The world is a scary place, and it got a lot scarier with the passage of Obamacare. The Texas government is reacting, with one arm twisted behind its back, by proposing House Bill 636, filed by Representative John Zerwas. This bill essentially sets up the “Texas Insurance Connector,” which aims to help small businesses and patients obtain affordable health insurance. This is a direct result of Obamacare which mandates that states must set up their own health insurance exchange by 2014 or the federal government could potentially control the health insurance market in Texas. The quality of health care is about to go down, way down.
ONE of the problems with Obamacare, and potentially House Bill 636, is that the creation of the connector program could potentially ruin the competitive insurance market. Proponents of state insurance connectors claim that the new exchange will be market-friendly, but this is simply not the case. Private health insurance companies will not be able to compete with the Texas Connector. No competition means quality goes down, costs go up and easy access to health care becomes impossible. Massachusetts already implemented similar legislation, and since then, the wait time to see a doctor has spiked to over 50 days.
Federal funding for the connector program doesn’t completely cover the costs of creating this program, and by 2014 funding will completely run out. Who is left to foot the bill? We, the tax payers of Texas, will foot that bill, and the connector program will be forced to raise its costs. At one point will the connector program no longer be “low cost?” There will also be a huge increase in the number of people that are enrolled in Medicaid, a program that is receiving less and less funding from the government. Reimbursement rates for physicians and hospital are already low, and those reimbursement rates will continue to drop. What does this mean for healthcare? Take a look at the results of this study by Athena Health and Sermo regarding physician attitudes towards Obamacare: 66% of physicians say that they would consider dropping out of government health programs and 53% would consider opting out of insurance programs altogether. Who can blame them? Physicians spend 7-12 years in training post-college, acquire hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt just to receive that training, and then they aren’t even making enough money to pay off that debt, yet alone run a practice. This means that many physicians will opt for treating only the (rich) private payer and there will be fewer and fewer physicians willing to treat the low to middle income population. The repercussions are huge, and the gap between the rich and the poor will continue to grow.
There doesn’t seem to be a clear-cut answer to the health care crisis, but I’m also not sure that HB 636 is the solution, and Obamacare is DEFINITELY is not going to help. It seems nearly an impossible feat to be able to provide quality, affordable health care for all, but it doesn’t mean that we should stop short of a solution and try something that seems to have so many shortfalls.
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-health-resources/health-reform-and-texas/john-zerwas-the-tt-interview/ http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/7394440.html
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