Even the most die-hard liberal seems to believe that the SCOTUS is about to either gut or utterly destroy Obamacare, so there's angst all over the media.
Too bad it's misplaced angst, for angst can be a good thing if it leads to logical solutions.
The misplaced angst here is the failure of the entire liberal side to look at the One Big Question* in the single-payer scheme of health insurance.
That question is simply this: shouldn't any mandated insurance plan have, at it's core, efficiency in payment? Let us not forget these points:
An insurance plan is just that, and that only: a plan to arrange payment for a service: rebuilding your home after a fire or other loss, rebuilding YOU after an illness. All those restorative services have COST associated with them, so PAYMENT is required.
It almost seems like liberals think that a health insurance plan must first change health care delivery. No, it doesn't have to, all it has to do is arrange PAYMENT for services. This is where Obamacare over-reached, it attempted to reconfigure health care delivery, then pay for the new delivery system.
Obamacare was a deliberate attempt of the President and his party to use health care services, or the control of them, to drag the USA into a new political system, socialism. You see, the health care insurance system we have now is not mandatory. People can and do forgo health care. They can and do shop around for the best price for health care AND health insurance, and their choices lead directly to the efficiencies in the health care marketplace. The LACK of efficiency in the health care marketplace is due entirely to non-payers. Yes, a health-care services bill is the easiest one to refuse to pay. All you have to do is declare that you can't afford to pay, and the bill will either be put off, or reduced, or some arrangement made to pay it from public funds.
The lack of certainty in payment for health care services causes the ineffiencies. To solve that one, relatively easy problem, Obamacare proposed to re-write the entire idea of delivering AND paying for health care services. This is the equivalent of using a SWAT team to bring an overtime-parking violator to justice.
BTW, your Rivrdog won't keep you in suspense. The way to solve the problem of uninsureds in the system is to have a pool of money for payment. This has been done in the auto insurance industry almost since the start of auto insurance some 80 years or so ago. It's called "assigned risk", and the system works well. If you are in the assigned risk pool, you pay higher premiums, but you get insurance, the equivalent of using a SWAT team to arrest an overtime-parking violator. The higher premiums encourage you to do whatever it takes to improve yourself so that you get OUT of the Assigned Risk pool.
All the Feds had to do to execute Universal Health Care was establish the Assigned Risk Pool for those payers who couldn't find normal insurance, and make paying for medical care the same level of debt that everything else is. Establishing that pool would have required only a small fraction of the bureaucracy and a small fraction of the money which Obamacare demands from us in it's various forms. Assigned risk wouldn't have imposed insurance, it just would have paid for all those who don't have insurance to get it.
The health insurance system in this country works. It can and should be made more efficient, but most of the job of making it more efficient would be done by establishing the Assigned Risk pool.
The Assigned Risk solution isn't glitzy though, it doesn't require a "Czar" to run it, and it certainly wouldn't require the pogrom against health care that is now in place and hopefully, will soon be erased by the SCOTUS.
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* The "One Big Question" is a construct of Joe Huffman, who blogs frequently, here. He says that most propaganda can be unraveled by the simple technique of digging out the One Big Question, and examining it for the truth.