What's wrong with ObamaCare?
1) It puts government regulations on the insurance industry that has operated for over a hundred years using actuarial tables to identify risk, spread that risk and make a profit in addition to employing millions of Americans.
Bullshit. Insurance companies don't spread risk. They do everything they can to eliminate risk by refusing to insure people who need insurance risk-spreading the most.
2) The bill does nothing to address malpractice costs and abuse which drives unnecessary tests and costs and is a key contributor to overcharges.
Bullshit. The answer to malpractice is simple: Don't do it. Unnecessary tests? Sure. Prescribed at physician owned facilities by the physicians themselves as another way to maximize their profits.
3) The process criminalizes what used to be considered coding errors to now call them fraud using a iron-fist approach in charging hospitals and doctors penalities and interest for what many times is a keying error or lack of understanding of the complicated ICD9 procedures.
Bullshit. There is something like $30 billion in medicare fraud every year. This is not simple coding errors; it is outright fraud, billing for services which were neither needed nor provided.
4) Hospitals are spending millions of dollars combating #3 above (RAC teams) and a brand new industry is born to offset those auditors...dollars not spent on providing care.
Bullshit. Any competent and trained person can code correctly.
5) Reduced payments to primary care docs have already resulted in a) some shortages in these types of doctors in low income areas and b) many of those doctors now being affiliated (employed) by hospitals thereby reducing the number of independent practitioners.
True. Specialists are over compensated, and primary care docs are underpaid.
6) Insurance costs have gone up (I believe the figure is 17%) for those of us with insurance because those companies now forced to cover people they would not normally consider simply pass those costs along to those of us who can pay.
Bullshit. Every for-profit insurance company is free to set it's underwriting and acceptance rules any way they like. They turn down high-risk folks all day, every day.
7) Hospitals Emergency Departments are now seeing patients that previously would not have gone to the ED. For those of you who know little about healthcare, one of the biggest problems is people using the ED as their primary care doc (see #5 above) for routine matters. This stretches care for true emergencies. Before you start whining, remember any person going to the ED before ObamaCare got treatment regardless of ability to pay.
And they still do get emergency treatment without regard of ability to pay. The answer? Universal health care.
8) Part of the bill pays for itself by reducing Medicare payments to hospitals and doctors. Hospitals are already closing their ED services as these were barely profitable before. Hospitals again will figure out a way to make a margin but, those reduced payments will not be absorbed.
Bullshit. Hospitals, regardless of their inefficiencies, are free to set their fees however they like, and to refuse Medicare patients and rates any time they please.
9) Consolidation in the healthcare industry will ramp up again with for-profit corporations buying religious based and independent facilities. Sound like a good thing, ask people in Louisiana where that occurred and now the hospital is being shut down and there is only one provider in town with no competition. Check out Phoenix where a hospital system was purchased and went from religious based to profit. After alot of layoffs and two years, it was then resold to another for profit entity.
10) The government is now mandating that citizens must buy a particular product...to I have to expain the problem with that?
So? The government, our government, can mandate everything from compulsory servitude in the military to compliance with laws. That's why we HAVE a government rather than a dog-eat-dog anarchy.
There's ten things off the top of my head. Lucky for you this is so obvious to most people that it really didn't take that much time for me to have to explain it to you.
