…The individual mandate has been one of the greatest windfalls for the insurance industry ever. Insurance companies stand to increase their customer base by many millions. That being said, consider the fact that insurance products offered for individual purchase are often limited in their scope and only the most expensive, and therefor least attainable policies actually provide adequate coverage.
The idea that the individual mandate will somehow be a panacea for the flaws in our healthcare system is terribly flawed. The individual mandate, in the absence of governmental cost controls and a single payer system, will only serve to make Americans functionally poorer as they are forced by law to buy a product from a business. Health insurance costs will not go down. In fact, I seriously doubt that annual premium increases will decrease at all. Health care costs – note the difference – will not go down either, because our private, for profit system of health care provides absolutely zero incentives for low cost, high quality care.
Don’t be fooled by some altruistic political gestures “granting” healthcare to all. That certainly hasn’t happened. The only thing we’ve all been guaranteed is a new bill each month, unless we’re lucky to work for one of the few remaining businesses offering low cost health insurance as a benefit of employment.
The rich get richer and the beat goes on.
The huge windfall to the Insurance companies was the price to get anything done, just as the Bush era’s prescription drug plan gave another huge windfall to the industry via the wholesale delivery of Medicare to private companies, adding billions in cost without a single improvement, in order to get basic pharmaceutical insurance for seniors So, with the latest compromise, “Blackmail”, even though millions more will now be “insured”, via the mandate, your comment that “insurance products offered for individual purchase are often limited in their scope and only the most expensive, and therefor least attainable policies actually provide adequate coverage” is additionally disheartening.
The machine is broken but lumbers on crushing millions because everyone who profits from the existing system (Insurance and pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturers, hospitals (for profit and “not for profit”), and doctors, have (collectively), like wall street, huge control over “our” elected representatives, and even ourselves via a money powered propaganda machine.
Someday we will certainly have a one payer system like most of the advanced countries in the world, but only, I fear, after a monumental collapse of our entire economy. Too bad.