I find it depressing that Speaker Ryan actually said: “The whole idea of Obamacare is … the people who are healthy pay for the … sick. It’s not working, and that’s why it’s in a death spiral.”
Ummm … that’s the way Insurance is supposed to work! Maybe someone should ask the GOP’s jihadist Speaker “WHY then does government mandate that we by car insurance?” The same principle applies, but instead of sick and not sick, it’s good driver and bad driver. Insurance is a “pool” where we all contribute to assure we can each get the care we need when we get sick and need treatment. It may be me this month, but you the next. Where just one of us may not be able to pony up the full cost for breast cancer treatment, but the pool can. We all don’t get breast cancer or prostate cancer or have a heart attack all at the same time.
The orchestrated “Death Spiral” is being created by actions taken by the Gang of Predators to orchestrate the demise of the Affordable Care Act. Here’s the actual timeline of events published on the Speaker’s website detailing the activities they have taken over the last year to take down the accessibility to insurance for ordinary Americans.
Here’s some food for thought as to Ryan’s point #5: A federal judge has ruled that Aetna was NOT being truthful when the health insurer said last summer that its decision to pull out of most Obamacare exchanges was strictly a business decision triggered by mounting losses. U.S. District Judge John Bates concluded this week that Aetna’s real motivation for dropping Obamacare coverage in several states was “specifically to evade judicial scrutiny” over its merger with Humana. Aetna’s temper tantrum to pull out of Obamacare exchanges in 11 states last August, including 17 counties in Florida, Georgia and Missouri where the Department of Justice argued the merger would wipe out competition and blocked Aetna’s $34 billion merger with Humana on antitrust grounds.
Please note that in #6, the Speaker rales about how premiums spiked … uh … might their budgetary activities that continually cut Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) financial support to hospitals that serve the nation’s most vulnerable populations – Medicaid beneficiaries, low-income Medicare beneficiaries, the uninsured and under-insured. I in 2013 alone, hospitals provided $46 billion of uncompensated (DSH) care. Facilities have to be maintained. Supplies need to be purchased. Doctors and nurses need to get paid for their services. The money for that just doesn’t get picked off of some magical tree planted on the Hospital front lawn. It gets charged to the rest of us in the form of higher rates for services rendered, which in turn gets transformed into HIGHER insurance premiums to be able to pay for such services.