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Showing posts with label solution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label solution. Show all posts

February 26, 2010

Obamacare Ponzi Scheme makes Madoff Blush. How to really do it.

The "health care summit" looked to me like a bunch of frogs trying to fornicate a football. Down the rabbit hole they're in, no one has the presence of mind to realize what they're trying to do.

Democrats talk of "premium discrimination" and elimination of pre-existing conditions. Non-starter. If you treat a healthy, athletic 21 year-old kid the same as a 55 year old man with diabetes and three prior heart attacks, the system will be unsustainable.

By treating all people alike and disregarding pre-existing conditions, you eliminate the risk rating that lies at the heart of all insurance, and you tell people that for every dollar they put in, they're guaranteed to receive multiples of that dollar in benefits, thus the ponzi scheme.

Here's the fix:
-assign each person risk based on their health. This would require a preventive maintenance health checkup. At that time, you establish a preventative program. Hey, and ounce of prevention, right?
-place high-risk people in a high-risk pool in order to spread the risk among a mass group, thus lowering the premium for all in the group. The lower the risk, the lower the cost. THAT'S FAIR.
-Require the high-risk group to practice preventative measures like exercise, weight loss, etc. They give some effort toward the program that covers them. THAT'S FAIR.
-Reduce or eliminate the waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid. Use the recovered money to pay for those unable to pay for their insurance. It's still taking money from Peter to pay for Paul, but much more palatable because of the trade off. Funny how we never expect the government to run a program free of waste, fraud, and abuse.
-establish a baseline medical benefit used as a COBRA for people on unemployment.
-require welfare recipients and those who simply refuse to work to perform some sort of labor for their medical benefit. Consider it community service.
-If a state establishes a better system, allow them to opt-out of the federal system.
-make insurance portability a law.
-eliminate medical conditions discovered at birth being considered pre-existing.
-establish a grace period for people to try and get into a lower risk group. For example, if someone is diabetic because of their weight, allow them time to drop weight. If they don't do it, then they go into the higher group. Put the responsibility on the citizen. THAT'S FAIR.
-Lay off union health care plans. If a union member pays for something, they should get it. If the unions can negotiate better plans than the government, don't penalize them. (Unbelievable I said that since I don't like unions)
-extend scholarships to more medical students and put them to work in the system after graduation. Same for nurses. The whole system will fail if they're aren't enough medical professionals.
-tort reform
-take the insurance company lobbyists out of DC and throw them in the Potomac.

The other option to these ideas is ask Bernie Madoff how to do it. You know what he'll say...