STEPHEN MOORE: Obamacare And The Healthcare System’s Dirty Little Secret
No one likes insurance companies (trying to get them to pay a claim is like wrenching a bone out of a dog’s clenched teeth), and now we have another reason to hold them in low regard. The biggest advocate for blowing…
No one likes insurance companies (trying to get them to pay a claim is like wrenching a bone out of a dog’s clenched teeth), and now we have another reason to hold them in low regard. The biggest advocate for blowing another $1 trillion hole in the federal budget is the health insurance lobby.
The giant insurance companies — including UnitedHealth, Blue Cross, and Humana — are leading what Capitol Hill sources describe as “an unprecedented lobbying blitz to restore hundreds of billions in taxpayer-funded Obamacare and Medicare Advantage subsidies.”
This isn’t to help seniors or poor households. Brian Blase, a longtime healthcare expert who worked in the Trump White House, calculates that most of the reimbursement money wouldn’t financially benefit patients. The premium subsidies would mostly go straight into the bank accounts of the mega insurers.
The dirty little secret of the healthcare system since Obamacare was enacted back in 2010 is that the big jackpot winner has been the insurance industry. Their stock has risen roughly four times faster than average for the stock indexes.
By some estimates restoring expanded taxpayer subsidies (that were trimmed in the tax bill passed in July) are worth $30 to $50 billion to the insurance lobby.
This raises the question of whether most health insurance spending is really needed at all. If every American simply had a catastrophic coverage plan that would avoid families going bankrupt due to cancer or a terrible accident, we could simply pay our routine health bills the way we pay for rent or groceries — and then cut out the insurance middleman.
This would immediately bring a stop to the stampeding costs of health care services, because patients would be selective about what services cost while doctors and hospitals could no longer pass costs on to third party insurers.
Patients would shop around for the lowest prices, and health insurance would be like home fire insurance. There to aid families in an emergency.