They have health insurance, but still no peace of mind. Overall, 1 in 4 privately insured adults say they doubt they could pay for a major unexpected illness or injury.
A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research may help explain why President Barack Obama faces such strong headwinds in trying to persuade the public that his health care law is holding down costs.
The survey found the biggest financial worries among people with so-called high-deductible plans that require patients to pay a big chunk of their medical bills each year before insurance kicks in.
Why is it that our industrialised nations, despite their wealth of money and talent, cannot get this right? The U.S. has problems, and whether he got it right or not, President Obama was at least trying to tackle the problem of uninsured Americans. As it happens I had an appointment this morning at a major London teaching hospital. I reported to a crowded, chaotic clinic, with intolerable noise levels. You could also detect the rising levels of anxiety as people wondered whether they would be seen or not. After an hour my name still had not been called and I gently complained; I was seen 15 minutes later and the outcome is that there seems little cause for worry. However, it struck me sitting there that we, do not have the answer in the NHS either. Yes it cost me nothing beyond my taxes. But I was greeted by a system almost visibly buckling. These days if you have an NHS appointment it is almost laughable to expect to be seen at that time. Effectively you have to take half a day off work. Is it impossible to balance supply and demand in healthcare? Has any nation got it right? (FWIW we keep hearing in the UK that the French system works well.)
“President Obama was at least trying to tackle the problem of uninsured Americans. ”
That is laughable to the extreme. The only thing Obamacare is going to do is pave the way for Government single-payer healthcare which will put the US in the precise pickle that England, Canada, and other totally socialized medical systems are in.
There is a book out called “Wait Until it is Free” which details the simple to predict consequences of stimulating demand for medical services while stifling supply with over-bearing Government bureaucracy.
Why can’t we get it right? Because we won’t unleash the free market capitalistic system in the medical market. Medicine is not some holy endeavor that is resistant to market forces. The same economic factors that deliver cell phones of miraculous power with declining costs will do the exact same thing for healthcare.
Just look at the Oklahoma Surgical Care Center. They post their prices online and other hospitals won’t even give you a ballpark price. Doctors have opted out of the Government system and are cash only and have time to actually provide medical care……they have to or they go out of business!
But then we would have to admit that the current system is broken. And that is ONE thing the Obama administration is ontologically incapable of doing: admitting they made a mistake.
One of my daughters is insured through her employer, a moderately large government contractor in the DC area. She recently found that the co-pay for her basic asthma medicine, not an unusual item, will be $750 every three months. This is an astronomical increase over prior years. The idea that the ACA is reducing costs is ludicrous.