If you like your plan you can keep it, period

There are so many errors in your posts I don't know where to start. Perhaps the article below will enlighten you:

100 Years of US Medical Fascism - Dale Steinreich - Mises Daily

BTW, about 99% of the problems with our current health care system are due to government intervention. The guy in the video below runs a surgery center that doesn't accept insurance. He DOESN'T use electronic records. Nor does he have a huge staff to deal with insurance company billing.

His prices are 1/10th to 1/5th of competing hospitals. Mind you that those prices would be EVEN LOWER in a free market.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRn9ySc-RDM]How the Market Can Cure the Health Care Crisis w/Dr. Keith Smith! - YouTube[/ame]



ptpatil said:
They mean exactly what they literally mean. ACA is good for the economy, reduces the profits of a middle man industry, prices in a lot of ignored externalities and sets up long term infrastructure that's already allowing our clients to automate tons of administrative aspects of medical care.

I did payment automation with PNC bank for a hospital in Virginia (108 doctors), SCH in Illinois (170 doctors) and another pilot in Denver that got rid of their entire billing staffs and save anywhere from 10-15% of their revenue in billing alone. The Illinois group has increased it's self pay/uninsured discount for the first time in years thanks to it.
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JarredLv said:
Some might say increased demand, others would say an entire population being forced to buy a product under the threat of violence by a draconian overbearing government.
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Well when you say it like that..

I also meant just that the population is getting older as well.
 
charlesmartel said:
There are so many errors in your posts I don't know where to start. Perhaps the article below will enlighten you:

100 Years of US Medical Fascism - Dale Steinreich - Mises Daily

BTW, about 99% of the problems with our current health care system are due to government intervention. The guy in the video below runs a surgery center that doesn't accept insurance. He DOESN'T use electronic records. Nor does he have a huge staff to deal with insurance company billing.

His prices are 1/10th to 1/5th of competing hospitals. Mind you that those prices would be EVEN LOWER in a free market.

How the Market Can Cure the Health Care Crisis w/Dr. Keith Smith! - YouTube
Click to expand...

I don't know what errors you saw because you didn't refer to any specific ones, just gave me a 10 minute youtube video of some surgeon. Great, is he operating legally? Then why don't more surgeons do what he did and attract more customers? Or is it that a free market works best with informational symmetry, comparable goods and distributed purchasing power?

It's like you guys went to the first 15 minutes of a econ 101 lecture and called it a fucking day, repeatedly saying "the free market will work because...efficiency!" is like those retards in highschool physics who try to coast by with "F = MA".
 
The insurance industry is entirely to blame for the current situation. And they pretty much wrote Obamacare so you know they wont be disadvantaged at all. A big part of the problem revolves around the way these insurance companies market their plans.

They will take plan A and sell the shit out of it at a low rate. Eventually they start to have to raise the rates as the group (all policy holders) age and use their coverage. So what the insurance company does is what it has to do (raise the rates). Then the younger healthier policy holders jump ship to a new more affordable plan. The insurance companies cant afford to lose those customers so they close the group to no new customers. They cant cancel anyones insurance, and with no new blood coming in they raise the rates. The rest of the "insurable" people jump ship to get a more affordable plan. This leaves nothing but the old and sick.

Simply rinse and repeat. All that would have been needed to be done to "fix" healthcare, would have been to limit the insurance companies right to keep opening and segregating their groups. Insurance is about the law of large numbers. It's not clear to me if Obamacare is going to change the way the insurance industry classifies their groups. If they are allowed to continue segregating their policy holders we are truly going to be fucked.
 
I'm a free market guy. But no one in government really is when it comes to policy. No, not Republicans, either. You can't really expect governments to act in accordance with free market economic principles. I'm not cynical. I'm just a realist.

The problem is there is a problem. There is a cost and access issue. And regardless of ideology, a lot of people are not going to accept the United States being the only developed country without some sort of universal coverage scheme. There are 4 types of universal coverage systems, then there is the US and developing countries.

Politicians want to "do something" even if it's not the right thing. We can't act like pre-ACA there was anything resembling a free market system in healthcare. It's debatable to what extent it's possible, but almost no one with any political clout was proposing any market-based reforms. I fit solidly in the libertarian quadrant, and frankly there are no practical policy solutions coming from there. So what we get, as usual, is something that does attempt to address the issue but has plenty more issues.

