Finding out what's in it
Health insurance premiums for NC college students rise 51% under ObamaCare
This is one more repeat of an old, bad joke already heard far too many times -- the deliberate low-balling of cost estimates to get the legislation passed.
All versions of socialized medicine make two bad predictions, and they make both of them on purpose to get the program passed into law in the first place. Without exception it will (Oops!) always turn out that (1) People use the system much more than predicted; and (2) The services (procedures, prescriptions, etc.) they use turn out to cost a lot more than predicted. Golly, call Ripley.
The result is a program in the red from Day One, and in a long dive straight into the debt toilet from there. When Medicare began in 1966, it cost $3 billion. In 2010 it cost $523 billion, blowing all cost predictions to smithereens. The CBO estimate for 2020 is $932 billion, and over a Trillion Dollars by 2022 -- estimates that we can safely predict will be grossly exceeded. Fraud and abuse remain rampant, with only 5% of claims audited.
The whole model is hopeless, because it creates an undifferentiated, anonymous, common pool of Other People's Money that is very poorly guarded, and which every participant in the health care system has a strong incentive to dip into as deeply as possible. The results are as inevitable as time and tides.
Byron
This is one more repeat of an old, bad joke already heard far too many times -- the deliberate low-balling of cost estimates to get the legislation passed.
All versions of socialized medicine make two bad predictions, and they make both of them on purpose to get the program passed into law in the first place. Without exception it will (Oops!) always turn out that (1) People use the system much more than predicted; and (2) The services (procedures, prescriptions, etc.) they use turn out to cost a lot more than predicted. Golly, call Ripley.
The result is a program in the red from Day One, and in a long dive straight into the debt toilet from there. When Medicare began in 1966, it cost $3 billion. In 2010 it cost $523 billion, blowing all cost predictions to smithereens. The CBO estimate for 2020 is $932 billion, and over a Trillion Dollars by 2022 -- estimates that we can safely predict will be grossly exceeded. Fraud and abuse remain rampant, with only 5% of claims audited.
The whole model is hopeless, because it creates an undifferentiated, anonymous, common pool of Other People's Money that is very poorly guarded, and which every participant in the health care system has a strong incentive to dip into as deeply as possible. The results are as inevitable as time and tides.
Byron
posted by Byron | Wednesday, September 05, 2012
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