NewJerseyRich wrote:Many Dr's don't accept Obamacare as payment. The cost has skyrocketed.
This is a claim that I've heard many times and don't understand. What, exactly, do you mean by it? "Obamacare" itself isn't a payment system. It mandates that everyone have insurance, it mandates a minimum set of coverage for those plans, etc. But it doesn't directly pay doctors or hospitals. At least not that I know of. When you say "doctors don't accept Obamacare as payment," what exactly do you mean?
Also, what do you mean by "costs have skyrocketed"? Are you talking about co-pays? Premiums? The cost of actual procedures? If you're talking about premiums, then yeah, some state costs have gone up rapidly. Other states haven't. California, for example, has gone up 5% (from $245/mo to $258/mo before tax credit, and from $208/mo to $207/mo after tax credit) for a 40-year-old non-smoker on a "Silver Premium" plan. And worst case? That's Phoenix AZ that has gone from $207/mo to $504/mo (a 145% increase), but which gets normalized to $207/mo (and is the same as last year) with the tax credit. [ http://kff.org/health-reform/issue-brie ... ketplaces/ ]
Anyway - I agree that the ACA is in desperate need of an overhaul since it mostly is a big wet kiss on the lips for insurance companies and does almost nothing to control the actual cost of medical care. A comprehensive overhaul of the US healthcare industry including pharmaceuticals, health care providers, insurance, etc is needed and until it happens "healthcare" as an industry is going to simply continue escalating in cost and consume more and more of our GDP. That "medical tourism" is increasingly a thing (the act of visiting a foreign country to get more affordable medical procedures than can be had here) is a GREAT sign that things are screwed. The ACA (and certainly not the AHCA) does nothing to fix this.
