Todd pleading with Rep. Erik Paulsen staffer to not repeal the ACA – Dec. 20th, 2016
Today the Republicans in the House are failing in what they promised would be done on the first day of Trump’s administration, repealing ObamaCare. The first day of Trump’s presidency began over two months ago. I was told in December by Minnesota 3rd District Congressman Erik Paulsen’s office they’d repeal it even before the inaugural, on the first week of the legislative session on January 3rd.
Of course the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) has become popular since the GOP “replacement” bill came out and details have been exposed. Perhaps popular is too strong of a word to describe the ACA. But now more people than not want it to stay in place and feel it should be repaired instead of replaced.
If the Republicans merely got rid of the trojan horse sabotage they put into the ACA in the first place, it would begin to work better. And if they added the public option which they opposed so much back then, the whole system would begin to work better, and the cost of treatment would begin to come down. THEN, if they added a transparency rule on the cost of treatment, things would really pan out into being a good system, even with private market insurance companies being involved. But if they also added the rule that Minnesota has already – only allowing insurance companies to be non-profit – we’d have affordable medical treatment and insurance coverage. It still may not be as good as single payer systems – but there’s a chance it could be even better.
Currently only 17% of Americans approve of the GOP bill, which Trump is calling “RyanCare”, and Ryan is calling “TrumpCare”. What does that tell you about the confidence of the author and people who are supposed to be championing the bill?
I mentioned a “transparency rule” and you may have heard that mentioned by others in the past. Imagine you work for a huge public relations firm and you’re the person who entertains prospective clients when they come to town. The company provides you with a credit card to be used to pay for dinner at the most expensive steakhouse in the city. You don’t know how much those steak dinners are, and you don’t care because you’re not paying for them. Of course the clients you’re buying for don’t know or care either. In fact, the finance wing of your company doesn’t know either. They don’t care what it takes to land those clients, so they’ve never looked into what those steak dinners cost. The fancy steakhouse realizes this, and they charge you obscenely high prices. It doesn’t make them look bad either because no one knows what they’re charging you.
You are the insurance broker, the clients you’re taking out on the town are the patient, your company is the insurance company, and the steakhouse is providing the treatment. If it were to be revealed what the steakhouse was charging — say $900.00 for one steak dinner, your company would boycott them and make sure you go somewhere else next time you’re entertaining clients. And they would pay attention to the prices at that new place as well. That steakhouse would lower their price to something reasonable in order to save face and compete in the steak dinner market.
What if we had real transparency with regard to health care costs? Insurance companies would be aware of caregiver costs and send their clients to the most competitively priced place. They’d also bring their charges down in order to be competitive in the insurance market. If they were only allowed to be non-profit entities, they’d be obligated to charge the least amount possible. The actual cost of care would come down from the obscene levels it’s at now, which is more than two times that in other countries. Healthcare costs in the U.S. are 18+% of our GDP. Other countries spend less than 9% of GDP on healthcare.
Of course, actual legislation would be more complicated than the steak dinner analogy, but what if real transparency was one of the things legislators were discussing when tackling the healthcare mess? The reason they’re not, and the reason the ACA was sabotaged at the outset is due in large part to the influence of money in politics. A good start to get at the problem of healthcare in our country would be to overturn Citizens United. If we went even further and had publicly financed political campaigns, legislators could work together for the good of the people of the country instead of being beholden to the corporate entities that are financing so many of their campaigns.
