The healthcare bill wouldn’t have changed shit imo, forcing people to buy it won’t change the prices. If you’re an insurance company, and you KNOW people have to buy your insurance…what would you do? “Price Gouge” of course.
Now the real porblem with the healthcare industry is the model itself. It’s caused prices to get absolutely bat shit out of control. The deductable system is retarded for healthcare. For car insurance, it’s okay, price can only get so high(the cost of the car). Same for house insurance. You fucked your car up, $3k in damages, pay your deductable and we’ll cover the rest. Fine, no biggie.
The problem with healthcare is that tests, medicine, ALL that shit is super super expensive, and can be ongoing for a persons life. If you have a certain deductable and a monthly payment, from a consumer standpoint, that’s the price of your healthcare. You don’t care how much the cost of all that shit really is, you just care how much comes out of your pocket. The problem is, Docters know this. I firmly believe Doctors, though they mean well, are fucking stingy people like everyone else. If I’m a Docter, and a CT scan costs $5,000, and you come in because you have a headache, ima be like "Yo, get yourself a CT scan, it’ll only cost you your deductable. Better safe than sorry
" Then you do it, and pay your deductable, but your insurance pays a fuck load of money for your headache.
The problem is furthered by all the malpractice lawsuites running around. Now you have lawyers coming into play trying to make some easy cash. Let’s say 1 in 5,000 times a headache leads to death, a Dr. won’t risk it because they don’t wanna get fucked in the ass by a fucking stingy lawyer. So fuck it, better safe than sorry for the doctor too. So now you have all these unecessary tests being ran on everyone with a headache. Not just headaches either. Your knee hurts? Get an MRI. Your skin is itchy, let’s draw some blood and get some expensive labwork ran. Before you know it, insurance companies are spending money out the ass. When that happens, of course they’re gonna raise the price of insurance to the consumer.
Now you get rid of policy caps, and force more people to have insurance…jesus christ, I bet in the long-run the bill would cost more for majority of americans, and help very few(The ones who were denied insurance in the first place…that’s fucked up).
Single payer will help, better yet, the system we have for animal insurance would be better too. Insurance just pays a % of damages, no matter what. 5,6,7…depends on your montly payment. So you have to think about how much shit REALLY cost, not just your deductable and/or monthly paychecks.
Drugs are a fuckin joke too. The price difference between a “real” and “generic” drug is astronomical in most cases. I’ve seen cases where a generic costs $50, and the real deal costs $500. However, the difference in co-pays is like what? $10, $20? It’s fuckin dumb. So now what? Most consumers are like, “Well, the real drug costs me $20, and the generic is $10, I’ll just get the real one”. And you walk away thinking it was only $10 more, however the price difference was MUCH more, you just don’t see it because of the way our system works.
I think without changing the system itself and forcing more people to be involved in this, obviously, disfunctional model, would do more harm than good. Just me though…
/rant