Anecdotal stuff, but probably more useful than the garbage biased articles.
- my best friend operates a small civil engineering firm. The penalty to not insure is far cheaper than the cost to insure. And the cost to insure has continued to increase - regardless of pre- or post-Obamacare.
I'm a MD who up until the past week worked in a very depressed inner city setting (~8 years). In addition to the obvious, my bias is the experiences recounted to me by my father, who grew up under socialism in eastern Europe.
- There is far too much administrative overhead in healthcare (HC) - and what will Obamacare do? Increase administration.
- There is a tremendous amount of time and effort spent by those of us who deliver HC to navigate the well-intentioned but ignorant mistakes of people with business degrees.
- I read an article on how California plans to deal with the HC worker shortage by allowing unsupervised nurse practitioners, physician assistants and pharmacists to treat patients. While I think they serve a vital role in HC today, my experience is that they lack the knowledge and (continued) professional investment for this task. Think about what this means for the end-user (you).
- My experience at two different VA hospitals, which are the closest thing we have to socialized HC, is that people will not be happy with socialized HC. Socialized HC contains cost by rationing, despite the euphemisms used by proponents of such.
There's more... ultimately, I would pose questions to the proponents of Obamacare / socialized medicine: Why does the gov't exempt others and themselves from participation if this is such a good program?