The insurance against possible non-contagious conditions may not deliver what was promised if a contagious event occurs, and the medicine for contagious diseases do not promise a very impressive recovery rate. With COVID19, we learned that our health care premiums do not guarantee access to health care when we need it.
We once had a medical system that can competently manage epidemics. We discarded it to make room for the managed-condition healthcare system we have now. Our system has proved that it cannot tolerate an epidemic, something that history tells us is a fact of nature. As a result, when an epidemic appears, we have to stop everything until a vaccine can make it go away.
Given the established one-size fits all medical policies, we have no choice but to allow the general population only to know general counts of cases and outcomes with no additional information such as precise locations and the specific age or other characteristics of that location’s patient. I ask whether there has ever been a time when anyone in government has seriously defended this approach with a serious consideration that an epidemic could actually happen before the collapse of society.
The age of 55 matches the age I used in my discussions of parallel governments where a government of debt service has a minimum voting age of 55 and this government has jurisdiction over that age group. If such a parallel age-distinctive government existed already, it would be natural to have it also maintain a separate health policy for the older age group. The older population is the population most in need of government subsidies for health insurance as evidenced by the current Medicare policies. This proposal effectively replaces Medicare with a policy governing some type of health insurance policy (public or private) that mandates coverage for all adults over 55.
Allow me to assume all of the above can be backed by good data. The Dedomenocratic Party would have the data to gain their support for the second open enrollment period, but it’s support also depends on evidence of urgency. The urgency is that this is a very unique opportunity over all subsequent years and this opportunity closes at the end of the current tax filing season.
That uncertainty is gone at the time of filing for a tax. For many people, it is at this time of certainty of health-care needs for prior year that they now must confront a higher cost of the premiums they had been enjoying. It is nonsensical to claim that they must now pay premiums for past insurance. The present payments are not buying insurance because there is no longer anything to insure against. As far as the individual is concerned, he has already paid the fair price of the insurance. The repayment cost is instead a tax penalty (or a fine) that requires a different justification than paying for insurance.
After Obamacare 1.0, the new hope, all insurance companies must accept all patients, and all individuals must obtain insurance. The chronically ill will be paying premiums and the insurance companies will be approving their treatments. With Obamacare 2.0, the empire of preexisting conditions strikes back. The chronically ill will either find their services are not available or that they must pay more (in uncovered or out-of-network costs) to obtain them.
The chosen metal levels in ACA plans are not private and the different metals naturally attract their own distinctive populations based on their economic situation. The ACA metal levels provides the opportunity to distinguish people into class labels that they will not be able to escape from. We will see bronze, silver, and gold/platinum people. Although this identification is possible to change during future open-enrollment periods, there are strong economic reasons for selecting the specific metal level they currently hold. While a bronze-plan holder can upgrade to a more noble metal, doing so will come with a much higher monthly premium that will be harder to cover indefinitely. Over time, the metal levels may become the class identifications for class conflicts the alluded USA politics until now.
It will take a few more years before we get reliable data, but I suspect that the data will show that there are more people avoiding health care now than before ACA was passed. The financial risk for seeking care is too high. They will still benefit from ACA’s catastrophic coverage (such as no maximums), but they’ll wait until it is a catastrophic need. From an overall population perspective, the qualify of healthcare will be worse because many people will interpret the ACA-compliant plans as catastrophic-only insurance.
My thinking about the affordable care act (ACA or Obamacare) is entangled with my thinking about data science. For background of my thinking, it seems ACA is more about insurance rather than delivery of health care. The fundamental premise is that health care otherwise would be inaccessible without insurance coverage. This lack of…
Hypothesis Discovery 