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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (684810)	11/14/2012 4:23:01 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583391

Hi Tenchusatsu; Re: "Wait, so ObamaCare pretty much tells doctors and hospitals how much they can charge for specific treatments?" The dang thing is >2000 pages long so it's difficult to understand at best. But my understanding is that Obamacare tells how much doctors and hospitals can receive from insurance. Now the difference between "receive from insurance" and "charge for" is the co-pay. My (limited and less sure) understanding is that the Democrats wrote it so that co-pays were not allowed. Thus there is no financial incentive for the consumer to minimize his healthcare expenses, which is bad, but hospitals cannot weed out poor people by their not being able to afford the co-pay. So I think what you wrote is correct. Re: "If the treatment is expensive because, for example, it requires a brand new drug or specific doctoral expertise that isn't readily available, the providers have to beg the government to raise prices?" If the cost of the treatment exceeds the amount of insurance reimbursement, then the hospital / doctor either (a) loses money, or (b) doesn't do those treatments. This is more common than a lot of people think. Your doctor will simply not tell you about the options that will make him lose money. By putting a low dollar value on the reimbursement, the government can influence what doctors tell patients. The expensive options not only aren't offered, they cannot be provided even if you have the bucks to pay for it. I haven't read enough to see how much of this will be applied to government workers. I remember something to the effect that they exempted themselves but I haven't googled around to see if this is true or what it really means. I would think that there are no hospitals that are to cater to government employees differently and so their treatment options would be similarly restricted. (I.e. once the hospital decides to stock some expensive stent for heart attack patients, they would end up using it for all kinds of patients no matter what insurance they're on. This is under the assumption that the doctors have freedom to decide the best treatment, as opposed to being assigned the task of selling services like a used car salesman.) -- Carl P.S. Bonefish; Thanks for correction, I see various reports that Obama / Romney got around 71 / 27% of the Latino vote, a 44% difference. Four years ago the difference was 36%. I think this is basically economic fears and an absence of an active culture war (which is what the Republicans get when they put up an east coast blue state republican).