While we all wait to see whether the Supreme Court will overturn decades of established precedent by gutting Congress's power under the Commerce Clause so that it can overturn the Affordable Health Care Act, it's worth taking a moment to remember how health care is paid for now.
The controversial part of the Affordable Care Act (call it "Obamacare" if you want, but just remember that before it was Obamacare it was "Romneycare") is the individual mandate. That's the part of the law that charges an additional tax to anyone who does not have insurance. You get a choice: buy insurance, or pay a tax. For people who can't afford insurance, enough subsidies will be given so that they can afford it. But middle class people who don't want to buy health insurance will be penalized by paying this tax. It's true; and it's certainly understandable why it's controversial.
But what happens right now to middle-class people who don't want to buy health insurance? Most of them get away with it, because they're healthy. But every year some percentage of them get a serious illness, or get hit by a car, or fall off a ladder. Remarkably, these people -- your friends and neighbors -- don't stay at home and die, wishing all the while they had bought health insurance. Instead, they go to their local emergency room. There, they get treated, and are sent home with a $100,000 or $300,000 or $1,000,000 invoice. They declare bankruptcy, bilk their creditors, and stiff the hospital.
Who pays for that? You do. You pay for it in higher taxes to pay for hospital bailouts, higher insurance premiums, and higher hospital charges.
Don't like it? Here are your options: (1) Stick with our current system in which $56 billion in medical care was provided to the uninsured in 2008, resulting in higher taxes, insurance bills, and hospital charges. (2) Obama(Romney)care. (3) Have emergency rooms stop treating the uninsured. This would mean repealing the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), which has required emergency rooms to treat all comers since 1986, when it was passed with great bipartisan support. Such a repeal would leave uninsured people to bleed to death, curable diseases to go undiagnosed, and babies to die in their mothers' wombs for want of medical care. The L.A. Times recently ran an interesting article detailing this colorful history of of EMTALA.
Obama(Romney)care is starting to look pretty good to me. We'll find out soon if the Roberts Court agrees.
Follow Joshua Shulman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/joshuashulman
Robert Scheer: Health Care: Give the People What They Want
Frankly I am stunned that you would watch your daughter die because she couldn't get insurance. Or your best friend, because that is what is going on. 45,0000 people die every year for lack of medical care here in the states. Do we not take care of our own?
Right now it's extortion and will apparently continue to be so.
Bilk one's creditors- how absurd!
If America wants to be honest, time to say no insurance card, no treatment. We don't have the stomach for those consequesnces yet so many rail against a law that begins to address the sinkhole that is our current system.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs
Keep smiling, my friend!
Enables them to go through the pockets whilst they dress.
This unconscionable greed must be addressed and the rich required to contribute their fair share to this basic human right. The intransigence of the rich makes it ever more clear that the only solution to forcing them to pay their fair global share is World Socialism under the auspices of the U.N.
Remember in November that only Obama and his Social Democrat Party will always support the commonsense solution of one world government, united under the benevolent rule of World Socialism ... with Obama as world president.
More to the point, based on about 25% of housholds being uninsured, that represents about $2,000 per uninsured household. Except, since the 25% don't contribute, it ends up adding $650 to every insurance policy.
The GOP's effective position, then is that the 75% responsible (or lucky, more like) enough to carry insurance should subsidize the 25% to the tune of that $650 per person, per year.
What happened to the GOP's "personal responsibility" mantra here?
It's really a question of how much will we pay.
Only two required entities in health care.
The provider and the recipient of said care.
Kinda like going to the grocery store and handing some guy $100 who in turn gives it to the cashier and you leave with $70 worth og food stuffs.
The joker who got the 30 bucks brought no value to the transaction.
Any doctor or hospital that charges a governmental entity a higher price than the lowest price that the doctor/hospital is willing to accept from a patient who pays in cash or via insurance should be prosecuted for medicare/medicaid fraud.