Did you know…The Obamacare ruling allows the IRS to tax you 1% of adjusted gross income, but no less than $95 per adult/$47.50 per child in 2013. These taxes rise in 2015 and 2016. For more, see Obamacare Taxes.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/what-is-obamacare/274509/ (Leans to the pro side)
http://obamacarefacts.com/whatis-obamacare.php (Pro side)
http://useconomy.about.com/od/healthcarereform/f/What-Is-Obama-Care.htm (factual and neutral)
The above links are mostly just the basic facts that you need to know about Obama Care and what most people don’t know. I suggest you take a look. The chart above should encourage you.
Government intervention has caused our healthcare to go up. If ours is higher than other countries its because those countries have single payer systems where care is rationed to hold costs down. When that happens cancer patients have to wait months to see a specialist and people needing knee replacement are stuck on a waiting list for months.
In tytpical progressive fashion the link to Kaiser “explains” how the conservatives attempt to scare people about the rationing body that will be created under Obumblecare:
I believe that’s called projection: saying others do what you yourself commonly do.
The sneaking tyrannical Pelosi, Reid, Obama, have created a healthcare law that will destroy private insurance leaving every single American a single choice, government sponsored insurance…they call it single payer. The government is set up to destroy the private insurance market to create a government MONOPOLY! Private sector companies that attempt to form monopolies are stopped by the federal government because it is bad for consumers!!!!!
Why is it bad for consumers? Because a monopoly has no competition and competition helps to keeps prices low as companies must compete for your avor and dollars!
The site Jack referred us to has information you can use…this is the law…but be forewarned… it also contains biased opinion and spin that misrepresents the way Obamacare will impact our healthcare and its costs and ignores some of the already negative aspects of implementation.
“The affordable Care Act”, Affordable? Ha!, and how many pages now of a crap law are there because of its so flawed to the core? I read over seven feet high. Hey you environmentalists your people, they killed a tree for NOTHING!
We needed a heath care over-haul that had 5 things items to benefit us;
1-Pre-existing coverage
2-limits on Malpractice suits
3-Coverage good anywhere you are
4-Competition in prices Nation wide
5- A “COBRA” like clause for extended benefits.
Those 5 problems were the issues affecting health care premiums and coverage.
But What we got crammed down our throats was a law, now a tax (?) so depleted of thought and good work, that it only serves to glorify its namesake, “Obama” Who had no input in this leaderless cobbled POS legislation what so ever! and passed by the Liberal party who passed it with no real understanding of its contents.
Today, It is nothing more than another tax on the overburdened tax payer, employers, and soon the youth of our country are going to feel its impact on their wallet as well.
Poor law by maybe the worst Congress in History, who excluded themselves so they will not have to participate in the bitter pill they created. NICE WORK Congress!
I hope that America wakes up in 2014 and stays awake through 2016 and realizes the need for real leadership from either party. Reed, Schumer, McConnell Boehner, Feinstein and others need to be retired, but mostly Pelosi and Boxer definatly need to be replaced. What we need is representatives willing to put their skin in the game, and not so much coin in their pockets.
“2-limits on Malpractice suits’
California was the first state to enact medical tort reform and limits on malpractice lawsuits. It was signed into law back in 1974 by Governor Jerry Brown.
One of the principal myths surrounding medical malpractice is its effect on overall health care costs. Medical malpractice is actually a tiny percentage of health care costs, in part because medical malpractice claims are far less frequent than many people believe. In 2004, the CBO calculated malpractice costs amounted to “less than 2 percent of overall health care spending. Thus, even a reduction of 25 percent to 30 percent in malpractice costs would lower health care costs by only about 0.4 percent to 0.5 percent, and the likely effect on health insurance premiums would be comparably small.” http://www.justice.org/cps/rde/justice/hs.xsl/8686.htm
http://truecostofhealthcare.org/malpractice
http://www.medmalfacts.com/facts-and-myths/
Jack the medmalfacts link above is confusing. The page you link to seems to suggest tort reform is unnecessary because lawsuits don’t drive up costs by very much. But another page contains the following which suggests a need for tort reform across the nation:
The conclusion here is ridiculous for most doctors! If a doctor can be assured that his liability has been reduced (his exposure/risk lessened) he will not perceive the same need to prescribe extra services to cover himself. Doctors are not morons.
