Market Exuberance, Individual Healthcare, & tune into News at 11.
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By David Schaeffer
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We all know when the market moves up, frowns turn upside down. Good news for pension funds, school endowments, and our clients. Many of our clients saw great returns in both their brokerage accounts and insured savings programs. Some day we may even see a viable market for bonds like we saw from 1970 until about 2007. Just remember what goes up must… (unless you have an insured savings plan of course.)
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The Affordable Healthcare Act was really a great idea, just poorly executed. For healthcare to be affordable, doctors need to get paid, patients need access to consistent quality care, the lawyers need to stop suing every drug company, and the insurance companies need to be allowed to make a small profit. I know that is a long sentence but that is what needs to happen.
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Doctors in the past (Primary Care Physicians) had multiple streams of income. They received their payment for seeing patients, stipends for recommending drugs, stipends for recommending labs and diagnostics, and referral fees for sending patients to specialists. Most of those sources of income vanished with the Affordable Care Act. Lawyers love to create class action suits against pharmaceutical companies. Many cases cost millions to litigate and who usually gets the lion’s share of the settlements? Not the consumers who must burden the higher costs, not the drug companies that spend less on research and more on legal defense, and not the small percentage of folks that were actually harmed by the side effects of the drug. Our local non-profit, Blue Cross Blue Shield, lost $221 million dollars on the block of business serving individuals and families both on and off the healthcare exchange. They were promised, if they participated, that the government would reimburse excess losses. The government failed to cover the losses. You have to agree that a non-profit company formed to offer insurance would really like to sell insurance. Under the constraints placed on companies by the ACA, that is not possible in many counties in the United States.
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Changes are coming to individual, under-age 65, health insurance, of that I am sure. But they will not be what folks are thinking. Costs for premiums will increase, subsidies are in question, and the networks will likely have to be constructed from scratch as they have been every year since 2014.
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So I can’t say, “Tune into news at eleven.” Whether you watch FOX or CNN, both sides are so biased it is difficult to get a real understanding. We will let you know the REAL facts as they unfold directly from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and from the insurance companies.
