In the discussion about how Americans can be forced to pay ever-increasing prices for increasingly dysfunctional health care they can no longer afford, an important aspect of the problem has been ignored. Basically, its this: "Insurance" is designed for healthy people and its based on the assumption that buyers are healthy when they buy it. Of course, many people have health issues, so the insurance industry and others, like the government, has in the past and in the future too, I'm sure, will be doing everything they can to avoid having them as customers.
The government isn't being honest about how they are trying to discourage those who need decent healthcare the most from being able to afford it, but AHIP, at least isn't lying about this!
"Ms. Ignagni said her biggest concern was that the bill would require insurers to accept all applicants for several years before the government had any meaningful way to enforce a requirement for people to have insurance. In that gap, Ms. Ignagni predicted, many people with health problems are likely to enter the market."
What we need is a separate kind of organization that sick people can join instead of insurance that really advocates for their interests, kind of like a lawyer advocates for a client in court. So you would not be there, fighting for your life with all the odds against you. Politicians don't do it, insurers CERTAINLY don't do it, doctors interests are increasingly being set against patients interests, and certainly other providers interests are rarely the same.
Millions of Americans won't be able to afford the new COBRA-like premiums just as they couldn't afford the old, but is anybody standng up for their rights? No, politicians are falling over backwards to sell their futures off to the highest bidders. The US has the highest healthcare prices in the world, but are the politicians doing what they can to adopt the solutions that have worked again and again to lower those prices? No, they are making every possible lame excuse and lying about the numbers in ever more shameless ways to explain away why they won't. (not 'can't', because its so obviously relatively easy compared to what they are doing, they WON'T)
We need some kind of national advocacy group whose members are joined not by having paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a share, like a co-op, no, we need an organization based on mutual aid and international solidarity.