(11-03-2018, 01:31 PM)mikesez Wrote:

(11-03-2018, 12:28 PM)jj82284 Wrote: So I join us in condemning the ACA and it's syrocketting deductibles?

The ACA has very little to do with deductibles.
The bronze, silver, gold, grading is just about over all costs distributions and there are ways to achieve each grade with high and with low deductibles.
high-deductible plans were becoming a bigger part of the marketplace already. people are interested in high-deductible plan simply because the lower premium is the only premium they can afford.
The overall health system is just too expensive. Too many Middle Men.

ofcourse it does.  Essentially, we eliminated rating for pre-existing conditions, merged pools like maternity and mental health and eliminated lifetime caps for insurance.  That all sounds great, just like a dry aged ribeye sounds great.  IT just costs more.  In this case, that cost was passed onto the consumer in the form of higher premiums and exponentially high deductibles that are invariably leading to the kind of rationing you lamented above.  

We should have learned by now that 2000 pages of bureaucracy don't reduce costs or increase resources.  It just results in an increase in the cost of compliance and a reduction in the number of producers and thus options for consumers.  

The market has always had a solution to making healthcare more affordable.  Doctors could self insure for the lower level care and pair that with catastrophic coverage for the heart transplant/cancer diagnosis etc. etc. etc.  There are practices emerging across the country that charge $50 bucks a month per adult for unlimited visits and service and have the same discounts on prescription drugs that we all get through our insurance programs.  Why aren't these more prevalent?  Because in the previous 10's of thousands of pages of Washington crap attempted price controls etc. etc. etc. they made medical associations more difficult to set up, and basically enshrined group health coverage because of tax treatment (and as a way around post WWII wage controls).  

So what's the solution?  Have Washington stop trying to HELP like a two year old with a chainsaw trying to fix their mothers broken toe.  Let producers develop products that work for consumers.  You'd think that the absolute horror show of the VA would serve as a cautionary tale about the government running healthcare, but people still believe in fairy tales.

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