The biggest benefit to patients however would be to young mothers to be. OB/GYN docs are among the most frequently sued and have some of the the highest premium cost. Many are choosing to restrict their practices to Gynecology only.
The real damage of frivolous malpractice suits is largely hidden. The real cost is in extra tests or treatments. They make this decision based on risk management or fear rather than good medicine…what the patient actually needs. That is where the cost for care is unnecessarily driven higher.
Tina, I was just trying to give a broad spectrum of fact/opinion from various degrees of left and right. Take what you will from it. There’s some good and some I totally disagree with.
My own opinion is after reading a number of healthcare cost articles from the left and right, is that tort reform is always a nice idea, but it represents such a small portion of medical insurance costs we would be better served to focus on reforming the bigger costs.
Doctors in the USA are better paid than anywhere else in the world and by a pretty wide margin. That great pay is an incentive for more people to become doctors and for existing doctors from other countries to come here. But, it also has an impact on what we pay for office visits, surgeries, insurance etc. My belief is that docs have priced their sugical services about 20-30% higher than is fair and reasonable even for our high priced medical market place. Routine exams and office visits are probably a bit high too. At the heart of this is a price fixing. I’ve never seen competitive bidding in medicine. Seems like they almost always charge exactly the same price like they were in a medical union. Not sure how we deal with that one, but there is bloat in the pay scales for doctors IMHO.
R & D in America costs more than anywhere else, but then we also have more breakthru medicine than any other single country that I’m aware of. However, one could argue that at least half of the R & D is just redesigning what already exists. The so-called new stuff provides a very marginal benefit over the old stuff. Those drugs are no longer patent protected and of course they are much cheaper. So, there’s big money to made by redesigning old drugs and calling them new and improved. Mfgs market them on TV and they sell direct to the patient…that’s wrong. This gets into defensive medicine where docs are pressured to given the patient what they saw on TV, because the ad has them convinced this is a wonder drug even though the docs know its not. Pushing the latest form of Prozac, etc., is running up the medical bills and I oppose those TV ads. Thats no way to practice medicine and sell cures.
Unnecessary high technology also plays a part in the cost. For exmple, a hospital spending a million dollars for a computer assisted robotic surgical device is more apt to want to use it to recoup their money, but evidence suggests traditional surgical methods are just as good. Lots of money spent in the name of high tech that hasn’t been proven to be that beneficial.
Government is to blame too, when you start looking at the laws controlling the insurance industry you find many of them were written by lobbyists for the insurance industry! How could this ever be a good idea? This has kept competition out of California and added unecessary coverage to policies that drive up costs and improve the insurance companies bottom line.
And lastly, we the people, are more to blame more than anyone else! For example, lets say poor ol Grandma is brain dead and has been for a year, but the family can’t bring themselves to pull the plug. They might, if they were paying to keep her alive. But, in most cases they’re not paying a darn dime, it’s all on the taxpayers. Families like this also get in the way of doctors recommendations, as if they knew more than the attending and this results all kinds of costs charged back to medical or medicare. Then consider that we have the boomers, a huge number of people coming of advanced age and most are out of shape and overweight. They arrive with major health problems and that costs big $$$$$$. Modern medicine can keep them alive long after the experation date. Letting go and allowing natural death is one area of medicine represents huge costs and we are so unrealistic about how to deal with it.
Forbes magazine had an article that proved that less than 5% of the patients resulted in costing us 50% of our available healthcare dollars. According to one study (Banarto, McClellan, Kagy and Garber, 2004), 30% of all Medicare expenditures are attributed to the 5% of beneficiaries that die each year, with 1/3 of that cost occurring in the last month of life. Is that worth it?
Jim, Brown’s politics have always been quixotic in nature but now and then he manages to hit on a solid idea. It’s one of the things Brown actually did right.
Which reminds me. One of the links above was written by a California doctor. Of course his insurance premiums, and those of his fellow doctors in California, are low…tort reform HAS been enacted in California.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-d-braunstein-md/medical-malpractice_b_1761443.html