Originally Posted by
mickjoebill
What is it with the USA and both the high cost of health care and the lack of adequate insurance?
The one item always missing from these discussions is that US law prevents the possibility of trying to change these issues.
For example, helicopter EMS ops is "protected" by the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. Believe it or not. Every time a State tries to reel in the EMS costs the operators play their dereg card and win. Until congress legislates these ops out of the Act they will continue.
The lack of insurance... is a misnomer. Everyone in the US has access to healthcare whether they can pay or not. Walk into any hospital emergency room and you will get treated. It's against the law not to treat you. However, in the big picture, if congress would legislate the ability to purchase medical insurance outside the state in which you live... the free market would bring costs down and offer better alternatives, Currently, by law, I can only buy insurance from a company with offices in my state.
And while obamacare was all the talk, it has slowly taken the existing insurance system and buried it. Out of 175M working adults, 120M get insurance from their work. The other 50M were supposed to be taken care by the ACA. What they failed to detail was that 30M of that 50M were going to get free healthcare through an "expansion" of the Medicaid system (low-income). The paying obamacare group never got above 24M. So guess who has to pay for those 30M?
The funny thing is, the hype on the ACA was it was to help "middle-income" folks. But with the current median single income of around $52K per year, how come all ACA subsidies stop at $49K income per year? The insurance company lobbyists are a close second to the defense industry lobbyists. Until that bond can be broken, our healthcare system will remain broken.