re: Rush on pre-existing ...it's not insurance, it's welfare

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you didn't fix the car, mechanics still fixed it up and then sent the bill to insurers in the form of higher reimbursement prices.

Leaving the person with a fixed car, a bill they can't pay, and everyone else distributing the cost to fix it.

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Sounds like we shouldn't do that.

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It's not, but you always have been and will continue to do so.

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This.

That's how insurance has always worked. What has changed is we started living longer. People get sicker. People get "sicker". Immigration. Soaring drug prices. Lawsuits.

The only answer is a single payer public OPTION. If it's all you can afford so be it. For those who have more and can afford supplements? All the better. I see no other option. Insurance companies are pulling out. The lucky, young, and healthy are saying frick you to folks who do get ill. "shite happens. I ain't paying. "

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Would still fall under the umbrella of Healthcare, wouldn't it?

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No. Health insurance does not equal health care. Ask the people with Obamacare policies that no medical facility will take. Or ask the ones who have deductibles and copays so high they can't afford to use the "insurance".

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Yes he did mention that you are totally wrong. Pre-existing under the ACA was offset by increased premiums on the healthy. That's why premiums doubled for many people. Mine went up 3K per year. Try to keep up.

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So you are of the opinion that Rush Limbaugh has a health care plan where the costs of treatment of uninsured, underinsured and the un-insurable due to a pre-existing conditionis not passed on to those of us with adequate insurance? If Rush has that plan he shouldn't be holding it so close to the chest because that is the alchemistry that has been searched for for years and no one has ever found the solution.

So can you provide a cliffs not version of how more uninsured, underinsured and uninsurable people, all of whom are going to be treated somehow and someway in the United States, is not going to drive up the costs of healthcare and health insurance for everyone? If you can do that then you will have found the free lunch that almost all responsible adults are convinced does not exist....

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Some pretty good examples in the NYTimes. I don't see why these people should suffer.

LINK

Larisa Thomason, of New Market, Ala., remembers the day 15 years ago when her husband got a letter from Humana informing him that his policy would not cover any cancer care because a preventive colonoscopy had turned up several benign polyps.

Likewise, an insurer in Wisconsin refused to cover any treatment related to Alice Thompson’s reproductive system, starting in 2003, because a doctor had written in her medical record that she should have a hysterectomy to eliminate painful menstrual periods. “Had I gotten ovarian or uterine cancer, I wouldn’t have been covered,” said Ms. Thompson, 62, of South Milwaukee. “For 10 years, I was living under this uncertainty of ‘what if.’”
Ms. Thompson, an environmental consultant who is now being treated for vision problems and headaches, added that when she switched to an Affordable Care Act plan in 2014, “I just remember the sense of relief being huge. Now the specter of all this coming back is horrifying. I don’t think I’m being overly paranoid to think, what if I have to move my business to a different state to get coverage?”

Before the Affordable Care Act mandated essential benefits to help make sure people had broad coverage, insurers routinely excluded various medical services. Almost two-thirds of people who bought their own policies did not have maternity benefits, a third did not have coverage for substance abuse services and about a fifth did not have care for mental health issues, according to a federal analysis of coverage before the law.

In the past, excluding certain conditions from coverage sometimes left people with crushing medical debts. John Gillespie and his wife, Beth, ran their own small auto repair shop. In the late 1990s, the couple, who live in Beaver Falls, Pa., could not find an insurance company willing to cover her epilepsy. At one point, Ms. Gillespie had to go to the emergency room because she was having seizures, and the doctors worried that she had developed meningitis. She was in the intensive care unit for three days. Her seizures were in fact because of the epilepsy, and the couple faced nearly $20,000 in medical bills. “We ended up making payments on that for several years,” Mr. Gillespie said. When the couple was finally able to find a plan that covered her disease, the premiums were astronomical — about $2,400 a month for both of them. “It was easily the single largest expense we had,” Mr. Gillespie said. The couple could barely make ends meet, despite his working 60 hours a week and teaching some night classes. They refinanced their house three times. The couple now pay $1,200 for coverage. They are both 58 and semiretired, with little in the way of savings if they were to face another medical emergency.

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The problem is that uninsured, under insured and uninsurable people are going to receieve care somehow, someway....the health care industry just is not in a position to not treat folks for the most part because the public outcry would be devastating. It may give some folks the warm fuzzies to think of a 35 year old who chooses not to pay for health insurance and then gets in a motorcycle accident to be allowed to die with their choices but the fact of the matter is that most humans do not think this way....most of us are cursed with a sense of nurturing and caring for one another...and so we insist that that idiot is cared for...and, knowing there is no such thing as a free lunch, someone has to pay for that care...and that someone is the health care paying public....

I don't have the answers and my gut tells me that the ACA ain't it...but I also know that more uninsured, underinsured and unisurable people, who will be treated without regard as to their ability to pay, is a problem....because I know there ain't no free lunch....

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Would still fall under the umbrella of Healthcare, wouldn't it?

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It absolutely is not healthcare. It's a payment mechanism for healthcare.

What page is this passing the senate on?

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For instance, a well controlled diabetic has an expensive pre-existing condition that scares insurers. If this person is compliant and hasn't been hospitalized in a year or two, they should be insurable.

A non compliant person with diabetes that has a history of multiple hospitalizations are not insurable and should go into another pool of people that pay higher premiums based on their risk category.

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Surely you aren't suggesting personal responsibility be used to rate people for insurance?

Given that the AHCA considers being a victim of Rape or Domestic Violence a pre-existing condition Rush can go back to pounding Oxy and going on Sex Vacations to countries notorious for child prostitution.

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In truth there are inequities everywhere.

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So because there are inequities--create more?

If you're OK with "inequities" why do you want to ameliorate the "inequity" of those that are sick onto the backs of others?