The focus of this blog, Health Insurance Issues With Dave, is, first and foremost, insurance, the way most Americans access and pay for health care. There are three key players in this process: the medical providers, the insurance companies, and the government. The medical provider section includes doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and everyone/everything else involved in the delivery of care. The insurance companies serve both to organize the market and as a useful buffer between the providers and the patients. And the government writes the rules, pays a huge portion of the bills through Medicare and Medicaid, and significantly impacts the pricing. There is a natural push and pull in this process. The American public benefits when all three sectors work towards a common good (Enlightened Self-Interest). That isn’t easy and it depends on a determined focus and an honest effort. To be clear, determined focus and honest efforts don’t guarantee success. A lack of either determined focus or honest effort guarantee failure.
Deep In The Heart(less) Of Texas was posted on September 9, 2018. This was the first blog dedicated to the Texas lawsuit, the attempt to have the courts declare the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) unconstitutional. Today’s post will be the 14th warning of the havoc this could cause. Yes, I keep sounding the alarm. There isn’t any good will, focus, or honest effort involved in the promotion of this lawsuit. And it only got worse when Donald Trump decided to champion its cause.
The sudden elimination of Obamacare without a replacement would terminate health insurance for millions of Americans. This is so important that I was happy to see an article in Sunday’s (5/24/2020) Plain Dealer on the issue. “If Obamacare was overturned, what would it mean here?” was written by Sabrina Eaton. Welcome to the conversation!
Please read her article. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that contradicts my 13 previous posts. I will note that Ms. Eaton bothered to contact Senator Portman’s office for the story. He predictably declined to comment on the court case, but his spokesman did note that premiums have gone up. I would never contact Senator Portman’s office about a solution or improvement to our health care system for the same reason you wouldn’t bother to call my Rabbi for a ham recipe. But she tried.
As previously noted, I was both surprised and pleased to see this coverage in the Plain Dealer. Considering the potential impact on our area, I expected them to sound the alarm regularly. Imagine my shock when I went to their website to link this article. It took some effort to find it. Ms. Eaton’s article was posted on Cleveland.com on May 8, 2020, over two weeks earlier! I guess Greater Clevelanders are lucky that there was so little going on this Memorial Day weekend that her article finally made it to print. And though I have readers across the country, I would never compare the reach of my little blog to the readership of the once formidable Plain Dealer or its disorganized website. An issue that impacts nearly 20% of our nation’s economy, the lives of millions of Ohioans, and the financial stability of our hospitals deserves our attention. In the old days we could count on our newspapers to bring us the information we needed.
Will the Texas lawsuit succeed? Stranger things have happened. I promise to keep you informed. And to keep sounding the alarm.
DAVE
Picture – Thankfully Loud – David L Cunix