regardless of the enrollment number thumpstick coming out of the Oscama camp,...... I'd love to see the ratio of enrollees that were sans benefits prior vs. the folks the had to reconfigure existing plans or find new ones all together. I'm going to meander a guess and say 1 in 8,000.
I'll give you the op-cost was considered to be coming out of the 20% formula handed down by O'Care. It still left plenty of room for insurers to post net profits in the 8%+ (not 1%) range for the most recent quarters of reporting. More than double historical earnings of 3.3-4.1%. The big rub is that the insurance companies were operating on the slimmest margins of any health care industry. All O'Care did was bring them up on a par with everybody else in the industry. :wtf?: It was, and continues to be, a farce of epic proportions. Promises were made, backs were scratched, pockets well padded, public debt coffers (we can't honestly call it a public piggy bank if it's empty) suitably squandered of billions of dollars (again) that went to questionable firms (again). What do we have to show for it? Pretty much the same people don't have insurance, the current market studies predict 30 million will remain uninsured for the foreseeable future (no marked gain on the problem) and we've spent billions of $$ and tens of millions of man hours. Gotta love when the Federal Government finds a problem that has to be solved for the rest of us. Lots of $$ $$ $$ $$$ flowing everywhere with little to actually show for it. Doesn't matter if it's a War on Poverty ($16 trillion over 50 years with a 2% drop in poverty rate), War on Drugs ($1 trillion and thousands of dead. Drug use has been largely undiminished), or Public healthcare. The result is the same because the body wielding the power is both myopic and corrupt.
The whole concept of insurance is insane. Well, it's gambling. The insurance companies are betting the premiums add up to more than what they have to pay out. It's institutionalized mandatory gambling. We payers of premiums are betting that we WILL get run over by a beer truck and will have to pay a shitload of money in medical bills, because if that happens and the insurance company pays and we don't have to sell a kid into slavery, we win. Yay. We have woven fear of disaster into the fabric of our society. Afraid something bad might happen? Buy an insurance policy!
