In the midst of the heated debate concerning the health care reform, many problems are arising with the policies that are being proposed. Currently it seems that politicians care more about reforming how to pay for all of these health care changes, and it has become a political game in which politicians care more about expanding their popularity than doing what is right for our country. An article in the New York times called, Current Health Care Legislation Will Not control Medical Costs, Experts Warn, helps explain some issues surrounding the health care bill being proposed.
If the health care bill is passed one effect will be that insurance companies can no longer exclude patients with preexisting conditions. As a result, a lot more people who are sick are going to get insurance coverage. However, the insurance business has an adverse selection. In order to allow more sick people to have coverage, insurance companies also need to have a lot of healthy patients. These healthier patients help balance the expenses for the sick patients, but many younger, healthy people do not have health insurance because they believe it is unlikely that they will need it.
At first, congress was going make those who choose not to be covered pay a fee, but now politicians are going to make it easier for healthier people to opt out of insurance. These politicians probably know that this creates financial issues for insurance companies, but they do not care because their main concern is maintaining their popularity so they will get re-elected in the future. This in fact does create a huge problem for insurance companies because they need healthy participants to help subsidize the costs for the people who are sick with preexisting conditions. As a result, insurance companies are going to be forced to insure more people who are sick, and insurance coverage prices will raise for those who are healthy and also currently insured. This is because the insurance companies will need to compensate for the costs of the unhealthy recipients, and they will relay the costs onto the healthy recipients. As the article explains, the biggest problem facing the majority of Americans is geared toward those who already have insurance because the prices will increase.
Do you think this is fair? Are there other ways to help balance these costs, or will medical costs expand no matter what policies are implemented?
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I think this a very interesting article and a huge problem that Congress and taxpayers will face. There is no correct way to solve this problem, but I think everyone should be taxed some amount of money in order for the reform to work. If there are healthy people who are able to opt out, yes it's great for them, but they are creating a problem. I think this idea can be closely related to public education taxes. Everyone, minus public school teachers, have to pay a tax for education regardless of whether or not their kids go to private or public school, or even if the person actually has kids. This way everyone has an equal opportunity to benefit from public education and is forced to help sponsor public education. The same should be done with the health care reform where everyone should be taxed X amount of dollars.
ReplyDeleteAnother way to solve the issue of providing health care to people with preconditions is to put a cap on the total amount of medical aid they can receive. Caps are very bad and people are immediately bothered by the notion of capping funds, but if they're trying to keep health care balanced, a cap will have to put in place somewhere.