. My 2010 BCBS high-deductible plan had a 1K deductible. In 2011 it went up to 3K. (The change was announced in October 2010, shortly before the election. October Surprise.) When do I see cost savings?

3. Birth Control, Sterilization, and now Death Panels. Anyone note a trend?

   1. Trends? Trends are racist!

4. Alan Henderson:

   You came HERE? To a primarily space-related website to get advice on your medical insurance?

   Not as a physician, but as a friend — a would-be friend — let me offer one friendly suggestion: Start smoking something else.

   Now. Obamacare doesn’t add that much “new bureaucracy” since the folks who administer Medicare and Medicaid are already in place. Okay, there’ll be some new offices and some new people, but presumably in bearable quantities. We’re talking about adding 40 million people to the health insurance rolls, after all, so it stands to reason there’ll be some administrative expansion.

   How’s it going to reduce costs? Quantity discounts? Here’s a thought: you’ve got a disease which pops up now and then — chronic bonchitis, say, which leads to pneumonia every three or four months if not treated, And you’re broke, so you follow Mitt Romney’s advice and go to the Emergency Room when you’re really damned sick and they hospitalize you for 2-4 days at about 10,000 bucks a day and fix you up. For another three or four months. Which the taxpayers pay for since YOU ARE BROKE. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Here’s another idea: you’ve got Medicare or Medicaid, so you chew up a 100 bucks of taxpayer funds every couple of months seeing a physician on a regular basis who prescribes various medications which cost you about a hundred bucks a month and probably cost the taxpayers about four hundred a month. You aren’t going into the hospital anymore, so overall you’re better off, the hospital is better off, and even the sadly abused taxpayers are better off.

   Understand that? Let me mention that I’m broke and have chronic bronchitis and that this is not a wholly imaginary example. Giving people something like “normal” medical care really can be cheaper than yelling them to suck it up until they have to crawl into an emergency room.

   Next point. Obamacare has a notion that medical records might well be computerized and sort of follow you around, so a doctor in Maine can check out your allergic responses to medicines just by tapping some keys on a computer rather than relying on your possibly faulty memory. Somethjing like the way your credit history follows you around. Imagine that. Anyhow, if the idea works, it just might save some money and maybe some lives.

   One more idea, and it’s a big one, Obamacare delivers something like 40 million new customers to medical insurance providers, and while it’s a lot of fun to point to this patient and that who will cost more than their premiums, most of these folks won’t. So the insurance companies aren’t going to be able to charge all these people what they’d really like to charge for insurance — the government’s going to shove some lower amount down their throats and the insurance companies will — let us all hope! — decide that are making a small profit from all these new customers and that that is preferable to making nothing at all.

   There are some other cost saving notions — the bill was 2000 pages long, for G*** sake! — but I think that’s the main notion. The government is trying to use the insurance companies so Obamacare recipients get the same kind of treatment as ordinary folks. But at the same time, it’s trying to push the insurance premium costs down on the grounds that it’s providing a really large number of new clients. Hey — tough bargaining over insurance costs is something conservatives regularly recommend.

   What next? Your deductable went up, and you blame it on Obama. I paid attention to my insurance costs all thru the 2000’s and my deductable kept going up as well. I couldn’t blame it on Obama — heck, I hadn’t even heard of Obama most of that time — and it didn’t seem fair to blame George Bush. So I eventually decided — with a little help from various economists’ blogs — that medical costs and thus medical insurance costs were rising faster than the overall inflation rate, and that the office manager who purchased health insurance for people working in that office was engaged in an annual battle with insurance providers, which usually resulted in health insurance premiums going up while benefits went a bit … south. I sat about five feet from the office manager for about ten years and I gotta tell you she discussed the situation rather frequently.

   But that’s me, and I’m sure my circumstances were quite unusual. Your insurance costs have gone up and it’s all due to Obama, and that’s pretty darn normal, isn’t it.

   And watch what you’re smoking, hmmm?

