Okay! So! The cat is coming out of hat. Obama administration is basically saying, gotcha! All those promises of lower premiums as a senator, presidential candidate and as president of United States were just to fool you and get this law passed. The fact of the matter is that the, so called, free market people were right. As the first step, administration is only accepting that prices will go up for only certain people. You and I, along with millions of other Americans are already paying higher premiums, higher co-pays and deductibles, with virtually no improvement in benefits or service, promised by government. The fact is that the cost will go up for everyone, except for the ones getting free healthcare or subsidized healthcare.
These are the common sense questions that we have been asking right from beginning. Who is going to pay for the thirty-two million new people in the insurance pool? Will 32 million new subscribers, not jack up the demand for health insurance and hence, raise the cost? Obama and other Democrats have been ruling out these questions labeling them as anti-people. Well, reality remains reality, whether you consider it pro-people or anti-people. It does not change. You cannot avoid it and ultimately you have to face it up.
Obama care proponents have been saying that the increased volume and price control strategy from single largest payer, the government, will bring down the cost. You must have noticed that the volume is following well known economic principle of supply and demand, while price controls have failed so far. Now, they are giving the better healthcare as an excuse for higher prices. They should be totally ashamed to even say this. You know why? Because it is not a new element in this equation. It was already there, when they were making every promise, possible. They were talking about lower cost, keeping quality into equation. Nobody thought that the cost will come down due to worse healthcare. They kept saying that everyone will have better healthcare on lower cost> No excuses, okay? It is just not working that way.
The biggest reason for all of us being in huge mess of Obama care, is, because, most Democrats, including Obama, do not really believe in free markets. They think that government do, and can offer better solutions and alternatives. They are wrong. Again! Yes, they are wrong. As usual government is just messing it up, even more.
For the sake of this very important issue of health care, we need to analyze it from scratch:
There is no doubt that the healthcare cost is out of control. It is getting increasingly difficult to afford healthcare as an individual, as a nation and as a country. To really understand the factors that are driving up cost, we have to think outside the box. The cookie cutter causes and solution projected and proposed by media and politicians, do not paint a complete picture and cannot solve the real issues.
If you look at the history, healthcare cost hikes are directly proportional to the boom in healthcare insurance industry. Initially the health insurance idea proposed, and bought by the consumers, was all about catastrophe. It was suggested that in the event of a catastrophic health related event, insurance will save the family with a huge, unexpected burden. Gradually, everyone involved in the equation, started to learn eventual benefits of system, and all the involved parties started to build a mutually beneficial relationship, at the cost and expense of consumer. Insurance companies realized that higher the cost of healthcare, more people are likely to buy it, at higher prices. Employers realized it as a very good tool to lock in and enslave the employees. Hospitals, doctors, laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare equipment and instruments manufacturers, realized that insurance companies has a real interest in keeping the cost high. So, they can get paid as much as they want. Consumers loved the convenience. As long as the employers and the employees are paying their share, they didn’t even had to worry about who is getting paid, for what and how much. Most patients and consumers, did not read, even a single bill in their lives.
All these factors, combined, kept rising the cost. But, this fantastic story did not stay as fantastic, after all. Soon, the bigger, more powerful and more connected partners in this scam, started spreading their legs and begin to push out the smaller, weaker and less connected. The first group to be orphaned out of all of them were doctors. As the awareness about skyrocketing cost grew, and stories about fraud became common, insurance companies blamed all that joint venture on doctors, and started cutting their payments, in the name cutting cost and fraud. Although, out of all the involved parties, doctors get the smallest chunk of defrauded healthcare money. Therefore, targeting the doctors to control cost and healthcare insurance fraud, did not make much difference.
The matter of the fact is that the biggest chunks out of healthcare money are going to health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare equipment manufacturing giants, hospitals and laboratories. All these involved parties, including doctors have been very successful, through their lobbies, at every level of government, including federal, state and local, to limit the competition, through increasingly complicating, expensive and time consuming licensing processes and other regulations. Because of all these regulations and lobbying, the competition is very limited, hence, there is no limit and restriction on price fixing, in every aspect of healthcare.
So, the government, corporate lobbies and oligopolies, never allowed free markets to work. It is ironic that the government is now blaming the free markets for failures in healthcare. They are telling us that government can solve all these problems, while the fact is that the government is one of the leading causes for these market failures.
What we really need to do is to lift the complex licensing requirements and other regulations and restrictions from all the aspects of healthcare, and open up markets. Allow free trade of all healthcare goods and services across the state lines.
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