Here's what happened to people without health insurance since Obamacare

Private MRI Clinics – A Viable Option for MRI Scans?

If your health concerns are serious, and you need an MRI scan for your brain, a full body scan or a specific bone scan, waiting over a year in pain and in fear is not an option.

Innes says he’s started to refer patients to the many private MRI scanning labs that have opened around the province. While this means a near-immediate appointment, it also means you have to shoulder the cost, and it’s no small amount; an MRI scan costs around $699 in Vancouver and about $875 in Victoria.

While this cost may be acceptable for some, it’s prohibitively expensive for others. The social safety net that is Canada’s health care system was designed to ensure everyone is able to access necessary exams. But what do you do when you simply can’t wait the typical 12 to 18 months’ delay for your MRI scan? This list of considerations will help you decide which way to go.

Population has nothing to do with universal health care.

The US is the richest country in the world. It should take care of our own citizens before we spend billions on the military that supposedly polices the world.

The United States federal budget contains a number of expenditures, which include mandatory programs such as the Medicare and Social Security programs, military spending, and discretionary funding for Cabinet Departments (e.g., United States Department of Justice) and agencies (e.g., Securities & Exchange Commission).

During FY2014, the federal government spent $3.504 trillion on a budget or cash basis, up $50 billion or 1% vs. FY2013 spending of $3.455 trillion. Major categories of FY 2014 spending included:

Social Security ($845B or 24% of spending),
Healthcare such as Medicare and Medicaid ($831B or 24%),
Defense Department ($596B or 17%),
non-defense discretionary spending used to run federal Departments and Agencies ($583B or 17%),
other mandatory programs such as food stamps and unemployment compensation ($420B or 12%) and interest ($229B or 6.5%).[1]
Expenditures are classified as mandatory, with payments required by specific laws, or discretionary, with payment amounts renewed annually as part of the budget process. Expenditures averaged 20.4% GDP over the past 40 years, generally ranging +/-2% GDP from that level. The 2014 spend was 20.3% GDP, versus 2013 spend of 20.8% GDP and a recent 2009 peak of 24.4% GDP.[1]

The German Health Care System

Who is covered?

Coverage is universal for all legal residents. About 85 percent of the population is covered by social health insurance and 10 percent by substitutive private health insurance. The remainder (e.g., soldiers, policemen) are covered under special programs. Undocumented immigrants are covered by social security in case of illness. All employed citizens (and other groups such as pensioners) earning less than €4,237.50 (US$5,422.80) per month (€50,850.00 [US$65,074.00] per year) as of 2012 are mandatorily covered by SHI, and their dependents (nonearning spouses and children) are covered free of charge. Individuals whose gross wages exceed the threshold, civil servants, and the self-employed can choose either to remain in the publicly financed scheme on a voluntary basis (and 75% of them do) or to purchase private health insurance.

Nothing in life is totally free, I have already said they have also have private health insurance. You never back your statements up, you just make claims without any proof whatsoever and expect everyone to think you are correct just because you put it in a post. It doesn't work that way, George. You have to back your statements up or it is not proven to be correct. So far, you have proven squat as usual.

Regulators could take steps to help resolve that conundrum. For one thing, they could be more aggressive in enforcing the “individual mandate,” the requirement that individuals buy insurance or face financial penalties. That rule is key to making sure that healthier (and therefore cheaper-to-insure) patients buy insurance, helping to offset the added cost of the sicker, more expensive patients who now have access to insurance under Obamacare.

Regulators could also limit the use of extremely expensive drugs such as new hepatitis C medications that cost as much as $94,500 per patient. Molina already restricts the new drugs in some cases to patients for whom the virus has already caused liver scarring, a step many larger insurers haven’t yet taken.3

The government could also negotiate the price of these drugs — a political nonstarter. Or it could require insurers to share the cost of pharmaceutical losses, as they already do for losses associated with high-risk patients.4


Such regulatory steps could help in the short term. Permanently fixing the problem, however, will likely require Congress to increase subsidies so that the policies offered on the exchanges will be more attractive to young, healthy workers. There is precedent for Congress adding more money to fix medical programs. The last two big expansions of Medicare — Medicare Advantage in the 1990s and Medicare Part D in the early 2000s — both faced what many feared was a death spiral, similar to the concerns Obamacare now faces. But according to a new paper by Jack Hoadley and Sabrina Corlette of Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute, Congress raised reimbursements to make those health care markets healthy.

Public perception of the Medicare system once “had the feel we have this year — ‘Oh my goodness, the program is falling apart,’” Hoadley said. “But over the next few years, payment levels got increased and plans began coming back in.”

Similar congressional action to save the ACA will be a hard sell in the current political environment. But at $250 billion yearly, the tax exclusion for employer-paid health insurance costs six times what Obamacare individual-market subsidies do, offsetting 30 percent of premium costs, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The money that United, Humana and Aetna lost on Obamacare totals less than 1 percent of that. The bottom line is that Obamacare can be fixed. The problem is deciding to do it.