The very real impact of Obamacare opposition, in one map – Vox

*Below there is a video, and an article which is much more informative than I. So if you don’t have much time please skip what I wrote and go straight to that.

The following video, and the article below it, were made by Ezra Klein (and whoever else Ezra works with). It describes some of the cost patterns associated with regulation and participation within the healthcare marketplace. Ezra describes the very real effects of people being able to opt out of a system that automatically promises to treat them (via: at the least Emergency Rooms). While I agree with virtually everything about this video (and I usually find him to be very informative), this is a Very complex topic, and thus there are items that could be essential information while considering cause and effect of the health care industry – in particular the cause and effect of prices. As people begin to debate what causes our nation to pay such an incredible amount (16.9% of our GDP, the highest in the world), and yet we aren’t even close to the healthiest.

I support business leading the way on development, and infrastructure as much as it can, but some great ideas have been midwifed by our collectivist society through our taxes. And something that I can’t seem to explain well enough to some of my friends is that free markets, and libertarianism is based in access. Do people have access to what they want? That is one measure of “free market” capitalism – but within our markets we regularly build levies and dams to protect us. Debating regulation specifics, rather than whether or not we should have any regulation is really what this country needs.

The regulation changes over the last few years have been labeled a handout to insurance companies, and in while that is true in many ways the real catalyst in terms of our prices being so inflated in comparison with the rest of the industrialized world is our administrative cost from having a privatized system that so heavily supports the pharmaceutical industry, as well as the networks of hospitals with virtually no accountability on many levels. These arguments cannot be made against the entire healthcare industry, but they should be made against certain portions of it.

I don’t know which approach we should take exactly, I don’t love “Obamacare”, but it’s in many ways an improvement on what he had before. The following might help in understanding the most controversial part of the ACA (Affordable Care Act), the Individual Mandate (invented by the Heritage Foundation in the 1990’s).

-Grady

Vox’s Ezra Klein explains exactly how the individual mandate works

The individual mandate is the provision of Obamacare that requires most Americans to purchase health insurance coverage. It exists to encourage people who are unlikely to buy coverage — mostly healthy people who think premiums are a waste of money — to go ahead and do so. This is necessary, many health economists believe, in order to keep premiums low.Some people do get an exemption from the individual mandate, because they can’t find an affordable plan, for example, or have a religious objection to health coverage. But, by and large, most Americans are now required to carry health coverage or pay a penalty.The penalty for not carrying coverage in 2014 is $95 or 1 percent of income, whichever is larger, and it goes up the next year and year after. The federal government recoups this penalty via the tax filing process. So someone who decided to go uninsured would file that information with the Internal Revenue Service, along with their income. They could have the penalty deducted from their 2014 tax return — the one that they file in the spring of 2015.Though the individual mandate was originally a conservative idea pushed in response to Bill Clinton’s 1994 health care plan, it became the subject of a lawsuit Republican attorneys general mounted against Obamacare’s constitutionality. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in June 2012 that the mandate was constitutional under the federal government’s taxing powers. You can read the decision here.

via The very real impact of Obamacare opposition, in one map – Vox.