ObamaCare’s Relentless Creation of Second-Class Citizens (5) [View all]

[HiPointDem]

And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

In this series, we’ve been looking at how ObamaCare, through its inherent system architecture, relentlessly creates first- and second-class citizens; how it treats people who should be treated equally unequally, for whimsical or arbitrary reasons. It’s all in the luck of the draw! If you live in the right place or have the right demographic, you go to Happyville. If you don’t, you go to Pain City.

We’ve looked at the whimsical differences between the citizens of Libby, MT, and all other citizens; the banked and the unbanked; those herded into Medicaid and those who are not; the arbitrary distinctions between creatures of the Beltway and all others, between the covered and the not covered, and between those who will be marketed to, and those who will not; the sheer bloody randomness of relying on credit reporting agency data for income validation; and discrimination based on jurisdiction and geography. In this installment, I’d like to look once more at geographical discrimination, give on update on the creatures of the Beltway, and look at “churn.”

First, on geographical discrimination, this from the Portland Press Herald:

An Aroostook County resident who buys a health care plan on the new federal insurance exchange could pay $1,000 more per year in premiums than a Portland resident for exactly the same coverage, according to information released Wednesday by the Maine Bureau of Insurance. The insurance industry lobbied for the changes, arguing that it costs more to deliver health care in rural areas...

$1000 is a lot of money! How can this differential possibly be justified in a program that’s supposedly there to aid citizens? It costs the Post Office more to move the mail from Aroostook County, but a first class stamp costs the same nationwide. We don’t change Social Security benefits by where people live. So why health care?

Answer: Because Obama and the Democrats had one key goal in designing ObamaCare: To preserve the health insurance industry...

What frosts me is that none of this suffering is needed. It’s all an inevitable consequence of ObamaCare’s system architecture. ObamaCare throws Americans into different buckets using a complex and confusing system of eligibility determination, and people inevitably get thrown in the wrong buckets, or land between buckets, or there aren’t even the right buckets for them. Adding to the mix is that buckets differ by state, both legally and in terms of insurance markets, and so what should be a simple, national system of Medicare for All instead creates second-class citizens all over the place, both within and between states.

Under a single payer system, where health care is a right, the eligibility paperwork is very simple. There is one form, and it’s already been filled out: Your birth certificate. And that’s how it should be.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/08/obamacares-relentless-creation-of-second-class-citizens-5.html