Why Is Healthcare So Expensive - the Legacy of ACA

Spare_change

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Jun 27, 2011
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Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 health care costs have gone up by double digits each year.

The health care bill did get more people insured and helped with issues like preexisting conditions, but the problem with the healthcare law isn't what it tried to do, it's what it failed to do: reduce costs. The solutions to the cost problem is with the free market and competition. Here are just three ideas that could make a huge difference.

Number 1: We can roll back the tax burden on insurance companies. The ACA added a $60 billion tax on health insurers, which made them have to charge more to consumers to cover their costs. Taxes roll downhill so a tax on insurers means higher costs for all of us.

Number 2: We can lower the regulations on health plans. The ACA has a lot of requirements that force insurance plans to cover an incredibly big list of benefits. If you want a bare-bones insurance plan that simply covers catastrophic events like a car accident or cancer you currently can't get one. By boosting the benefits of every plan it restricts competition and drives up prices by forcing smaller health insurers out of the marketplace. Low-cost catastrophic plans that are normally purchased by younger, healthier people are no longer available because of the ACA requirements.

Introducing as many health insurers to the marketplace as possible can drive down prices by encouraging businesses to compete to cut costs. The ACA did the exact opposite: Less competition and higher prices.

Number 3: Encourage medical innovation. The cost to bring a new drug to market already exceeds two and half billion dollars. And the ACA places an additional twenty-two billion dollar tax burden on innovator drug companies, the same businesses that produce lifesaving medications and cures for those in need. Punishing drug producers forces them to charge even higher prices to make up for the lost money in research, development, and taxes.
 
Funny, Black Flag?

Is your knowledge base so superficial that this is the best you can do?
 
Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 health care costs have gone up by double digits each year.

The health care bill did get more people insured and helped with issues like preexisting conditions, but the problem with the healthcare law isn't what it tried to do, it's what it failed to do: reduce costs. The solutions to the cost problem is with the free market and competition. Here are just three ideas that could make a huge difference.

Number 1: We can roll back the tax burden on insurance companies. The ACA added a $60 billion tax on health insurers, which made them have to charge more to consumers to cover their costs. Taxes roll downhill so a tax on insurers means higher costs for all of us.

Number 2: We can lower the regulations on health plans. The ACA has a lot of requirements that force insurance plans to cover an incredibly big list of benefits. If you want a bare-bones insurance plan that simply covers catastrophic events like a car accident or cancer you currently can't get one. By boosting the benefits of every plan it restricts competition and drives up prices by forcing smaller health insurers out of the marketplace. Low-cost catastrophic plans that are normally purchased by younger, healthier people are no longer available because of the ACA requirements.

Introducing as many health insurers to the marketplace as possible can drive down prices by encouraging businesses to compete to cut costs. The ACA did the exact opposite: Less competition and higher prices.

Number 3: Encourage medical innovation. The cost to bring a new drug to market already exceeds two and half billion dollars. And the ACA places an additional twenty-two billion dollar tax burden on innovator drug companies, the same businesses that produce lifesaving medications and cures for those in need. Punishing drug producers forces them to charge even higher prices to make up for the lost money in research, development, and taxes.

If you really want to lower healthcare cost you need to make people responsible for their health, or more accurately, their lack of health. You can eat crap, not exercise, use drugs and generally abuse your body, and then go to your doctor to get a drug to "fix" it all. If you don't have to pay for repairs to your car, most people would never bother to change the oil.

Single payer is nearly here, and it will be a reality. ACA, along with Medicare, Medicade are the precursors to single,payer.
 
Funny, Black Flag?

Is your knowledge base so superficial that this is the best you can do?
So cut and dry and simple, is it? Just cut taxes on healthcare companies, cut taxes on big pharma, and they will be charitable towards towards the peasants. :rolleyes:
if you drive the cost down, you drive the retail price down.

Simple, huh?

Besides, ask yourself what those billions of dollars of tax income was used for.
 
Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 health care costs have gone up by double digits each year.

The health care bill did get more people insured and helped with issues like preexisting conditions, but the problem with the healthcare law isn't what it tried to do, it's what it failed to do: reduce costs. The solutions to the cost problem is with the free market and competition. Here are just three ideas that could make a huge difference.

