we'd not see articles like this.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The first caller on a telephone town hall with Maryland Rep. Andy Harris, leader of the House’s conservative Freedom Caucus, came ready with a question about the Affordable Care Act. Her cousin’s disabled son is at risk of losing the insurance he gained under that law, the caller said.
“Now she’s looking at two or three times the premium that she’s been paying for the insurance,” said the woman, identified as Lisa from Harford County, Maryland. “I’d love for you to elucidate what the Republicans’ plan is for health insurance?”
Well, no.
The premium isn't changing -- just the capacity to force other people to pay yours by force.
Where do you think the "subsidies" come from? Do you believe they're manifested out of thin air? Of course not. They come from the Federal Budget and to the extent the budget runs a deficit every dollar of that deficit winds up as inflation, which means every single person pays it -- forcibly, quite-literally by armed force (just try to opt out and see what happens.) Indeed it is mathematically impossible to make something less-expensive as a whole through any "insurance" scheme for the simple reason that nobody works for free so the more people involved in a given thing the more it costs.
Harris, a seven-term Republican, didn’t have a clear answer. “We think the solution is to try to do something to make sure all the premiums go down,” he said, predicting Congress would “probably negotiate some off-ramp” later.
Well, you could, for example, enforce 15 USC Chapter 1 against every single health care company. A law that, I remind everyone, was ruled to apply to the entire health care sector in two separate Supreme Court decisions in the late 1970s and early 1980s -- first, when insurance companies and drug firms tried to claim otherwise (Royal Drug) and then again when medical practices tried to claim an exemption (Maricopa County.) Both times they got smacked at the Supreme Court.
You could also enforce the general consumer principle that everyone pays the same price and you must post a price -- which implicates both 15 USC Chapter 1 and various state and federal Consumer Protection laws. This, plus more, is contained in a proposal that I first published back in 2011 in Leverage and refined a few times since -- but which has not changed since 2017 because it doesn't need to -- and it would resolve all of the problem including those who can't pay.
No, the resolution isn't "screw them" either; it is an actual answer that gives all citizens access to the care they need but stops the price-gouging where one person pays $500 for something and another pays $5,000.
Note that had we done this in 2017 it would have taken $900 billion, more or less, out of federal spending. Today it would be much more than that -- probably close to double. Oh by the way that's the entire deficit so it would also collapse inflation, which is directly caused by said federal deficit.
It would also, however, blow up a bunch of high-flying companies with high stock prices, force into the open the value (or lack thereof) of various treatments, screenings and similar processes, force medical providers to eat the cost of anything they actually caused (which would make them considerably more-careful in that regard for obvious reasons) and at the same time end "defensive medicine."
Remember that we were all told Obamacare would not only let you keep your doctor if you liked him or her (which was a lie) but that it would save the average person thousands a year. It has instead more than doubled the average person's cost directly and indirectly through subsidies and thus shifting to others and at the same time deductibles have shot skyward so in many cases you get nothing until you've spent $7,000 out of pocket on top of the sky-high premiums.
In other words for all this money you spend you get an effective nothing and with prices collapsed by 80% you could pay nothing in premiums and for less than the current deductible get all the treatment you have now, plus take a vacation to Aruba for two weeks!
Of course firms like United Health (UNH) would sell for $20/share -- not $364. CVS would sell for $30 instead of $82, Merck for $30 instead of $88 and so on. Oh, and the so-called "non-profit" care networks wouldn't have entire buildings that do nothing but find ways to bill you for this and that since there would be one price just as there is at WalMart or Publix for everything on offer.
The often-repeated cry is "what about pre-existing conditions?" My answer to that is two-fold:
- You can't buy fire insurance on a house that is already burning, or collision on your car after you wreck it. Thus the answer to that problem is to first stop incentivizing providers to cause conditions because today they get paid if they do.
- We must bring down the price to where you can afford it if a thing is in fact unavoidable but can be resolved. Yes, that can occur -- and used to. I'm old enough to remember that; we had people with diabetes when I was a kid -- my Grandfather being one of them! He didn't have an $8,000 bill every year for medical care; he paid out of pocket for the doctor and drugs to treat it
If you have no money then see the above linked plan -- it takes care of it. Simply put once prices are reasonable because everyone, no matter how they pay, is paying the same price and nobody can charge people in the US more for a drug or device than they charge in other countries (because both have been illegal for 100 years, by the way, and now we prosecute those offenses and throw the offenders in prison) then if you can't pay as a citizen the bill goes to Treasury and becomes a tax lien. If you die broke then the taxpayer eats it -- but the amount eaten is both reasonable and relatively uncommon.
How hard would it be to do this? Not hard at all, except that the "mavens of industry" and "medical societies" would of course scream about it. The AMA, for example, couldn't make a huge amount of money by utilizing monopoly control over "CPT" codes that they sell a "license" to use and every single insurance company and CMS in the Government forces upon everyone else. That pesky 15 USC Chapter 1 law, incidentally, makes such monopolies a felony offense carrying prison time so were it to be enforced all that nonsense -- and all the cost it imposes on you -- would instantly go "poof!"
The simple fact is that neither political party will do this until the people of the country force them to. Both are lying about the root of the problem; we spend five times what we should on average, having gone from 4% of GDP in the 1970s for health care to 20% today, and this -- above all else -- is what has driven up the cost of living in all respects because the budgetary impact is the direct cause of inflation.
This, and only this, is why you can't afford rent, why your kids can't manage to make a go of it with a couple of kids and a modest house to own, why all the rage is "offshoring" this or that (or "AI"ing this or that) and more. It all comes down to inflation being fed by a monster that has gone from 4% of our total spending in American to 20% and will keep accelerating until we either force it to stop or it bankrupts everyone including federal, state, local governments and you.
Look at the MTS; last fiscal year (just ended September 30th) CMS (Medicare and Medicaid) spent $2.485 trillion up from $2.222 trillion the previous year. That's an 11.8% increase and $263 billion in direct impact as an increase to the deficit. Only about $320 billion was collected last year as a direct tax (Medicare) to offset any of this and the entire deficit was $1.775 billion.
In other words if this spending was brought back to the former percentage of GDP, about 1/5th of what it is now, a literal $2 trillion would disappear off the federal spending side and thus we'd have a $225 billion surplus without changing an additional single thing in our government's tax or spending structure.
There would not only be no inflation the cost of living would drop like a stone.
So why doesn't either party go after this?
Because they're not only not interested in solving this problem they have no interest in addressing the cost of living issues Americans have at all, in any way, because doing so will cause asset prices to correct back to something more-reasonable -- and of course the people who profit from said inflated "values" are who they actually serve, at 99% of the population's expense, and they will continue to do so until and unless the body politic of America forces them to change their point of view.