This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 8:14 am and is filed under FYI. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Under health reform plans being considered in Congress (including Sen. Kennedy's) millions of people will be added to the Medicaid rolls – many losing private coverage in the process. This is from the Merritt Hawkins and Associates study, previously reported on here and in the Dallas Morning News:
June 9th, 2009 at 8:33 am
Why don’t you list the cost of Medicaid? Is it $10,000 a year per person in New York?
A 30-year-old can get HSA insurance in Lansing, MI for $57 a month from America’s oldest health insurance company that has a choice of three different networks.
Network providers are under contract to accept our HSA health insurance consumers.
Problem solved.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:42 am
If Sen Kennedy has his way we are going to all be in Medicaid.
June 9th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Enrolling everyone in government-run plan is more likely than people realize. If there is a “public plan option” that has advantages not available to private insurers (i.e. the power of law to set reimbursement rates 30% below what private insurers pay and able to rely on taxpayer subsidies to cover losses); and free of all the responsibilities private insurers must meet (i.e. reserve requirements, taxes, etc.), the public plan could undercut private insurers’ premiums by about 25%.
The Lewin Group estimates that if the public plan is open to everyone, pays Medicare rates and has other cost advantages over private plans, 131 million people might opt for that public plan. Of these, 119 million would have dropped (or been dropped from) private coverage.
Summing up all the enrollees in the public plan, Medicare, Medicaid and the proposed Medicaid/SCHIP expansion, the total enrollment in a government-run plan could approach 230 million to 240 million people. That represents 75% to 80% of the market for health insurance. This would be very similar to the single-payer concept that so many people have rejected as not a viable option the American people would accept.
June 9th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
I believe it was the Canadian Supreme Court that ruled that the right to health care did not mean the right to wait in line.
June 9th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Yes: The Canadian Supreme Court decision in 2005 is usually referred to as Chaoulli/Zeliotis. There is an article about it at http://tinyurl.com/nvkwdb. As a result, private clinics have opened up in Canada, but they operate in a sort of gray market, experiencing benign neglect by a government that refuses to renounce control over health care. Dr. David Gratzer also has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal that addresses the Canadian situation.