Kasich should really go back to Ohio and work on what he confides is the state of disarray in the health insurance market in his state--health insurance costs have gone UP "…approximately 80 percent in Ohio's individual and small group market." (https://www.johnkasich.com/healthcare/) Ohio also has expanded Medicaid which, if Kasich has his "repeal" way would also leave those people suffering through Ohio's 80 percent increase in costs.
While Ohio under Kasich has done worse than other states that have seen less of an increase in costs, Ohio is an example of how states FAILED consumers and contributed to the healthcare "crisis" that created the opportunity for the federal debacle of Obamacare.
State insurance departments FAILED to slow what consumers in their states are charged for needed medical care and services and failed to slow what health insurers charged to consumers to pay for those increased costs (Obamacare also failed). Most states have also failed (like Obamacare) to address balance billing, defensive medicine, and the continued tradeoff of coverage of checkups instead of NEEDED medical care and services. Into this void we bought the false proposition of Obamacare presented and passed by this president and the government under this President.
Unfortunately, Obamacare, as it turns out, chose to align itself with insurance companies and team up government with insurance companies in forcing people to purchase health insurance EVEN IF it was a product that didn't meet their needs. And it is worse than that--in aligning itself with insurers who would prefer to pay the finite costs of a checkup INSTEAD of providing meaningful coverage for the costs of possible illness (WHICH IS THE ONLY REASON FOR THE HIGH COST OF INSURANCE, THE POSSIBLE HIGH COSTS OF THE UNEXPECTED), Obamacare adopted the "PREVENTION" model which covers prevention testing at the expense of illness coverage and which incentivized the further abuse of defensive medicine by physicians who now argue that who cares if they send you for unnecessary testing, after all you don't have an out-of-pocket expense for it.
Kasich's idea is the same as Obamacare: "…reward value that helps people stay healthier." This is the pay physicians to run people through preventive care without addressing improving the affordability and availability of competent care IF YOU ARE SICK model that makes Obamacare a ridiculous model of gouging consumers in order to get them covered for free healthcare services if THEY'RE NOT SICK.
This Kasich-Obamacare model is a bizarre model put forth by insurers trying to improve their bottom line and adopted by Obama and Kasich where the people who have the best coverage as "patients" are those who aren't sick. Ridiculous. Prevention should NOT be a health INSURER role because checkups are a finite cost and we don't need to pay premiums, which are based on the odds something will happen, for finite costs which simply increases the prices we pay for checkups because they're reimbursed by insurers at higher rates than providers would otherwise charge and are used by insurance companies as an excuse to raise premiums. We're left with higher costs and fewer options if we actually NEED medical care and services.
Kasich also adopts the Obamacare model of PAYING physicians for doing what the insurance companies say, in order to cut costs which he writes as "Savings generated this way accrues, in part, to health insurance plans as avoided costs." His idea is to expand the incentives to providers to obey insurance companies by proposing to "also share[s] those savings with the providers." This is pure Obamacare as you can see with plans like BC/BS's CAREFIRST program that pays providers to get patients to participate in their care plan programs--NO financial benefit accrues to the patients and similarly Kasich could care less about passing savings onto CONSUMERS, the ones who are being turned into "healthy" patients to finance this scheme.
Kasich also proposes bundling services, the Obamacare darling designed to have providers bundle their services and manage costs and thereby get financial reward (see bundled payments). Kasich proposes: "…what if the surgeon earned more for meeting high quality standards while also better managing the entire procedure in order to produce lower costs?"
I don't believe Kasich belongs in the Presidential race, but as we see the lengths to which his ego will propel him into playing the system so that he can be dubbed President, the very least we should do is know what values he holds dear and from his health care ideas it's obvious--Replace Obamacare with Obamacare.