Also, we can't pretend insurers weren't cancelling policies or that low-wage employers weren't cutting hours pre-Obamacare. It might provide convenient cover, though.
 
Obamacare is an attempt to fix a problem it created a 100 years ago.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBFoC1gkExI]How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis! - YouTube[/ame]
 
dmnEPC said:
The insurance industry is entirely to blame for the current situation. And they pretty much wrote Obamacare so you know they wont be disadvantaged at all. A big part of the problem revolves around the way these insurance companies market their plans.

They will take plan A and sell the shit out of it at a low rate. Eventually they start to have to raise the rates as the group (all policy holders) age and use their coverage. So what the insurance company does is what it has to do (raise the rates). Then the younger healthier policy holders jump ship to a new more affordable plan. The insurance companies cant afford to lose those customers so they close the group to no new customers. They cant cancel anyones insurance, and with no new blood coming in they raise the rates. The rest of the "insurable" people jump ship to get a more affordable plan. This leaves nothing but the old and sick.

Simply rinse and repeat. All that would have been needed to be done to "fix" healthcare, would have been to limit the insurance companies right to keep opening and segregating their groups. Insurance is about the law of large numbers. It's not clear to me if Obamacare is going to change the way the insurance industry classifies their groups. If they are allowed to continue segregating their policy holders we are truly going to be fucked.
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See, this is a well reasoned argument, those are good points. I agree that Obamacare is largely Ins company influenced but I think the insurance companies got fucked in big ways with this one.

A. They are trapped in regards to profit taking and admin costs, 80% of every premium dollar HAS to go to CPT line item charges on claims meaning at most, a Insurance company can have 20% profit from premium dollars.

B. They were probably aiming to get rid of A when lobbying the law as it was drafted, they were not succesful.

C. The preexisting condition clause that forbids them to drop or refuse sick people means the problem you just mentioned is exacerbated 10 fold.

D. ACA came up with a pretty crappy way of taking care of the preexisting clause pushback from the Ins. lobby by forcing you to buy Insurance, a better way would have been a minimum quota for preexistings and high risk patients that the company had to meet as a percentage and then they were free to do as they please. A special status for high riskers or patients with CPT line item charges exceeding X would have also been better.
 
User9364 said:
How do you mean that?

Also, I thought you worked in the medical field. Are you an economist in that field?
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Yea it was 2 AM man, I do work in the medical field. I am not professionally a economist but I minored in it with a major in EE and have traded for the past 6 years almost daily in both equities and ETFs.

I do daily tech. analysis and data mine tick feeds, I even provide fundamentals reports to a few people via IBM Cognos.

I work as a machine learning dev & product manager at an EMR company doing neural nets/ SVM classifiers for clinical data and also do NLP with Nuance integrated with our EMR so doctors can do ambulatory visits w/ voice.
 
Yes, the guy is operating legally. Here is his pricing:

Procedures | Surgery Center of Oklahoma

You know a lot of economics jargon but very little economics. His first customers were Canadians because they could jump the queue and get healthcare immediately instead of months out. Most doctors think they have to accept insurance but this is slowly starting to change.

Riddle me this. How is he able to provide operations at 1/10th to 1/5th the price of competing hospitals? For the price of my annual Obamacare premium, I could afford one operation per YEAR at his facility. Please read that article on medical fascism.


ptpatil said:
I don't know what errors you saw because you didn't refer to any specific ones, just gave me a 10 minute youtube video of some surgeon. Great, is he operating legally? Then why don't more surgeons do what he did and attract more customers? Or is it that a free market works best with informational symmetry, comparable goods and distributed purchasing power?

It's like you guys went to the first 15 minutes of a econ 101 lecture and called it a fucking day, repeatedly saying "the free market will work because...efficiency!" is like those retards in highschool physics who try to coast by with "F = MA".
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ptpatil said:
A. They are trapped in regards to profit taking and admin costs, 80% of every premium dollar HAS to go to CPT line item charges on claims meaning at most, a Insurance company can have 20% profit from premium dollars.
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Assuming what you have said is correct, Obamacare raises premiums for a lot of people, and while they are capped at 20% profit, the Ins companies have 20% of a larger base, because the plans by law have to cover more stuff.

