Health Care Reform: Undoing Obama's Health Law Could Have Messy Ripple Effects

The Emergency Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires all hospitals to provide emergency treatment to any person regardless of their citizenship, legal status or ability to pay.  It was passed through the US Congress in 1986 and signed into law in by Reagan.

This opened the doors for uninsured people to use the Emergency Room as a doctor's office and thus made all insurance premiums rise and all of us pay for their medical bills.


With the ACA law, each person is responsible for buying their own health insurance thus we, the taxpayer, doesn't pay for it.

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Yes, everyone needs to contribute, but not to insurance companies.

The only "start" that ACA is is the institutionalization of insurance companies as the gatekeepers to medical care.  Insurance companies add nothing to the relationship between someone who is sick and someone who can provide treatment.  Insurance companies exist to make profits off of DENYING care.

I've never been impressed with the analogy of car insurance to health insurance, because for one thing people don't have to drive.  

Perhaps a more equivalent comparison with healthcare in this democracy where everyone needs medical treatment throughout their lifetime might be other necessities for survival, such as food, water, and shelter (protection from the elements).   We subsidize food costs, heating oil expenses, housing, because it's necessary for human survival.  

There are resources that should be nationalized, such as water and oil and land.  They belong to all of us, as our birthright, to share, and not for the 1% to take and sell them for profit, for their own private gain.

There are services which we recognize are necessary, like fire-fighting and policing, that are non-profit.  Or used to be.  We chipped in through our taxes to pay for these services, in order to get these services for a reasonable price.  

The same should be true for medical treatment.  When Americans say, "Don't touch my Medicare", that is what they are saying that they want.  

Obama took single payer (Medicare For All) off the table, because if the goal is to get affordable quality medical care for all then everything else pales in comparison.  He's preserving an anachronistic and failed insurance industry and employer-provided system for medical care. It's government-sanctioned racketeering.

Insurance adds NOTHING to the medical model. The insurance industry is the 'Don Fanucci' (Godfather, Part II -- "I don't want a lot...Just enough to wet my beak") of medical care, letting you get medical care only if you pay them a gratuity up front.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost