The Senate bill that will cost you more

Nick Dawson
Jul 25, 2017 · 4 min read

If you sold that the ACA and affordable healthcare coverage is a good thing for you and others, this post is not for you. This is a post for people who care about protecting what they’ve worked hard for — their income, their profits, their nest eggs.

There is a decision being debated by the Senate today which has a big potential to negatively impact you financially. At very real risk are your hard earned dollars and potentially your company’s profits.

Let’s begin by agreeing it is a fair position to feel proud of something for which you have worked. If you have gained a job, built a company or otherwise bettered your life, that is absolutely a source of pride. You may also be of the opinion that because you worked for it you earned whatever comes with that hard work. It may feel downright insulting that someone else is getting something for free or at a discount for which you toiled. It may also feel like further insult to injury to see some of your tax dollars going toward giving someone else something for which they did not work nearly as hard as you. Those are OK feelings if for no other reason then they are your own. For me to suggest you should feel otherwise would be insulting.

When we, as we so often do in the course of national discussion, boil an issue down to a ‘this or that’ scenario, nuance which transcends political or social alignment is easily lost. But it is often in those nuances where we find the details which may ultimately affect us as individuals.

Consider, for a moment, that most of us regardless of insurance status or relative health all pay the full cost of healthcare. Healthcare is a business and the people managing those businessess have a resoponsiblity to keep them solvant. Some of us have wages withheld by our employer, transferred on our behalf into insurance. When we go to the doctor or the hospital our stored wages are again transferred to whomever provided that care. We may also have to pay some (or all) of the cost directly out of our pockets. Regardless, the hospital or doctor is going to be made 100% whole through a combination of insurance and out of pocket payments.

If there is someone who does not have insurance and goes to get health care, there is a strong likelihood that the hospital or doctor may eventually have to absorb the cost of providing that care. There are, of course, attempts to collect what is owed. (And that collection effort adds cost to the bottom line of the orginization). The net/net is while many hospitals are registered as charities, they have a margin and bottom line they need to meet to keep the lights on.

So what happens? Hospitals and doctors raise their prices for everyone else to cover their losses from bad debt and charity care. The next time you go to the doctor or hospital, or one of your employees does (if your company provides them insurance), you will pay more.

You will pay more for your healthcare because someone else doesn’t have health insurance.

Taking away both the requirement to have insurance and a viable market on which to purchase (moderately) affordable insurance will cost us all more.

This, as they say, is a bitter pill.

Unlike other things in a free market — cars, new cell phones, a larger TV — healthcare is something most people cannot simply ‘do without’. And we know conclusively through two large scale, well-vetted studies (The RAND Health Insurance Experiment and the Oregon Medicaid study) that people with less coverage use just as much healthcare, only at a higher cost. They wait until they are catastrophically sick and end up at high cost points of care like the emergency room.

So not only will we all pay more for our own individual healthcare if less people are covered, that price increase is a sharper curve.

Do you have to like any of this? Absolutely not. Do you want to think about ways to invent how we think about healthcare and economics and society? Please do! But today, literally Tuesday July 25, if you don’t want to lose more of your heard earned money when you go to the doctor, it is in your interest to help keep affordable coverage as an option.

Please call your Senator and ask them what they are doing to ensure you don’t have to pay more when you or your family gets sick. If you are a business owner, call them and demand that they do something to protect your bottom line so you don’t end up spending more on purchasing healthcare for your employees. If ever there was a time to be focused on you and your family and your finances, this is it!

Nick Dawson

Written by

Former hospital admin. Now focused on patient and staff experience. Believes in patient designed care. Eats plants not pigs. Skis backwards. Golden Gopher. ENFP

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