I have had employer based insurance all of my working life and up until the early 2000's it was not costing me that much. The insurance companies had to raise rates to employers and they were passed on to employee but overall .
Originally Posted by loneshark
You make some great points, but this is where the overall argument falls down because you ignore the reasons why costs have climbed. Why did they have to raise rates? They had to raise rates because the cost of health care was sky-rocketing. Ok, but why was it sky-rocketing? 3 major reasons...
1. Technology is expensive. Better and newer therapies cost more money than old therapies. For this reason, it is very difficult to keep health care inflation below the broader market inflation. The only way to do so is to stick to old tried and true therapies. But does anybody going in for a hip replacement want a 1995 version of the procedure or a 2017 version?
2. The archaic patent system in this country allows companies to create mini-monopolies on drugs and therapies. If there are artificial barriers to competition, then you can guarantee that prices will be too high.
3. Too many people were receiving health care and never paying. This means that everyone who does pay (either through insurance or out of pocket) is subsidizing those freeloaders. Have you ever been to an emergency room? Take a look around and try to guess how many of them are actually going to pay for the services they are about to receive. You might be shocked. Folks who dislike socialized medicine don't realize we've already had it for years.
Some folks would argue that regulation and malpractice lawsuits were driving the costs. But those were very, very small market influences.
Don't be so quick to claim Obamacare is a failure. It's not a failure to the millions of folks with pre-existing conditions who were unable to obtain insurance at any price in the past. It's not a failure to the millions of folks under 26 who are unable to obtain employer based coverage and can remain under their parents' plan (though the obvious solution here is to drive job growth and get these folks employed). It's not a failure to the self-employed who can now buy insurance on the exchanges rather than being stuck with whatever plan is available in their location.
Where Obamacare has 'failed' is because it does nothing to address items #1 and #2 above. I haven't seen a plan that does. Most folks who complain about Obamacare want to go back to a free market system and allow capitalism to work it's magic. But the previous system was anything but 'free market'.