The Affordable Healthcare Act in the U.S. Supreme Court -…

On April 01 2012 01:28 JonnyBNoHo wrote:



It's not "law of the jungle" in the US. If you are sick you go to the hospital and they take care of you. Even if you don't have insurance and cannot pay. Basic needs ARE covered.

On March 23 2012 14:01 dAPhREAk wrote:
cost of my health care went up after this passed. coverage didnt. i am curious to see how the supreme court will handle it, but i doubt the cost of my health care is going to change even if its ruled unconstitutional (fucking insurance companies).

On April 01 2012 01:42 Nottoo wrote:


All these stories of crippling debt and the resulting poverty, due to not being able to afford treatment for some random illness or accident must be some big conspiracy then right?

@liberal Anyone can say "oh x will lead to y will lead to z". It still doesn't make it true. It's called a fallacy because even if something similar happens in another country and it goes horribly wrong (which it hasn't) you still can't qualify for how the people in the country will react to changes that do really exert control.

On March 31 2012 14:55 xDaunt wrote:
The root problem of the high cost of medical care in the US is the fact that the industry has become so detached from the free market that there are gross distortions in prices and billing practices. You'd laugh if you actually saw what medical providers charged for something as simple as OTC/generic medicine or incredibly basic and cheap medical supplies.

On April 01 2012 01:54 kineSiS- wrote:



Are you a derpatron? This doesn't even go into effect until 2013. How could prices increase DUE TO IT. If it hasn't even been implemented.

9: Percentage cost that the average family health care policy annual premium (through employers) has risen by in 2011 from 2010, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report cited by The New York Times.

On April 01 2012 01:42 Nottoo wrote:


All these stories of crippling debt and the resulting poverty, due to not being able to afford treatment for some random illness or accident must be some big conspiracy then right?

@liberal Anyone can say "oh x will lead to y will lead to z". It still doesn't make it true. It's called a fallacy because even if something similar happens in another country and it goes horribly wrong (which it hasn't) you still can't qualify for how the people in the country will react to changes that do really exert control.

On April 01 2012 04:53 JonnyBNoHo wrote:


Sure, the system needs to be improved and it isn't perfect - none are. But you don't need to exaggerate the flaws in the system and make comments like "law of the jungle" to justify your opinion.

Becoming impoverished due to health bills happens but it is rare. If you have money than you should have been responsible and bought insurance. If not, then then debt is irrelevant as you just declare bankruptcy and walk away from the debt. I'm sure you can dig up some anecdotal evidence that says otherwise but you can do the same for any system anywhere in the world.

On April 01 2012 07:03 liberal wrote:

What people need to realize is that our technology advances faster than our means to pay for it. It's hilarious going back and looking at a couple megabyte hard drive and seeing it be $2000 or something... But the same principle follows for health care. Just because it becomes possible to save someone's life with a new treatment, doesn't mean it is economically feasible to do so. There will always be bankruptcies from medical bills so long as the technology is advancing. The only way to prevent that is to have the government ration the treatments to begin with. Every system, including socialized medicine, MUST ration care in some way.

The United State's rations care by cost, socialized medicine seems to ration care by waiting lists. Personally, I think it is better for an individual to have their life saved and yet be financially damaged than to have the care rationed to begin with. The time spent waiting is often worth more to a person than the price they would pay otherwise. Getting effective and timely treatment for a deadly condition is certainly worth the cost of declaring bankruptcy.

In either case, we still haven't addressed once the actual reasons for the rising costs of health care in the US. That's the primary problem with the system, the rising costs. And there are real reasons for those rising costs, and uncompensated care from uninsured individuals is a very, very small percentage of the costs despite what proponents of the individual mandate claim. The reason the individual will BECOME necessary is only because insurance companies are being forced to subsidize those with pre-existing conditions, instead of having the government subsidize those individuals directly.

People may get the impression that I am opposed to helping the poor receive treatment... That is not true at all. I just think the help to the poor should always be in the form of direct government subsidies instead of attempting to transform an entire market with excessive regulations and force individuals to purchase a product from private companies. That is a horrible way of accomplishing the end goals which we all have in common. It is those government controls which have broken the health care system to begin with. More of the same isn't a solution.

On April 01 2012 04:08 dAPhREAk wrote:

lol. insurance premiums have been raised in anticipation of the legislation going into effect. are you a "derpatron?"

Health Insurance Coverage, Costs Since Obamacare was Made Law



http://news.yahoo.com/health-insurance-coverage-costs-since-obamacare-made-law-224200906.html

On April 01 2012 07:22 batmobile wrote:
like half of the idiots here even understand what obamacare is

On April 01 2012 07:19 Derez wrote:

My insurance cost goes up between 5 and 10 percent on an almost yearly basis, without additional coverage or legislation. Most years I actually lose coverage. Different country, but the same trend in insurance premiums. Which is just to say that you can't attribute the 9% increase directly to Obamacare.

This graph is from a previous Kaiser report:

(Full report)
10 percent increases on a year-by-year basis are pretty much the norm when it comes to health insurance. I'm not denying that part of it might be due to changing legislation, but it's not like the increases in costs are completely out-of-synch with the earlier decade.

In either case, we still haven't addressed once the actual reasons for the rising costs of health care in the US. That's the primary problem with the system, the rising costs. And there are real reasons for those rising costs, and uncompensated care from uninsured individuals is a very, very small percentage of the costs despite what proponents of the individual mandate claim. The reason the individual will BECOME necessary is only because insurance companies are being forced to subsidize those with pre-existing conditions, instead of having the government subsidize those individuals directly.

