Loath am I to defend Scott Walker, but the New York Times is the pot calling the kettle black when it says that by dismantling Obamacare that Scott Walker (and Marco Rubio) will hurt poor people. Nothing could be farther from the truth. What Walker is talking about is harnessing the power of the market economy to reduce premiums and costs for everyone.
The Walker and Rubio proposals call for a much less regulated insurance market, where the federal government exercises little oversight over the products in the market.
How could there be an insurance market without federal oversight? liberals must wonder. Could insurers figure out what policies to sell if they were unregulated? Could consumers, on their own, make the choices of what kind of coverage they want to buy?
Their plans are also much less concerned about ensuring health care access for the poor.
This is the big lie. Health insurance alone doesn't equal access. Just ask all the people in North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela with health insurance. Availability of doctors and medicine equals access. Obamacare has been going in the direction of the Cuban model by offering plans with limited access to a smaller number of doctors and hospitals, many of whom are overburdened and unable to take new patients. So under Obamacare everyone has insurance – great – but not necessarily an available doctor.
One of Obamacare’s main effects has been to redistribute income. The law taxes wages, health insurance and medical devices, and raises insurance prices for wealthy, healthy people. It uses the money to subsidize insurance for people who are poor or whose health history made them poor insurance risks in the old system.
Yes, Democrats are great at redistribution. The problem with that is there aren't enough rich people to subsidize all the poor people, including the illegal aliens who get free medical treatment in places like emergency rooms.
Walker's plan would give vouchers to people to spend as they will. By opening access to insurers across state lines, competition will be vastly increased and prices will go down.
Both plans, however, would strip away Obamacare’s myriad health insurance regulations. Among the rules that would be cut away are popular ones, like rules preventing insurance companies from capping how much health care they will pay for during your lifetime, or the requirement that plans cover adult children up to age 26. They would also eliminate less popular rules, like the requirement that everyone obtain insurance or pay a fine and a rule that requires every health plan to cover a fixed set of benefits, including prenatal and maternity care.
By stripping these requirements, health insurers can offer medical plans with vastly lower premiums. Not every American needs or wants coverage for maternity benefits or covering 26 year old "Children".
Without all the rules, and without as many sick people in the system, insurance would be expected to become less expensive, and perhaps more inventive. Insurers could offer a wider array of products, including plans that only cover certain, limited services, or products that charge high deductibles or cap the amount of care they will pay for. Insurers may develop innovations that appeal to customers and cost less than what’s currently offered. Plans that include health savings accounts would be encouraged with additional federal dollars.
Yep. By increasing competition and reducing regulations, this will actually help poor people. Actually, it will help all Americans, but that still doesn't make it a bad thing. But the Times wants you think that anyone who tampers with a single line of the Obamacare legislation hates the poor. But it is the people who voted for Obamacare who are dismissive of the poor, or, at the very least, ignorant of the effects of the law they voted for.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/08/scott_walker_hates_poor_people_because_he_wants_to_dismantle_obamacare.html#ixzz3jJcPv0fI
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
No comments:
Post a Comment