Interesting reasoning for ruling this way…
Does that mean the US government is going to refund my penalty?
Somehow, it will be ruled the Judge overstepped his bounds.
A judge in Hawaii has since ruled the Fifth Circuit to be unconstitutional.
Just kidding, but no harder to believe than actual decisions coming from that direction.
As for the ruling - it seems legally sound to me, but that’s no guarantee it will survive. Even if it does, what next? People have been hoping for this for years and I suspect most of the “right” will now be like the proverbial dog that caught the car.
Edit to add:
The US healthcare “system” has been a financial dumpster fire for patients under Obamacare (ACA), and it was a financial dumpster fire for patients pre-Obamacare. Ripping up ACA and going back to 2008 fixes nothing and makes life worse for some, better for others, with no net improvement and possibly even a net harm. ACA was driven by insurance companies first, and highly partisan Democrats second, and I don’t think any intelligent person expected it to fix anything. What ACA did was pick winners - mostly insurance companies, but also low-income people with chronic medical conditions, and just by PURE UNFORESEEN COINCIDENCE those people are primarily “D” voters.
ACA also picked losers - anyone who actually pays for their own health insurance and doesn’t get a massive subsidy, and to some extent hospitals and other providers. As a business owner who’s been paying for 100% of my own health care costs since 2008, with no subsidies ever, the cost is outrageous. I will be paying $22,500 for heath insurance in 2019 to cover my family, using the lowest cost, ultra-high-deductible plan that still provides any useful coverage among providers in my area. Before ACA I paid $12,000 a year for vastly better coverage where I had only moderate co-pays, not a $6600 deductible.
The fundamental problems in the system are these, closely interrelated:
- Costs are out of control.
- There is a disconnect between payment for care, provision of care, and consumption of care, which makes all pricing inputs near useless.
- There is no real competition for most products in the crucial sectors of pharmaceutical and medical devices.
Regardless of court rulings I don’t see these problems getting fixed in the foreseeable future.
The ruling is only 55 pages. I’m going to pull it down and read it tomorrow.
A lot of folks smarter than I am tell the that the ACA was designed to fail in order to facilitate adoption of a single payer system.
Andy
Yeah. Single payer. Pffft.
Brought to you and ran by the same folks that run DMV…
Perhaps indirectly, but the fundamental idea is to push down a slope for total control of the entire industry - one of the three main goals outlined by Alinsky for creating a socialist state.
I could have written this same post as a business owner as well. What’s worse is that several of my employees that were not full time had emergency health care plans that cost them about $400 a month. The minute the ACA was enacted those plans disappeared and those same people were forced into plans that cost more than twice as much.
I will say that even though I am paying nearly what you are for coverage and the same deductible, insurance saved my financial ass over the last couple years. I have a daughter that has hereditary angioedema and her medication pushes $80K a month, that’s right…nearly a million $$ per year. I had a heart ablation last year to fix a PSVT problem and that was over $100K.
I truly hope this spurs along the ability to quote coverage across state lines and form group plans across state lines (and otherwise loosen requirements on group plans)
Ding, ding, ding. Frankly, with places like CA, you already have the gov as a huge payer already. IIRC, it is close to 50% of healthcare dollars spent there are medicare, medicaid, govt employer health plans.
The real issue that I understand from Medicare for all, is that Medicaid doesn’t pay it’s fair share and the it is subsidized by private money to make the system work. If every patient paid in Medicaid money, the books won’t ‘balance’ and you’d have to make cuts somewhere. Now I know I used Medicare and Medicaid interchangeably there. But I think that is the right way to think about it since it is the right age group and we haven’t paid into it all our lives.
The interesting thing about single payer, is that to get it to work at all, you have to have everyone paying much higher tax rates, even if it is some kind of transfer from employee benefit that they don’t see directly, to a direct tax. You’d have to raise taxes to do it- and the middle class won’t get off with a token payment. We are talking about like doubling tax rates- and then a decline in services.
What we need is s two tier system to our single tier now. Everyone gets the same care. We need to get the medicaid type people out of high-cost/high-service to lower-cost/appropriate service.
ETA: I agree that insurers were winners in the ACA shuffle, but some got hurt. I know one here in CO that is in a death spiral. They offered plans that people would take, get services, pay for a couple of months and then drop out and stop paying. That along with selling plans at low prices and not being able to make up the margin on volume.
Where the hell was this judge 7 years ago?!?!
The ruling is encouraging but it still doesn’t help the sky rocketing cost of health insurance.
Somebody fix that crap, make insurance more affordable for us hard working, wage earners.
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I worked with a guy who’s daughter (age 4) had a preexisting condition, their family insurance costs ate a bit more than two weeks of his salary every month. His Wife worked, they couldn’t afford day care so grandma watched the kids after school. It was a accounting and logistical nightmare for this young family.
So, do we need a .gov program to help them? Do we need some sort of accountability for insurance companies? The ACA didn’t exactly do what it has promised to do, as a matter of fact, it’s actually made things worse.
I don’t have an answer for this other than, we’re being gouged out of existence and something has to give.
There is no doubt in my mind that your daughter is worth every penny.
Still, it’s hard for me to justify in my mind selling medication like it’s made from crushed diamonds with a platinum binder.
Part of the cost is malpractice/liability, some is research and testing, some is advertising, and some is the utterly bizarre way that drug companies move their product (salesmen and women).
I don’t know what the answer is, but I am thankful I am retired military and have Tricare, warts and all.
A large portion of the exorbitant cost for prescription medication here, is the us subsidizing other countries lower costs for the same medications.
We are the deep pockets/market that makes the board of directors of big pharma multi $100 million nuts and the rest of the world gets cheap meds that we susbidize.
Add in all the illegals and downtrodden going to urgent care for the sniffles/some codeine cough syrup and a back ache/hydrocodone and the picture is clear.
I have never had a mortgage payment as high as my current monthly health insurance bill, and I’ve lived in some nice houses financed with typical 20% down mortgages.
ACA was a “D” dream come true. Everyone needs to realize that the Dems are a corporate party with an absurd pretense of being a working person / lower class / social welfare party. They do enough BS to get the idiot vote and then they hand a selected group of wealthy people anything they want on a silver platter. ACA is just another, very large and painful, example of this practice. ACA benefits drug companies and the larger, greedier health insurance companies. Destroying the middle class is not a primary goal, but I’m sure it is a perfectly OK side effect. A lot of those people are now voting “D” anyway, and all the rest are hateful deplorables who deserve worse than they get, from the D’s perspective.
To a great extent this is just rearranging deck chairs. Nothing will improve until costs are brought under control, and the far reaches of the system are like a cancer of the economy at this point.
Absolutely right. I couldn’t have said it any better myself, and the above cannot be stressed enough.
She’s worth every dime. The maker of the medication she takes has bought back the rights to make the medication in Canada and Mexico, thereby controlling the production and price. The level of service one gets as a user of this drug is incredible, and somebody ends up paying for it. My daughter has a nurse that is on call 24/7 to assist her with any problem she has (it’s self IV administered), the nurse flew from California to Alaska just for my daughter, and they host “seminars” for all the patients so they can get together and share their experiences. The last “seminar” was in one of the most expensive restaurants in Alaska.(which she refused to attend) The whole thing is a freeking sham and we’re embarrassed that we have to be part of it. The pharmaceutical company that makes this stuff is taking a free ride on the backs of taxpayers and insurance payers. We’d drop it in a heartbeat if it wasn’t the only thing that works for her. We honestly don’t know what we will do if she get’s denied insurance in the future.