And that needs to change
Under Obamacare, People Must Be Broken of Their Preference for Choice
We have a new contender for most-telling-ever Obamacare quote this morning: “We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has.†That’s Marcus Merz, head of Minnesota health insurer PreferredOne, in a New York Times report on the increasing prevalence of narrow network health plans.
Merz is basically stating openly what the Obama administration won’t, which is that Obamacare is intentionally designed to narrow consumer choice and plan design within the health insurance market. The Obama administration doesn’t want to say this because it is bad politics generally, and also because President Obama specifically and repeatedly promised that, under the law, people would be able to keep their choice of health plans and doctors, not that they would be broken of their preference for medical choice. But the law’s authors and administrators have a pretty good idea of what kind of health insurance they want you to have, and that’s the kind of insurance that you’re going to get.
“We’re all trying to break away from this fixation on open access and broad networks,” Merz continues. “We”—by which I mean the insurance industry—tried this before, in the 1990s, when narrow-network plans referred to as Health Maintenance Organizations were all the rage. It didn’t go so well, and eventually insurers cut it out.
Because people hated them and they didn’t work they way they were sold. Now people are finding out that they are mandated by law. As more and more of them figure this out, they will (hopefully) remember who forced it upon them.
What’s infuriating, is the amount of money diverted to bureaucrats and lawyers.
Real health care form would have been tort reform. Provide a legal shield to doctors, make them liable only for clear gross negligence and malice. Same protection for drug and device makers. If anything needed to be socialized, it was medical insurance. If the US had cut the costs for doctors to buy insurance, everything else would be cheaper.
If we cut the bureaucracy and paper work costs, everything would have gotten cheaper.
Right now, if a doctor wants to go help poor kids for free, he can’t. He doesn’t have the insurance coverage he needs. When a safe drug goes from presciption only to over-the-counter, everybody wins (patients get easy access, more sales, less doctor time wasted). But the drug company will be afriad, that Joe might take 10 pills at once with whiskey and then go for a drive.
Guess I’m not part of the “we” they are referring to.
When will the sheep wake up & smell the coffee?
Merle
Merle – they will wake up about the time the coffee is boiling hot, and they can elbow the frog and ask “how long you been in here?”
but, but …. wouldn’t that qualify as frog soup instead??? 🙂
Nah, that’s when you spill the coffee in your lap and then sue somebody for not tellin’ you that your hot coffee was hot. Not that that’d ever happen in this country, huh?