Insurance providers can't drop your coverage after you get sick, and they can't discriminate against you if you sign up AFTER you get sick. Costs are going to go up, on average.
My issues with Obamacare are the failure to hit the heart of certain health care costs.
1) Medical device tax. This gets passed directly to the consumer, and thus through Obamacare increase everyone's insurance slightly. Medical device costs are disproportionate to the cost of developing these devices. We need more competition to reduce these costs to merely the cost of development plus a healthy payoff to investors.
2) Medicare bargaining. Some of the most expensive treatments are those that treat medicare patients disproportionately (never thought I'd use this word so often). Altering medicare's bargaining power to be more similar to the VA's system could reduce costs of medicine and thus insurance costs to everyone.
3) Research funding. Platforms for drug discovery have shifted over the last 50 years. Natural product research repeatedly rediscovers known compounds providing ever-diminishing rates of new drugs. Synthetic combinatorial libraries yield incredibly low hit rates coupled with frequent late-stage clinical trial failures, dramatically reducing the yield and increasing the cost of this discovery platform compared to the promise it showed decades ago. New platforms for drug discovery are required in order to adequately fill the drug pipeline and provide sufficient options so that anything resembling competition between similar drugs occur. Ever wonder why we pay 40+% more for a given drug than other civilized countries? Ever wonder how major drug companies continuously make 10-15% profits regardless of expenses? They set the price to make profits that seem reasonable based on their multi-billion dollar investments. The risk isn't real, since the prices are set to guarantee that profit margin. We need to increase our investment in the crazy new drug discovery platforms that are rampantly discussed in academia.
4) Tort reform. Doctors frequently over-test to insure they can't be sued. Doesn't matter if this is a state by state reform or national reform. Doctors shouldn't be required to waste our money to avoid being sued.
5) Minimum wage. The more young people sign up for Obamacare, the cheaper rates get for everyone. Tax penalties will be 1% next year, and will steadily increase to 2.5% iirc. If we increase minimum wage to the actual cost of living, more people will choose to pay for stupidly expensive insurance rather than pay a big tax for nothing. Numerous studies show that increasing the minimum wage has a net zero effect on the number of jobs and can easily be absorbed by the businesses paying minimum wage.
6) Employer mandate. The beauty of Obamacare is that it forces personal responsibility by taxing those who refuse to contribute by purchasing health insurance. The individual mandate makes sense, but the employer mandate does not. It gives companies that would have switched to part time employees an very convincing excuse. The federal government shouldn't set itself up to be anyone's scapegoat. Increasing the minimum wage should do what the employer mandate attempts to do, anyways. Imagine being reduced to 30 hours of work, being told Obamacare is to blame, and then being required to buy your own insurance with your substantially reduced wages. People won't be happy.
I'm really drunk, I hope all that made sense.
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