(February 19, 2014 at 12:02 pm)Asimm Wrote: My Mom works for Aetna, she pretty much thinks Obamacare is the end of the world. She's also the one who does the math to determine if you will be a financial loss for the company. ...I doubt that Obamacare will put your mother out of a job. You Americans missed the boat on universal national health care. In Canada it started in the early 1960s before the insurance companies were deeply entrenched.
As I understand Obamacare, it is going to work through those same companies rather than having a government pay the doctors and hospitals. In Canada each province is responsible for health care rather than the federal government, but there are national standards which they must adhere to.
If you ever got a single payer system like ours, it might indeed put your mother out of work, because the duplication of effort by so many insurance companies is very costly. It takes an army of free enterprise gnomes to prove that the patient is not covered for what ails him. Way back in 1991 the New England Journal of Medicine published a study which commented that "Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts covers 2.5 million subscribers and employs 6682 workers, more than work for all of Canada's provincial health plans which cover more than 25 million people."
That is what drives up your health care costs, and not just the employees of the insurance companies. I have read that most American doctors need one full-time employee just to deal with the HMOs. Generally in Canada one receptionist can handle all the office work.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people — House
