Presidents Of All Stripes Pushed Health Reform
As President’s Day comes and goes, it’s important to look back on why so many presidents from both parties have pushed to reform health care – and how all of those efforts led to the reform law that was passed nearly two years ago.
The Republican presidents who have pushed reform include Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. More recently, former Governor (and current presidential candidate) Mitt Romney passed his own plan in Massachusetts. The Democratic presidents who have pushed reform include Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Bill Clinton, and most recently, Barack Obama.
They have pushed health reform for different reasons. Of course, the fact that many of our friends and neighbors would not be able to get appropriate medical treatment has always been a great concern. Another is a matter of simple economics. As health care costs have increased faster than the rates of inflation for many other services and products, presidents have sought to find a way to keep such costs from spiraling out of control.
For instance, right now 75 percent of health care costs and 7 in 10 American deaths come from chronic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Yet these diseases are often preventable. That is the big reason that the health reform law – officially called the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – requires Medicare and private insurance to cover many preventive services with no co-pay or deductible attached. Investing some money upfront ultimately saves money and lives because you’re catching things when they’re easier and less expensive to treat.
While many different ways of doing reform were talked about over the years and some proposed doing a single payer “Medicare for All”-type plan, ultimately Congress and the President decided to do a private insurance-based reform plan when they passed health reform in 2010. This means that rather than replace private, employer-based insurance with a plan like Medicare, the law instead keeps private insurance but places tighter rules on insurance companies in order to protect patients.
Mass Health Insurance Carriers - News
BOSTON—The Massachusetts Health Connector is reaching out to small business owners in a bid to make it more affordable to provide health coverage to their workers. One new program would offer small businesses rebates for up to 15 percent of what they
This means that rather than replace private, employer-based insurance with a plan like Medicare, the law instead keeps private insurance but places tighter rules on insurance companies in order to protect patients. These protections include things like
BOSTON (AP) — The Massachusetts Health Connector is reaching out to small business owners in a bid to make it more affordable to provide health coverage to their workers. One new program would offer small businesses rebates for up to 15 percent of
Never mind that Obama softened the rule so that the insurance companies, not the employers, will pay for the coverage. Never mind that many employees served by these health care plans don't share the same religion as the institution for which they work
For starters, the individual mandate that requires all Americans to purchase health insurance policies is probably unconstitutional, and it's certain to be rendered pointlessly expensive by all the medical and quasi-medical bells and whistles shoved
Massachusetts Health Stats: "Medicare as We Know It" Depends on ...
Their ideological statement begins with the typical academic premise about Medicare (also fondly referred to by many academics and politicians as "Medicare as we know it"), the idea that it is good insurance. The authors are totally wrong when they say "Medicare is designed to absorb risk." Medicare is designed to do exactly the opposite; it is terrible insurance with lifetime limits, geographic restrictions, no drug/vision/dental/annual-physical-exam coverage, high co-pays, and high deductibles. Their article suffers the usual academic misunderstanding about what us seniors really do to protect ourselves from high healthcare costs. We do not depend on the Medicare inaccurately described in the Archer/Marmor article. Medicare beneficiaries turn to what they call "commercial insurers" -- the authors ignore the fact that some are for-profit and non-profit, depending on locale -- at a much higher rate than those not eligible for Medicare: A very few percent of us are signed up only for Medicare Parts A and B. Presumably those in that relatively small group are the very rich or are people who for some reason have fallen through the cracks despite extensive efforts by CMS-certified State Healthcare Information Programs (SHIPs) to reach out to the needy and make sure everyone has good healthcare insurance from private insurers to make up for the shortcomings of "Medicare as we know it." In fact it is not even accurate for Archer and Marmor to say "Medicare is a federally administered" program. While the U.S. federal government is the payer of Medicare claims, all Parts of Medicare are administered by the private insurance companies the authors apparently despise.