By - Reg Baker, Host of Business in Hawaii for Think Tech
Hawaii
Ever since I was the COO and CFO for HMAA, one of Hawaii’s
largest health insurance companies, I have been following the ACA aka
Obamacare.
It was widely accepted in the healthcare industry that we
did not need nor want the ACA. This was
especially true in Hawaii due to the Prepaid Healthcare act that was passed
over 25 years ago. Many felt that the
ACA was just another step in the direction of nationalizing the healthcare
industry, which has been proven to be a failure in every country that ever
attempted nationalized healthcare.
Flash forward to today and we find many of those earlier
concerns are coming true. Healthcare
premiums continue to increase at double digit rates. California just announced on Tuesday another
13% increase in premiums. Hawaii has
experienced similar rate increases and very large loses by our local medical
insurance companies. We already lost one
local medical insurance company, Family Health, and the mainland has seen
record high failures and consolidations.
The only way for smaller medial insurance companies to
survive under the ACA is to merge with larger companies to obtain economies of
scale and larger risk pools of customers.
This has been happening at an alarming rate and has caught the attention
of the US Department of Justice. This
week, the DOJ announced they will be cracking down on these medical insurance
mergers and acquisitions claiming that they are unacceptable.
The US Healthcare industry was one of the best in the
world. We lead the world in setting the
bar very high for quality of care, access to care, innovation, research and
education. It is so sad and very scary to
see how the ACA has disrupted the best health care system in the world to one
that is fighting to survive with record bankruptcies, record levels of mergers
and consolidations resulting in dwindling medical insurance companies,
physicians retiring faster than we can replace them because of the challenges
current providers face and constant regulatory interference.
If the plan of Obamacare, like many projected, was to create
a single payer system, which is another word for nationalized healthcare, then
we are clearly moving in that very scary direction. Let’s hope that it is not too late to save
the US healthcare system that was once the best the world had ever seen.
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