Random health quotes:
Random health quotes:
'people are "increasingly comfortable trading a greater choice of hospitals or doctors for a health plan that costs significantly less money." '
No they aren't. They are being forced to do so and resigned to choosing that over no health insurance, at all. Realistically, there should be a good equivalence of hospital care and in-office medical care so under, say, 95% of circumstances, you will get good care no matter where you go or from whom it's gotten. Acting as if that other 5% doesn't matter, though, is foolish. If only because 5% of all health encounters, or 5% of health care utilizing population are rather large actual numbers of people.
Besides, what happened to open markets and so forth determining the best and least costly, etc.? Surely, if you believe in unfettered markets for everything else, you believe people should be able to vote for their healthcare with their feet?
Further, insurance companies are businesses. They have always used their considerable leverage to their advantage. What is to prevent them from using this to put even more pressure on doctors and hospitals to take whatever the insurance company is willing to give them, or not be included in their plans? If more and more people are going to be covered by the type of insurance being developed specifically under the ACA, won't doctors and hospitals have to see these patients? How will they then be able to argue that the insurance isn't paying them enough to stay in business?
Or will we see what happened with Medicaid? The payments were so low that many places refused to see Medicaid patients, because at the end of the day, they were effectively paying for the privilege of seeing them, never mind getting paid to see them. And Medicaid is where a lot of people going through the exchanges are being placed.
It's probably not a large number of people, but we've been seeing more and more "concierge" care. Programs where people pay what can be large amounts of money out of pocket to get better access, or more personalized attention. Which is a more divided health care system where fewer people are wealthy enough to access the best possible care. I'm pretty sure that was not supposed to be the point of the ACA. We were supposed to be bringing everyone up to the best supportable level of care, not bringing everyone down to the cheapest.
So if you want to say that more people are accepting going back to the past when you were limited to as to whom you could see and where you could go, I would accept those semantics. But don't try to tell me people are comfortable.
'people are "increasingly comfortable trading a greater choice of hospitals or doctors for a health plan that costs significantly less money." '
No they aren't. They are being forced to do so and resigned to choosing that over no health insurance, at all. Realistically, there should be a good equivalence of hospital care and in-office medical care so under, say, 95% of circumstances, you will get good care no matter where you go or from whom it's gotten. Acting as if that other 5% doesn't matter, though, is foolish. If only because 5% of all health encounters, or 5% of health care utilizing population are rather large actual numbers of people.
Besides, what happened to open markets and so forth determining the best and least costly, etc.? Surely, if you believe in unfettered markets for everything else, you believe people should be able to vote for their healthcare with their feet?
Further, insurance companies are businesses. They have always used their considerable leverage to their advantage. What is to prevent them from using this to put even more pressure on doctors and hospitals to take whatever the insurance company is willing to give them, or not be included in their plans? If more and more people are going to be covered by the type of insurance being developed specifically under the ACA, won't doctors and hospitals have to see these patients? How will they then be able to argue that the insurance isn't paying them enough to stay in business?
Or will we see what happened with Medicaid? The payments were so low that many places refused to see Medicaid patients, because at the end of the day, they were effectively paying for the privilege of seeing them, never mind getting paid to see them. And Medicaid is where a lot of people going through the exchanges are being placed.
It's probably not a large number of people, but we've been seeing more and more "concierge" care. Programs where people pay what can be large amounts of money out of pocket to get better access, or more personalized attention. Which is a more divided health care system where fewer people are wealthy enough to access the best possible care. I'm pretty sure that was not supposed to be the point of the ACA. We were supposed to be bringing everyone up to the best supportable level of care, not bringing everyone down to the cheapest.
So if you want to say that more people are accepting going back to the past when you were limited to as to whom you could see and where you could go, I would accept those semantics. But don't try to tell me people are comfortable.
So frustrating. The Medicaid problem is exactly what things like the ACA are supposed to fix.
ReplyDelete