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Originally Posted by Mavdog
yeah, "the market" has sure stopped these conditions from existing....wait, the market CAUSED these conditions to exist!
it's amazing when people react to the obvious inequities of the existing health insurance platform with a cry of "let the market work". the market has "worked" to bring about these conditions.
that ridiculous rhetoric of "a socialist guvment [sic] takeover" is just old, inaccurate, and insulting to anyone who has taken the time to understand the plans that have been proposed. there is no "takeover" of the insurers, no "takeover" of the hospitals, no "takeover" of the medical providors.
maybe the right has come up with a new definition of "socialism", because the definition of socialism that we've used for over a century sure isn't shown anywhere in these plans.
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Nope. The market didn't setup modern HMOs or make an employer's portion a deductible expense virtually killing individual policies. The market didn't refuse to reign in frivolous and costly litigation bringing defensive procedures to the process. The market didn't fracture itself into 50 markets. Both Partys are guilty. Characterizing current conditions as a free market with little in the way of regulations setting what's allowable is just flat wrong.
If the current proposals go through, the market isn't choosing the Public Option, if it stays, as the only national plan.
If you raise the exposure without doing anything to lower costs, you will set up the environment where insurers will leave the market. If the penalties for not offering coverage is lower than company offered coverage, they will stop doing it. And if a small business gets a hardship waiver, guess where the workers get coverage?
There isn't anything like a finished Bill to debate yet, and insurance companies don't have to offer coverage. If you abolish caps and make it illegal to consider preexisting conditions they will act like a business. It doesn't, as you keep maintaining, take some explicit law to force them out.