The health care reform bill did NOTHING related to heath care.

If an ATM does not give customer money because there is no money in the account, the ATM is not broken.

The only way to resolve the problem with the high cost of health care is to address to cost of health care. Changing the way health care is paid for is not going to solve the root of the problem.

The health care reform bill should have addressed issues related to the high cost of health care.

These causes include:

The patient should be careful when choosing a physician. If a surgeon makes a mistake during the procedure, the patient should assume some of the responsibility for choosing that doctor. If the doctor tries to do his personal best while performing a surgery, why should he pay if a complication comes up. The doctor tries to help somebody and gets sued for his efforts because a complication occurred. This is bad enough. He doesn't pay for the complication directly; his (and other doctors) insurance company pays for the complication in the form of a lawsuit settlement or judgement. This spreads the cost of the complication to the other health care providers insured. (That is the way insurance works). These health care providers (who are themselves insured) pass these higher insurance costs to their customers. Patients (people) are their customers.

Now I would like to move on to the issue of health insurance and how this bill will destroy the health insurance industry.

Health insurance is in fact insurance. People and companies have been selling insurance for many generations. It works like this. A person can protect themself from a catastrophic loss that may occur in the future by buying an insurance policy. The insurance company uses statistical analysis to determine the chance of the catastrophic loss occurring for each policy that it sells. It then uses this analysis while calculating the premium to charge. Some policies have a higher risk of loss or have a higher payout associated with them. These policies are more expensive.

No insurance company will sell insurance to fix a car that has already crashed, or a house that already was destroyed by a disaster. They can not stay in business if they are required to pay for pre-existing losses that have occurred before they collected any premiums.

The health care bill that passed tries to get around the problem of pre-existing conditions by having everybody required to buy insurance. The basic premise is to have a larger group of people pay into the total pool of premiums. This would allow all health costs to be spread across the entire population. If the health care cost remained the same and more people paid the premiums, the cost per person for the premiums would go down. This basic premise is flawed.

There is a large percentage of the population that do what they can to take care of themselves because they know health care is expensive. They do not have health insurance because they have prioritized their expenses. Food, clothing, rent, and other bills are more important to them than paying for health insurance. Many pay for a low cost policy that covers injuries or catastrophic expenses. Their plan for their health care includes eating healthy, exercising, washing their hands frequently, dressing right, and getting flu shots. They even take vitamins. Some are careful to nor get hurt. For some, their plan is that fact that they are young, and they do not relly need to pay to much attention to health. They feel they will be healthy while they are still young. Some have just moved out on their own and do not want others telling them what they have to do or pay for. Their plan does not include paying hundreds of dollars (or thousands) each month to pay for insurance that they feel that can live better without. If these people get sick enough to go to the doctor, they write a check or put the cost of the visit and any medicine on their credit card. These costs that occur every once in a while is far less than EACH monthly payment for health insurance.

If the government requires everyone to purchase health insurance, the people who were taking care of themselves without insurance will now be forced to pay for the insurance they did not want to buy. You can absolutely be sure that they will increase their visits to medical professionals because if they are forced to pay for it, they will try to get their moneys worth. This will raise the total costs of health care for the population.

Additionally, the cost of that health insurance will come from personal budgets. This will leave less money to spend on healthy food, exercise and other fun / healthy activities. The requirement of purchasing health insurance will actually cause the general health of this population to decrease.

There are also people who make decisions to not go to doctors or hospitals. This is their choice. This choice is based on religious, mystic other beliefs. Law makers or judges may not agree with their beliefs. Doctors may not agree with their beliefs. This decision is not for doctors, law makers or judges to decide. The last I heard, this is a free country, and the US Constitution protects these peoples rights. Now these people may choose to not drive a car because cars do not go where they live in the mountains. Should they be required to buy auto insurance? The answer is no because they do not drive cars. They should not be required to purchase health insurance because they do not use health care.

