How Would You Like to be in Medicaid?
Under health reform plans being considered in Congress (including Sen. Kennedy’s) millions of people will be added to the Medicaid rolls – many losing private coverage in the process. This is from the Merritt Hawkins and Associates study, previously reported on here and in the Dallas Morning News:
- In Dallas and Philadelphia, only 8% of cardiologists accept Medicaid patients; in Los Angeles, it’s only 11%.
- In both Dallas and New York City, only 14% of OB/GYN specialists will see Medicaid patients; the figure is 28% in Miami and 33% in Denver.
- Among general practitioners, the lowest figures are 30% (Los Angeles), 40% (Miami) and 50% (Dallas and Houston).
Why don’t you list the cost of Medicaid? Is it $10,000 a year per person in New York?
A 30-year-old can get HSA insurance in Lansing, MI for $57 a month from America’s oldest health insurance company that has a choice of three different networks.
Network providers are under contract to accept our HSA health insurance consumers.
Problem solved.
If Sen Kennedy has his way we are going to all be in Medicaid.
Enrolling everyone in government-run plan is more likely than people realize. If there is a “public plan option” that has advantages not available to private insurers (i.e. the power of law to set reimbursement rates 30% below what private insurers pay and able to rely on taxpayer subsidies to cover losses); and free of all the responsibilities private insurers must meet (i.e. reserve requirements, taxes, etc.), the public plan could undercut private insurers’ premiums by about 25%.
The Lewin Group estimates that if the public plan is open to everyone, pays Medicare rates and has other cost advantages over private plans, 131 million people might opt for that public plan. Of these, 119 million would have dropped (or been dropped from) private coverage.
Summing up all the enrollees in the public plan, Medicare, Medicaid and the proposed Medicaid/SCHIP expansion, the total enrollment in a government-run plan could approach 230 million to 240 million people. That represents 75% to 80% of the market for health insurance. This would be very similar to the single-payer concept that so many people have rejected as not a viable option the American people would accept.
I believe it was the Canadian Supreme Court that ruled that the right to health care did not mean the right to wait in line.
Yes: The Canadian Supreme Court decision in 2005 is usually referred to as Chaoulli/Zeliotis. There is an article about it at http://tinyurl.com/nvkwdb. As a result, private clinics have opened up in Canada, but they operate in a sort of gray market, experiencing benign neglect by a government that refuses to renounce control over health care. Dr. David Gratzer also has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal that addresses the Canadian situation.