What Will Happen to Health Care? from Health Justice

[eridani]

I think he's overestimating how well off China is, but still--

http://www.1payer.net/
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As even the more "liberal" Republicans recognize, the health insurance industry is dying. There is no way that a family making 100,000 dollars in 2014 can pay a 25,000 premium for health insurance with a 25,000 deductible and a 30% copay. So the health insurance industry will contract, indeed has even begun to do so. Insurers will shed their individual policies and compete fiercely only for the largest and most well-heeled companies who can afford to stiff their workers on pay in return for providing what everyone wants but can't have -- health insurance.

At the same time, those who are younger or healthier or bolder will go without health insurance and pay the fine (or not), then will sign up for an expensive policy when they get sick. Insurers will try every way possible to avoid signing these people up -- usually by claiming that they were defrauded when the newly insured person didn't include a cold that he had ten years before he applied.

As the price rises for health insurance, fewer and fewer people will buy it and more and more will take the bolder approach. The price will rise faster. The insurers will consolidate because only the biggest will survive. Eventually there will be three health insurers nationwide who will only insure people that work for Microsoft or Google and will have figured out a way to avoid insuring anyone else.

Those on Medicare or Medicaid will not be able to find a specialist, although there will be plenty of impecunious pediatricians, internists and family practice docs who are trying to scrape by on the measly payments by Medicare and Medicaid, which have cut year by year to pay the insurers to insure the middle-class employed person at ever higher prices.

Eventually, this will cut into the hospitals' and the high-paid specialists' bottom line and they will gradually start to see fewer and fewer patients, limiting their patients to those who can pay by some guaranteed manner. Only the most infected and infested practices will be left for those who cannot guarantee payment.

And through all of this, Mitt Romney and fellow Republicans will be telling Americans that everything will be fine if they just eat right and exercise more.

But by that time (prediction: 2020), the Chinese will have essentially foreclosed on their loans to the US and will own most of our industrial base.

Another prediction: buy Wellpoint/Anthem -- it will own one-third of the market by 2015. But wait to buy until the stock hits bottom after the Obamination passes.

http://www.cafepress.com/1payerdotnet/