"UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurer, reported last week that it made $10.3 billion in profits in 2014 on revenues of $130.5 billion. Both profits and revenues grew seven percent from 2013.
Under Obamacare, the private insurers have made out like bandits!
United impressed Wall Street so much that investors pushed its share price to an all-time high. When the New York Stock Exchange closed last Thursday, United's share price stood at $113.85, a record.
To put that in perspective, United's share price was $30.40 on March 23, 2010, the day President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law. Since then, the company's price per share has increased an astonishing 375 percent."
So the ACA has been a huge gift to the private insurance industry.
Will they allow the Republicans to take away their new customers and fabulous profits? Hardly. Let's follow the money for a clue to what will happen when the ACA is repealed:
In 2016, the private insurers have spent over 30 million to buy politicians: The largest insurer, Blueshield, spent 4 million and over 3/4 went to Republicans. Only a total naive would think that Republicans would cut their own throats and punish those who have bought them power. (source: opensecrets.org)
So not only do the Republicans NOT have a replacement for the ACA, but they are inevitably compelled to maintain the record profits of their donors in the private insurance industry by continuing government subsidies, as originally designed in the Republican plan, to those unable to afford their policies.
Keep in mind that all the policies, all the medical treatment, is private. Medicare for all, which most Americans now support, would return 98 cents of every dollar to the private medical industry, while private insurance returns 85-90 cents. Should healthcare dollars go to the insurers or to the doctors?
So what can the Republicans do? That is the very question they, including their President, cannot answer, for they have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, orphaned their own lovechild and are left, therefore, with nothing but gibberish. And gibberish and inaction are exactly why Congress has a 15% approval rating.
Conclusion:
1. I have shown the origins of "Obamacare" in the Heritage plan, adopted by the Republicans when out of power, ignored when in.
2. I have shown that once the Democrats gave up on single payer or a "public option (which was in the House bill), they called the Republican's bluff and adopted the Republican Plan. At that point, the Republicans turned against their own Plan, leaving them with........nothing but empty and vague promies of "something better."
3. I have shown that the Republicans are now in a dilemma that will only reduce the level of approval they now have, since they cannot betray their corporate sponsors (whose profits rest on the 30 million new customers), they cannot refuse to repeal the ACA, and they have no other plan which "covers everyone," as Trump promised. Their prime argument is that the ACA has skyrocketed prices but the facts say otherwise: to repeal the ACA wihtout a replacement is to go back to the Bush years, where the ratio of health care spending skyrocketed from 12% of GDP to 17%. I has since slowed to the lowest rate of increase in decades, with the ratio now about 18%, all due to private rate increases on which their 370% increase in profits is based. Republicans can lie about this but that won't provide medical care to the tens of millions who would lose it if the ACA is repealed without replacing it with national healthcare plan, the very "socialism" which Republicans warn us about, tho Medicare for all would return 10% more to private medicine than the current private insurance scam.
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