The Trump Budget and TrumpCare will have but one result — to kill off as many as possible who can’t afford insurance. Bernie Sanders said it best: If you can’t afford it, access simply doesn’t matter.
Free care for those who don’t pay must be built into the escalating insurance rates or come from public sources; somebody has to pay the costs. Yet self-righteous conservative politicians babble unending nonsense that insurance competition and eliminating fraud and waste will take care of it all.
Medicare reimbursement rates are also a big problem. Medicare usually pays a provider 10-20 cents on the dollar; the providers have to build those write-offs into the costs charged to private plans. Bingo, massively higher rates.
No health care is free. Even in single-payer universal coverage systems it’s part of the budget. You either take care of people or let them die.
The individual mandate is the very basis of workable health insurance – you are required to have car insurance, why not healthcare? Even Trump now acknowledges that coverage for all requires an individual mandate.
If you can’t afford the $1,050/month average individual premium; or the $400 / month that most employer plans cost; then you have Ted Cruz’s silly access argument. LOL.
Ryan says that having healthy people pay for sick people is wrong. Yet non-accident drivers pay for many accidents they don’t have every day.
More and more employers don’t want to provide health care to employees and have to build it into the cost of their services or product. However, such human costs are inevitable, and they know it. They just want to complain about it, book the profit, and blame everyone else because people don’t have access to healthcare.
One only has to look at the total $7+ trillion in government aid and bailouts (direct and Federal Reserve) to Wall Street, banksters and the wealthiest Americans in the 2008 meltdown. Now TrumpCare and intended tax “reform” will transfer even more trillions, as the Bush tax cuts already did, to billionaires and millionaires. The middle class gets scraps from the table.
I consider health care a human right! Jesus Christ said the meek will inherit the Earth — Trump’s going to make sure some get six feet of it. America has the number one cost in health care, but it’s 23rd in world quality rankings.
I won’t apologize for putting the majority of Americans before the wealthiest “parasitic class” who have made their fortunes on the backs of workers; and yes, immigrants who moved in (ask any Native American) and helped build this country with their hard work.
There is but one Deity that rules America — Mammon. And for the richest Americans there is never enough for them.
I’m not against money or wealth; that is part of life. I am against the government supported crony phony capitalism and the aggressive diversion of resources to the ultra wealthy in this second Robber Barron era — 1980-present.
No free pass to Heaven because you stopped an abortion, and then supported denying health care to others because of the totally phony expense/revenue claims. I don’t think a truly “Supreme Being” is that stupid; at least I hope not. The hallowed “baby” saved from an abortion becomes the much maligned “welfare cheat” overnight.
Let’s add on that Medicare was forbidden to ask for discounts by Congress on drug prices. I sincerely doubt “El” Pfizer, Merck “Chapo,” Valeant “Escobar,” etc., and Americas Drug Lord pharmaceutical industry, are going to allow their paid for Congress to provide prices like the rest of the world.
Real health care reform requires everything: more revenue contribution from the wealthiest, universal truly competitive insurance, mandated minimum coverage, major drug price changes, organizational consolidation, more treatment flexibility, alternative medicine, tort control, education and more patient cooperation. All of it.
The supposed “free market” fee model for health care, for what is an inevitable human condition, is incompatible with human life — like being born, staying healthy, getting sick, recovering or dying.
• Anselm Staack is retired CPA and attorney with an extensive actual working background in auditing, fraud and forensic investigation, personal finance, and retirement and benefits.
