Health care reform almost at the finish line... correction: it's finished

You are required to have health insurance which can be purchased from a private health insurance company.Or you can look at it this way. Everyone is being charged a $750 dollar tax (adjusted for lower income individuals and families). You can get an offsetting tax credit of $750 by purchasing health insurance from a private health insurance provider. Would you feel better if the government raised taxes equivalent to the amount of health insurance premiums and then offered free health insurance?The fact of the matter is that everyone, at some point, uses the health care system. If they are uninsured then there is a much higher chance that they will either go bankrupt due to their medical bills or walk away from those bills entirely. It's not like forcing everyone to purchase a TV in that someone can go through life without one. It is either this or we start kicking the uninsured out of emergency rooms (which we wouldn't do anyway, but you get the point).

Do you truly think we have the best health care in the world?The truth about canadian helath care.
Mythbusting Canadian Health Care -- Part I | OurFuture.org by People's Action
http://www.ourfuture.org/...art-ii-debunking-free-marketeersMore truth Poll Finds Most Doctors Support Public Option : NPR
Most U.S. doctors want public-private mix: poll | ReutersThose damn facts. Why do the have such a liberal bias?

---

Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

It is estimated that 40,000 people die per year because they can not get access to health care. More than 10% of our nation is uninsured right now which means they may very well face the choice of either dying or bankrupting their family. I would call that a failure. If it is so expensive that more than 10% of our population is limited to emergency rooms then it isn't the best health care in the world. This is further backed up by the fact that first world nations with nationalized health systems have citizens that are far healthier than Americans, and they spend a fraction of what we do for the same care.Like I said earlier, why not privatize education and roads? If we modeled education and roads after our current health care system then 10% of our country would be illiterate and 10% of our citizens would not be able to use roads to get to work. Does that sound like a good idea? There are reasons that we have public roads and public schools, and it is the same reason that we should have public health care. You can't allow capitalism to fuck around with something as vital has your health. Your life is not a commodity.

Taq,You give an example of public schools. Let me ask you, as a whole, what's performing better in this country, public or private schools? I'm not saying there aren't good public schools, we've discussed this in another thread, but as whole, private schools are well outperforming public....and I'm not plugging "christian" schools here, I'm talking about just private schools, whatever that might be.When I talk about the best health care system in the world, I'm not necessarily talking about the cost. I realize costs in this country are out of control but I'm referring to the quality of care we get here. There's a reason why leaders from foreign countries have sent their family members thousands of miles away to our country to have surgeries performed. Money drives incentive to perform good work. I'm sure you don't work for free Taq...I'm sure you get a paycheck and probably even try to perform above and beyond for a bonus or something...we all do. It's human nature and those incentives increase the quality of work performed in this country, no matter the product.Well, that's my peace...I won't respond in this thread anymore as we'll just go around in circles. Until the next debate...........