   1. so you follow Mitt Romney’s advice and go to the Emergency Room

      I’m glad you put that little nugget relatively high up. Saved me some time. Whatever you’re smoking, keep it up.

   2. This has never been a “primarily space-related web site.”

   3. mike, a cost saving measure is a measure that saves costs. Let’s start with the first one.

      Here’s a thought: you’ve got a disease which pops up now and then — chronic bonchitis, say, which leads to pneumonia every three or four months if not treated, And you’re broke, so you follow Mitt Romney’s advice and go to the Emergency Room when you’re really damned sick and they hospitalize you for 2-4 days at about 10,000 bucks a day and fix you up. For another three or four months. Which the taxpayers pay for since YOU ARE BROKE.

      You could pay for your treatment instead. Even if you go the “Romney-recommended” emergency route, it’s your money spent not the taxpayers. But let’s say that you decide to use that fatty mass on top of your neck and think for a change. Then you go a cheaper route and get treatment that fits your budget. Or you could just forgo treatment.

      If everyone did that sort of decision-making, then I imagine doctors and other medical practitioners would have to charge less in order to attract business. And that in turn would be less “BROKE” people.

      Here’s another idea: you’ve got Medicare or Medicaid, so you chew up a 100 bucks of taxpayer funds every couple of months seeing a physician on a regular basis who prescribes various medications which cost you about a hundred bucks a month and probably cost the taxpayers about four hundred a month. You aren’t going into the hospital anymore, so overall you’re better off, the hospital is better off, and even the sadly abused taxpayers are better off.

      Another case where paying for your medical care helps the taxpayer out.

      Next point. Obamacare has a notion that medical records might well be computerized and sort of follow you around, so a doctor in Maine can check out your allergic responses to medicines just by tapping some keys on a computer rather than relying on your possibly faulty memory. Somethjing like the way your credit history follows you around. Imagine that. Anyhow, if the idea works, it just might save some money and maybe some lives.

      Why would it save money? There’s plenty of examples where computerizing records vastly inflates the cost of some activity. We already know the government, especially the Obama administration, is going to optimize this process for benefit to its campaign donors and political allies.

      Second, why give the federal government yet more power over our lives? If the federal government doesn’t have access to these records (as in no possible way to get access to these records rather than merely some flimsy promise that it won’t peek), then it can’t use that information against us.

      Obamacare delivers something like 40 million new customers to medical insurance providers

      Obamacare creates and massively subsidizes demand for medical services and insurance? Costs go up. No brainer here. And we just lost the ability and freedom to self-insure ourselves (the so-called “uninsured” case).

      There are some other cost saving notions — the bill was 2000 pages long, for G*** sake!

      Suuuure. Translation: “It just had to be packed with cost saving notions because I drunk the kool aid!” Ever consider that 2000 pages is much too long for any sort of health care reform, but just long enough to hide all sorts of pork?

      So I eventually decided — with a little help from various economists’ blogs — that medical costs and thus medical insurance costs were rising faster than the overall inflation rate, and that the office manager who purchased health insurance for people working in that office was engaged in an annual battle with insurance providers, which usually resulted in health insurance premiums going up while benefits went a bit … south. I sat about five feet from the office manager for about ten years and I gotta tell you she discussed the situation rather frequently.

      There’s a solution here. Stop being an idiot. First, you have employer mandated health care which is subsidized by the federal government (as a tax write off). Get rid of that subsidy and you’ve already put US health care in line with the costs of French health care (a similar insurance-based system and rather expensive in its own right). Then there’s the matter of what sort of health care is being mandated by the federal government. For example, a government agency mandated that employer-based insurance cover birth control for free even though that wasn’t required by law nor is most other health care similarly free. Obamacare is helping create a nation of men not laws where what you have to do is a whim of some unelected official. My view is that the huge health care inflation over the past half century is mostly due to government interference.

      It does still amaze me that people can look at something like Obamacare and its two thousand pages of corruption and uncritically support it without even bothering to look at what it actually does.

