Those precise words can be used to describe health insurance. It is there to protect the hospital and the doctors from getting stiffed when you can't pay. And it's not as if this is a rare issue. Uncompensated care was $41 billion in 2011. It's as much a matter of responsibility as liability insurance on your auto. You don't get a choice as to whether or not you carry insurance because the hospital and doctors working there don't get a choice as to whether or not they try to keep you from dying.
That's nowhere close to an accurate comparison and you know it.
The price of health care already takes into consideration expected losses from charge-off. No different than how retail business adds in shrinkage from theft and spoilage into the prices you pay at the register.
All Obamacare accomplishes by heavily subsidizing insurance for those who would have been charge-offs before is simply tax the other users of the system via penalty or higher premium costs. It really doesn't solve any problem by the time you wash it out. Rate payers still end up picking up the tab for non-rate payers, it's just the payment point is re-jiggered assuming that the price per procedure comes down as a result of ACA, which I don't see any initial signs that will be the case.
Keep in mind, 30 million Americans still will not have coverage. That doesn't do a whole lot to mitigate charge offs as hospitals can't turn away someone with critical injuries and no way to pay.
When we talk about the Affordable Care Act, we mostly focus on the millions of Americans who will gain health insurance coverage. We talk less about the millions who will remain uninsured.
And there are a lot of them: 30 million Americans will not have coverage under Obamacare, according to a new analysis in the journal Health Affairs.
"Even if the law were fully implemented, there would have been 26 million uninsured people," co-author Steffie Woolhandler said in an interview Thursday. "This isn't just about the Medicaid expansion. This is the system as originally designed."
Thirty million is a lot smaller than the 48.6 million Americans who lack insurance coverage right now. It's also, as Woolhandler points out, not exactly breaking news: The Congressional Budget Office estimated over a year ago that between 26 million and 27 million Americans would not have insurance under the expansion.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/07/obamacare-leaves-millions-uninsured-heres-who-they-are/
Granted, there is also the part of the law that is more about improving outcomes (and thus lowering lifetime cost) by getting earlier treatment, which is why qualifying plans are required to be relatively comprehensive. At present, people wait until they're on Medicare to get stuff treated that would be cheaper if treatment was begun earlier in life, driving the cost of that program up. We shouldn't be allowed to foist our costs onto hospitals and doctors and insurance companies should not be allowed to foist their costs onto Medicare.
Regardless of how accessible you make health care there are simply some people who won't go to the doctor until that lump on the side of their neck is the size of an orange or until those nagging headaches are now accompanied by vertigo and black-out sessions. People are naturally afraid of bad news. If someone buys a bronze plan with a high co-pay due to household budget concerns, they still won't prioritize going to the doctor because they can't afford the office visit cost.
There needs to be a whole lot more awareness of a proactive approach to health. That's the primary reason other countries have better "outcomes". They commute by foot and bicycle more. Their governments ban suspect food additives, and people's attitudes about diet and health are much different than ours are. Americans are far too accustomed to making poor choices based on convenience. I consider myself very blessed that I no longer have to travel quite a bit in my career. I can make better intake choices and have time for exercise as well as commuting to work by bicycle when it's convenient.
The single best things I've done to improve my outcomes since I turned 40 are quitting tobacco use, losing 60 pounds, changing my eating habits to avoid suspected and known carcinogens and agents which help cause all sorts of allergies, making daily exercise a priority. I've always done annual check-ups and gone to the Dr. when I knew "something wasn't right".
That in itself wouldn't result in better outcomes if I still had a cigarette hanging out of my mouth and I weighed 225 pounds.
