All signs point to a crushing surge in health care costs for patients and employers next year — and that means health care industry groups are about to brawl over who pays the price.
Source: Congress may face a reckoning on health care costs
Plus, for the next 2-3 decades, the decline in the younger population – with the Baby Boom bulge aging – means fewer people providing health care to more. This is a recipe for health care disaster.
ObamaCare was a failure; the media will not remind you that ObamaCare was going to lower prices and control future price hikes – and failed.
We received our 2023 ACA “affordable” insurance renewal for 2 adults:
- $1,924 per month premium
- $17,400 deductible, up from $13,500 in 2022
They had 12 years to fix this since the ACA was passed in 2010. Politicians do not give a fuck about the ACA failure and pretend the ACA is an overwhelming success. All of them are liars.
The actual prices for care access are generally US $20 per minute and up; ER access will run $30 to $50 per minute of access to a care provider. I just had a lab test workup done (results found I am healthy and fine); took 1 hour. My estimated cost (I have no idea yet because they have not told me) is $1,200 (60 minutes x $20/minute) or more, plus an additional fee for physician review of the results. Actual pricing is a total mystery at this point. Due to absurd deductibles, I pay out of pocket for all health care. The ACA is a fucking joke.
Two obvious ways the ACA might have exerted influence on prices:
- Require all health care providers to publish prices, in an easy-to-use format so we could comparison shop.
- Fix the ACA so the tiny individual marketplace risk pools would be large enough to absorb all the high-risk patients that the ACA dumped into the ACA individual risk pools, turning the individual market into a high risk/high cost insurance program.
They could let market signals control prices, or the government could mandate prices (price fixing has never worked) or have government take over all health care (government run – likely as effective as public health’s ability to control a pandemic virus).
No matter what is done, many health care providers will end up having to be competitive or suffer price fixing. But health care is a huge lobby – and they will not be satisfied until 100% of GDP is going to the health industrial complex.
Yes, this overwhelmingly influences my votes – but since the failure affects perhaps 1-2% of the population the lies over ObamaCare have no impact. Ultimately, the politicians do not care. In the 12 years since the ACA was passed, the U.S. could have fought and won World War II – THREE TIMES. But Congress could not fix what they broke in that time frame.
If you have not noticed I am frustrated by the bull shit and lies from our politicians. None of them give a shit.