1) NO insurance is offered by the Government. THis is simply wrong. We will now be forced to purchase insurance from private industry. It's not at all unlike my State's requirement that I purchase automotive insurance in order to drive my car.2) We are required through taxes to purchase police protection, which pays your salary. Some of us (not all, of course) are footing the bill.This isn't a unique concept, Flyer. It's not new. In any government service, the many pay for a service which serves the relative few who need it, so that it's there when any of us need it. I pay for my fire and police protection regardless of whether I've been robbed or had my apartment catch fire this month. I pay for road maintenance on roads I've never driven on. My tax dollars subsidize farmers who produce food I never eat. I even pay to fund wars I don't agree with.The only difference is that this time we're forced to involve a private industry - so instead of paying for it through taxes so that you don't directly see that you're paying for services that help even those too poor to pay for them themselves, you pay the money directly. The Founding Fathers are irrelevant - they've been dead for a couple of centuries, give or take. The needs of the people of the US have changed significantly from the time of Revolution, where we didn;t have to subsidize extending power and phone grids to remote areas because they didn't exist yet; where we didn't pay for the national highway system because it didn't exist yet; where even fire protection wasn't yet paid for by taxes.Here are the facts, Flyer:1) US health care is much worse than most other First World nations who use Universal health care. The exception is the extremely small top percentage of income - if you have enough money, you get the absolute best. You and I, on the other hand, are regular schmucks, and we get vastly inferior care to what we would get in, say, Canada or the UK. Every set of numbers (infant mortality rates, etc) agrees with this, regardless of what Fox News and the Teabaggers like to claim.2) Without health insurance or a public option, people in the US die from treatable diseases. Do you think it's morally acceptable to tell someone that it's okay for them to suffer and die because they couldn;t afford health insurance? What about those who are dropped from the health insurance they did pay for because they got sick, and the insurance company decided they liked taking money more than paying it? What about those who became too sick to work, and lost their jobs and thus their insurance? Is it morally acceptable to allow people to have to choose between their life or the life of a loved one and financial ruin? The vast majority of bankruptcies in the US are from medical debts.3) Health insurance rates are currently rising at an astronomical rate, The only way to bring that rate down is to expand the risk pool - in other words, to get more people paying into the system. Insurance of all types, including your homeowners insurance, automotive insurance, etc, are the subsidization of the few who need to use the service by the many who pay their premiums every month and never actually use it, so that it will be available if you do need it.I'm fairly anonymous here, so I;m going to be more specific about something I've been vague about before.My girlfriend has HIV. She takes several very expensive medications daily in order to control the disease. Her viral count is currently kept so low that some kinds of tests wouldn;t even show her as infected.However, she graduated college just a few years ago, and could no longer be on her mother's health insurance. She has a pre-existing condition, so she couldn't get private insurance at all. Even the supplemental care her mother was paying for to add to what she got through her job was several hundred dollars monthly - there was absolutely no way she could pay.Without those pills every day, the HIV virus would regain a foothold in her body...and it would mutate rapidly, to the point that it's very likely her current drug combination would stop working. This leads to the long and extremely uncomfortable road of ever-stronger drug cocktails, with ever stronger side effects (even on her current meds, she feels sick all the time, literally all the time, every day, she feels like she might vomit. She has to take another prescription just to take down the nausea enough to eat. And it doesn't work all the time.)Her pills cost us about $100 per month. Without insurance, that number goes up to thousands of dollars. I'd basically need to devote my entire salary to paying for her pills. We'd be homeless.I fortunately managed to get her put on my insurance as a Domestic Partner. But guess what? There's a lifetime maximum of coverage. It's pretty high, because I pay for the best plan my company offers, but her pills alone will exceed that limit in less than 80 years. That sounds like a lot...but it doesn't take into account her frequent doctor's visits, all the lab work and blood tests (she needs to get regular kidney and liver panels, for instance, because her medication damages them), and normal things like getting sick.She's considering getting on partial disability, because her pills make her so sick and weak that she can't work like you or I can.Oh...and I can't change jobs, because there would be an interruption in her health care. If I get fired, she's fucked. She's working on getting a better job that provides its own health care, but job availability is rather shitty right now, as you may have noticed.So I have a rather more realistic perspective on health care than most people. When someone says that it's okay to let a few million people in the US go without health care, they are effectively saying that it would be okay to let my girlfriend die. I understand that that's not what you're thinking, but it is the effect of continuing to allow private industry to run amok with health insurance. Think about that when next you say that it's inappropriate for the government to mandate health coverage for everyone. Think about it when you say that it's okay for my girlfriend, and all the other chronically ill people like her, to die, because you don't want higher taxes.In comparison...if we were Canadian citizens, my girlfriend could walk into any clinic, see a doctor, and get the pills she needs to stay alive without paying a cent. Sure, she'd have to wait a while to see an HIV specialist...but she does here, too. It takes about a month to see her doctor. We'd move to Canada, or hell, any other First World nation...but of course, we can't afford to immigrate, and until very recently most countries had an HIV embargo - she wouldn't be allowed to immigrate in any case.That's my $.02 worth.

Private schools failed long ago. Prior to the introduction of public schools 80% of blacks were illiterate, and 20% of the overall population was illiterate.National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) - 120 Years of LiteracyModern private schools are a by-product of the public school system. These schools cater to the relatively rich, so higher scholastic scores are to be expected in private schools. However, if the public school system were taken away then we would return to soaring illiteracy rates. If we take the private health system as our model, we would have about 10-15% illiteracy rates among the entire population, and disproportionately higher rates among minorities and the poor. To be fair, the quality of care needs to be averaged across the entire population. This would necessarily include those who are prevented from getting primary care and are only given access to emergency care.As an analogy, we could claim that the fictitious country of Traveland has the best transportation in the world. On closer examination you find that of the cars on the road all are luxury cars costing $85k and above. However, you also find that only 10% of the population owns a car. Does Traveland have the best transportation in the world? Of the people who actually can afford cars, yes. Across the entire population, no. In any business you do not price your product so that it is affordable to 100% of the population. You shoot for a sweet spot where (price) x (# of people who can buy your product) is maximized. This means that your price may only be affordable to 90% of the population. This is how capitalism works. This is NOT the way health care should work. We should not be denying health care to 10% of the population in the name of profit. That is morally wrong.We have some of the same safeguards for utilities. Many states heavily regulate the utilities in their state to the point where the legistlature sets the price (at least that's the way it is in ID). If markets were unregulated then there is nothing to stop the electric company from pricing out 10% of the population in the name of profits. The same for the water, sewer, and gas companies. The eletric and gas companies in say N. Dak. could charge extremely high rates for their product in the winter months and balance out price vs. customer base to maximize their profits. Does this sound like a good idea? If not, then why is it a good idea to run our health care system like this?

