Obamacare

One of the complaints that I keep hearing about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare,” is how the cost to employers will be so detrimental that they will have to start letting go of employees and/or reducing hours to disqualify employees from being eligible for insurance. One article that I read the other day talked about how some employers will pass on the cost to their customers, with one even stating that he will print a disclaimer in his menus that informs customers of a 5% surcharge due to Obamacare. His reasoning: he wants consumers to know that they are the ones who are actually paying for everybody else’s medical care. Wait…this is news?? I kinda figured this out on my own when I was in the hospital for the birth of my daughter and each ibuprofen I was given cost $8…each pill. I received a Tdap shot while I was there as well; it cost almost $400. At CVS, I could get the same shot for $64.99. While there are varying opinions on what exactly the inflated rate of hospital services is, the consensus seems to be that it is around 400%. When my daughter had a seizure and was transported to a hospital that was 5 minutes away, we paid $800 out of pocket. That was AFTER insurance paid their part (and we have very good insurance).

To those people that think this is something new, that Obamacare is just the government’s way of forcing the rest of us to pay for socialized medicine, it’s not. As long as uninsured people continue to visit emergency rooms to receive care for problems that are minor enough to be addressed in a doctor’s office, those of us with insurance will continue to make up the loss by paying more, be it through our premiums or our copays. We ALREADY pay for the healthcare for the uninsured. Now, that being said, I do believe that everybody has the right to healthcare. When you walk into a hospital, there are signs on the wall that clearly state that they cannot turn away somebody in labor or somebody with a medical emergency, even if they don’t have insurance. And this is definitely the right thing to do. But lots of people visit hospitals and ERs for situations that are not emergencies. Is Obamacare perfect? Is it the right answer? I don’t know, perhaps only time will tell. Hopefully, the government will figure out what does work from it and what doesn’t, and tweak the things that don’t work. But the road we have previously been following clearly does not work from a financial standpoint, and something has to change. Insurance companies aren’t going to change on their own…. Pharmaceutical companies aren’t going to lower prices on their own. Something has to be done to get healthcare affordable and under control. While there may be some negatives to this program, there are lots of great things that it will fix as well. One of the greatest things that I see coming from the program is that insurance companies cannot decline health insurance to someone with a pre-existing condition. I have a friend who has a genetic kidney disease that runs in her family. Her younger brother and sisters haven’t been tested for it yet out of fear that if they did have it, they would be labeled as having a pre-existing condition and would to be able to obtain health insurance. Now, they won’t have to worry about that anymore.