SCOTUS will likely preserve Obamacare

He's been about the ACA since its inception. Because it's so "unfair" for someone like him who is young and healthy and will never, ever be in an auto accident or cut himself in the kitchen or in any way require medical services of any kind to have to pay a nominal annual fee, whereas anyone else in the country he pretends to be a part of can suck up tens of thousands of dollars in medical fees because fuck them, that's why.

A true Merkin.

Regarding ACA, I would say that the health insurance market doesn't behave at all like a normal insurance market. Insurance is about managing some unknown risks. With pre-existing conditions., the risk is already known therefore insurance is no longer an appropriate product. People with pre-existing conditions should have their healthcare funded by a direct transfer i.e. taxes. If our goal as a nation is really to make sure that everyone has access to high-quality healthcare regardless of any pre-condition then I would prefer a pre-dominant single-payer system like the French one funded by taxes over the current Obamacare system. This involves aggressive govt-mandated regular checkups as Asyn. alluded to earlier and aggressive negotiations over prices by the govt. Unfortunately I think the latter (the prices) would be hard to lower since our doctors and other medical professionals like people in big pharma earn far more share of the GDP than the French ones.. Given the entrenched very high compensation for people in the medicine, it would be a struggle to get them to accept ONLY very good compensation i.e. top 15% of the income distribution as it's the case in France as compared to the top 5% of income distribution as it's the case in the United States. Of course a key part of this formula is also that our doctors have to pay for medical school as well as mal-practice insurance. The French doctors don't have worry about those.. Bottom line, America spends double as percentage of GDP as France in medical care and by most measures, for a worst outcome. That spending difference is not disappearing into a black hole. It is funding someone's salary or income. And the majority of that spending gap can be explained by the difference in salaries of medical professionals in France compared to the same set of professionals in America. The rest of gap is some insurance / paperwork / administrative inefficiencies..

I end this post with a quote from a business insider article on healthcare reform. "What should reformers make of the fact that French doctors produce such good results while earning less? It would be an oversimplification to draw the inference that across-the-board pay cuts should be a priority element of US health care reforms. Attempts to cut payments to doctors have not always worked well."..

^Patients who require kidney dialysis get Medicaid. Since almost everyone in the U.S. knows someone (or is someone) who has end-stage renal disease, nobody says "Boo" about that.

Nevermind that young healthy people paying for old sick people is exactly how private fucking insurance works.

Yabbut, that's not "GUBMINT TELLING ME WHAT TO DO!!!!" so as far as he's concerned it's not as bad as abandoning them on an ice floe.

Late to the party I know, but bear with me:

To be fair, I tried Googling examples of ERs / Drs refusing to bill insurance when the patient has insurance. All I can find are examples of insurance that was billed failing to pay for various reasons (which is also pretty bad, but still, a different animal entirely).

Have you even seen the latest iPhone? No one has time for shit like fighting for their right to live (or having to choose between living and being indebted until you die). There are thee cameras on that baby, how cool is that?!

Oh yeah, I forgot about tv get bigger.