Number 1: We can roll back the tax burden on insurance companies. The ACA added a $60 billion tax on health insurers, which made them have to charge more to consumers to cover their costs. Taxes roll downhill so a tax on insurers means higher costs for all of us.

Number 2: We can lower the regulations on health plans. The ACA has a lot of requirements that force insurance plans to cover an incredibly big list of benefits. If you want a bare-bones insurance plan that simply covers catastrophic events like a car accident or cancer you currently can't get one. By boosting the benefits of every plan it restricts competition and drives up prices by forcing smaller health insurers out of the marketplace. Low-cost catastrophic plans that are normally purchased by younger, healthier people are no longer available because of the ACA requirements.

Introducing as many health insurers to the marketplace as possible can drive down prices by encouraging businesses to compete to cut costs. The ACA did the exact opposite: Less competition and higher prices.

Number 3: Encourage medical innovation. The cost to bring a new drug to market already exceeds two and half billion dollars. And the ACA places an additional twenty-two billion dollar tax burden on innovator drug companies, the same businesses that produce lifesaving medications and cures for those in need. Punishing drug producers forces them to charge even higher prices to make up for the lost money in research, development, and taxes.
1. Healthcare costs were sky- rocketing way before the PPACA was born.

2. Drug production and research is being outsourced to places like India and China. So why is the markup so high? You know the answer and so do I.
http://www.pharmamanufacturing.com/articles/2013/018/
 
if you drive the cost down, you drive the retail price down.
Are you suggesting that big pharma's drugs were cheap before the ACA? :rofl:
Compare them and tell me .....

When was the largest increase in drug costs?

I'll wait right here.
Under Obama, I'm guessing? What were you saying about demand in that other thread? If 10's of millions lose their healthcare, and the rest have shittier healthcare coverage, do you think demand will go down? Do you think big pharma's profits will go down?

Were drugs cheap before the ACA? Were they more accessible to more people before the ACA?
 
if you drive the cost down, you drive the retail price down.
Are you suggesting that big pharma's drugs were cheap before the ACA? :rofl:
Compare them and tell me .....

When was the largest increase in drug costs?

I'll wait right here.
Under Obama, I'm guessing? What were you saying about demand in that other thread? If 10's of millions lose their healthcare, and the rest have shittier healthcare coverage, do you think demand will go down? Do you think big pharma's profits will go down?

Were drugs cheap before the ACA? Were they more accessible to more people before the ACA?
Yes.
 
if you drive the cost down, you drive the retail price down.
Are you suggesting that big pharma's drugs were cheap before the ACA? :rofl:
Compare them and tell me .....

When was the largest increase in drug costs?

I'll wait right here.
Under Obama, I'm guessing? What were you saying about demand in that other thread? If 10's of millions lose their healthcare, and the rest have shittier healthcare coverage, do you think demand will go down? Do you think big pharma's profits will go down?

Were drugs cheap before the ACA? Were they more accessible to more people before the ACA?
Yes.
Wrong. Good luck trying to drive demand down by making medicine inaccessible to people.

I suspect you'll have better luck with that than getting a full ACA repeal.
 
if you drive the cost down, you drive the retail price down.
Are you suggesting that big pharma's drugs were cheap before the ACA? :rofl:
Compare them and tell me .....

When was the largest increase in drug costs?

I'll wait right here.
Under Obama, I'm guessing? What were you saying about demand in that other thread? If 10's of millions lose their healthcare, and the rest have shittier healthcare coverage, do you think demand will go down? Do you think big pharma's profits will go down?

Were drugs cheap before the ACA? Were they more accessible to more people before the ACA?
Yes.
Wrong. Good luck trying to drive demand down by making medicine inaccessible to people.

I suspect you'll have better luck with that than getting a full ACA repeal.
That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever .... you operate from a fallacious position.

No one is making medicine inaccessible to people ... except in the haunted crypts of the liberal mind.
 
Why Is Healthcare So Expensive - the Legacy of ACA

Hopefully, people realize there is no simple and wholly accurate answer to the title question....People who think there is clearly don't haven't a clue about healthcare and they don't even listen to our simpleton POTUS who remarked, "Who knew healthcare was so complicated?"

It's not much discussed in the news as far as I can tell, but here is one quantifiable reason why: risk corridor payments that were never made.

The risk corridors program was modeled after a successful plan that was part of George W. Bush’s Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage, albeit slightly different than the Obamacare version. Here's an explanation of what risk corridors are and how they were designed.

