Lets get serious about healthcare and call a spade a spade. Politicians gave 10% of the population free health insurance ( 33,000,000 people ) and expected the 33 mil to vote for them.
Their plan was to let the insurance companies set fees to cover the costs for their plan by forcing everyone to buy insurance, mostly the healthy young (69,000,000)who didn’t need insurance.
Needless to say most of the young and healthy didn’t buy insurance.
The plan forced insurance companies to cover those same young healthy people under their parents plans until age 26, mandating income for the insurance companies.
Their plan also included some 3,000,000 people with pre-existing conditions that could not get coverage due to very expensive treatment requirements. Insurance companies had to absorb those costs.
This plan was suppose to save the government money by reducing Medicaid costs and generate votes for the party creating the plan. All the flaws and pitfalls in the plan instead raised costs for all the working class people.
The double edge sword was what happens when you give free stuff to 33 mil people and try and take it back, just like the Obama phone? Anyone who takes it away will not get their vote. If the plan remains in place everyone’s insurance costs will double by 2019 and both parties will loose millions of voters.
Now that the true cost of the plan has surfaced by higher insurance costs for everyone and the only out is go back to a astronomically high Medicaid program for the un-insured and one or the other political party are going to loose millions of voters.
The entire scheme was to get votes.
If you want to reduce the cost of anything product, you create competition like they did in the cellular business or you regulate the industry. Regulate insurance and the medical companies like they did in the utilities industry.
For less than 7% of what healthcare costs the government, you could build a medical school, provide free education and graduate 40,000 new doctors and nurses in 8 years time.