The MPR report on ACA rates raised some hackles amongst readers on Facebook. First up:
If people bail on paying their insurance (required by law, fined if you don’t have it, though the fine is minor at the moment) after expensive treatments, I’d say someone didn’t think through the financial incentives properly. That “someone” would mostly be legislators, but probably corporations involved in health care legislation as well.
People are always going to do what makes the most financial sense for themselves, _especially_ when stressed. Their altruistic, moral choices of following the intent of the law and making sure the system works by full participating (in this example) will be given quick short shrift when they feel like the health care industry and government are both screwing them, and/or they’re in a panic to pay their bills. Economy goes south? To hell with morals, put food on the table by canceling the health care insurance right after that necessary surgery. It’s an obvious choice.
Which tends to speak to single-payer. Next up:
The penalties are not high enough to actually force compliance, but there is no political appetite to raise them. Without full compliance, the pools are too small and full of older, sicker people. So there’s one problem.
Problem 2 was that the insurance industry did not know how to price insurance for sick people, so their initial estimates were way off. They want to recoup that money now. So premiums go up.
Root problem is that we have a for-profit medical services industry and a for-profit insurance industry. So medical services prices go up, with zero oversight or regulation, which raises the cost of medical care. The insurance companies have to pay some portion of that, and their CEOs want $30 million salaries and big stock prices, so the price of insurance goes up.
Which reminds me of the old Mayo Clinic model of rewarding wellness, not procedures. The procedures model works fine when the customer is an expert; a patient is very rarely an expert. Then an answer to my puzzlement:
Oh, Hue, this one: ” people in government health coverage are being steered into the private insurance market because their providers will get paid more that way.” I think that is things like VA services, where there are now some options to use private sector providers. There’s this huge push by the private sector to convince VA users that waiting a couple weeks for an appointment is intolerable so these patients will opt into private providers, who bill the government more than the VA does. I think.
I do know that the GOP has been pushing to privatize the VA. Here’s Steve Benen:
As Rachel notedon the show last night, privatization of veterans’ care is back as a Republican priority, as this Wall Street Journalreport yesterday helped prove.
Donald Trump says the Department of Veterans Affairs’ health-care system is badly broken, and this week his campaign released some guidelines that would steer changes he would implement if he wins the presidency.
While short on details, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee would likely push VA health care toward privatization and might move for it to become more of an insurance provider like Medicare rather than an integrated hospital system, said Sam Clovis, Mr. Trump’s chief policy adviser, in an interview.
Clovis told the newspaper, “We want quality care top to bottom. If that means we have some form of privatization or some form of Medicare, we don’t see anything wrong with that.”
Veterans, however, tend to have a very different opinion on the matter.
An opposing point of view from Accuracy in Media’s Roger Aronoff:
Instead, left-wing pundits such as Steve Benen of MSNBC warn that Republicans are working to privatize the VA. Focusing on a left-wing bogeyman, Benen’s report, although posted and updated on April 19, contains no mention of the GAO report about misleading wait times, the hearing, or the shredding of claims documents. Readers are left to wonder why, exactly, conservatives might wish to privatize the VA. After all, Benen isn’t reporting on any of the department’s problems.
We have reported, time and again that the news media ignore the biggest stories because they prove inconvenient to the left-wing agenda. While Benen writes of a conspiracy to make changes to how the VA offers care, the other half of the story is how the VA is failing veterans right now.
While there may be problems in the VA, the existence of problems does not justify the destruction of an institution with a long and honorable service record, nor the imposition of a solution which comes with its own set of problems. Insofar as Accuracy in Media goes, I’m not sure how far to trust them to be sincere. From their record, according to Wikipedia, they definitely had some troubles with the truth back during the Reagan era – but that was a long time ago. And how much should I trust Wikipedia?
Finally, another reader notes:
Dayton is getting ready to try and step in with a big subsidy.
I also noted in last night’s news broadcast that Minnesota Speaker of the House Daudt has rapidly changed his tune since a few nights ago, when he threw an impressive fit behind the microphone. Now he sounded quite more like … an adult. I wonder if his constituents called with complaints, or if he simply decided there were better ways to accomplish his goals.
