Why does Barack Obama think that mandatory health insurance will contain premiums and improve affordability?

Say we make it mandatory to get a haircut once every week. Will the price of haircut increase or decrease?

according to supply and demand, it will go up........

and what sucke even more is that the working folks have to pay for the professional welfare and unemployed...........so why even work anymore?

Increased the rates of insured means that people will go to the doctor at earlier stages for illness treatment, rather than waiting until they have to go to the emergency room... putting the non- or under-payment burden on the insured.

Health care delivery through the emergency room, and long after it was easily treatable, is the most expensive and inefficient use of health care dollars.

In your incomparable example, in the short term it would dramatically increase costs to mandate weekly haircuts because government mandated demand doesn't fit supply. There is also the factor of startup-costs and loan maintenance for new businesses which would play into the bottom line. Eventually, more people would have a job cutting hair and the price would be slightly higher than it is now because of the added bureaucracy of documenting fulfillment of the regulation.

If you have ALL people pay into a health care system, be it private or public, you get the premiums of the young healthy ones, not just the older or sicker ones that use it. For example: Medicare is $98 per month (as opposed to an average premium of $400 for private insurance) for major medical. An average 20 year old doesn't use $98 worth of health care each month, and there are a lot of average 20 year olds in the country. It's the idea that the younger, healthier ones help pay for the older, sicker ones. Then by the time the young ones grow old and need it, they will be assured to receive health care since "new" younger ones have taken their place. It's a system that actually works in virtually all of the civilized countries in the world (in one form or another) -- except the US, where we lag behind... Our health care system is for either those with money and can afford premiums or the poor who go to the ER but never pay. Middle class working families get left out.

If you're truly interested and not just bashing a president you don't like, I'd be glad to explain further. Feel free to email me.

One certainly could do better than paying twice as much for half the care that we now receive owing to the profit motive- not a bad thing at all until lives become involved. Streamline the system and eliminate the insurance companies in their present, inefficient state. Make so people don't have to die so readily for lack of money-particularly if they are among the working poor. Your comparison of health insurance with a hair cut is a bit insulting to the value of human life. Since you are young and inexperienced in these matters I'll chalk it up to a poor economic analogy.

He could really care less. It's about control. Does anyone really believe that Congress can't get the facts if they wanted to. For C****** sake, there are 4-5 board certified medical doctors currently serving terms in the House and Senate. Canada's and England's doctors are speaking out about the health care rationing going on. Only an idiot would want a board of bureaucrats making their health care choices instead of themselves.

Insurance is a little different from other goods because it is a financial product. If you try to buy insurance on your own, you'll pay a lot. If you buy it as a group, you'll pay a lot less because the risk gets averaged out. So if your group rate reflects the entire US population, it actually will be cheaper than if your group rate is just ACME Widgets INC.

Decrease due to competition ... and it's exactly the point ...

Looks like someone slept during economics courses ...

The higher the demand is, the lower the prices are because more companies will want to compete and get a share of the $$$ ... just making sense

The higher the offer is (more companies), the lower the prices are because they compete

it makes sense to all those liberals that just when the economy is lowest and people aren't working(to contribute into a health care program) is the time to invest trillions into a scheme that somehow doesn't even have a plan how it will work yet?.....go democrats.....spend trillions to figure out how to spend more trillions........

Track, Track, Track...you poor ignorant soul. Let me educate you, when you write the laws, you can make them the way you want them...DUH!

A single payer plan would definitely cut costs. For profit insurance companies make billions every year. How much of your premiums do you think actually goes to treating patients, as opposed to executive pay and bonuses for insurance company executives?

Because some of us don't have health insurance. Are you more interested in what's best for you, or what's best for the country as a whole? If you're only interested in you, then you don't really love your country now do you?

There are not emergency rooms for haircuts.

Invalid argument. With 44 million people without insurance, they will still get sick. The cost of having preventive care is MUCH cheaper than emergency care.

It means that if more preventative care exists then there will be far less people going to hospital for expensive emergency care.

Its only mandatory for children, and when people take their kids to the doctors without insurance I pay for it just as every other insurance owner does.

group insurance is actually cheaper, the larger the group

He's a smart man and think he knows it's a bad idea. It helps keep him popular though, doesn't it?

For the morons supporting socialized medicine: Look up RATIONING... it's not as pretty as it seems.

The price of a hair cut would decrease. It's simple economics when more people buy a product the price goes down.

In Canada the average cost the goverment pays out of it's own GDP is $5000 a month per family...

Nothings free

If we made it mandatory to get a haircut once every week, the price of a haircut would decrease.

Because he's an unfit president

because I said so