Ask any business man if he wants 50% of $100 or 20% of $500.

Who wouldn't sell their mother to have guaranteed 20% profits?

All that happened here is that the insurance industry become nationalized, and if they lose any money, the government will bail them out like the banks. It's just another huge wealth transfer.
 
As long as this thread is a perpetual whinefest about how right you all are about obvious shit, it's nothing but a testament to why the powers that be rule as much over you as they do.
 
ptpatil said:
See, this is a well reasoned argument, those are good points. I agree that Obamacare is largely Ins company influenced but I think the insurance companies got fucked in big ways with this one.

A. They are trapped in regards to profit taking and admin costs, 80% of every premium dollar HAS to go to CPT line item charges on claims meaning at most, a Insurance company can have 20% profit from premium dollars.
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This is simply not a problem for the insurance company's. Would you believe the majority of the profits an insurance company makes has nothing to do with premiums received minus claims paid? Insurance companies are required to keep reserves. About 15 years ago congress changed the requirements for the insurance companies to keep their reserves in super secure investments. I can't remember if it was part of glass stegal act. Either way just like with the banks, this gave the insurance industry the license to print money. It's not uncommon for an insurance company to pay out 90 to 105% of premiums and still be extremely profitable. Force the industry back to the old way to make profits and you start to fix healthcare.

B. They were probably aiming to get rid of A when lobbying the law as it was drafted, they were not succesful.

C. The preexisting condition clause that forbids them to drop or refuse sick people means the problem you just mentioned is exacerbated 10 fold.
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Dropping A changes nothing. It's already illegal to drop someone based off of claims or preexisting conditions. Most when they loose insurance it's because 1 of 2 things. They can't afford the high rates. Or they changed jobs. If changing jobs they have cobra an 18 months to change with no preexisting penalty. The majority of the people that can't get new coverage had an opportunity at some point to obtain it.
D. ACA came up with a pretty crappy way of taking care of the preexisting clause pushback from the Ins. lobby by forcing you to buy Insurance, a better way would have been a minimum quota for preexistings and high risk patients that the company had to meet as a percentage and then they were free to do as they please. A special status for high riskers or patients with CPT line item charges exceeding X would have also been better.
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As mentioned before this is what's Basically been happening and lead to most of the problems with healthcare
 
My small co with 17 employees and of those on health insurance, monthly rate's went up $80/person.

We are a small company and our health insurance just went up ~$12k/yr (not all are on our ins) due to Obama care.

I'm sure it's pummeling the big corps. My friend that is the VP of AutoZone said they have slashing employee hours across the country and pushing part-time positions like mad-men.
Same thing is happening to the other auto-parts stores. I can only imagine other industries.
 
ptpatil said:
Economically speaking the ACA is overall a good thing
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quote-it-is-no-crime-to-be-ignorant-of-economics-which-is-after-all-a-specialized-discipline-and-one-murray-rothbard-263126.jpg
 
ptpatil said:
See, this is a well reasoned argument, those are good points. I agree that Obamacare is largely Ins company influenced but I think the insurance companies got fucked in big ways with this one.

A. They are trapped in regards to profit taking and admin costs, 80% of every premium dollar HAS to go to CPT line item charges on claims meaning at most, a Insurance company can have 20% profit from premium dollars.

B. They were probably aiming to get rid of A when lobbying the law as it was drafted, they were not succesful.
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uuummmm... as guerilla pointed out, 20% of $500 is more than 50% of $100. Also, they can always change it latter. The trick in a negotiation is the make the other side *think* they won.

ptpatil said:
C. The preexisting condition clause that forbids them to drop or refuse sick people means the problem you just mentioned is exacerbated 10 fold.

D. ACA came up with a pretty crappy way of taking care of the preexisting clause pushback from the Ins. lobby by forcing you to buy Insurance, a better way would have been a minimum quota for preexistings and high risk patients that the company had to meet as a percentage and then they were free to do as they please. A special status for high riskers or patients with CPT line item charges exceeding X would have also been better.
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They don't give a shit about pre-existing conditions so long as everyone has to take them on, the costs is just passed on to their user base.
 
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