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In 2009, President Obama said, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” when he promoted the Affordable Care Act. He did know, at the time, that one of the goals of the ACA was to police health care plans that were effectively scams, those that didn’t deliver real benefits for the cost.
What he didn’t know firstly, because the government had less visibility into it at the time, was how MANY fraudulent and unfair plans were out there and, secondly that many people would become attached to those plans and say they liked them.
So the headlines were that Obama had lied. Because he didn’t realize how much fraud there was or that people wouldn’t recognize when they were being defrauded.
People fixated, after that, on the plans themselves. 20 million more people were insured than before, but, somehow, people on the far right found a way to get Americans to focus more on the health of the insurance companies than on their own health- to care if insurance companies were doing well, raking in money.
Today, looking through various news sites (starting with Reuters, moving to AP, then on to national sites) I found a Fox News Headline:
“Harris wants to eliminate private health insurance, could end 150M plans.”
Which is how Fox wants to spin this. Harris wants to expand Medicare to cover all Americans so that we have, in the US, 100% coverage of all citizens. This policy is becoming more and more popular with people all over the country. She does. She knows, like most people who are paying attention, that insurance, as a model for health care, isn’t working, and it will work LESS AND LESS as time goes on. Because Insurance relies on ignorance to make it work.
If you are an insurance company you want to sign up people who will spend more in ongoing policy payments than they will take in as care. And if you are a person, you want a policy that will deliver more or equal in care to how much you pay into it. Insurance companies, with greater knowledge of the statistical realities, had always been the big winners in that game of “financial chicken.” But that was before all the tools that helped people and organizations make more advanced and real predictions about health evolved. Can the insurance model survive in the age of genetic testing? I don’t think so.
More importantly, should it?
That Fox News headline is trying to do the thing the far right did during the end of Obama’s term… Trying to get you to care about the health insurance companies- trying to get you to waste your empathy on the people who run these businesses.
150 million insurance plans will likely disappear, and it will be a good thing. More people than ever before in the history of this country will have access to health care when they need it, including preventative care- the kind that health care plans often penalize- the kind that has been proven to save money in the long run. That isn’t the only quirk that will be alleviated by the end of priced health insurance.
A number of years ago, the CDC recommended that screenings for infectious diseases be, essentially, free. The World Health Organization and international health groups agreed. Why? Because that made catching infectious outbreaks early possible. The longer people waited, worrying about their co-pay, the more the disease had the chance to root itself in communities. Access to health care for all effectively “future-proofed” communities and made it possible for them to ward off epidemics.
Just not epidemics like shitty headline writing.
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