Does Single Payer Control Healthcare Costs?

CEO of healthcare insurance company Aetna Mark Bertolini suggests the Congress should discard the plan of repealing Obamacare and attempt to negotiate a bipartisan solution. Aetna has left the Obamacare market and it will only return when the system has stabilized says Bertolini. He also criticized Donald Trump’s tweets on the insurance company bailout and the single-payer options.

Congress should give up on getting the Affordable Care Act repealed, said the Aetna CEO. It cannot be done and there is no room for argument he said when he appeared on CNBC’s show “Closing Bell”.

The right thing to do would be to fix the system continued Bertolini. He suggested everyone in the Senate and at the White House should come together and do the job that is expected of them; instead of scrapping the system they should work on bettering the one that is already in place. Bertolini went on to say the government should work on a new solution in case that does not work out. He also said the authorities are hung up on the politics and worried about the elections in 2018 and if they could get over them then fixing the healthcare situation is relatively easy.

According to Bertolini Aetna will only rejoin the ACA program when the system is stable. The type of changes and fluctuations that the program has experienced from quarter to quarter, oftentimes on a monthly basis isn’t feasible for any business to sustain their practices consistently on a long-term basis. This problem can be fixed and when it does then Aetna will consider rejoining. Until then there will be no participation from their end due to the unstable nature of the market.

President Donald Trump tweeted in late July that the new health-care bill will not pass then there is a possibility of ‘bailouts’ for the insurance companies ending soon. By ‘bailouts’ he was referring to the payments made by the government to keep the premiums from rising further in the next year.

Mark Bertolini also challenged Trump’s statement and said the payments are not ‘bailouts’. That money is not kept by the insurance companies and goes to the healthcare provider in the form of premiums paid by the members. He said Trump is misinformed.

Bertolini explained Aetna’s premiums remain the same and these are costs that are paid to hospitals and healthcare professionals which would otherwise go unpaid. The new policy is only hurting the insurance members and citizens of the country as they will no longer have access to healthcare if the bailouts are no longer given.

Bertolini criticized those who have proposed a single-payer system as a solution since it has already failed in Colorado and Vermont. The system is ill-defined and does not help the American public with their savings, he explained.

According to Bertolini, the single-payer system can never be implemented in the version that people think it can. The costs of healthcare should be openly discussed and something must be done about getting them under control. Changing the person who pays for the bills is not a viable solution.