Political Quotes

“There are so many pieces to this healthcare system. One thing that I want to put on the table here from my experience as insurance commissioner in California is that there are two fundamental parts to the healthcare system in the United States, and really around the world. One of those two parts is how we collect the money and then pay for the services. We call that insurance. It is also Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' programs, and the like. These are the way in which we collect money and pay for the services. {time} 2015 The other part of the healthcare system is the delivery of services; these are the doctors, the clinics, the hospitals, and other providers, mental health providers, and the like. We often get confused by putting these two things together. There has been a lot of talk about what we are doing with the Affordable Care Act. It is essentially a mechanism to pay for services. It is an insurance mechanism. Using the private insurance system, these various exchanges are set up to pool the population of people who do not have insurance from their employer, the individual people, individual coverage. It pools them so that you have that large population so that the cost is spread out across that large pool and the insurance becomes affordable. That is an insurance mechanism. That is a pooling. It has nothing to do directly with the provision of medical services.…”