Republican Healthcare Plan

Then this is a flaw. Legally-mandated health insurance should require the condition that insurers are able to pay, and when they can't payment should be guaranteed by the state.

Really? That is your argument. Medicare has been hamstrung for years by the republicans in congress. You use that as an argument?

I won't do your research for you. Have you heard of Mitt's 47%?

Theodoric observes: It's like the Republicans are an advancing heavily-armed phalanx of jack-booted thugs, shooting guns at all the unarmed children & people crawling across the ground and saying your ability to save your lives is NOT WORKING, you should give up and let us kill you or stop us by getting a $7.25 McJob.Sorry to be so angry, but that is where I am today.

I spent all day arguing with a Rethug about the ACA. Nothing he claimed was true. I even showed him that, but he refused to consider that actually facts mean more than "what he was told".
The main issue was the Obamacare subsidy. He claims it is unfair for people to get a subsidy for their insurance. His argument is that the tax break he gets from the feds for his employer provided health insurance is not a subsidy.
I found out he makes over 150k and his company pays $30k plus for his insurance. He therefore gets effectively at least an $8k subsidy for his insurance. Of course he claims he does not, but is unwilling to give up his tax break,

quote:

---

Having the government in charge of something makes it cost more money and take longer. Plus they're notoriously incompetent and careless.
  —Cat Sci

---

That's just dogma - the USA's private system is an enormously inefficient and ineffective system compared the the NHS. Off the scale....

Each state has their own regulations, and an insurance company has to abide by those regulations. I know of no state with just one company offering health insurance, so there is already competition in each state. The only side effect I see of getting rid of this system is to allow companies to use use the most corporate friendly regulations in one state to sell insurance in another state. I believe the same thing has happened with banking rules in the past. If the country would pull its collective head out of its ass, the Democrats would. The really sad part is that there is very little public support for a single payer system which is the only viable solution for decreasing the price of healthcare. Propaganda has convinced US citizens that socialism is bad, so they are against it. At the same time, they think their socialist schools, roads, fire departments, and other socialist programs are just great.

Other countries have government run healthcare that people really, really like. On top of that, they pay half of what we do in the US. How do you explain that? The NHS is a government agency that runs the healthcare system in the UK. They pay less than half of what we do for healthcare. How do you explain that?

If the UK can do it, why can't the US?All of the socialist programs out there cost less than our US for-profit system. How do you explain that?

The real obscenity and the one not being addressed or even questioned is the idea that health care, education, public utilities, roads and protection should ever be profit centers or for profit enterprises.

One of the enduring myths so many Americans believe about socialist healthcare is that it costs too much. We have seen Cat Sci repeat that myth in this very thread. I have heard this same myth repeated ad nauseum by many, many of my fellow citizens. Here are the facts: See all those countries paying much less than the US? Those are socialist healthcare systems. Unless someone can show how these numbers are incorrect, lets just accept the fact that the the US for-profit system costs too much, not socialist healthcare. If someone can't accept these plain facts, then their opinions on this topic are simply not legitimate.With that said, the US healthcare system is a 500 billion dollar industry that takes up 16% of our GDP. It is a massive behemoth that employs hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. Its not as if we can flip a switch and suddenly have our own NHS tomorrow. The industry has massive momentum and it can't be changed overnight.The ACA was a first step, however flawed. It attempted to get everyone into the healthcare system, something that has to happen if we are going to move healthcare in the right direction. We can't leave out sick people who can't get insurance through an employer. In fact, we shouldn't be tying access to healthcare to employment at all.So what we are really talking about is something that pushes the massive ship of US healthcare a few degrees towards a better harbor, and a set of future steps to keep pushing the system.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

Precisely. In my state, and I assume in many or all other states, the price for utilities is controlled by the state. Companies aren't allowed to jack up the price for electrical power or gas when there is a cold snap in the winter. If we treated utilities like we treat healthcare, that is exactly what would happen.What if we treated education the same way? What if kids born to poor families weren't able to attend elementary school. What if fire departments would just watch houses burn to the ground because they hadn't paid their fire department insurance? What if all roads were toll roads so poor workers couldn't even afford to get to work?Why should healthcare be any different than utilities, education, roads, and the fire department? It is absolutely obscene that people treat healthcare differently than these other institutions.

A damn 40% tax rate. Fuck that.

Where did I say that?For the record, I don't think that healthcare being socialist would make it cost too much.

So you don't want to spend less than 50% of what we are currently spending on healthcare if it means that the government is involved? If so, why?