Not talking about doctors, and I worked in a nursing home long enough to know about the problems with Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. Not sure what your position on healthcare is, but for the record here’s mine.
As bad as it is/was with Obamacare, under the pre-Obamacare system that the paid for politicians want to go back to it was far worse.
If we still had that system, I’d be dead.
With myriad fairly recent “pre-existing conditions” the company I was retired from after over 37 years, who provided my health insurance in retirement, went chapter 11 and my health insurance went away, I was left with COBRA as the only option.
COBRA is a very expensive, and temporary, option for those who are laid off or otherwise have lost their insurance (because the normal ruling by federal bankruptcy judges is now slashing all benefits of all already retired workers).
So: a true story of how insurance used to work in the USA, and how it will once again work if the insurance companies, and their paid for congressmen, win this thing in the long run.
A person in my extended family was laid off from a long-time job in a “downsizing”.
They lost their health insurance.
They went on COBRA.
When COBRA benefits ran out, they had only been able to find a job that, like most jobs now days, did not include health insurance benefits, the insurance company that had provided the COBRA coverage offered a (very pricy) continuing coverage with the same coverage as the COBRA had offered.
Although the coverage was expensive, he decided that, as it was his only option, he would go with it.
During the first two years he had no medical problems other than an episode with massive headaches that, although they were never actually diagnosed, eventually went away.
During the fourth year with this extremely expensive, and only option, insurance, he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor.
All insurance claims were then denied as the policy technically was renewed annually, so each year pre-existing conditions from previous years were disqualified.
The undefined cause of the headaches from two years ago “could” be related to the tumor, thus it was a “pre-existing” condition and not covered.
THAT is the system we should go back to?
The garbage we have now is ridiculously worse than any other developed country has, yet it’s far superior to what many of our politicians wanted to keep, and now want to go back to.
So, my position?
The insurance companies should simply be put out of business and a single payer plan put into place.
Although what such a plan should look like or how exactly it would work is fair grist for debate, I could never agree that the current status quo, let alone the much inferior former one, is in any way fair or even logical.
![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")