ObamaCare health insurance will only work if healthy young
people join.
If that is true then why does Medicare work, all the participants
are older, at least 65 years of age, still Medicare is working very well,
Medicare premiums are lower, benefits are better and every retired person is
covered. The answer is in the math, for Obamacare to work a large number of
people need to sign up. As long as there are a large number of members it will
work, all the members can be sick or well or any mixture of the two. Insurance
is risk sharing by a large pool of members; actuarial science is often counter
intuitive, as is true of most scientifically sound statistics.
ObamaCare will change the American health care system.
ObamaCare will certainly change the health insurance
industry. The previous business model for the insurance corporation was simple,
collect premiums, and then deny claims. The industry had developed a collection
of highly profitable practices. Preexisting conditions, rescission (a legal
method of undoing a contract), cherry picking by forced selling to employed
citizens (did you really have any choice as an employee?), annual and life-time
maximums, these are just some of the highly profitable health insurance
business practices. The ACA law forbids or seriously restricts all these
practices. The insurance industry will have to go back to the old fashion
practice of actuarial science. The health insurance industry will remain profitable;
the proof of this projection is visible everyday on the public stock market.
I’ve profited by owning the Medicines Company (symbol MDCO) and Covidien PLC
(symbol COV), and I still own shares of MDCO. For anyone claiming that the
health care industry will be destroyed I will point to the world’s stock market
exchanges, and then ask for proof of their claim judged against the open
market’s evaluation. The stock markets are reacting to a free market health care
system with government mandated rules. This is the same as car insurance or
mortgage insurance. America will be the only example of this system; the other
advanced nations have chosen true government run health care systems, with
private insurance available on the margin.
There will be shortages of Doctors and facilities.
I guess all the Doctors are going to quite medicine and become welders, maybe hospitals will be converted to shopping malls, or maybe since we all have insurance, we will start grapping snakes with bare hands, or diving freeways in reverse. I can’t predict for certain but I think not. Any shortage of Doctors (or Engineers, or Car Mechanics) is due to an artificial shortage of educational opportunities.
I could easily go on and on about the politically motivated
claims of the right wing, however the consistent theme is massive misinformation.
This is a surprising paradox, the Tea Party types I know spend a lot of time
informing themselves. They read a lot, they meet and discuss issues, and they
profess commitment to logic and facts, so why are they so misinformed? This is
a clear case of a self reinforcing believe system, they start with the answer
then find “facts” to support their beliefs. This still leaves a paradox, the
Tea Party types are generally intelligent, well educated and willing to study.
I guess that with over 300 million Americans you can find a few hundred
thousand of anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment