emma rocks

Massachusetts has the most expensive family health insurance in the country - The Boston Globe

jayparkinsonmd:

When the government mandates individuals to purchase health insurance from the private industry, where is the incentive for those oligopolies to control their costs. Can they do whatever they want knowing that the government has mandated their product?

In healthcare, there’s money in and money out. It takes an entire team to manage the money out. And every member of that team has an incentive to work independently of one another to maximize their profits. And none of them are accountable for the quality of their work.

Massachusetts has been a failure because they mandated insurance without mandating, at the same time, changing how healthcare is delivered. And therein lies the problem. The problem of spiraling healthcare costs is not who pays, it’s how care is delivered. If nobody is accountable for quality and every deliverer is disconnected with an incentive to do as much as they can, the process needs a reboot.

As we’ve witnessed in Massachusetts, mandating health insurance will quickly bankrupt  the American people, if there are no mandates for changing the incentives of healthcare delivery.

Like I said yesterday, the federal government is saying to the insurance companies, “Here are 50 million new customers. Carry on.”

As a self-employed individual in Boston, I’m mostly happy with the mandate and the affordability. Commonwealth Care bases premiums on income, so some of my friends who make under $30k don’t pay any premiums at all. I know it could be a lot better, and the costs are being spread around to employers and those with higher incomes, but for the middle-income self-employed 26 year old, it suits me just fine.

However, the problem I continue to run into is the lack of available primary care doctors. I see a resident doctor and a nurse practitioner at a teaching hospital because I didn’t want to wait 3+ months to schedule my first appointment. Even friends of mine with brand-name insurance and doctors they’ve had for years have to wait several weeks to months for their appointments. While I’m glad more people are insured, including myself, but I miss my family doctor in Florida who I’ve known for years and could call up just for some advice or walk in that afternoon if I wasn’t feeling well.