by Ken Conklin Bash Instead of saying, “Under the Affordable Care Act, if you like your current health insurance policy, you can keep it,” here’s what President Obama should have said:
“If you’re stupid enough to want to keep your old health insurance policy, with lifetime maximum payout caps and exclusions for pre-existing conditions and exclusions for anything else the insurance company doesn’t want to cover, and high co-pays and high deductibles and huge annual premium increases and no maternity coverage and no mental health coverage and no preventive care coverage and the likelihood of getting canceled if you get sick or injured so you have to declare bankruptcy, then sure, you can keep it. Sucker.” That might have been more honest. The problem with that is when people with those limited policies suffer a catastrophic illness and go bankrupt because they can’t pay their medical bills, or when doctors and hospitals end up providing free care for indigent patients, everyone else has to pay. So who are the suckers then? We take out “affordable” policies with low premiums and limited coverage, gambling that something terrible won’t happen. But almost a million Americans lose that bet every year, because 62% of all bankruptcies are caused by overwhelming medical bills, and more than three-fourths of those people actually had health insurance! Or thought they did, because they had been paying premiums. It just doesn’t make sense that in the richest nation on earth so many of our citizens are financially ruined when they become ill, even after buying insurance. Obamacare aims to fix that, and it ultimately will, in spite of Republican roadblocks, sabotage, and misinformation.
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