Comment by klenwell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klenwell | Hacker News Reader

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A few tea partiers turned down the insurance this year on principle. One was interviewed on NPR, where he acknowledged that the insurance rates he found on the open marker were a bit of a shock:

http://www.npr.org/2011/02/09/133629806/16-Freshmen-GOP-Decl...

Still, he rationalizes away the benefits of the new Health Care law:

"But I think that if we had true health care reform that I wouldn't be paying $1,300 a month for this health care. If we had true tort reform, if we had true health care reform where physicians weren't ordering unnecessary, you know, procedures just to protect their backside, I'd think that a lot of us would see a reduction in what we pay in any health care, whether it's, you know, employee - helped, subsidized, or, you know, employer-subsidized."

In case you miss his weasel words: tort reform makes virtually no difference and hasn't had a noticeable impact in states where it has passed. Otherwise, the new law is about the most realistic first step you're going to get passed in this country toward controlling costs. Meanwhile, the one area where the law is halfway decent is in extending more affordable health insurance coverage to more people.

IMHO, Obama and company got carried away. They saw this opportunity to enact something comparable to Social Security and Medicare, and wanted to go down in the history books as having achieved something similar. Unfortunately, like any big project in Washington, this one was laden with loopholes, sweeteners, etc. In other words, a total mess.

It would have been far better to pass a series of smaller laws. Start with: it's illegal to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions. Then, create cross-state markets and let insurance companies compete across state boundaries. Then, let families buy into the Federal government's health insurance program (if our elected reps can do it, why can't we?). And so on.

Social Security had plenty of loopholes when it was first passed, too.

If Obamacare had merely outlawed discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, then premiums would have gone through the roof, because lots of healthy people would have put off buying insurance until they got sick. So the law needed to include a provision requiring everyone to buy insurance. If everyone has to buy insurance, then there also have to be subsidies for people who make too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford insurance. If there are subsidies, then money to cover the cost of subsidies has to be found, through a combination of tax increases and cost savings elsewhere in the system. Those are the pillars of Obamacare; everything else is gravy.

Also, one of the sad realities of the American political system is that the only way to pass a law that pisses off some powerful interest group is to buy off other powerful interest groups at the same time.

Yeah, I caught the 'tort reform' misdirection as well. Also, I think earns north of $170,000 a year, which made his turning down the insurance 'on principle' a bit ridiculous.

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