General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: My experience with Universal health Care [View all]Ron Obvious
(6,261 posts)One benefit of even having insurance is that they will negotiate your costs down a fair bit, and many doctors won't even see you if you don't have insurance. Costs seem arbitrary. Our BCBS is currently costing us more than $600 a month, and they literally pay for nothing. I get to deduct somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000 from our taxes every year. I venture that's unique in the developed world.
Many people will benefit from Obamacare, but the real problem isn't getting addressed: The absurdly high cost of medical care in the first place. It will further enshrine medical insurance as a work benefit, when it ought to be decoupled from employment entirely and it will not address medical costs. Like Shrub's Medicare part D, it explicitly prevents the government from negotiating for lower prices.
Even those who don't see the insurance premiums their employers are paying will probably notice the raises they're not getting since wages have been stagnating ever since Reagan.
One way or another, the absurdly high cost of medical care in this country will still be born by the people.
I'm not even addressing the cost of medication. In Germany, they freely gave me 6 months of pills for about 100 bucks. For comparison, two (2!) vitamin K pills I had to buy here to counteract my too thin blood was already $22. For that matter, can you imagine any US pharmacy turning over 6 months of pills in one go? It was always a struggle for my wife to get her birth control pills more than one month at a time. They always had excuses.