Obamacare

For the advocates of a national health care system these times are frustrating. It’s because they originally wanted a single payer system somewhat like Medicare but that was not politically feasible so they settled for this quasi-government/private plan called Obamacare. The hope is that in time this is what we will end up with as companies and government agencies all abandon their health care plans and switch over to Obamacare at which time it will become the desired single payer plan. If this happens we can get a glimpse of the cost and changes that will take place. First change will be the elimination of 10 million jobs in the insurance industry. These are people who have at a minimum a 12 grade education, people who for the most part have families and are homeowners, people who are productive tax paying citizens. They are computer savvy and adept at dealing with government and insurance paperwork. They will eventually work their way back into the system. Today there are 50 million people on Medicare and the annual cost is 600 billion or $12,000 per person per year. On the other end of the spectrum we have Medicaid and there are 60 million people covered at a cost of 400 billion or $6,000 per person per year. Since this group includes the old and the young we could say that if everyone were on the same plan the cost would be $9,000 per person per year. Since we have 310 million people we can project the cost at 2.8 trillion dollars which is close to the current cost of health care for the country. Much of the cost of the current health care system is born by employers but that will change and the cost will be shifted to the government. People who are currently insured by their employer, be it private or public will be moved to Obamacare and many will not like it because employer plans, especially those negotiated by union contract, are significantly better than even the best plan under Obamacare. This is one of the reasons that the big unions are objecting, however their objections since they met privately with the president have been muted, leading people to believe that they struck a deal allowing them to opt out of Obamacare. For every group that is allowed to opt out the cost to those remaining will increase. Once everyone is under the single government plan the move toward rationing will accelerate and most of us will have our treatment options determined by a group of experts living in Washington DC. This is the way that Medicare operates but the new plan will ration more in order to meet the cost of the ageing population.