Health Care Vs. Wall Street

Stone Mountain GA

Description

Something that has always bugged me is how so few of you realize, and even refuse to believe is that something our government did 10 or 20 or 80 years ago can still be $crewing us over now. So you keep re-electing the same incumbents. The history of health insurance is kinda a long one starting in the 1920's when medical advances were made, and the cost of health care went up due to that. Back then it was common for a hospital to sell health insurance policies for $1 a month to a person regardless of their age or gender. If they had a regular health problem they went to their doctor and paid out of pocket. If they needed an appendectomy, the hospital covered it. We all know during the wage freeze of the Big One, WW II, companies started offering group health insurance as an incentive to hire new employees and keep their old ones. That worked fine for 30 years and the cost stayed well within the line of inflation. In 1973 The HMO Act was passed, and our Parents and Grand parents were told it would open up health care to the free market, which would create competition, that would lead to lower cost and a higher quality of care. At the time around 15% of health insurance companies were for profit, the rest like BCBS were Mutual Insurers. The for profit HMO type insurers back then focused on younger people so they could make the most money, because they could not compete with the Non Profit Insurers for older people. The HMO Act changed all that. Look up any information you can find, seriously, don't just take my word for it, and you will see that the cost of health care started going up a little faster than inflation by 1975. And since 1980 the cost of health care has out paced the standard rate of inflation every year since. Every year for 41 years! In the late 1980's the cost of group health insurance had gone up so much employers were looking for ways to control cost. Enter the for profit HMO. I was young and healthy back then and did not really care what was going on. But I remember when my company switched to an HMO, and several of my older co-workers with kids were complaining their doctor would not accept our new insurance. HMO's were all about the profit, and would only pay Doctors about half of what they normally charged, take it or leave it! So Dr's started telling their patients your insurance company will only pay me $20, so if you want me to continue seeing you, you have to pay the other $15. Enter the Co-pay. In 1980 my Group Insurance at a Regional Grocery store cost them $100 a month, of which I paid 25%, which was $25. It was good insurance. My employers remaining cost was around.50 (fifty cents) per a man hour. By the 1990's as the cost of health care continued to out pace inflation, corporations did not like it. At the time a lot of new tax law changes had already occurred and corporations, especially in retail and the food service industry decided to cut back on full time employees with benefits, and use more part timers with minimal to no benefits. In 1990 retail stores used 60% full time employees with benefits, today they use 90% part timer's. Starting in the 1990's the cost of Group Health Insurance had gone up so much, many employers were looking for ways to avoid paying it. Some employers needed full time employee's, so they started using more contracting companies and 1099 people. Other companies looked at it as the last straw, and shut down factories and sent them to other countries that had some form of socialized medicine, which all the other countries have. Of course in some of those countries they also got much lower pay scales and fewer if any environmental regulations. We are the only country that has a system of health care based on profit first, out come second. By 2000 the cost of Group Health Insurance was costing companies around $3 per a man hour. Based on inflation that was faster than wages had risen the last 20 years. Corporations did not like that. They could easily project cost for things like wages and vacation pay going up in line with inflation, but not health insurance. In the mid 1990's a lot of old people started complaining about the ever increasing cost of their prescriptions. By 2001 they were making a lot of noise and the media started following it. At first the pharmaceutical industry said their products were so expensive due to R&D cost. But the problem was they were increasing cost 25% or more every year on hundreds of drugs that had been around for 2 or 3 or 5 decades. The R&D was long since recovered. By 2004 our politicians had 2 choices, 1-look into why Americans were paying from 400% to 1,000% more for drugs than people in other countries paid for the same drugs, often made in the same factory! Or our politicians could just create a new system of welfare to subsidize the maximum cost of those drugs. Enter Medicare Part D. The Bill that became Medicare Part D was written by PhARM Lobbyist, Sponsored by Rep Tauzin (La) and had a clause in it that Medicare COULD NOT negotiate their retail prices down to what other countries pay for the same drugs, often made in the same factories. That clause is still in effect today. In 2006 after Part D was fully passed, Rep Tauzin retired from Congress and got a new job. Guess what job he got! Come on guess, it is obvious. He got the job as the King of Pharmaceutical Lobbyist making $2 million a year. Medicare has paid several hundred Billion dollars extra for prescription drugs since 2006 so good ole Billy Tauzin could pad his pocket for a few years. By 2005 people were complaining about how their Individual Health Insurance just kept going up and up, I was one of them. Our leaders had 2 choices, 1-look into why we pay from 100% to 500% more for health care than people in other industrialized countries do, or 2-start subsidizing the cost of individual health insurance policies. Enter the (Un)Affordable Care Act. The ACA did absolutely nothing to make the cost of health care affordable! Nothing! The only non politicians involved with writing the 2000+ pages of the ACA were Lobbyist for the Health Insurance and Hospital Industries. I remember back in 2010 and 11 when people on my radio were telling me Obamacare was going to destroy our health care. Since 2012 the Health Care Industry has been the best performing sector on Wall Street. Not long after the ACA passed a lot of Congressional Aides involved got high paying jobs in various health care companies. I'd like to see 60 Minutes do a segment on that. The ACA overall was a wonderful welfare subsidy for poor people and rich people. The Middle Class got $crewed. As usual. Prior to the ACA a lot of financially comfortable people who wanted to retire early did not because of how much they would have to pay for Individual Health Insurance. But now we can legally manipulate how we sell off stocks and bonds so we stay within the lower area of income, and get the ACA welfare subsidy. You kids have no idea how hard ALL your elected Congressmen have worked to set up this system. The US of A has the most expensive health care in the known universe, but since the 1990's we have not ranked better than #14 in over all quality of care compared to other industrialized nations, and one 2nd world nation. Seriously, you are more likely to catch a staph infection at one of our huge shinny glass medical centers here, than you are at a 70 year old hospital in Brittan, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Cuba, or 25 other countries. Look it up! Our politicians created this problem, and now for some reason voters believe the same people can fix this. President Biden was a brand new Senator in 1973 when all this started. I haven't done the research yet to see if he voted for the HMO Act.