President Obama did a fair job of addressing the complexities of the health care implementation today. Yeah, the President failed to understand how dependent people are on what he says, and how carefully they listen to him. When he said people could continue to keep their health plan if they liked it, he should have also reminded them of a few other points:
1) I don’t control your insurance company, and the reason we are doing the ACA is because they constantly change plans and make them more expensive, anyway. We can try to make it better, but they can still change plans and make them more expensive.
2) If governors decide not to add their working poor to Medicaid, or don’t try to make exchanges work, then you are going to have some blowback from that in your state, hospitals can close, and insurance could get more expensive. Buck up — this is America, and I am not King.
3) Insurance companies have ways of charging to make money in ways we did not anticipate. Don’t ever forget that is possible.
4) We can require insurance companies not deny you for existing conditions, but we cannot tell them they cannot charge you enough to make money. Your plan can change because of that, too. Get ready for it.
5) If you have a pretend, or cheap, insurance policy, or some silly prescription coverage, or something insufficient for the purposes of this bill, you might not be able to keep ONLY that and may have to belly up like the rest of us. Don’t be a crybaby if you are cheating yourself but want to call it real insurance. And don’t think I lied to you. I will let you know if you have insufficient insurance coverage, though, like your agent should have. You don’t have to thank me.
6) If you want change, everything might change, and it might not be good at first. Have some courage and don’t whine too much. Be a patriot and help make this country better. Health care is a gigantic tax on all of us at twice what the world pays.
7) I can make sure insurance companies do not charge you too much more than the insurance game requires — but your insurance costs have been lower because a lot of the 15 percent that didn’t have insurance were gigantic risks, so they were thrown through the cracks to make everyone else’s bills cheaper. Since they so often defaulted and made costs higher anyway, we decided to deal with them like they had not died yet. If you have a problem with that, see Bible….
8) Any time you are disgusted with paying twice what the rest of the world does for health care, we can go to a single payer system like the rest of the planet seems to use. You’re going to have to tell some of these Republicans you want that, or they will talk bad about you.
9) Let me say it is obvious that the Republicans in Congress see the ACA as a horse they can ride into power, and they don’t feel they should help fix it, yet, because of that. If they try to make it bad they think they will reap the reward and might take the Senate. Considering what they did to help reform health care for the last 20 years when they were in office that would be an incredible tragedy for this nation. You see what they did over those 20 years.
10) Those of you who can do the math know everything is tied to the economy, and with our health care at twice what the rest of the world pays, that means an awful lot of jobs and income. If we ever were able to “fix” health care and bring it down to what Europe or Canada pay, you do know there would be massive layoffs and pay cuts, and the US economy would be in a tailspin from all those lost dollars? Since so many got confused about my hope that insurance providers would continue to offer coverage, I thought I should mention that about jobs. It might be one of you, which loses his, if we ever get costs as low as the rest of the planet.
Edited by SS
