BillCosby

Of the three hers seems to just force ppl to do what they are already having problems doing???

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Preventive war is not war!!!!Counter-terror is not terror

Jonesy

Maybe it would work better if liberals came up with intentions and conservatives came up with solutions. Hand-in-hand, together we can do it.

You can still do harm while walking the path of good intentions.

RK77

Edwards plan was also mandatory. I think the tone of the presumption that mandatory insurance makes is disturbing.

A question that may get you a more informative answer might be "How is Hillary's plan different from Romney's?"

I suggest this because we are beginning to see the problems with mandated care. In totality it is designed to punt a problem that government created (and has made no significant attempt to resolve)--out of the way of the federal government and out of the way of their corporate buddies and land it on the heads of the people!

I will post some things for your information.

RK77

Massachusetts Health Plan (with an individual mandate) is Universal in Name Only

August 30, 2007 - 10:38pm —

Michele Swenson CBS News (8/24/07) reported that since the Massachusetts Health Reform Plan took effect last year, only 120,000 of the 400,000 uninsured have obtained insurance. The estimate quoted of uninsured is thought to be low – the Census Bureau reported 748,000 uninsured last year in Massachusetts.

The linchpin of the Massachusetts plan - the thing that makes it "universal" in name only - is an individual mandate that compels everyone, including low- and middle-income uninsured, to purchase private health insurance coverage, or suffer tax penalties.

Comprehensive health plans in Massachusetts total $6,000 annually for an individual or $14,000 for a family, prohibitive costs for many. Another middleman - the insurance Connector - is intended to help people find private health insurance coverage they can afford. "Affordable" is often a bare-bones, stripped-down insurance averaging $660/month for a family, and $330 for an individual - still unaffordable to many working families.

Stripped-down policies, with high copays and deductibles, provide neither adequate access to care nor real financial protection.

A 2005 Harvard Medical and Law Schools study estimated that 76 percent of those bankrupted by medical bills had insurance at the onset of the illness that bankrupted them. As noted previously, high-deductible or catastrophic insurances have contributed to a 59 percent rise in consumer out-of-pocket health expenses and a 60 percent rise in uncompensated hospital care over a decade (reported by the American Hospital Association).

In the RAND Health Insurance Experiment (the only randomized controlled trial comparing high-deductible plans to comprehensive coverage) high-deductibles resulted in a 17% drop in toddler immunizations, and swelled the number of infants and toddlers failing to see a doctor in the course of a year from 5 to 18 percent. Adults with high-deductible policies also accessed less primary preventive care and experienced more symptoms like elevated blood pressure and higher risk of dying.

The Massachusetts plan falls short because it does nothing to eliminate the high overhead costs of the multiple commercial insurers that perpetuate excessive health administrative costs - e.g., Massachusetts Blue Cross spends only 85 percent of premiums for health care. The remaining 15% - $700 million annually - goes to administrative costs such as billing, marketing, etc. Billions more in adminsitration are spent by doctors and hospitals to obtain reimbursements.


Rest of article

RK77

Massachusetts Healthcare Plan Costs Skyrocket

By Monisha Bansal
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
January 25, 2008

(CNSNews.com) - According to recent reports, the cost of Massachusetts' health insurance mandate will rise 85 percent, or $400 million, in 2009. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), meanwhile, has been on the presidential campaign trail praising the program he put into place.

According to The Boston Globe, the cost increase is largely due to an increase in the number of people signing up for state-subsidized health insurance. State and federal taxpayers are likely to shoulder the cost increase.

"Essentially, the people who signed up under the mandate were the people who were getting subsidies," said Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Carmen Balber, a consumer advocate at Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, added, "What we've seen happen in Massachusetts is that lots of people are signing up for subsidized care," although "just 7 to 8 percent of the people who have newly signed up for health insurance have enrolled in a program they must pay full price for."

Tanner told Cybercast News Service that the state will likely need to raise taxes to cover the additional costs.

Romney, however, has been campaigning on the health insurance plan as a success.

Rest of article

RK77

Hazards of the Individual Health Care Mandate
By Glen Whitman

Glen Whitman is associate professor of economics at California State University, Northridge.

The latest fad in health care reform is the "individual mandate" — a law that requires individuals to purchase health insurance and threatens punishment for those who don't. Massachusetts, under the governorship of presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, has already created a health care policy with an individual mandate as its centerpiece. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed a similar plan for California. And politicians are not alone, as analysts from across the political spectrum have jumped on board. Even analysts who usually favor markets over regulation — like economist Gary Becker, legal scholar Richard Posner, Ron Bailey of Reason magazine, and Robert Moffit of the Heritage Foundation — have voiced support for the individual mandate.

Their support, however, is unjustified. The individual mandate will do little, if anything, to solve the problem of "free riders" whose health expenses are paid for by the rest of us. The mandate will do nothing to decrease the actual cost of health services. Worst of all, the mandate will create a set of political incentives that will likely drive up the cost of health insurance while impeding the adoption of more effective reforms.

Is Free Riding Really the Problem?

Supporters of the individual mandate rely heavily on the problem of uncompensated care. People who lack health insurance nevertheless receive health care in this country, because hospitals and health care providers are unable or unwilling to turn them away. When recipients don't pay for their care, the rest of us end up footing the bill one way or another. Individual-mandate advocates contend, plausibly enough, that we should make the free riders pay for themselves.