I'm not sure 'bout you, but here in Wisconsin (and Illinois where I grew up), we WERE required to have automobile insurance. I'm not sure about home owners, because I've never owned a home.

---

"Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Othersfor example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einsteinconsidered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws."-Carl Sagan"Show me where Christ said "Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones." Gay people, too, are made in my God's image. I would never worship a homophobic God." -Desmond Tutu

Perhaps it would be better to get rid of public schools so those that can't afford private schooling get no education whatsoever. Of course the quality of education may be better (pure speculation on my part here, I've not investigated) since they have way more money. They also have less of a student-teacher ratio because only the rich need apply.

---

"Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Othersfor example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einsteinconsidered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws."-Carl Sagan"Show me where Christ said "Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones." Gay people, too, are made in my God's image. I would never worship a homophobic God." -Desmond Tutu

I thought about that... but you do have the option of not having an automotive and thus, not having car insurace without penalty.With this new plan, isn't there a penalty for people if they didn't particiapate and didn't have insurance? Doesn't this make the example a little different?Not that I'm disagreeing with your whole point.

Can you guarantee that said person would never ever ever use medical services? If this person never ever ever in his/her entire life used any form of medical services, you may have a point.

---

"Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Othersfor example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einsteinconsidered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws."-Carl Sagan"Show me where Christ said "Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones." Gay people, too, are made in my God's image. I would never worship a homophobic God." -Desmond Tutu

It's a little different, but not a lot. Yes, you can opt not to drive a car at all. But if you drive, you pay for insurance.There's no fee for not having insurance, at least not like there is in the health care bill. You just get a ticket if pulled over, can;t renew your registration (which leads to crazy late fees and even more tickets), and possibly get your car towed, which is a rather expensive ordeal. The whole thing makes the fees for not having health insurance look pretty light.I used car insurance only because it was one of the few examples I can think of where the government forces the purchase of a privately offered product. Fire, police, education, road maintenance, etc. are all better examples, but the health care bill makes a strange hybrid between the two, by mandating universal coverage but making us pay for it individually rather than collectively through taxation. The end result is similar, we just see more of the details.Honestly though - you only pay a fee for not having health insurance if you make more than over $40,000 per year and still choose not to sign up. Below that, you get government subsidies to pay for insurance - and if you're really poor, they just stick you on Medicare. Even if you're making over $40k and choose not to buy insurance, you'll pay 2% of your income ($800 at $40k per year) in taxes as a penalty. That's honestly not too bad, but should work as an incentive to find insurance and get something for that money instead of just handing it over.

If that's the case and I can't get assistance (I make 45k/yr) and premiums don't go down......I'm still fucked.

---

"Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Othersfor example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einsteinconsidered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws."-Carl Sagan"Show me where Christ said "Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones." Gay people, too, are made in my God's image. I would never worship a homophobic God." -Desmond Tutu

This is a ridiculous statement to make, and you know it. Public schools as a whole don't do as well as private schools because public schools take in EVERYONE, not just the few privileged whose families have enough money to send them to private school. As I stated in another thread, public schools take in the all kids from the brightest to the downright retarded.

quote:

---

I'm sure you don't work for free Taq...I'm sure you get a paycheck and probably even try to perform above and beyond for a bonus or something...we all do.

---

Funny that you mentioned bonus, because that's exactly what this bill does. It gives bonuses to doctors that produce results.As I said in another post, I am one of the lucky ones that have never had any health problem at all. None. The few times I go for check-ups because of my job has produced perfect results. Someone like me can very easily condemn those who go to the emergency room for minor health concerns because they don't have insurance. Who do you think pay for them? Santa Claus?But you see, I have more sense than that. I know that not everyone is as lucky as I am with my health. They go to the emergency room for minor health concerns and not pay because they don't have a choice. They have no insurance and they can't afford the medical costs.The bill says if you can afford it you must get health insurance.This is like the seat belt laws. If your car has seat belt, you need to have it on. Those whose cars do not have seat belt are exempt. I remember when my state first came out with the seat belt law people were screaming up and down that their right was being infringed upon. Just a year after the law got enforced, crash fatality rate took a nose dive.

It's set at 4x the poverty level, which comes out to (I believe) around $44,000. It sounds like you might be one of those caught right on the edge, where you make just a hair too much money to get subsidies, but not quite enough to afford coverage - or if you can afford coverage, you wouldn't be able to afford to use it, which isn't really better.It really depends on the state-level insurance pools. If they work as intended, you should get much more reasonable rates for your insurance, with the purchasing power of a large group instead of working as an individual.

Hopefully. Except that, as I mentioned above, idiots up top in Wisconsin are fighting tooth and nail to not have to acknowledge the bill.

---

"Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Othersfor example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einsteinconsidered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws."-Carl Sagan"Show me where Christ said "Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones." Gay people, too, are made in my God's image. I would never worship a homophobic God." -Desmond Tutu