Sunday, October 20, 2013

Truest statement of the week II

5. We gave an ongoing river of cash to private health insurance companies. Millions more are now forced to buy their crappy product, with the premiums funded by billion annually in public subsidies.

Health insurance executives got massive salary increases since the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Existing insurance company shareholders saw profits and stock prices spike, first with the passage of the ACA, then with the onset of open enrollment. Anticipated ballooning profits have led health insurance companies to buy back as much of their own stock as possible. What else would you expect? Health insurance company lobbyists wrote the ACA.
While the ACA pads the pockets of insurance company executives and keeps employed an army of advertisers, marketers and bureaucrats, single payer would have created a quarter million new good paying jobs delivering actual health care to people, according to the National Nurses Union.
6. The ACA gives us little or no cost control over medical care and even bans most measures that would lower the cost of prescription drugs.

With the substandard policies the most families will be able to afford, skimpy coverage, high co-pays and deductibles will continue to threaten hundreds of thousands annually with bankruptcy due to unpayable medical bills.
The US is one of the few places in the developed world in which a family can lose its home, and its children their college educations because of unpayable medical bills. We could have changed that. But we didn't.


-- Bruce Dixon,  "Obamacare VS Single Payer – Top 10 Things the ACA Gave Us VS the Top 10 We Gave Up" (Black Agenda Report).