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Benefits of scale work in a free market, which is why it DOESN’T work that way under Obamacare. The fact is HMOs WANTED to cover “uninsurable” people, but people can’t afford the premiums and it would make them look bad, so why not have the government “force” them to cover more people? Then they can get the government to pay through them, adding more profits. (Remember, the bill was written by a consortium of HMOs and not even read by Congress.)

In the end, some people will get coverage they couldn’t get — but it does collectively cost more — for everyone.

The problem is we’ve been stuck in the insurance model so long, people forgot how it used to work, and work better, and far less expensively. I don’t think for a second cost rose because of people leaving the pool. Costs rose because after the institution of Medicare/medicaid and proliferation of HMOs INSTEAD of people paying out of pocket reasonable costs, providers realized they could charge whatever they want and no one saw the cost directly to challenge it. The system insulates price from actual cost in the extreme.

The fact is, “health insurance” is no longer INSURANCE. It’s a huge money funnel that devolves the more our corporatist government gets INvolved. There used to be “catastropic” policies — now in the form of what are basically high-deductible HMO pooled payment plans of sorts — and there’s still “long-term care” insurance. But to the average person, access to health care equals health coverage and that is simply not true, or at least not even arguable outside of special need cases that even then usually wouldn’t be so expensive if there were no HMOs agreeing to cover inflated costs.

But just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that collectively it isn’t a good thing to help those with special needs or levels of care that aren’t affordable to most individuals. I’m saying the way it is done even before Obamacare was a travesty, and now it’s twofold, heaping untold suffering on society in general to make a statistically few anecdotal wins.

With Obamacare, almost every nightmare predicted about it is coming true, from it’s impact of underemployment and unemployment to spiraling costs and premiums. But without it, we would still be left with a system that naturally makes health care unaffordable to more and more people and the only way to save the HMOs from becoming obsolete and replaced with a sane payment system was for Big Government to step in and perpetuate (and amplify) the outdated paradigm by force. Yes, I am saying Obamacare was specifically designed to solve the HMOs problem of market saturation and reached limitations on maximized profit.

You can “love” it for the personal benefit it brings to your family, but I consider that more of a forgivable attitude in lieu of an apology that IMO supporters of it owe the rest of America. I myself am roughly in the uninsured middle class zone that will be pushed closer to poverty because of it, as are millions of others. But of course, the growing disparity will continue to be blamed on Capitalism …