For just about four years now the forces of the right have been campaigning against the ACA, popularly known as Obamacare. Anyone who is aware of today’s headlines knows that they have now given up all pretense of doing anything for the country in general in pursuit of the holy grail of far right stupidity, the recall of the ACA. To some of us it has never been quite clear why anyone in their right minds would ever be against universal, affordable health care but there they are, whining and kicking their feet, wasting the House’s time by bringing futile attempts to abolish it to the floor forty times. No wonder nothing ever gets done in congress. They have clowns wasting their time on drivel like this.
Two weeks ago it looked like the dead weight of the right had finally gotten some traction when the President announced that some of the exchanges which would negotiate for individual health care buyers would not be ready to go on line in 2014 but would start in 2015. The Right went bananas, braying like horny mules that Obama couldn’t deliver on his own plan. Of course the reason for this was because Republicans had continued to put blockades in front of this happening, stopping money and other resources necessary for the plan’s exchanges to become reality.
Now Governor Andrew Cuomo of NY has announced that as the heath care exchanges in New York State come on line they will allow New Yorkers to save, on average, well over 60% on premiums they are paying now.
New York City dwellers who are now paying about $1,000 per month in premiums will pay only $308 monthly and with available Federal subsidies the cost will be even lower.
How is this possible? Haven’t the insurance lobbies been busy telling us that Obamacare will bankrupt the country and all individual insurance buyers? Sure they have but that’s because Obamacare will damage the insurance companies, mainly by holding their profit margins down to 20%. The insurance industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year on lobbyists and bribes because they will lose more than that when Obamacare is functional. And where will those hundreds of millions go? Into the pockets of the buyers of health care, just like the plan promised.
The savings that Cuomo speaks to and the limit on insurance company profits are the result of good old-fashioned leverage. You go to an insurance company as an individual and they dictate terms. An exchange that represents hundreds of thousands of customers goes to an insurance company and the exchange dictates the terms. Their bargaining chip is numbers. The insurance company wants to make a thousand percent profit on you and you just don’t have any choice in the matter but when an exchange tells them that it will take its business to a rival they will settle for less than the mandated 20% profit and be very thankful to get the business.
Forget about all the other benefits of Obamacare, this one alone is worth all the problems it has caused by coming into being. Sure there are changes that could and should be made. It would be much better and more efficient as a single payer system. Then, the estimated savings that Cuomo predicts would be even higher. The program also needs Tort control. That doesn’t mean abandonment of those who have been the victims of mal-practice but it does mean controls on frivolous suits that are bankrupting doctors and hospitals and creating soaring mal-practice insurance rates.
With all our knowledge and training the human body is still a mystifying machine, whose endgame, no matter what we do, will always be death, Medical malpractice suits should only be allowed in cases of obvious wrong doing. The death of a loved one should not be prima facie cause for a suit. We all die eventually and there’s nothing any doctor can do about that. Cutting off the wrong leg, however, should definitely be actionable, even if the patient is Mitch McConnell.
I keep asking my conservative friends what they have against Obamacare but none of them can come up with a logical reason why they hate it. The closest any of them can come is that the nation can’t afford it. That’s ridiculous. Every non-patrician calculation that has been published has shown that it will save the country money and that it will save individuals money, if it is carried out in the way it was set up. Even more important than that is that it will improve health care because of the innovations that it is bringing into being, the most important of which is getting the whole system computerized.
Of course, the big right-wing chant here is, “They’re invading our privacy.” This from the same imbeciles who want to see Bradley Manning and Ed Snowden shot for treason and who love what the NSA id doing to our phone calls. Yes, they are a heady group.
Right now, all over this country Obamacare has forced insurance companies to accept patients who already suffer from some disease that desperately needs treatment. The insurance companies hate this. They only want healthy patients paying high premiums. That way they can afford to shell out the hundreds of millions that hey now do to lobbyists, to lie on their behalf.
Don’t forget this is basically a plan developed by Mitt Romney. It wasn’t until Obama took it under his wing that the right started regarding it as a bad idea. That, if nothing else, shows how fair minded and logical the opposition to the plan really is.
Maybe it’s time that the Obama haters in the Republican Party get their act together. Maybe it’s time they stopped thinking about themselves, and started thinking about the country. It’s definitely time that the people who have been voting them into office, realize that these men don’t give a rats ass about their welfare. These men, men like Boehner, Cruz, McConnell, Sessions, Cornyn, Ryan and Rubio are interested only in lining heir pockets with as much insurance money as they can squeeze out of an industry that has proven that it has no regard for its customers.