“Free Market” Health Care Solutions Won’t Work

From my new piece at the Occupied Tucson Citizen, a locally run online journal for Occupy Tucson: http://occupiedtucsoncitizen.org/?p=2439

“Free Market” Health Care Solutions Won’t Work


The Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as “Obamacare”, does not adequately address the rising costs of health care. It retains the “free market” insurance and health care model responsible for a substantial portion of the rise in costs and does not have a long term plan to deal with our aging population. In fact, the ACA is one big give away to insurance companies.

As a Baltimore Sun article reads, “Whether the individual mandate is a fee or a penalty or a tax, it fails to address the structural inequities of a health care system that supports huge for-profit insurance companies…the money will go to maintain this arrangement, guaranteeing that health care costs rise, that insurers prioritize profits over care, and that deductibles, co-payments, and co-insurance continue to impoverish our family members and neighbors.”   Another thing is certain: Congress won’t give up its generous health benefits even as they mandate the rest of us buy insurance that will keep rising in cost. As long as we have profit-based healthcare and not wellness-based health care, this will not change.

The Physicians for a National Health Program website agrees, “The Affordable Care Act fails to address the cost of American health-care delivery because the central feature of Obamacare is the forced reliance on the private health-insurance-industry business model, known as the individual mandate. Private health insurance is the most wasteful way to pay for health care ever invented, with excess administrative costs in the United States of about $400 billion per year…” and the incentive model central to the ACA will “cost an additional $700 billion per year in wasted payments.”

Human needs such as health care should not be beholden to the free market. In a free market, capitalists compete to see who can control the market for a goods and services. Once a corporation or trust (a group of jointly run companies) controls a major share of a market, they use non-competitive practices to maintain their advantage in pricing and market share. Besides colluding to control the market, the health insurance industry has a long standing trust exemption to maintain its huge profits.

Representative Fazio of Oregon explains this trust exemption, “ ‘Right now, it is legal under federal law for insurance companies to collude to drive up prices, limit competition, conspire to underpay doctors and hospitals, and price gouge consumers…We must address the rapidly escalating cost of health insurance premiums…’ ”  The ACA does little to stop health insurance companies from colluding to drive prices up. The trust exemption for health insurers should have been addressed before the political capital was spent passing the law. (snip)

For the rest of the piece, link here: http://occupiedtucsoncitizen.org/?p=2439

Peace,
Tex Shelters