As the major structural issues of Obamacare continue to crop up, issues that were exposed even before the law was passed, issues that were said were features, not bugs, ones that would lead to a leftist call for single payer, and we were told “oh, come on, stop with the conspiracies!”, well, the calls for a public option and single payer keep growing. Guess this isn’t so much of a conspiracy
Why A Single-Payer Healthcare System Is Inevitable
The best argument for a single-payer health plan is the recent decision by giant health insurer Aetna to bail out next year from 11 of the 15 states where it sells Obamacare plans.Aetna’s decision follows similar moves by UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest health insurer, and by Humana, another one of the giants.
All claim they’re not making enough money because too many people with serious health problems are using the Obamacare exchanges, and not enough healthy people are signing up.
The problem isn’t Obamacare per se. It lies in the structure of private markets for health insurance – which creates powerful incentives to avoid sick people and attract healthy ones. Obamacare is just making this structural problem more obvious.
In a nutshell, the more sick people and the fewer healthy people a private for-profit insurer attracts, the less competitive that insurer becomes relative to other insurers that don’t attract as high a percentage of the sick but a higher percentage of the healthy.
Eventually, insurers that take in too many sick and too few healthy people are driven out of business.
Obamacare created a situation where there were more sick people than healthy joining the exchanges, yet, this was all turned around into blame on the insurance providers in order to say “see? We need single payer.” The structure of Ocare was designed to eventually collapse to pave the way to say “see? We need single payer.”
The real choice in the future is either a hugely expensive for-profit oligopoly with the market power to charge high prices even to healthy people and stop insuring sick people.
Or else a government-run single payer system – such as is in place in almost every other advanced economy – dedicated to lower premiums and better care for everyone.
We’re going to have to choose eventually.
Lest you think this is just some barely known or totally unknown crank yammering on at the Huffington Post, alas, no, the writer is Robert Reich, a big time lefty who served under Bill Clinton, and is a major supporter of single payer (for Other People). And he’s been saying virtually the same thing for years, such as in July, 2015.
As the structure of Ocare continues to degrade (in a manner exactly as opponents predicted), Leftists will increase their calls for single payer, putting the health care of over 300 million under the fingers of a tiny number of politicians and unelected bureaucrats.
