For the 10th millionth time, government is not taking over health insurance companies, although I certainly wish they were. The government is delivering millions of new customers to them. The health insurance companies increase our health care cost. They add their overhead, about 10% and their profits, about 15% to the cost of healthcare.
For the 10 millionth time. Prices of services WILL go up if government takes it over as well. That's basic economics. The less incentive someone one has to be frugal with their money, the more costs will rise. You aren't addressing the price of services by simply saying 'eh, let government handle it'. You're simply subsdizing individual's expenses. And when you subsidize the cost of something, the price of that somethings goes UP, not down.
That is precisely what happened when Medicare and Medicaid went into effect. Up until then medical costs rose pretty much at the overall rate of inflation in general and basic healthcare was affordable for almost everybody. If you look at the history of rising medical costs you see a sharp spike almost immediately after Medicare and Medicaid went into effect and that has continued unabated since. Before Medicare/Medicaid, the uninsured paid off their medical debts in installments. The few who couldn't afford an operation or treatments even with time payments were usually handled as charity cases or the community took up collections.
The fact that every entitlement implemented by the federal government has cost far more than its initial advertisement and every entitlement that has run for any time is currently broke and draining the national treasury should be our first clue. Why anybody is naive enough to think a new entitlement would be any different is beyond me.
It is apparently beyond anyone that hasn't taken basic ecomomics. Maybe we need to address some more fundamental issues here and decide what we want. Questions like:
Do we just want to reduce what a person has to pay for health care?
or
Is there a problem where the prices being charged for services are overly inflated and there are things we can do to bring them down?
Now if all 'we' care about is the first question, fine. Subsidize the shit out of it. Just know you aren't really addressing the issue and in fact you're making it worse.
On the other hand, if you tackle the second question, a side affect of that will be solving the first question. The problem with Obamacare is it's too long on trying to accomplish lowering what people pay and very short (and in cases where new taxes are being levied, making it worse) on addressing the cost of resources. I hope people can see the problem with subsidizing what the individual pays while the actual cost of the resources rise....especially when the reason they are rising is because of the subsidization.