A Mr Rick Ungar writing at blogs.forbes.com makes note of the beginning of the end of the for-profit healthcare business. He’s saying a lot of what I’ve said here, particularly that this is the most important component of “Obamacare”;
That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.
This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time. Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that represents the true ‘death panel’ found in Obamacare—but not one that is going to lead to the death of American consumers. Rather, the medical loss ration will, ultimately, lead to the death of large parts of the private, for-profit health insurance industry.
It is now in place, having gone into effect yesterday.
Yay.
If you let the wingnuts know they will know this was a backdoor public option, also let the leftnuts know that this is actually a good law so we can defend it.
The conservative side rests on two contradicting precepts. 1)public healthcare is bad 2)free market competition is good. Well if public healthcare is so bad wouldn’t it lose in the free market place? Why kill the public option then? If the private sector is always better and dynamic than wouldn’t it just own any public option? Its because public healthcare is actually cheaper and better, and all the private cartels and lobbyists that fund Washington would be looking for real jobs.