I start my mornings reading, usually for about two hours. This morning, as I looked at my emails, there, like it is every morning, is Paul Krugman’s email.
Mr. Krugman actually holds a doctorate in economics, but he doesn’t insist that you call him “doctor,” as too many professors and administrators do. Anyhow, as I was reading the article on health insurance, I read the following.
One way to solve the “denial of care based on pre-existing conditions” problem is to bypass profit-making insurance companies and have the government pay medical bills directly, as Medicare and Medicaid do. But if we want to maintain a system of private health insurance, we must regulate insurers to prevent discrimination based on medical history. Yet that alone is not enough. We also have to ensure that relatively healthy people buy health insurance; because if they don’t, only those who are sick or have pre-existing conditions will get insurance, forcing insurers to charge extremely high premiums to cover their costs.
So what’s needed to make a system of private health insurance work is both regulation of insurers and policies to make premiums affordable for healthy people through incentives such as significant tax credits or premium subsidies.
This is basically what Obamacare does. Yet for 15 years Republicans have been promising that, any moment now, they will come up with something better to replace it. Years ago, I might have conceded that this was due to Republican ignorance. But when even Majorie Taylor Greene gets it, I have to chalk this up to inbred cruelty and willful mis-representation. As Jared Bernstein says, Republicans have lost the ability to think about policies that solve actual problems. Now it’s all a display of fealty to Dear Leader.
Reading the article reminded me why Obamacare was passed: to help people with preexisting conditions. Even switching jobs became complicated, as the new employer’s insurance may not cover you. Obamacare forces them to accept you.
There is quite an amount of information in today’s article by Mr. Krugman. Please spend a few minutes reading it and reflecting. That is the beauty of reading: one can stop to think about what one just read.
I ran across an article that says you don’t need to purchase car insurance for repairs unless your car breaks down. That is so true, but that is true of most insurance. I have been paying for home insurance for over 50 years and have never had the insurance company pay out a claim. In today’s article, I learned that there are 400,000 home fires a year and that we have over 150,000,000,000 (150 million) dwellings, so the chance of needing home insurance is very low unless there is a fire. That is a probability of 0.0000026667, yet most of us carry home insurance even though our houses are paid for; if not, the mortgage company requires it.
VOTE DEMOCRAT -TIME TO GET RID OF THE CRUELTY MONSTERS
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