politics

Hey you picked one I know a little about since I deal in liability for personal injuries, including medical care. Do some reading. The entire bill is a massive handout to the pharmaceutical industry and the billionaire class.

It created HSAs which is a way for large employers to past the cost of medical insurance on to their employees; basically allows companies to give their employees gift cards to use for medical care while saving money on premiums by providing shittier coverage. This is a subsidy for big corporations and the rich; they depend hand-to-mouth on the good health of lowly employees, and they will place as much of that liability as possible onto their employees, but won't similarly share profits. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses. It would certainly benefit our country in every way to have every person in it covered for healthcare 24/7, 365 by a single payer, the SSA. As it is now, health coverage is all broken up and fractured. Try getting seriously hurt the job and see if you don't spend the rest of your natural life in the middle of a fight between two giants over who should be the primary payer, either the workers comp insurer or the SSA or your health insurer, and neither has any concern whether you actually get the care you need, in fact they'd prefer you did not get it.

The same law also put a new focus in the SSA on recoupment in cases of a secondary payer. So like if you're getting healthcare because you got in an accident or if you were at work, the SSA can come after you, the secondary payer, the doctor, or your lawyer, whoever got paid, if SSA finds out that they paid as primary when they should have been a secondary, or a conditional payer. So like if you get $100,000 settlement for a car accident, but oopsie Medicare accidentally paid for most of your medical treatment, you could get a bill from the feds in five years for $150,000, or a denial of $150,000 worth of future Medicare benefits, to make up for it. The 2006 law modernized the systems for making these collections.

As part of that same modernization, they took a bunch of jobs that used to exist in the private sector for claims administration on Medicare Parts A and B, and placed the burden of that administration on the federal government. Usually im all for creating good federal jobs, but only for Literally getting the government to do corporation's work for them, so that corporations could cut the jobs. Privatize the profit, socialize the loss. No big deal, only your tax money being handed directly to people who own insurance companies.

The main handout was to prevent the federal government, Medicare, from negotiating with pharmacaceutical companies over the price of prescription drugs. Think of how ridiculous that is and how hypocritical it is? The Republicans who claim to love the free market so much prevented the largest buyer of medications from negotiating the price. No discounts for buying in bulk. That's your tax money I'm talking about buying meds, and Republicans made sure that pharmaceutical companies could set their own prices. They got massively richer after 2006.

In short, yes, this law was very beneficent, if you own an insurance company.