Now, part of the problem is that the the health care law didn’t say where it would get the money for any risk corridor payments. Remember those user fees from successful insurers? The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, later decided they would use that money to make any payments owed to insurers that weren’t so successful.

In 2013, CMS said insurers who said they needed money would get it, "regardless of the balance of payments and receipts" in the program. CMS said in April 2014 it wouldn’t ask Congress for an appropriation, but instead would make up the difference in later years if the marketplace didn’t bring in enough user fees. Marco Rubio then pressed then-Speaker of the House John Boehner in October 2014 to block potential tax money appropriations for risk corridor payments.

Block the payments Congress did. When lawmakers passed a spending bill in December 2014, it included special language called a "rider" that said the CMS’ parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, could not use any extra money in its budget to pay risk corridor expenses. That effectively locked CMS into its stated plan of using user fees. (The same rider was included in the 2015 spending bill.)

By October 2015, it became apparent there was a huge gap between the user fees CMS had collected and the sums insurers solicited. CMS announced the program took in $362 million in user fees for 2014, while less successful insurers asked for a total of $2.87 billion, leaving a $2.5 billion shortfall CMS didn't pay.

CMS said it would pay out 12.6 percent of claims from 2014, then wait to see next year’s results. Some insurers left the marketplaces or even collapsed altogether, leading Rubio to crow his actions have been "a big part of ending Obamacare for good."

Congress' acts to prevent the risk corridor payments drove insurers out of certain markets, namely the high risk ones. If the program doesn’t pay up, CMS will have to find the money somehow or ask Congress to make an appropriation to pay insurers. Otherwise, insurers will, as noted in the content found at bulleted links below, sue to get those payments. An Oregon insurance company that is no longer offering marketplace plans did just that, suing the government for $5 billion over missed risk corridors payments.

Now the preceding provides the business and actuarial answer to the question of why healthcare is so expensive. There's also the practical side: an aging, obese, thus relatively unhealthy citizenry has a lot to do with why the insurance risk is as it is. Take a look at the chart below that identifies states that have few insurers from which residents can choose on O-care marketplaces.

obamacare_insurers_3.jpg


Now look at the list of most unhealthy states:
  • PA
  • SD
  • AK
  • MT
  • IL
  • DE
  • NM
  • NC
  • FL
  • OH
  • GA
  • MI
  • NV
  • TN
  • TX
  • IN
  • MO
  • OK
  • KY
  • AL
  • SC
  • WV
  • AR
  • LA
  • MS
The "red letter" states each saw notable reductions in the quantity of insurers on their exchanges. That is the relevance of the risk corridor payments and the general health of people living in those states.
 
What in the holy fuck?

Healthcare cost were going up faster before the ACA! The ACA slown the rate of growth down for the first time in decades.

Why do you republicans have to lie to enrich the damn rich at the cost of life?
 
Funny, Black Flag?

Is your knowledge base so superficial that this is the best you can do?
So cut and dry and simple, is it? Just cut taxes on healthcare companies, cut taxes on big pharma, and they will be charitable towards towards the peasants. :rolleyes:


Yep, fact is, prices were going down until the Rs stepped in.

Prices will go higher now and willfully ignorant RWNJs won't look any further than what they're ordered to believe.

Note to RWNJs - Listen to your owners and what ever you do, don't listen to those fake news outlets.

[emoji849]




Sent from my iPad using USMessageBoard.com
 
The problem is that before the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the cost of healthcare was relatively low and stable. I can remember going to the dentist and he didn't even use latex gloves. In fact, the cashiers at the store never used latex gloves. Many businesses insured their own employees. After AIDS everyone got scared and were afraid of lawsuits. Sorry, this is the fact. Our healthcare was ruined not by expensive procedures, but by horny selfish individuals who place everyone at risk and demand equal healthcare regardless of their own personal responsibility and lifestyle.
 
If you want a bare-bones insurance plan that simply covers catastrophic events like a car accident or cancer you currently can't get one.

Not sure where you're buying health insurance, but I can get a catastrophic plan. A car accident injury should be covered under your auto insurance plan.

Single payer is nearly here, and it will be a reality. ACA, along with Medicare, Medicade are the precursors to single,payer.

Not sure where you're getting that idea from. You don't even have the correct people in office to support such an idea.
 

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