Is it possible for the health care debate to get any more insane?
I’m curious why the business community is not speaking out in defense of Obamacare. Anything that can bring down the cost of health insurance, while keeping workers healthier, will be a tremendous boon to the economy. Even the health insurance industry has tons to gain from the individual mandate — after all it is a law that requires people to buy your product. But there has been nary a peep from them.
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Regarding the business community, from the WP’s Pearlstein article previously linked: “So how did the National Federation of Independent Businesses respond to a law that assured small businesses the benefits of large-group purchasing and community rating and threw in billions of dollars in subsidies to boot? It signed up as one of the named plaintiffs challenging the constitutionality of the new law.
If I had to guess, the insurance companies are hoping the law will be struck down altogether, and not just the mandate. The mandate is definitely good for them, but maybe not enough to offset other provisions they dislike, such as the limits on how much of our insurance premiums they are allowed to keep vs how much must actually go to pay for our medical care.
I’m with Drew — I think the requirement that insurance companies spend at least 85% of revenues on paying claims makes “Obamacare” an unforgivable insult to the insurance industry. I mean, 15% has come to be sneered at as a net profit level over the past 30 years, especially in this second-most-profitable industry. The individual mandate holds no joy as long as there are no huge exec bonuses and no gigantic profit margins to play with.
I’ve been in the same insurance plan for more than 30 years now, and in every one of those 30+ years, my premiums have gone up, usually by a big chunk. This year they actually went down — just a couple of bucks, but still, it felt like the sun had risen in the West. The only thing I could figure was that 15% cap on non-claims expenditures was starting to have an effect.
Everyone is confused as to why the GOP has chosen to condemn the individual mandate, a badly flawed but functional program they proposed which Romney signed off on in Mass. It’s no mystery at all. It’s all a function of how they absolutely abhor Obama’s ethnicity (the dreaded “n” word) and wouldn’t cut him any slack if he personally developed a cure for cancer.