Anything is possible, but if current employees have health care, it's more likely that new employees will have the same or lower health care costs.
Why lower?
Because the new health care law requires that everyone have coverage. Companies will no longer be paying extra so that the uninsured can get charity care.
Businesses are making more money than ever. We can see that in the quarterly reporting. Earnings keep climbing. They aren't investing in new capacity because demand is lacking.
Sorry to post in an off-topic thread, think of this as alt.homeland.repair.
On 7/27/2011 9:39 AM, snipped-for-privacy@verizon.net wrote: ...
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Wishful thinking... :(
The other side of the coin is that the increased coverage of pre-existing conditions and the like will cause payouts to soar.
There's a recognition of that already in the revised budgetary numbers.
And, where are the premiums of these new enrollees coming from? If they're not already employed in organizations which have benefit plans, those employers will have to add costs; if they're unemployed their coverage has to come from either Medicaid or subsidized private premiums; if they're working minimum wage or undocumented or cash economy they're not in the system on the revenue side only on the walk-in ER expense side.
Except since they were covered with health care already, and that health care meets the minimums, which you acknowledge, they wouldn't incur any additional charges
The experience in MA, which has both "mandated" coverage and no pre-existing condition insurance argues otherwise. Like HCR, the fine for not being insured is substanatially less than the cost of insurance (and virtually no chance of getting caught) so certain number of people don't sign up. According the MA state government's own stats a large number of people are not signing up until they need insurance, using it becuase you can't deny for pre-exisiting conditions, and then jetisoning it after no longer needed. Also the "drive-by" insured end up costing more on average than the "regulars". Since MA HCR was instituted, the annual increase in premiums has actually been ABOVE the national average as opposed to being below the national average before the changes.
That isn't exactly the case either. Private-sector job creation had improved by an average of nearly 68,000 a month in the 15 months before April 2010. But in the 15 months since then, it has slowed to an average of 6,500 a month. The significance of APril 2010? The month the reform bill was passed. Coincidence? I think not. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics)_
What about the bar down the street that doesn't cover his employees. Those employees will get coverage from tax money. And where will that tax money come from?
No, they are not investing because they are stockpiling cash for other things, contingencies. What other things? Well, nobody knows, but the uncertainty over their imminent insurance costs is, for sure, one bucket they want filled.
Nutcases are found everywhere. Still, if you want to categorize evil-doers by religious affiliation, you'd be hard-pressed to outdo Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot, and Pee-Wee Herman.
That's the great thing about science. It adapts to the new data.
Notice that it doesn't start out with a conclusion that it defends at any cost. More data comes in, new conclusions emerge.
Personally, I think it would be great if we found that CO2 levels don't cause any problems. As soon as that's the scientifically accepted conclusion, I'll accept it too.
Meanwhile, I'm not about to take my science from political leaders including Al Gore and Dick Cheney.
SInce the fines as currently structured are less than the likely premiums, how is that supposed to work?
I ahve followed these things professionally for nearly 3 decades and the next study that shows this will be the first. Even in insured populations this doesn't show up.
That's certainly not what polling data indicates...while historic organized denominations (of all stripes) are losing market share to the nondenominational and that ilk, individuals indicate a personal belief at roughly 70% overall US population. Down some, but not "most" on the side of no belief or belief in none by any stretch.
[No value judgment implied either way, simply observation...]
Employers that don't currently pay for coverage will have to. The premiums will come partly from the employer, partly from the employee. If there is tax money involved, I believe it plays a minor role.
But that's not the question you should be asking.
Currently if one of those uncovered bar employees gets cancer or has a car accident, who pays for their treatment?
Since CO2 is around 400PPM I think we're talking about 400 cubic centimeters? Somewhere around 24 cubic inches. Sounds like easy quantities to measure and work with.
"Currently structured" answers your own question. If too many companies decide to pay the fine but not provide health care, the fines can be adjusted until they do. This law *should* have been passed when so many businesses *began* ditching health care and the problem hadn't become a nationwide epidemic.
Fixing healthcare is going to be a tough, ugly job because too many people make oodles of money with things just the way they are. MRSA is a perfectly example of the built in lack of incentives to actually *improve* healthcare. With 30 years experience, Kurt, surely you can tell us how hospitals made buckets of blood money making sick people even sicker from iatrogenic MRSA infections. At least until the Feds stepped in, that is. And even that will be a long, uphill battle.
By definition the free market cannot operate fairly in a system where you're buying a future service of unknown quality that can KILL you if poorly performed. What are your free market options when the market has killed you? To not buy THAT insurance again? A basic Federal minimum Medicare-like plan for everyone who's a citizen with the ability to buy all the Cadillac "gap" insurance for those who feel that the minimum is not good enough for them is where we are headed and will end up. It will just take a while.
But the concept is sound. The current structure of the health care system does very little to prevent ill health because that would rob them of expensive "Hail Mary" procedures downstream. Mal's point is still valid even if the example is not - and I don't even know if that's true. Just because something isn't studied doesn't make it false. It's just unstudied.
On the other hand, I can direct you to old journals full of studies showing ulcers were stress induced (they're not - they are bacterially caused). So even a study showing X is cause by Y has to be taken with a grain of salt - or some antibiotics. That's especially true when so darn many studies are funded by the drug makers themselves with the express intent to prove a product's efficacy or non-lethality. Common sense tells us that there are likely to be some conflicts of interest in those studies.
Looking for myself, it seems to be now "common wisdom" that early detection and treatment of cirrhosis can reduce the need for transplants:
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Makes sense to me, too, studied, unstudied, understudied or overstudied. Is your objection simply that no studies have confirmed this? Or are you actually saying that catching liver diseases earlier than where we tend to catch them now would have NO effect on the liver transplant rates?
But then, they wouldn't have had to move large numbers of people to the government plans. Interestingly enough, the same problem show in the MA plan, more or less the template for much of reform. And many people go in and out of insurance plans as needed since they can't be kept out due to pre-existing conditions. The REALLY scary part about MA is that, since inception of their reform, annual increases in premiums have gone from well below the national average to above it. Their general spending also has accelerated in a similar matter.
Yeah, those evil hospitals who made a killer disease just to increase revenue.
The insurance isn't going to kill you though.
A basic Federal minimum
Well under those indications, we should probably then federalize car makers (well MORE federalize carmakers) because a bad brake pad could kill me.
The concept is sound but there is no evidence of its usefulness so we should go ahead and do it anyway.
which of course makes my point rather nicely, the concept of stress was sound (actually it still is but research has shown you need this other thing, too) until it wasn't.
That's especially true when so darn many studies are
Well known and well discussed.
No, I am saying that no studies show that insurance status has an impact on catching these things earlier. Even with insurance that covers annual physicals, the rates at which people take the time to actually do them is low. The magic behind preventive medicine is largely not supported by reality.
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