On Wednesday, Stephen Moore posted an article at The Patriot Post about the healthcare aspect of the current government shutdown.
The article notes:
The government shutdown has focused debate on the vast sum ($136 billion in 2025, as projected by the Congressional Budget Office) that the federal government spends to annually subsize continually skyrocketing Obamacare health insurance premiums. The Wall Street Journal reports that regardless of how that fiscal tug-of- war turns out, health insurance premiums paid by Americans are expected to rise another 8% or 9% next year.
The mega-health insurers are leading the charge for more subsidies because this money lands right in their pockets. Their profits and stock values have been soaring while the rest of us struggle to pay the rising tab.
One reason health care costs are rising at two to three times the cost of everything else is that the entire insurance market is dysfunctional. Most Americans pay high monthly premiums (or the government pays for them) for coverage they often don’t use.
In 2024, 11.7 million people, more than one-third of those covered by Obamacare, had no medical claims. They, or taxpayers, paid a lot in premiums — for nothing.
But the whole idea of insurance is to protect your family from major expenses — not minor ones. That’s why we have fire insurance on our homes — to protect against the risk of the total loss of your property.
We need a system much more sensible and less costly for patients and taxpayers. We should be encouraging insurance plans with low premiums that cover major “catastrophic” medical expenses but leave smaller expenses — like checkups or minor surgery — to be paid by policyholders directly.
Such policies — known as catastrophic health insurance plans — have been available for several decades. Most of us would be better off financially if we signed up for these plans. With low premiums and coverage for major medical expenses, they are a win-win for families.
Even as regulated by Obamacare, this coverage charges premiums that are only about half the amount of other Obamacare plans. For example, Forbes recently analyzed the premiums of “77 catastrophic health plans nationwide.” The average premium for a 50-year old member is $443 per month, or $5,316 per year, compared to almost $10,000 for the average Obamacare plan, according to Paragon Health Institute calculations.
The article notes that Obamacare makes catastrophic health insurance plans illegal. Many in Congress are quite happy to move Americans to government healthcare and government insurance (as long as they can have their private insurance).
The article concludes:
Sometimes in life the best solution is the simplest one: Stop the hundreds of billions of dollars of wasteful subsidies, the skyrocketing premiums and the “one size fits all” plans that so many of us do not use, want or need — and instead legalize pro-growth catastrophic health insurance plans for all. Stop fattening the checks of the fat and happy health insurance conglomerates like UnitedHealth, who resist paying honest claims but force you to write monthly checks for insurance you don’t use or need.
Please follow the link to read the entire article.
