Feed: Obama Healthcare Plan Summary - AggScore: 62.4

Obama Healthcare Plan Summary

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Obama Healthcare Information
Why Obama's plan won't work

I already discussed financial consultant Paul Krugman's statement that Obama's plan leaves 15 million north Americans lacking affordable medical care. The thing is, I think Krugman is wrong . My analysis is that Obama's plan leaves most USA citizens uninsured in the end.

Obama's plan relies on folks willingly purchasing healthcare insurance or signing up for public health programs in order to receive medicare. Obama mixes this with a couple of engaging twists. First is a mandate that health insurers must accept all comers, in any case of how well or how sick they are. Second is that insurers must cover established conditions. The final mandate in Obama's plan is a mandate that health insurers aren't permitted to drop folks from their rolls at renewal time.

O.K, so here's a question : with a mandate like these, why would anybody willingly join healthcare insurance *before* they got sick? I mean, medical care insurance is pricey, right? So then the healthcare death spiral that I discussed back in Sep 2007 kicks in. As healthy people back out of paying for medical care, that means the remaining folks end up paying more, which causes more folks to drop out, which causes health care insurance to become costlier, and then yet more people drop out. The end result is that only sick folks end up paying for health care -- which isn't a viable option, as the little share of sick people simply cannot pay for current levels of medical care. There just ain't no'there' there.

briefly without a mandate that healthy people subsidize the care of sick people, there's no universal health care, just lots of dead sick people. Now, Obama adds a slick tiny move to his medical care plan -- a'reinsurer pool' funded by the govt. that takes the sickest of the sick off the health insurance insurance company's rolls -- but I do not know that this would end the death spiral that otherwise results from mandating that insurers accept all comers, but not mandating that everyone buy insurance. When I'm employed the numbers, Obama's plan simply doesn't work -- the medical insurance death spiral gets even worse.

My point, the point I have been making all along, is that unless *everybody* is needed to participate either through buying private insurance or participating in a public program ( and remember, at least 5,000,000 of the uninsured *CURRENTLY QUALIFY FOR PUBLIC INSURANCE PROGRAMS*, they have just never gotten around to signing up ), we end up with a system where only sick folks pay -- and, in the end, with a lot of dead people. Without mandates, we end up with dead people.

Krugman is an optimist. I'm not. Krugman sees 15 million uninsured. I see a heap more, if Obama's plan were passed as-is -- which, naturally, it won't be, since as a plan this would have such horrific effects that when the CBO works the numbers the whole Congress would flinch in horror and send it to the shredder.
- http://obama-healthcare-issues.blogspot.com/