Cost shifting is the practice of shifting the much of the cost of Medicare, Medicaid, and indigent care to private insurance or the uninsured. In simple terms, private insurance premiums bear a 20-40% hidden tax to support underpayments in government programs.
The implications are enormous. The avenues for inefficiency and corruption are endless. But the implementation of Obamacare will be the real tipping point. Millions of government sponsored patients will be added to the rolls. Their underpayments will be forced into the premiums of private insurance. The collapse of private health insurance will be almost immediate. The effect on healthcare will be devastating, and the cost of public care will escalate 20-40% or more.
(The source articles linked there are behind a subscriber wall, but you can access reprints of the second here.)
(h/t Ed Z)
I certainly agree that the rats are in the cheese.
But the proposed solution does not seem to be part of this world:
1. A flat tax, reducing taxes payable for the working poor, the middle class and the upper middle class, and maybe even a bit higher.
2. Increase taxes on the filthy rich, individuals and organizations both.
3. Reduce expenditure (including entitlements) to the level of tax received.
4. Close loopholes.
It seems to me that the filthy rich will be long gone before any such proposal can be enacted, and they’ll take their money with them. They got their money by investing (for the most part), and investment means jobs. They’ll want to re-invest that lolly in their new homelands to keep the profits rolling in (much of it to be yet re-invested again, and that won’t happen in the country from which they fled. The jobs resulting from all that investment won’t be, either.
So not only will a lot of capital be lost, but so will a lot of savvy people. Not very smart.
You can always count on Obama making a bad situation worse. Its his specialty.
“They got their money by investing (for the most part), and investment means jobs.”
Very true. For people to invest the gamble has to be worth it. The harder it is for businesses to make money the harder it is for them to get investors. Why would anybody take a gamble on investing when they would make more money having the money sitting in the bank making interest.
USSR redux…..
Everybody equal…in grinding poverty….
Except for the PARTY elites…..of course….
Net result…….a society with the most accurate missiles…yet incapable of making a reliable toaster….
Obamacare was designed to allow tens of millions of additional Americsns to qualify directly for Medicaid, and small employers will indirectly dump millions more into the government plan, as they will be forced to cancel their plans as more and more cost increasing provisions of O’care go into effect in 2012 and 2013. End result: America is converted to a single payer system, by default. Of course the ruling class will never be bothered by this, as they will have access to the first class care at Walter Reed Medical Center, and others.
Who is going to (or will be able to) pay for these programs?
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2010/08/us_birth_rate_falls_again.html
This is, by the way, nothing new. A few times here, I’ve recounted my experiences as an uninsured traveller visiting the US and becoming involved in a traffic accident. This was in 2000, and while I was in hospital, I received a single 30 unit injection of insulin.
I was charged $100 for that ($150 Cdn, at the time). Just for comparison, I purchase 5 vials of 300 units each today for $60 Cdn. At hospital prices, this would cost me $5000! How could this be?!
The answer, of course, is hospitals routinely inflate their prices to the insured to cover the cost of providing services to the uninsured. So private insurance (and the employers who purchase that insurance for their employees, and the people who purchase private insurance on their own) have been subsidizing the uninsured for decades.
Bambam’s “plan” (excuse me while I giggle hysterically) will only exacerbate this problem. I feel for my American friends; it’s a hard rain that’s gonna fall.
American political leaders are spending all this time whistling past the graveyard, they might as well, the current crop won’t have too much time left after this disastrous Administration is done….
Short term, I think what’s going to be discovered by the general public is that doctors as a class are really quite clever, and can make a living doing -anything-. Because most of them are going to QUIT, and go on to something else.
Then the American socialists will have achieved the ultimate and reached their goal. To turn America into Canada.
Long term, medicine will simply return to fee-for-service on an all cash basis, just like it used to be back in the pre-insurance days. When people used to save up money for Mom’s hip replacement, and if they came up short Mom died.
Might be a good time to join the Lion’s Club, or the Rotary Club, The OddFellows, Foresters, Shriners or what have you. That’s what those clubs were originally for, getting you over the hump when Mom needed an operation or the roof blew off the barn.
On the bright side, doctors will likely go back to doing house calls. Yay. (/sarc/.)