So-called uncompensated care "drives up the cost of everybody's health insurance, " Mr. Kasich said at a recent press conference.
So ideally that will drive down the number of folks who are uninsured and where you are giving uncompensated care.
Kagan , first of all, I do think there -- this is not the only place where there's uncompensated care.
Moreover, every time an uninsured employee had to go to an emergency department and receive uncompensated care, who paid for that?
Hospitals will eventually see their costs of uncompensated care fall when broader health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act kicks in next year.
The extra taxes paid by the uninsured (since they don't receive nontaxed benefits from their employers) go mostly to Washington, while the uncompensated care is delivered locally.
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Indeed, both ideas are based on the mistaken diagnosis that the central cause of our health care woes is the cost of uncompensated care that the uninsured get.
Much of the legal argument for the mandate turns on the ability of people with the freedom not to buy insurance to drive premiums up for everyone else by getting uncompensated care.
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Requiring them to carry insurance is just a way of regulating how they pay for it, and preventing all those with insurance coverage from subsidizing the cost of others' uncompensated care, he said.
But hospitals fear a continued jump in uncompensated care costs this year, with Congress and the White House poised to cut entitlement spending in the wake of the fiscal cliff that already saw hospitals wrestle with spending reductions.
In addition to the ideas favored by the insurers, the alternatives included levying a national tax to pay for uncompensated care, increasing federal subsidies to help people purchase health insurance, encouraging credit-ratings firms to use health-insurance status in determining ratings, and expanding employers' roles in enrolling people in insurance plans.
Though the hospital industry is taking a huge whack from spending reductions in what they have historically received from the Medicare health insurance program for the elderly, they are also going to see massive reductions in spending on charity care and uncompensated care, which is the amount they eat when patients cannot pay their bills.
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This scenario results, these advocates say, in all insured individuals being indirectly forced to bear the burden of uncompensated emergency care which, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), amounts to 55% of emergency care.
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