Me too

Health insurance needs to be more like car insurance or a powertrain warranty:
Big things covered. Regular maintenance and minor issues not covered.

Not covered:
Oil change
Regular maintenance items
New battery
New tires because others are worn
Light/lamp bulbs
Rip in seat
Etc...

For health insurance the same concept should be in place:

Not covered:
Routine preventive care
Dr visits for common colds, bugs, virus, etc.
All the little stuff

Health insurance needs to be there for MAJOR MEDICAL CARE only. Health savings accounts for all the little stuff. This approach plus opening interstate commerce for insurance companies would drastically decrease insurance costs and put people back to taking responsibility. More money in our pockets to pay for non-major medical needs.

Pipe dream I know, but still true.

That's not a bad idea.

Insurance...if we think about the term and what it means then we can see how it has gotten away from the intended purpose in health as compared to auto, home, etc...

Insuring against monetary loss based on an event occurring. Health insurance is far away from that structure today.

What was wrong with the system we had prior to obumercare? It wasn't perfect but it worked. Why can't they simply repeal obumercare entirely. Reset the whole damn thing to 2007 and leave it alone?

That's how it should work! Just like any other type of insurance. If you have a cold, you just pay the doctor out of pocket. It's just part of living expenses.

Thats Racist! (Which is what they will say and the Republicans will tuck-tail and run).

EXACTLY

health care by the government is NOT a right unless yer a socialist. and we are for sure leaning more and more that way every year.

Not that it matters;

"It's going to be - what my plan is is that I want to take care of everybody," Trump said. "I'm not going to leave the lower 20% that can't afford insurance."

“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump said. “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.” People covered under the law “can expect to have great health care. It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better.”

Which we all know is impossible.

Other countries have more homogenous cultures and peoples, much smaller populations, do not have America's history of individualism, self responsibility, constitutional principles, not to mention a massive large underclass of minorities that hate the original host culture/people/principles and who refuse to be responsible for themselves, not to mention a large underclass of people who are of the original host culture who also refuse to take responsibility for themselves.

So it is a very difficult problem.

And I will be clear on this: I absolutely do not want to pay for anyone else's health care and I absolutely do not want government runt health care.


The only solution from the liberal socialist perspective (which I reject) is expanded Medicaid.

The problem with expanded Medicaid is that it encourages and perpetuates the main cause of poverty (and crime): OUT OF WEDLOCK CHILDBIRTH!!!


Out of wedlock childbirth is destroying this country.

So is the massive divorce rate.

*****

1. totally repeal Obamacare/ACA and all its 60,000 pages of regulations.


2. keep the pre-existing condition law.

3. keep the "kids" on parents' policy until 25 law.

4. Phase out the Federal exchange over 2 years.

5. Repeal the ban on interstate sale of health insurance!
health insurance should be like home and auto insurance - maximum competition. And as folks like Straycat have mentioned - we need to see health insurance as something for major medical purposes, not something that pays for routine health care stuff.

6. And this is the hard part: what to do with the irresponsible people who cannot or will not provide for themselves. Frankly, we may have to just put them on Medicaid for major medical purposes, but at the same time we must have a national campaign against out of wedlock childbirth and provide free birth control pills.

WmHunter, there is iron in your words in your post above.

I dislike paying for or contributing to others that have made poor or irresponsible choices. I also dislike paying for other peoples progeny that they decided to create but didn't have the resources or self control to plan for financially.

Public schools and the taxes that I pay for them are another pain in my butt that comes to mind.

Stop breeding if you can't pay your own way. That's as simple as I can phrase it.

So far as your statement about Medicaid children, there was an article on Drudge that I read that gave the eye-popping percentages of those births by State:
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/24-states-50-babies-born-medicaid

x1000

Another increase and I reckon I'm gonna drop coverage.

here is the thing that pisses me off, several times, under Obama, the house repealed this crap knowing that their repeal would never go anywhere, now that it possibly could, they don't have the balls to repeal it.

Republicans voted to repeal it 60 damn times to be exact, knowing that they were just pissing up a rope. And this is all they can come up with in 7 years? It's a pathetic excuse for leadership not to already have a new plan ready to go with unanimous support from the party. Butthurt RINO's are doing just as much damage to the Trump presidency as the Democrats are.

It is a right as long as the government dictates anyone can receive treatment at any ER facility, regardless of their ability to pay. The current idea that insured patient payments will help partially cover the costs of the uninsured are gone. Commercial reimbursements barely cover you own visit(s), let alone help pay for those without coverage.

This is why I refused to live in Dallas county (Texas). The county hospital had a property tax to help pay the costs of uninsured patients.

Being in the healthcare field, I would seriously consider a single payer system compared to what we have now.

The only way healthcare costs go down is through capitalism. Lasik eye surgery used to be $15k per eye and wasn't covered by medical insurance. Over the years, supply/demand has brought the cost down substantially.

The problem with the current model is that there's not a true supply/demand. We don't get to shop around for the doctors with the best service, best prices, lowest wait times, etc. We don't get to shop around for the best prices on medications. We just have to go wherever our insurance tells us to go aka "network provider/pharmacy/etc". Or we go where the government tells us to go if we're on medicaid. To win in this type system, you don't have to play nice with the patients but you get rewarded for bending backwards for the insurance company and the government.

Until healthcare truly comes back to supply/demand economics then it won't get fixed and it won't get cheaper. We should be paying out of pocket for medical expenses, we should be able to shop around and go wherever we see fit, and we should have catastrophic health coverage in the event that something major happens. This is the only fix I can see, get the government out of the healthcare business....

The government IS the healthcare business, and has been since Medicare and Medicaid was established. It is impossible to get legitimate treatment pricing from either a physicians' office or a hospital, because pricing is set from both entities based upon pre-determined reimbursement rates for those who are insured, either privately or from government insurance. The physician and the hospital inflates actual costs to cover their losses for treating uninsured patients. An individual who actually pays out-of-pocket for their care gets hosed, because uninsured care equals uncompensated care in the large majority of cases. For example, an illegal alien, or anyone else, that shows up at an emergency room with ESRD ( end stage renal disease ) must, by EMTALA law, be treated, which will include extremely expensive dialysis. The cost of only one of these patients will be tens of thousands of dollars, for an indefinite period. Who pays for this? You and I pay for it in the form of inflated healthcare prices.
This system has existed for a looooong time.
The single interest of a politician is to get elected, and then re-elected. Removing entitlements, sadly, is not in the best interest of the politician, regardless of whether it is in the best interest of the nation.