The Lowdown on Healthcare, Part 2

In Part 1, we discussed exactly what the candidates said.

Akin said healthcare should be left to state level, and that the government should get out. Claire pointed out this means his plan for healthcare is to privatize it.

How health insurance works in 69 words

Everybody gets sick, injured, or needs medical help at some point -- and these treatments are expensive -- but not everybody needs help at the same time. So instead of closing your savings account when you get sick, insurance offers another option. Everybody chips in a little bit, and the people who aren't sick take care of the people who are. This way everybody pays less and everybody's covered.

Shouldn't this man decide your treatments?

Why supporting for-profit healthcare is stupid

Privatized health insurance is the application of an economic philosophy to healthcare. So, in theory, health insurance should remain cheap because companies are competing, more people get care because more customers mean more care, and citizens get more choice because its run on a state-by-state level.

Except that's not what happens.

Privatized healthcare means that profit is more important than the health and well-being of American citizens. So a given insurance company's best interest is denying care because that's how to make a profit. Obamacare mandated companies spend 80% of the money they make on providing care for their customers, and the companies are jumping ship.

This isn't ideology

This is common sense. Obamacare also mandates that everybody pay into healthcare.

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility...When they show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care paid for by you and me. If that’s not a form of socialism, I don’t know what is.”

We'd like to thank Mitt Romney for explaining that back in 2007.

The bigger the pool of those insured, the cheaper it is for everybody. Ideally and inevitably we'll turn to single-payer healthcare, where the entire nation is in one pool run by somebody not interested in skimming off the top.

Claire pointed out that Akin supports a deservedly soon-to-be-extinct dinosaur of an industry.