Socialized medicine coming to America courtesy of the Republicans

[egbertowillies]

Obama set the trap, and the Republicans fell into it nicely. I pointed out from its inception that Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act was designed to morph into single-payer Medicare for all, a form of socialized medicine. What I did not expect was that Republicans would make it a quicker reality with their evil attempts to destroy it.

https://egbertowillies.com/2017/12/28/socialized-medicine-from-republicans/

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. Or Ryan and McConnell could just kill Medicaid, ACA and everything.

[Volaris]

4. It would take one cycle.

They would all be voted out of office to the last, replaced by Dems with ONE purpose...restoration and universalization of the National Safety Net.

[leanforward]

2. I'm all in.

My healthcare is taken care of. The end result I would like to see is health care for all. Call it single payer or socialized medicine, I don't care.

One thing, it must not be written by the industry, but written for the people. Things like the Veterans Administration negotiable prices on drugs.

Private sector/privatization has an additional cost of at least 20 percent. The cost of government has risen because because some folks think the private sector can do it cheaper. Worst case, the private sector pollutes our streams and rivers for one thing.

Right now the deck (laws) are stacked against the citizen, especially those in the poverty category.

pRezident dRumpf needs to go. Anyone cheating someone out of their right to vote, needs six months in the slammer and loss of his/her right to vote.

[exboyfil]

3. And ten years after that when it is working

The Republicans will claim that poison pilling it to get to socialized/single payer was their idea all along.

Kind of like Star Wars and the 1980s military build up. They never thought it would work - it was just a vehicle for bankrupting the Soviet Union

[Hoyt]

5. I think there is a real possibility something like that will happen, as unlikely as it might seem,

especially if Democrats can make health care a major part of their taking the House in 2018 (assuming that happens).

[Jim Lane]

6. There might be a simpler path than the one you outline.

The key is that the Republican bill, while eliminating the individual mandate, retained the requirement that insurance companies cover people with pre-existing conditions.

Those two provisions had always been considered to be linked. Without the mandate, people who are generally healthy could do without insurance. A few of them would get a cancer diagnosis or be in an accident or the like, and those few could then sign up for insurance. The insurance company would be forced to pay for their care but wouldn't have the premiums from all those healthy people who didn't have a medical crisis.

People who suddenly need health care don't have complete freedom to exploit the insurance companies. There's only one general open-enrollment period each year. There are enough exceptions, though, that gaming the system isn't hard. You can move across state lines. I think you might even be able to move across county lines. You can get married. You can get divorced. These maneuvers have costs but if your choice is between doing the maneuver and dying because you can't pay a six-figure medical bill, you'll maneuver.

The insurance companies' risk adjusters recognize this. It won't be enough for them to set their premiums at a level appropriate to a risk pool that has none of the "young invincibles" (healthy people who think they won't need coverage). That would be bad enough, in terms of hiking premiums, but the truth is worse -- the premiums have to cover the costs of the young invincibles who suddenly find themselves not so invincible.

Won't the premiums have to be set so high that very few people find them affordable? If state regulators disallow the necessary enormous hikes, won't the insurance company just decide to get out of that state entirely? Won't this be the result with many companies in many states?

If there's widespread abandonment of the health-insurance field by the private sector, there will be no alternative to single payer.