But how big is the free-rider problem, really? First, we should note that not all free riders are uninsured. In fact, people with insurance consume almost a third of uncompensated care. Second, not all care received by the uninsured is paid for by others. Analysts at the Urban Institute found that the uninsured pay more than 25 percent of their health expenditures out of pocket.

So how much uncompensated care is received by the uninsured? The same study puts the number at about $35 billion a year in 2001, or only 2.8 percent of total health care expenditures for that year. In other words, even if the individual mandate works exactly as planned, it will affect at best a mere 3 percent of health care expenditures.

Rest of article

This is the best discussion of the problems, imo.

RK77

At one year, Mass. healthcare plan falls short

By Sally C. Pipes | May 15, 2007

MASSACHUSETTS'S UNIVERSAL healthcare law turned one in April. To survive, its guardians have had to make many changes, each of which has increased current and future government spending, increased the government's role in regulating the healthcare market, decreased individual responsibility to purchase insurance, and made certain that the plan will fall far short of achieving universal coverage.

The promise of the law was simple and seductive: Require people to purchase health insurance, make the insurance affordable, or at least tax-deductible, and then fine those who don't comply. Subsidies could come from the current money devoted to the Uncompensated Care Pool and the federal taxpayers. Universal coverage, then, would be achieved with little new spending.

Numerous problems existed with this plan, but the fairy tale quality appealed to politicians and the national media, so it passed to much fanfare.

Interestingly, the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, the bureaucrats in charge of implementing the plan, decided that the universal individual mandate does not apply to everyone, but rather only those who can afford the premiums. Therefore, nearly one in five of the currently uninsured will be exempt from the law.

The Connector Board also bowed to pressure and reduced the monthly premiums on the subsidized-but-not-entirely-free healthcare plans. This will increase the program's costs by $13 million.

Even at these reduced rates, the plans will still not be attractive to many. People earning between 151 percent and 300 percent of the federal poverty limit -- $25,000 to $110,000 for families and $15,316 to $50,000 for individuals -- are expected to pay up to 9.6 percent of their income on insurance premiums, or pay fines. (This 9.6 percent is before any co pays and cost sharing.) Meanwhile, taxpayers are still subsidizing them by as much as 94 percent of total costs.

The structure is a gourmet recipe for runaway spending. With this level of premium, those who don't value insurance enough to make financial sacrifice to purchase it will neglect to do so. The fine -- set at $216 -- will be more attractive than the premium. Politicians will be under strong pressure to not enforce the mandate once the fines increase to meaningful levels. Indeed, they have already shown their willingness to back away from it for the 20 percent of people, and have set up a waiver process to exempt others on a case-by-case basis.

At the same time, the massive premium subsidy will make these plans extremely attractive to individuals who expect to use large quantities of healthcare. The population paying the premiums will be older and sicker than the general population. Spending will explode. It will come from somewhere, most likely the taxpayer.

Early data already provide evidence of this dynamic. As of April 1, 62,979 individuals had signed up for Commonwealth Care, the subsidized plans. Of these, 52,500 were enrolled in the totally free option. Give something for nothing, and people sign up. The plans in which people have to pay are a different story. Sign-ups have been slow, and the people who have enrolled are older and sicker than those signing up for the free plan.

The average age of a person in the free plan is 36, while the average age in the paid plans is 47. Of the free plans, there have been 214 specialty referrals per 1,000 enrollees. Of the paid plans, there have been 416 specialty referrals per 1,000 enrollees.

The system is set up to tax the young and healthy -- who typically have both less income and less wealth -- to subsidize those who are older and less healthy. One goal, according to the organization Health Care For All, is "to create a statewide credible risk pool, so healthy people 'prepay' toward their medical care."

The problem with this is that the young and healthy, who are already prepaying for Medicare out of every paycheck, may object to this new form of taxation. According to the state's own data, it's not the young and healthy who use the Uncompensated Care Pool or who abuse emergency rooms, so the real point is the prepay or taxation and subsidization of a so-called risk pool.

So one year in, we have a plan that, even if no more concessions to liberal advocates are made, falls 20 percent short of its stated goal. Its costs have already increased by at least $13 million and are on track to skyrocket by some multiple of this once the doctors' bills start coming in. Happy Birthday.

Sally C. Pipes is president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute.

Source

RK77

I could bore you with a sea of articles but the bottom line is that this is nothing more than another way for the insurance industry to feast of the healthcare dollar. The only new twist is that under Hillary if you chose not to be part of the main course---you WILL pay!

BillCosby

THnX................

If someone is presently (& w/ this economy I imagine the #'s will be skyrocketing) unable to afford healthcare how is mandating it going to change that???

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Preventive war is not war!!!!Counter-terror is not terror

JeffinCO

proper health care should be the right of every citizen.
...not the requirement.

Take a guy who cant afford health insurance for his family,..and FINE him, because he cant afford it. (As I understand it it will be, like car insurance, right?)... Doesnt sound like a solution to me....

(unless of course, i have an interest in the MEGA_GIANT health care/ heath insurance companies.)

THEN it sounds GREAT!!!!

This stinks like yesterdays diapers.

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