The Truth About Obamacare and How It Solves the Suffering of the Insured [View all]

[ProSense]

The Truth About Obamacare and How It Solves the Suffering of the Insured

By Kurt Eichenwald

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Normally, I would start this discussion by providing chapter-and-verse details about the 47 million men, women, and children who now have the opportunity to obtain health insurance, to live longer and healthier lives, to avoid needless bankruptcies. But, in what to me is one of the saddest developments in our nation’s history, that reality is irrelevant to ardent Obamacare opponents. Words like “takers” and “slackers” are thrown at the uninsured, as if they have brought their pre-existing conditions, jobs without benefits, or low-paying positions on themselves. One Tea Party type I spoke with actually said the way to solve the health-care problem would be for the lazy uninsured just to take jobs that provide insurance benefits—as if there were tens of millions of such employment opportunities out there, unfilled. It’s the kind of simplistic answer that allows for the willfully blind to ignore the realities of the uninsured.

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Ugly, ugly stuff. And don’t forget, this does not include the increase in local taxes that goes toward paying the remaining portion of the bill for the uninsured.

How, you may wonder, do the subsidies that Obamacare provides to the folks unable to afford insurance on their own compare with those numbers? Well, remember, in 2005, the total amount of uncompensated care that had to be covered by taxpayers and the insured was $43 billion; in 2014, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that total exchange subsidies will be $35 billion. In 2010, the estimate of total uncompensated care was in excess of $60 billion; the total amount of subsidies for 2015 is estimated at $62 billion...the price paid by the insured because of others’ lack of insurance is not just monetary. In fact—if you have insurance—the more uninsured who live in your community, the lower the quality of care you receive. Again—if more people in your community are uninsured, your care will be worse. In other words, if you want to go to the places with the worst medical care, hightail it to states like Texas that are fighting Obamacare, making it difficult for their residents to figure out how to use the Obamacare insurance exchanges, and refusing to expand Medicaid. The insured folks in that state will get worse care than one with more people insured.

Before quoting anyone on that, follow the logic. Hospitals don’t have poverty wards; if a patient comes in the door in bad shape, they don’t do a wallet biopsy before deciding what care that person should receive—everyone at a hospital receives the same quality. But if a community has a higher number of uninsured, that means the latest and greatest technology and treatments will drive up the amounts of unreimbursed care. In essence, hospitals that provide the best, most modern, and most expensive treatments in an area with lots of uninsured will be forced to pass unsustainable amounts of cost to their prices. Insurance companies won’t pay it, local governments won’t finance it, and the hospitals will go out of business.

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http://www.vanityfair.com/online/eichenwald/2013/10/truth-obamacare-already-insured

Vanity Fair's Blockbuster Part 2 in Obamacare series: The truth!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/05/1244504/-Vanity-Fair-s-Blockbuster-Part-2-in-Obamacare-series-The-truth