I found Vicki Tosher’s story about her struggle with breast cancer heartbreaking. My own mother died of breast cancer earlier this year.
But there is a problem in taking one person’s anecdotal story and attempting to generalize it to make policy. Obamacare eliminated medical underwriting and prior conditions from being used as a basis to deny insurance. Remember though, 80 percent of people get their insurance through self insured employers and public entitlements who rarely underwrite.
Obamacare’s focus had the effect of shifting the financial burden of caring for older people with chronic illness to a select group of young people.
Pushback occurred when young healthy people were mandated to buy all-inclusive insurance. Their premiums and copays. Mixing unlike risks violates a key principal of insurance and revealed Obamacare to really be a covert tax scheme applied in a regressive fashion.
Ms. Tosher’s personal problem will be handled by Medicare when she soon turns 65. The big problem facing all of us is reducing overall health care costs so that insurance is affordable and copays and deductibles are reasonable.
Francis Miller, Parker
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