Can you help me understand how you came to this conclusion? Obamacare regulates insurance companies. Not what insurance you're going to get. They give you a whole market to make your own decision.
I've sorta followed your contributions on this subject, and I know you're taking a very positive view. A lot of people want this to be an answer. I've seen people bankrupted by medical care, I've seen people who just decided not to go get treatment and die. When I was 25 I got sick and the company I worked for "downsized" me out of a claim to job benefits, and had to go to Legal Aid to try to make them own up to their touted benefit package.
I actually read hundreds of the pages of the ACA when it was passed. . .. a few days after, because no one actually had the final draft on their desk until a few hours before it was passed. Yah yah. . . . there were some of the movers and shakers who knew what it was going to be, months ahead of the "debate" in our legislature. . . . but what we were told in the media definitely was not either accurate nor complete in scope. You say it regulates insurance companies and not the people? You have to be ignoring a whole boatload of facts to feel that way.
Yes, we get to choose from offerings put forth by insurance companies, who get to offer those choices at prices which they hope will be profitable. Which means we pay for what we get, theoretically. In fact, without increased taxes as well, it won't fly. . . .. we will have to pay for all the administrative costs, all the regulatory costs, and our actual choices in the process of receiving care will be narrowed, often meaning we will actually not get the care we need, and we will die. Or live with impediments that put us on the welfare rolls. . . .
to get briefly to your question about the sentence you bolded from my remarks above, the best example I can give is the situation my wife faced a little over a year ago, under the present system, which isn't very good as it is. She was denied in her and her doctor's request for a new diagnostic procedure by her insurance carrier. Months later, during surgery, her actual situation was revealed. . .. to be something that the new diagnostic tool would have disclosed, which would have changed the whole program of treatment over more than six months. It was a critical and life-threatening situation, that had---- for the lack of information deemed too experimental and expensive by bureaucrats---not been addressed. This meant hundreds of thousands of dollars of ineffective care had been given, and in some statistical analyses means she lost some years of her life expectancy.
Obamacare will give more bureaucrats more power to make such decisions in your health care. You will not have choices you will otherwise at least have a chance to make. . . .
I have no delusions about who will pay for Obamacare, or any other collective care program. I know we will pay for it. We always have, and always will. Socialism creates some illusions about transferring expenses to corporates somehow, but they will pass their costs down to consumers, and government will pass it's costs down to taxpayers. . . . we will always be the ones paying for what we get.
I just think we ought to still make the decisions that affect our life, our health, and our finances.
