The ACA is the first step towards a single payer system. Republican opposition is slowly eroding and the longer the ACA is law the more likely that other changes will meet less resistance. And really, why so much resistance to the basic right of healthcare is beyond me. Not everything should be a profit center.
But the reality is, the health care system in the U.S. is largely private. And that private system is built on profit. I have no problem with more people having access to insured medical care. I think that's a good thing. The question and concern is, who is going to pay for it and how? I don't much care for some of of the methods that I've seen so far.
I strongly object to how the cost and coverage for certain types of care has been mandated based purely on political whims. The government has mandated that birth control for females (though not males) must be provided
without a copay. These are "convenience" drugs and products, for the most part. But diabetes, high blood pressure and many other chronic conditions are not covered sans copay. Additionally, and seldom spoken about, while it is true that more people will have access to
basic medical care, for those who have cancer, there are now fewer top shelf options for treatment:
15 of the top 19 top cancer hospitals in the United States are not part of the exchanges in ObamaCare. And even those on Medicare are now finding that some treatments and screenings, previously available to them, no longer are. One of the doctors who treated my uncle at City of Hope, Dr. Daniel Raz, wrote a
very critical article on a government panel's decision to no longer cover early lung cancer screening. According to him, no one on the panel routinely treated lung cancer patients. Additionally, unless something has changed since that 2014 article, City of Hope would not have been an option for my uncle, had he been on an ObamaCare exchange policy. My personal feeling is, in order to save money (keep premiums affordable) and pay for some of these politically motivated, convenience items, those who are facing life threatening, high cost treatments, may be in dire straits. This is not to say that the death panel claims from some on the radical right were correct. There already were de facto "death panels" at every insurance company in the U.S. - such as when my aunt was denied coverage for a bone marrow transplant by BC/BS and she died from cancer. But it is to say that as the cost of care continues to rise in the United States, there will be a necessary rationing of care, because there is going to (have to) be a rationing of available resource$. Who gets what and how much? It seems to be based, at least partially, on who or what you are, and how old you are.
By not including a top cancer center, an insurer can cut costs. It may also shield itself from risk, delivering an implicit message to cancer survivors or people with a strong family history of the disease that they should look elsewhere.
People can object to Rush Limbaugh's choice of words when he criticized [NOBABE]Sandra Fluke[/NOBABE] (now a feminist attorney) several years ago. And though I am no fan of Limbaugh, his logic was completely sound, IMO. Who in their right mind would think that the taxpayer should be forced to subsidize birth control (with no copay) for a woman, with a severe entitlement mentality, attending a $50,000+/year law school, and not do the same for someone with high blood pressure, heart disease or diabetes???!!! The only way this could be logically explained would be by the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, as he read from Jabberwocky. That's just one example of the flawed logic and reasoning within this law. It had
so much potential. I truly believe that. But that potential was lost because radical, special interest groups and boot-licking politicians bastardized what could have been a really good attempt to make our health care system better.
But whether you look at the far right or the far left, that appears to be the perverse nation that we live in now. Oh well...
