Explanation of the Affordable Care Act and Medical Welfare

Great vid.
Also >Aeropostale shirt

Hey OP, you hiring? I've worked in health insurance before. HMU.

>>1853473
Nice soundtrack, good Mickey Mouse impression

So are you basically saying that there are two groups of people in the US: those who can afford private insurance and those who get medical welfare from the government?

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>>1853503
>>Aeropostale shirt
Lol I do still buy stuff there because it's usually dirt cheap for t-shirts.

>>1853523
>Hey OP, you hiring?
It's a small business <50 employees. I'm probably going to quit and sell back my little shares in the business as soon as I can get rid of my house and move somewhere else. I never really signed up to be in insurance - it just kind of happened when my teaching job went to shit and I got hired. Over the last 5 years I've learned a lot about it though - enough that I could tell you pretty much how to build a health insurance plan from the ground up. That's among other shit like property / casualty insurance and running a self-funded Workers' Comp plan.

Riveting shit, I know. It pays the bills and I worked my ass off for a few years getting my foot in the door - but a desk job is just not something I want to do long term. I'd probably be happier being a field adjuster or something, at least I'd get to drive.

>>1853558
>So are you basically saying that there are two groups of people in the US: those who can afford private insurance and those who get medical welfare from the government?
More or less, yes. Insurance is not healthcare. Insurance as a concept is risk management. Commercial insurance as it exists today (particularly for businesses) is just a financial mechanism. A lot of contracts (of all kinds) are insured in some capacity because people want to hedge against potential losses or third parties suing someone in the contract.

In that way, it's more a cost of doing business than anything. Over time, people got this fucked up notion in their head that they needed insurance to access healthcare at all. Fact of the matter is that's not true, but they're partly right in that the ubiquity of health insurance within healthcare did have a role (over time) in driving up costs. Almost a vid unto itself talking about how / why healthcare costs are what they are and how they got that way...

>>1853627
>Over time, people got this fucked up notion in their head that they needed insurance to access healthcare at all
Well costs are so high you kind of do need it. Just walking into a hospital asking where the bathroom is will cost you 5 grand. So if you want to have any kind of hope of paying down unforeseen medical bills then you do kind of need health insurance.

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>>1853808

They are now, yeah I'd agree. Shit wasn't always that way though - but that goes back a long time and I'll agree that there were a lot of factors in play that caused the rise in healthcare prices through the decades. Like I said - the ubiquity of private insurance exacerbated it since the more money that was held in the hands of carriers, the more money Docs / Hospitals knew they could pursue in reimbursement from those carriers. Prices crept up from there. Even with private insurers usually trying to pay Docs less (to capture more profits), it was only a matter of time, especially as private physician practices waned and we entered an era where corporately-owned hospitals started coming around. Once a hospital group dominated the delivery of care a region, the carrier was forced to negotiate with them or send their insureds possibly miles and miles away to the next town for care.

Again, the ubiquity of health insurance is not the only reason, but one of the reasons.

Imagine a market where Docs and Hospitals could only seek reimbursement direct from patients. You can't get blood from a stone. Prices would have developed MUCH differently throughout the years, because who's paying for surgery no one can afford? Docs and Hospitals would have had to price services accordingly and budget around that, or they'd have gone under.

Fact of the matter is, the diminishing number of health carriers that remained in play found it easier to just increase premiums to capture profits - rather than suppress provider reimbursement. Now with only about 4-5 big time carriers left in the private sector and well-defined territories they control in the states (with real monopolies on some states) there's far less competition.

One thing Trump was / is right about is removing "state lines" (state license requirements for insurance products) will encourage competition between carriers again and should improve the private market.