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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (15848)	3/31/2010 6:53:01 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

BUT, the per capita cost might go down. Per capita in contexts like this would normally mean per person in the country, per citizen, something like that (that cost will likely increase), obviously your using it to mean something like cost per covered person. On that point - Bringing in more people with a mandate would tend to lower cost per insured individual, but the requirement to cover people with pre-existing conditions will probably increase costs per covered person to a larger extent, and then you have other cost increasing regulations. And the fact that people with pre-existing conditions must be covered provides an incentive for people to not buy coverage (unless the combination of penalties and subsidies is sufficiently large to make the marginal cost of buying insurance dirt cheap, but subsides tend to increase total cost even as they decrease more direct payments). Maybe it's because some of these people will actually have to pay for some of the care they were previously not paying for? Many of them where previously paying for care, and those that are not will likely be receiving subsidies for their coverage, so they will still not be paying the full cost.