   4. And people keep talking about how now they don’t have to go to the emergency room and get to go to the doctor instead. Uh, all those doctors are going to be in group health medical centers that have waiting rooms that feel an awfully like, emergency rooms…

   5. it’s trying to push the insurance premium costs down on the grounds that it’s providing a really large number of new clients.

      That’s interesting: adding demand lowers costs.

      Obamacare has a notion that medical records might well be computerized and sort of follow you around,… Somethjing [sic] like the way your credit history follows you around.

      Oh goodie, comparing access to your medical records to the same access debt collectors have! What could go wrong? Good thing government computer systems never get hacked.

      1. No, there shouldn’t be a vast online medical database fashioned after TransUnion, Experian and Equifax. My medical records with a particular doctor should have a form listing my other doctors; when that medical record is updated the updates should be sent to the other doctors by fax or email.

   6. mike shupp,

      You must be new here – and must not have read the post title.

      You assume that socialized health insurance will incentivize people to engage in preventative medicine sufficiently to significantly reduce the number of the more expensive medical procedures that maintenance is supposed to prevent, and thus bring down the overall cost of (largely nationalized) medical insurance. If that were the case, then why doesn’t this happen under any other socialized health insurance systems? Why are none of these systems solvent?

      Something to consider is the possibility that routine maintenance has artificial costs imposed on them. Why does it cost more for a technician to put you under a giant electromagnet to take some pictures than it does for a surgeon to carve your cornea LASIK? And that’s not including the 500 bucks for doctors to interpret those MRI scans. I think the reason is that hospitals get hit with a lot of expenses that would not occur if the medical industry were run sanely, and as a result they are forced to charge excessive fees.

      Bringing down medical costs does not mean taking the Conquistador approach and make somebody else pay the bill. (Redistributionism is rapidly running out of figurative Aztecs to loot.) It means bringing down the costs of medical procedures, administrative requirements, and medical education.

      “What next? Your deductable went up, and you blame it on Obama.” You better believe it, bucko. I’ve watched health care provisions erode, but nothing as drastic as TRIPLING OF THE DEDUCTIBLE has ever happened. Some extraordinary event relative to the health insurance industry happened in 2010, something that led Blue Cross/Blue Shield to significantly lessen its coverage. If not Obamacare, what was it?

   7. Mike,

      Isn’t it always nice when folks put words into your mouth and make bogus arguements in their responses? But that is par for the course for many of the folks on this web site. I find that a lot of conservatives consider things looking at an ‘ideal’ world instead of reality. Your example of what is a better option – going to the emergency room versus getting treatment is legitimate. The reality is that some people aren’t going to pay either way. I’d rather go the cheaper route with getting them treatment. Not that I like people not paying their own way but that is the world we live in now.

      The main reason insurance keeps going up is that people are living a lot longer and the treatment options are much more extensive as well as expensive. It is incredible how much some of these life saving measures cost and the medical industry spreads these costs across everything so even check-ups and simple procedures, end up being expensive. And that is a catch 22 – even check-ups aren’t affordable now for many folks. I don’t have the option either of going to another supplier because the medical industry does not operate like a free market (and hasn’t for decades) so I don’t agree this should be pinned on Obamacare.

      The only way to come up with a real solution, which we, as a society, have failed to address, is figuring out when enough is enough. Costs will continue to go up and up.

      I find it interesting about the flak with free birth control.

5. It’s a sign of how short-sighted people are. The liberals are just fine and dandy with Obamacare now that the Dem’s have their hands on the levers of power. But they all seem to fail to grasp the consequences of this overreaching power and control over our lives when someone they don’t necessarily agree with gets put in charge. All of the liberal policies fall into this short sighted trap. Even Obama goes onto Letterman and says the debt, of which he doesn’t know how much there is of exactly, doesn’t matter in the short term because its just a long term problem. In other words, 16 trillion dollars in debt isn’t his problem so he’s not going to worry about it.

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