Bill O'Connor wrote:
The healthy will be worse off with the mandate to buy insurance which
they can't afford, and the sick will be worse off still, after having
bought the insurance they can't afford and being unable to pay co-pays
and deductibles that they can't afford.
What I keep thinking about is the impact of this "reform" on hospital
outpatient services. When my wife went down to Lenox Hill Hospital a
couple of times last year for some borderline emergency treatments, we
noticed that the waiting room was filled with people who did not fit the
Upper East Side demographics. We figured out that these were folks who
were covered by the hospital's promise--written explicitly in a document
on the wall--that nobody would be refused service. They were covered by
charitable provisions that I assume are available at most hospitals. Now
that everybody will be forced to have insurance, I wonder how this will
impact poor people who will be forced to consider co-payment issues. For
my wife, it was no big deal under our Columbia plan. Fifteen dollars
each time was no biggie. But what if your co-payment is 100 dollars?
Will you decide to live with that nagging cough or the chest pain? My
guess is that one of the driving forces behind this "reform" is to sweep
poor people under the rug.
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