Understanding Obamacare

I think that was precisely the point. The actual political struggle has little to do with healthcare, that only defines the shape of the playing field.

If you have never worked with the puzzle that is hospital billing and regulation, you really have no idea at how helpful many of the clauses in Obama's bill will be at lowering health costs in the U.S.

I have a bit of knowledge of this. My wife works for a good-sized hospital managing the department that's responsible for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, and we've discussed this at great length. The very fact that this reimbursement requires a whole department ought to demonstrate that Medicare/caid is not a model of efficiency and low overhead as is claimed, but simply that they push their inefficiencies onto the providers.

But I'm quite surprised by your claim that the bill will lower costs. I don't see how that can be, nor can my wife or any of the industry people she talks with.

It's unclear how more regulation solves the problem of too much regulation....

> we must...MUST provide health coverage to ALL americans especially the youth of this nation.

CAPS are always a reliable indicator of a sound argument.

The "youth" actually has health coverage. As a "not youth", I'm happy to see that said youths are going to be forced to subsidize the "not youths" even more than they are today.

The best part of the whole thing is that said youths are pushing this.

Yay boomers! We got subsidized our entire lives.

This is an attractive sentiment, but, unfortunately, false.

I used to work for a private health insurer a couple of decades ago, and they absolutely do provide "real value", in two different forms. 1) They offer an opportunity to share risk among subscribers. If every small business (or individual) were responsible directly for their own health care costs, a catastrophic illness in the pool would most likely cause bankruptcy. By spreading the expenses (in the form of premiums) across a large pool of people (both healthy and sick), costs are levelled to everyone's advantage.

2) Even for groups with large enough risk pools to manage their own risk (i.e., companies of over 500 employees, generally speaking), health insurers provide a useful services in terms of negotiating discounts with hospitals, and in the formulation (and execution) of rules (such as which services are covered, what the co-payments should be, etc.). Large businesses often would self-insure (i.e., manage their own risk) but pay us a service fee to administer their plan.