During a discussion with New-York Presbyterian Hospital CEO Dr. Steven Corwin on Tuesday’s CBS This Morning, co-hosts Charlie Rose, Norah O’Donnell, and Gayle King all accepted his call for more government involvement in the health care industry and fretted that not enough Americans were being forced to purchase medical insurance.
Corwin declared: “I think that we have to, as a country, decide: is health care a right or is it a privilege? If it’s a right, then we’ve got to insure everybody.” Rose invited him to bash the Republican replacement of ObamaCare: “So therefore, what is the fundamental mis-assumption on the part of this bill?” Corwin replied: “The fundamental mis-assumption is that you need to subsidize people more and you need to keep the individual mandate. Otherwise you cannot have a functioning insurance market...”
Rose interjected: “You’ve got to have a mandate that forces people to have insurance?” Corwin agreed: “Absolutely.” O’Donnell chimed in: “Just like car insurance.” Corwin seized on her analogy: “Car insurance, property insurance. You need young healthy people who are paying premiums in to offset the costs of other people who are sick.”
Later in the discussion, O’Donnell pointed to problems with ObamaCare: “The AMA, the AHA, doctors, hospitals all backed the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare. And under the promise that premiums would start to slow down. Premiums have sky-rocketed....What happened?” Corwin noted a “lack of competition in certain markets” as being one factor, but then complained: “Secondly, you didn’t have enough young healthy people sign up.”
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Rose concluded: “That’s the point too, isn’t it?...Young people have to be buying insurance. If they’re not, there’s not going to be a system to take care of older people.”
Near the end of the segment, Corwin acknowledged that ObamaCare did not cover as many uninsured as initially predicted: “And then what do you do in the individual insurance market?... Right now, it’s less than the CBO projected.” However, he laid the blame not on flaws in the policy, but on Americans not following government orders: “...part of that is because people didn’t really insist on the individual mandate, there was a Supreme Court challenge on it, etcetera.”
Here are excerpts of the March 14 discussion:
8:05 AM ET
(...)
DR. STEVEN CORWIN [NEW YORK/PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL CEO]: And I think that we have to, as a country, decide: is health care a right or is it a privilege? If it’s a right, then we’ve got to insure everybody. And if we want to ultimately control the costs of health care, you’ve got to insure people.
CHARLIE ROSE: So therefore, what is the fundamental mis-assumption on the part of this bill?
CORWIN: The fundamental mis-assumption is that you need to subsidize people more and you need to keep the individual mandate. Otherwise you cannot have a functioning insurance market, point number one. Point number two is –
ROSE: You’ve got to have a mandate that forces people to have insurance?
CORWIN: Absolutely.
NORAH O’DONNELL: Just like car insurance.
CORWIN: Car insurance, property insurance. You need young healthy people who are paying premiums in to offset the costs of other people who are sick.
ROSE: So they abolish that.
(...)
O’DONNELL: But the power behind reforming and repealing the Affordable Care Act in the conservative movement is that this was a mandate, a burden on small and medium-sized businesses to pay for health care. The question still remains, who’s gonna pay for it? Are taxpayers gonna pay for it in higher taxes or are businesses gonna pay for it?
(...)
O’DONNELL: The AMA, the AHA, doctors, hospitals all backed the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare. And under the promise that premiums would start to slow down. Premiums have sky-rocketed.
CORWIN: Premiums have sky-rocketed.
O’DONNELL: What happened?
CORWIN: A couple of things happened. First, you have lack of competition in certain markets. Secondly, you didn’t have enough young healthy people sign up.
ROSE: That’s the point too, isn’t it?
CORWIN: Yeah, absolutely.
ROSE: Young people have to be buying insurance. If they’re not, there’s not going to be a system to take care of older people.
CORWIN: But, Norah, let me flip it around to you for a second. What’s gonna happen with less subsidies? And what the CBO has said is premiums are going to go up in the short run. The only reason premiums go down over the long run is older sicker patients will opt out of the program because they cannot afford it.
O’DONNELL: Yeah. There has to be a fundamental shift. People don’t want to pay for health care.
(...)
CORWIN: And then what do you do in the individual insurance market?
O’DONNELL: And how many are in that market?
CORWIN: Right now, it’s less than the CBO projected. That’s part of what the Republicans are claiming about the CBO report. But part of that is because people didn’t really insist on the individual mandate, there was a Supreme Court challenge on it, etcetera.
(...)
