Ed Haislamaier - Health Policy Researcher, Heritage Foundation Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Twenty two is our time here in Houston's Parting News. Right,
doctors cost money and Obamacare doctors cost a lot of money.
Because it turns out Obamacare was not really the Affordable
Care Act. It's the now the Unaffordable Care Act, which
is why there's talks of getting rid of it, which
is not going to happen. How often do we get
rid of government programs once they get started. Never, virtually never,

(00:23):
So now Republicans are talking about reforming it. Ed Heislamier
Health Policy Research Heritage Foundation joins us, I'm sure you
can come up with a long list ed of what's
wrong with Obamacare. Is there anything that's right about it?

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Well, it has provided assistance in the form of some
subsidies to lower income people who previously had trouble buying insurance.
The problem is it's done it in a very inefficient way,
and it doesn't and it's also made health insurance more
expensive for middle income so employed people who have to

(01:02):
buy their own coverage.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
So do you think the intent was ever really to
make healthcare more affordable or was it just really about
covering people who didn't have health care before? What do
you think that the beginning goal was supposed to be.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, that's the point. It was really more about trying
to find a way to provide insurance to people who
didn't have insurance, and those were particularly lower income people.
But the thing that's important to remember about this is
while people, particularly low income people, didn't have an insurance,

(01:39):
they did get medical care. Now it wasn't necessarily, you know,
what they should. In other words, it was often people
would wait until something happened and then they go to
the emergency room, and they wouldn't pay somebody, you know,
it would be picked up or provided free for them.
Now they'd be better off to go to a doctor

(02:01):
and get checked out first and avoid having to go
to the emergency room. So, in theory, insurance would help people.
It's just how you go about doing it.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
I don't think it was ever there, certainly, I would
think for any conservatives, it was ever any intention that
we'd have people making seventy thousand dollars a year or more,
maybe even more than that, who were eligible to get Obamacare.
How did we get to the point of providing middle
income people with Obamacare.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Well, the problem was, and this is one of the
points that I made, is they folded together really two
different markets. One is trying to reach those people who
were low income who didn't have insurance, who were relying
on charity or free care at hospitals and clinics. The
other group were these people who were the old or

(02:50):
the traditional individual market. These are people who were middle income,
usually self employed people, business owners, things like that, people
who were freelancers who were just buying in the individual
market because they weren't working for an employer that offered
coverage in the traditional employer group coverage, which most other

(03:12):
middle income people have. I mean, you know, it's important
to remember this is a relatively small piece of the market.
We're talking total maybe about twenty million people, of whom
seven million are the folks who are buying their own
coverage and are self employed. The market for traditional employer

(03:33):
group coverage is one hundred and sixty million people. That's
the workers and their dependents. So this is not and
this is the other problem here. People talk about the affordability.
The affordability issue, it hits everybody, and that's something that
we really think Congress needs to work on. And there's

(03:55):
some good bipartisan legislation to make prices more transparent, to
require disclosure so that people know who's getting paid what
in the system, because if you actually dig into this,
what people get charged for healthcare is all over the map,
even within the same health system or organization, say a

(04:17):
hospital system.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, well, we've been complaining about this for the last
thirty forty years. Why have we been unsuccessful so far
being able to reform healthcare? Is it really that hard?

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Well, because, as I just said, a lot of people
in the system are making money, I mean somebody else.
You know, your high expenses are somebody else's income, right
to the hospital, the insurers, the third party administrators. You know. Again,
if you know something is basic as getting a scan,

(04:50):
an MRI or backspay or something like that. And with
these hospital systems, they have multiple sites where you can
get it right, which one of them is called charging
a different amount?

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Well, in the case and all of them are charging
too much. Quite frankly, well.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
That's that's that's right, that's right, because because they're looking
at it saying, they're not looking at it to say, well,
how as you would in the normal market, to say, well,
how can I provide the customer with better for less
and therefore get more business. They're just saying, how can
I charge more?

Speaker 1 (05:23):
Exactly, how can I make that much more money?

Speaker 2 (05:25):
All right?

Speaker 1 (05:26):
Easier, easier said than done when it comes to solving it.
Thank you, I appreciate your time this morning. Ed Heistlight
Heislermeier pardon me, health policy researcher the Heritage Foundation,