Regulatory Capture or Freedom in Health Care?
Brethren on the left seek to protect folks from corporate exploitation....check. What runs counter to this is when they end up empowering Washington DC bureacrats (republican and/or democrat) to set the protective regulations....and invariably the regulatory process gets gummed up and derailed to protect the corporations (academics call this "capture").
With the billions and trillions tied up in health care, you can count on this happening....(one could argue it has already with special deals cut for pharma and labor...).
My question is: why don't our left of center brothers align with their libertarian cousins and advocate for the solution that we have solid evidence works....the Whole Foods solution and the Indiana solution centered around patient control and freedom....Health Savings Accounts?
The Indiana story ran Monday Mar. 1 in the WSJ...the Whole Foods story ran a few months back.
Could anyone help me understand this?
Paul
BlueNC is dedicated to making North Carolina a more progressive and prosperous state. If your intention is to disrupt this effort, please find somewhere else to express your opinions.
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that reminds me
Are you folks on the Left still boycotting Whole Foods because they give their employees better health coverage than other companies?
No
I'm still boycotting them because their Chairman is an asshole who uses his profits to advocate against health coverage for those who don't happen to work in his overpriced stores.
actually
Actually, he was advocating for the kind of superior coverage that his employees enjoy. But, since it doesn't involve massive intrusive gov't control, busted budgets & rationing, progressives oppose it.
Here's his article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070.html
Too bad that superior coverage
leaves out 40 or 50 million people. Besides that, it's a great plan.
actually
Actually, James, one of the biggest reasons there are so many people without health insurance is that health insurance is so expensive. If we cut the cost via this type of market-driven approach, more people will be able to afford it, and fewer people will be uninsured.
This will also help our struggling hospitals, since fewer uninsured means fewer deadbeats.
Note: When I switched from a BCBSNC 75/25 major medical plan to a Celtic HDHP + an HSA, I cut my monthly insurance cost just about exactly in half.
Here's the 3/1 WSJ article on Indiana's HSA experience
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704231304575091600470293066.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
Interesting article
Of course, the article was written by someone that could not be expected to present anything about the Indiana HSA experience of a negative nature. If you stay around politics long enough, you will find that just because an article was written and put in some supposedly reputable source, doesn't mean it tells the whole story.
The article was written by a biased individual, most certainly. The article was written by:
No I cannot dispute anything he has said. I also do not know what was left out or if there is an opposing view from someone with possibly good arguments in that regard.
Just sayin'....
Did you notice...
I also thought it was interesting.
Did you notice that it says more than 70% of Indiana public employees are now choosing the HSA option, up from just 4% the first year it was offered? You might think that Republican=biased (which, IMO, reflects your own bias), but you must realize that it can't possibly be that 70% of Indiana public employees are Republicans. That means an awful lot of Democrats must like it.
Plus, it has cut the State's health care expenses significantly, and it has resulted in substantial and growing nesteggs for most of the state employees who choose it.
BTW, ObamaCare would demolish this approach to healthcare reform. If you think Massachusetts (where they already have something resembling ObamaCare) gave a rousing thumbs-down to ObamaCare, imagine what Indiana is going to do this November, if the Democrats keep pushing their big-government approach.
In order for this plan to be relevant
to the discussion, the Federal government would have to not only pay everybody's premium, it would have to also deposit $2,750 into each citizen's account annually. Are you (as a taxpayer) willing to pay for that?
By the way, those Indiana public employees' HSA accounts are funded by State taxes. Taxes that are collected from some citizens who don't get a dime for their own health care needs from the State.
say what?
I thought we were talking about HR3200, HR3590, etc. -- the Democrats' health care Reform (to supporters) or Rationing (to opponents) bills? Do you realize that under those bills, the federal gov't is not planning to "pay everybody's premium." Rather, it will require you (or your employer) to pay for it.
I heard last night that, under Obama's latest "compromise" proposal, he's supposedly not going to disembowel HSAs, after all. (I say "supposedly" because I've not seen the details yet.) However, he's not backing away from the key provisions which create dozens of new federal bureaucracies and give the federal government oversight and control of health care -- the levers and cams and ratchets of rationing.
No, we were talking about
HSA's, and how effective, efficient and popular they were. I was pointing out to you that the example you used to demonstrate their popularity (70% of Indiana public employees) was inappropriate, because it's an employer-delivered benefit that relies heavily on taxpayer subsidation. Get it?
Most private companies, without the means to access funds via taxing the general public, would not have the resources to pay an employee's premium and give them an additional $2,750 to play with, and private individuals who cannot (now) afford health insurance definitely couldn't afford to finance such a plan out of their own pockets.
I hope whatever approach Congress and the President settle on doesn't impede the use of HSA's, because they do encourage people to manage their own health care expenditures. But they're also not any kind of "silver bullet" that can be used across the board to cover a majority of Americans.