The President of a marketing organization we use (one of several) to obtain some of our Insurance Contracts recently spent time in Washington D.C. conversing with policy makers, think tanks, and elected Congressmen and Congresswomen about the future of private health insurance. He absorbed a general consensus: we have nothing to worry about. The belief is that a Medicare for All system is NOT on America’s horizon (thanks to our 22 trillion dollar debt and foreseeable push back from health professionals willing to accept Medicare for All).
Additionally, he was surprised to discover that many of the freshman Congressmen are more in agreement about fixing the existing problem by focusing on ways to reduce the cost of care. There is more bi-partisan support than expected, so many of the headlines can be misleading. Many ideas are being considered that may not be as alluring as Medicare for All such as expanding health saving accounts to include more first dollar coverage, providing more incentives for wellness programs, and other common sense ideas to stabilize the existing Affordable Care Act (ACA) system.
That said, ACA is not going anywhere either. There is a general agreement that the ACA is now properly priced, subsidies are working, and the individual market is more stable (Please see sample rates at the bottom of this page showing where the rates have "Stabilized") than it has been in the past several years.
“The state of our health care system is absolutely atrocious,” Jayapal of Washington told reporters on a conference call Tuesday. “Americans are literally dying because they can’t afford insulin or they can’t get the cancer treatment they need. Americans are going bankrupt.”
Legislation proposed by Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal would steer all Americans into the Medicare program in two years.
*There are programs in every state as well as at the Federal level to help people with
unmet healthcare needs.
No realistic chance
For now, Medicare for all has no chance of becoming law in a divided Congress. Democrats control the House but Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a number of party moderates are resisting the idea. On Tuesday, a member of the House Democratic leadership, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, kept his distance from the proposal, saying the Democratic caucus supports universal coverage but wants to focus on strengthening the 2010 Affordable Care Act and lowering drug costs.
Even if it passed the House, the proposal would be doomed in the Republican-controlled Senate.
President Donald Trump has argued Medicare for all would have a disastrous impact.
He said in an October USA Today op-ed that the Democrats would “gut Medicare with their planned government takeover of American health care.” He said the proposal would put doctors and hospitals out of business and create “long wait lines for appointments and procedures.”
It’s a high-risk idea. A January 2019 poll by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found that Americans favor the idea of “national health care, sometimes called Medicare-for-all” by a margin of 56 percent to 42 percent. But public opinion fluctuates dramatically depending on what respondents hear about it. When told it would guarantee health insurance as a right, 71 percent support the idea; but when told it would eliminate private insurers and require most Americans to pay more taxes, just 37 percent support it.
Perhaps the greatest political danger for Democrats is that Medicare for all would disrupt coverage for about 156 million Americans who get their insurance from an employer. The proposal would face fierce objections from the health-care industry, including doctors, insurers and pharmaceutical companies.
‘So much unknown’
Brian Marcotte, president of the National Business Group on Health, which represents large employers, said, “There are so many questions about this, so it’s really hard to take Medicare for all seriously when there’s so much unknown about how you would make this transformation and actually make it work.”
The American Medical Association, the doctors’ organization that supported the Affordable Care Act, said in a statement that it is “opposed to Medicare for all based on a mountain of evidence about the cost, counterproductive disruption, and degradation of choice, quality and innovation that Americans deserve and want.”
For-profit, publicly traded health insurers employ more than a half million people in the U.S. The companies’ combined stock market value is worth more than one-half trillion dollars, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Insurance companies including UnitedHealth Group Inc., Anthem Inc., Humana Inc., and CVS Health Corp.’s Aetna unit do substantial business with the government. They contract with Medicare to provide health plans for more than 21 million beneficiaries who choose private Medicare Advantage plans. People who opt in to privately managed Medicare plans constitute more than one-third of Medicare’s total enrollment of about 60 million people.
More Statements based Solely on Assumptions
Jayapal said "Americans who worry about losing private insurance will come around to Medicare for all once they’re told they’ll still have access to their preferred doctors and hospitals under the
government-run plan".
**The American People have been told that before by other politicians and none of it came to fruition.
We have also seen ObamaCare which was supposed to be "Affordable Care" increase healthcare insurance premiums over 500% in which put many Americans that were always insured, without insurance.
We have found that Doctors who get frustrated with a insurance company (under 65 individual health), or government payer system such as Medicare, will simply insist on cash at time of services and leave it up to the patient to obtain reimbursement from their health plan.
But in a socialized setting as the select few are pushing, there would be no reimbursement so only those that can afford it, can get reasonable and quality care. While the rest are stuck on six month waiting list for a test or three month waiting list just to see a Doctor.
*We have helped many people with such programs over the years and we have several of those programs on our website under "Extra Help" located at the bottom of each page.
**These statements are based on our experience and knowledge of actions that were taken concerning the Affordable Care Act by our previous administration in which, was not made common public knowledge (This was allowed because the way the Affordable Care Act was written & passed).
Other article information was obtained from multiple sources.
