Must Watch: Xeni Jardin and having cancer before the ACA

Health care is life. Losing your insurance because you need care is punishment for getting sick.https://twitter.com/ajplus/status/829354863205060608I know my fellow old timers in the health care business can remember a time when patients would ask, beg, plead to not be given a diagnosis (something necessary for billing in a fee-for-service system) for fear of losing their health insurance. Times when we had to cross our fingers and hope that insurance companies couldn't find some byzantine path to link a new diagnosis to a pre-exisiting condition and leave the patient with the full tab. In the few short years since the protections of the ACA have been in place the relationship between health care providers and patients (the beneficiaries) and their insurers (the payers) has lost the vicious antagonism recalled by the fraud investigations Xeni Jardin went through.Insurance companies as good capitalist participants had incentive to deny deny deny. With the regulatory protections of the Affordable Care Act they are doing what all good capitalist entities do--look for other ways to reduce costs. Anyone on the population health tip? Insurance companies are attempting to lower their costs by improving overall health of their subscribers. IMAGINE! You may have noticed a gym membership benefit. Money off your premiums for getting a check up? Maybe a nurse from your insurer has called you to discuss managing a chronic condition. It is very much still in the proof-of-concept stage, but people can we agree that incentives for healthy behavior are better than punishments for being sick? THANKS OBAMACARE.Post Script: Does anyone remember the late '90s movie The Rainmaker? You know, novice lawyer Matt Damon going for broke for a man dying from Leukemia, his family in bankruptcy, because his insurance company refused to pay for treatment. The way teenage me loved that movie was kinda prescient, huh. But I digress.Losing the protections of the ACA=losing lives.