The Ruling Healthcare for all

In a landmark decision yesterday, the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate of the Affordable Healthcare Act.
Some comments beware of soapbox stands:

1. Our past employer has put out nearly 10,000 dollar each year for each employee of the district. That doesn't come close to the costs of the insurance that is needed to maintain. The added cost to the employee for total coverage adds another 6 thousand dollars a  year.

2. Many employers and employees do not have a plan that puts that much money into the benefits. Less than that moves people and institutions into the gambling mode. Would  you gamble you life savings and the life savings of your family so that you can pay the health care cost when you need it? This is one of the reasons that employers felt that it was so important for their employees to have good coverage. Sadly some classified people have told be over the years that the main reason that they work for the High School District is so that they can have family healthcare coverage not provided by their spouse that makes more money but whose job does not have family health care benefits. One family member works for the money the other for the benefits. Pretty sad. What is gong on with the freeloader employers that provide good salary but no benefits for their employee and the families. This is what this decision is all about. Those that don't pay should be taxed or added to the pool so that the overall cost is less for those that do pay.

3. Why are these costs so high? The doctors on the TV yesterday were griping about the reimbursement for medicare patients. They were also grousing about the most of serving medi cal patients and that many were leaving the profession early because the costs of running the business was more than the cost of their overhead. 

4. Although 51 percent of those surveyed, said that they did not like the Affordable Health Care Act, 13 percent included in the 31 percent felt that it didn't go far enough and favored a single payer system that would essentially gut the Health insurance Companies.

5. The Supreme Court stated that the Individual Mandate portion of the Affordable Health Care Act constituted a "Tax" and therefore was admissible as valid congressional bill. The interesting thing is that it is a tax to only those that do not have the coverage. Even then the tax would be around a thousand dollars. Compare that to the figures stated above. 

6. The bottom line is that Health Care Coverage has gotten to be a major cost to almost everyone. Without some sort of control of this, it will consume every available dollar that we have in a discretionary way. In some ways it has. The ability to bargain at the table for Cost of Living increases for the last 10 years has been severely thwarted by the shadow of health care costs. The cost of paying premium increases that far exceed other price factors has lead to a pocket inflation that has become onerous. It used to be that much of the raise that people got in public employment could be reported out and buried in the tax friendly health care categories. It was an area that the employee's income was not taxed. It was also a part that didn't come into figuring the retirement fund contribution for the district or the employee.  It was a sweet part of the deal that the workers loved and the employers benefited. And then it grew and grew and grew. It consumed every dollar that could be thrown at it.  Caps sprang up and suddenly the burden was shifted to the employee for the additional cost. 

7. In some senses its not hard to see where the conservatives have seen this cost escalation as a threat to liberty and freedom and the things that our country stands for. Yet, when they need hospitalization for life threatening acute illnesses, its too late to go get some insurance to cover it... in their model. They have not been paying the 16K that the rest of us have been paying do to the losses that the health industry picks up when non payers need help. This also falls on the budget worries of local governments that try to maintain a handle on their county medical costs.

8. So who really benefits from this decision? The 31 million people that will be added to the rolls of the health care insured. The kids that can be maintained on their parent's health plans... which increases the cost of these plans for everyone... just a little since most kids are dramatically less costly than older adults. The people that have chronic health care issues that the insurance companies do not ever want to see on their rolls. Local county support for hospitals should see a decrease in their need to cover the tight wads that didn't want to every pay insurance but were using the emergency rooms as urgent cares.

9. Who loses? The conservative groups that put huge amounts of money into the anti Affordable Health Care movement. I think that Huckabee with his sign my petition adds that streamed throughout the splinter satellite channels for months should be kicking themselves over the loss. One can only guess what major corporations were behind that multimillion dollar campaign that targeted the Obamacare provisions without having anything to support its replacement. Everyone seems to agree, we just cannot continue the way it is in Healthcare.

10. The Affordable Health Care Plan is not perfect. It is a step to moving us toward making health care coverage a right and not a privileged of just the few that can afford it.

Just a few months of not paying for a foreign war would bring this cost into the chump change category. Well someday.

: ) Pat