Flutterby™! : Steinback on health care 2009-12-11 02:41:45.65467+00

Steinback on health care

2009-12-11 02:41:45.65467+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

Robert Steinback on the failure of the current healthcare system:

I am scheduled to begin dying on Feb. 1, 2010.

That's when his COBRA eligibility runs out, and he can't find anyone who will pick up his insurance. So if you expect that you'll ever get sick, don't use your employer's health insurance, because one day you could become unemployed because they failed, and that could mean a discontinuity in your health insurance. And then you're screwed. In most states.

The first thing we need to do in this whole healthcare thing is remove the employer insurance deduction, or give it to everybody. Even before insurance portability, we need to make sure that people can keep the insurance they've got, and the easiest way to do that is to make sure we can always stay with the company we've got.

As long as insurance lobbyists are allowed access to lawmakers, I'm afraid no real reform will ever be passed.

If we remove the employer deduction, a lot of employers will either find ways to stop offering health care or go out of business, because health care costs too much.

Then more people will have to shoulder the burden on their own, and will be unable to do so, because health care costs too much.

I'm tired of all the discussions that essentially amount to "who will pick up the bill." We would be having none of them if the bill weren't ridiculously high in the first place. No one seems to want to address raw costs.

That's because no individual pays the raw costs and the market reflects that—the industry charges what the market can bear, and that market is currently being paid for by insurance, which can afford to pay more than individuals.

Remove medical insurance entirely and X things are going to happen: 1) no one (well, a few exceptions like Bill Gates or William Buffet) will be able to afford medical care, which leads to 2) companies in the medical industry will either go out of business or 3) quickly learn where to cut costs to maintain a profit margin.

Something that's been in the back of my mind for some time now—the cost differential for elective breast enhancement surgery (boob job) vs. non-elective breast enhancement surgery (reconstruction after a mastectomy). I pick that since the techniques are (to my lay knowledge) about the same, but insurance will only cover one but not the other.

One of the things that the current health reform bill in the Senate wants to do is to limit the profit of medical insurance companies to 10%. There are a few, according to the msnbc report last night, that make more than 27% profit. Last time I ran a business, albeit a small business, 10% profit was considered outrageously successful. Instead of the government run healthcare, or coop, the new bill wants to put a privately run nonprofit insurance company in place. I'd say that would cut about 27% of the cost out of your average healthcare insurance bill. For me, that would be about $750 a month instead of the $1,020-something I was quoted last time I looked into it.

Man, am I looking forward to getting tri-care next month.

#Comment Re: Steinback on healthcare made: 2009-12-17 22:23:50.948564+00 by: Barbara Feder Ostrov

Check out this interview with Robert Steinback on health reform: http://bit.ly/8cfz9N