People may get the impression that I am opposed to helping the poor receive treatment... That is not true at all. I just think the help to the poor should always be in the form of direct government subsidies instead of attempting to transform an entire market with excessive regulations and force individuals to purchase a product from private companies. That is a horrible way of accomplishing the end goals which we all have in common. It is those government controls which have broken the health care system to begin with. More of the same isn't a solution.

On April 01 2012 07:03 liberal wrote:

The United State's rations care by cost, socialized medicine seems to ration care by waiting lists. Personally, I think it is better for an individual to have their life saved and yet be financially damaged than to have the care rationed to begin with. The time spent waiting is often worth more to a person than the price they would pay otherwise. Getting effective and timely treatment for a deadly condition is certainly worth the cost of declaring bankruptcy.

Mindful of concerns about health-care’s spiraling costs, the Health Blog was struck by some new research on what the investigators identified as wasteful practices by family doctors and general practitioners.

Not being doctors, we can’t vouch for the clinical appropriateness of the findings, but there’s no harm in triggering a discussion, right?

What did the researchers say was the No. 1 most over-used activity by primary care physicians? Prescribing a brand-name cholesterol-lowering drug without trying a less expensive generic first, according to the research posted online by the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Doctors’ prescribing a brand-name statin, without first checking to see if a lower-priced generic drug would cut a patient’s cholesterol sufficiently, results in $5.8 billion in excess health-care spending, according to the research letter published Oct. 1.

The authors found $6.76 billion in what they said was non-recommended health-care spending after analyzing surveys of patient visits to certain primary care doctors’ offices and hospital outpatient departments in 2009.

Other practices deemed inappropriate by the authors: bone density scans for women ages 40 to 64 years, costing $527.4 million; ordering CT Scans or MRI’s for lower back pain, amounting to $175.4 million; and prescribing antibiotics to children with sore throats caused by a virus, worth $116.3 million.

Although these sums aren’t chump change, the authors write that achieving affordable but high-quality health-care will really depend on finding ”‘high value’ targets” in specialty areas.

There is another simple reason health care in the United States costs more than it does anywhere else: The prices are higher.

That may sound obvious. But it is, in fact, key to understanding one of the most pressing problems facing our economy. In 2009, Americans spent $7,960 per person on health care. Our neighbors in Canada spent $4,808. The Germans spent $4,218. The French, $3,978. If we had the per-person costs of any of those countries, America’s deficits would vanish. Workers would have much more money in their pockets. Our economy would grow more quickly, as our exports would be more competitive.

There are many possible explanations for why Americans pay so much more. It could be that we’re sicker. Or that we go to the doctor more frequently. But health researchers have largely discarded these theories. As Gerard Anderson, Uwe Reinhardt, Peter Hussey and Varduhi Petrosyan put it in the title of their influential 2003 study on international health-care costs, “it’s the prices, stupid.”

Prices don’t explain all of the difference between America and other countries. But they do explain a big chunk of it. The question, of course, is why Americans pay such high prices — and why we haven’t done anything about it.

“Other countries negotiate very aggressively with the providers and set rates that are much lower than we do,” Anderson says. They do this in one of two ways. In countries such as Canada and Britain, prices are set by the government. In others, such as Germany and Japan, they’re set by providers and insurers sitting in a room and coming to an agreement, with the government stepping in to set prices if they fail.

In America, Medicare and Medicaid negotiate prices on behalf of their tens of millions of members and, not coincidentally, purchase care at a substantial markdown from the commercial average. But outside that, it’s a free-for-all. Providers largely charge what they can get away with, often offering different prices to different insurers, and an even higher price to the uninsured.

On April 01 2012 09:29 DoubleReed wrote:


It's not just that there are rising costs of healthcare. It's that we are paying insanely more for crappier healthcare, people are without care, and the healthcare companies seem to doing just fine on the profit side. If anything they're doing better than ever. It reeks of 'crony capitalism,' not over-regulation. I'm tired of hearing about over-regulation, because you would think the healthcare companies would be doing poorly in that case. The individual mandate also reeks of 'crony capitalism.'

Honestly, I'm suggesting that maybe we need to consider throwing out profit entirely, and give a government option at the very least. That would at least force a control on the situation. Making huge profits off of denying people care is essentially what's happening right now.

So does that mean insurers are highly profitable? No. 2010 profit margins for publicly-traded health insurers averaged 4 percent. This compares poorly to cigarette manufacturers (20%), railroads (15%), long-distance carriers (14%), and soft-drink manufacturers (13%).

Overall, the profit margin for health insurance companies was a modest 3.4 percent over the past year, according to data provided by Morningstar. That ranks 87th out of 215 industries

The industry as a whole chalked up a profit margin of more than 10% in 2007, but that was carried by the life insurance side of the industry. Health insurance companies don’t fare nearly as well when it comes to making profits. Far more of their revenues are eaten up by claims, which continue to grow year after year as health care costs increase.

On April 01 2012 10:29 liberal wrote:


So now we've established that the insanely high costs aren't from either insurers profit margins or the costs of uninsured uncompensated care. The scapegoats are starting to dwindle.

On April 01 2012 10:38 screamingpalm wrote:
@ liberal- Interesting, but directly contradictory to the information provided by various other sources (such as Harvard Medical and California Associations). Will go and find links if desired.