If this bill does not get repealed, this is what will happen.

Insurance companies will decide to stop selling health insurance or close up all together. Cost sharing co-ops may also close up or go out of business. A person with ongoing $30,000 a month in medical costs will be able to go to an insurance company and get a policy while paying a premium not any where close to $30,000 a month. There is no way insurance companies can do this and stay in business. A more likely case is someone who averages $20,000 a year in medical and prescription costs. The chances are these costs will continue for the rest of the life of the person. The current annual medical expenses of this person is not an unforeseeable expense. These expenses are a given. The unforeseeable costs are a new disease or injury affecting the person. The new disease or injury is what should be insurable. If the insurance company sells insurance against the unforeseeable expenses, only the new disease or injury should be covered in the insurance. Otherwise the premium should be $20,000 plus the cost to insure the future unforeseeable expenses. If the insurance companies can not charge this, they will go out of business.

As companies go out of business, the high medical expense people will be the first to buy a policy at a remaining company. This is because they know they will have bills and need insurance. This will cause high expenses to be realized by the remaining companies. This will cause then to charge very high premiums to all off their customers. Even though the companies are charging high premiums, they will not be able to raise premiums fast enough to cover their costs (because of this law) and they will go out of business as well.

Health insurance will become a business that no company wants to sell because it will become a way to incur large liabilities without any chance of profit.

The United States government will have to create a government based insurance company because no private (for profit) company will sell health insurance. This will effectively be a health care tax on all people. The government will run this single payer system. It will be run by corrupt bureaucrats assigned by corrupt politicians as a way to repay the corrupt bureaucrat for their help getting the politician (re)elected. There will be waste in the form of fraudulent claims and wasteful expenses being paid by the bureaucracy after being approved by corrupt bureaucrats. Although the bureaucrats may be trying their best to perform their management work, they are not qualified to perform their job and will make many costly mistakes. The best candidates for those positions will be overlooked because they did not help the politicians. The resources in the health payment system will be drained by corruption, and cause the health care facilities to go out of business due to lack of payments. Health care will become harder to find and there will be long waits (appointments in 3 to 6 weeks).

People who need to see doctors more frequently than 3 to 6 weeks will need to find and will find other ways to get health care. If they have enough money, they will move to other parts of the world and take their business with them.

Small towns may create their own co-ops to take care of their health care needs because no other viable options exist for their towns people.

Imagine a small country town that has a medical facility that is paid for by the residents. A local co-op pays the expenses of the medical facility. The local population pays into to co-op. This law would force this local co-op to accept a person in poor health that moved into town because of the fact that this co-op was not bankrupt. This person in poor health would use up a large portion of the resources of the medical facility. This person in poor health could also sue the medical facility. Eventually the co-op could no longer support the costs of the medical facility so it would close. The person in poor health would move on to the next town to repeat the process again. The next town would be forced again to accept them into their co-op.

There are people that do need health services that do not have the ability to pay for them. The government can help these people. Most people do not have a problem with this idea of helping these people across all political party lines. The question is how it can be done.

If the government is to get into the business of health care, it can create free clinics. It can staff these clinics by paying for the education of the staff and requiring the staff to work at these clinics for a period of time. To keep expenses down, the patients that go to these clinics could give up their right to sue any staff member of the clinics as a pre-condition to using the services. Increasing the ratio of supply against demand will reduce the cost of a service. This includes health care.

The free clinics may not have the best care available, but they will offer a place for everyone who is in desperate need of health care to go. If needs demand it, additional free clinics could be created. These clinics would have longer waiting lists and the treatment may not be as advanced as the most expensive medical facilities, but they would be there as a place to go.

The problem with free clinics is that corrupt politicians and bureaucrats misuse the funds of these clinics and cause them to be political nightmares that need to be closed. The problems range from unqualified management being paid high salaries because of political cronyism, to waste due to incompetence, and fraud. These should be dealt with as their own problems.