by RAULC, Mon Dec 14, 2009 at 03:48:15 PM EST
Tags: Health care (all tags)
Following the example of the PO, it only takes 1 senator to remove the mandate.
Let's have at it.
license is also "regressive" and "borderline unconstitutional"?
It seems that many here think that the "PO" meant 'free healthcare'. It's impossible to have an intelligent discussion of the finer points when a basic understanding of the fundamentals is clearly lacking.
Are you kidding me? Are we paying private companies for a license? No. Can a person have a license and not buy car insurance? Yes. I know a lot of my friends living in big cities never bothered to buy a car because they did not need one, but they all have DLs. In this case, whether you are sick or healthy you will be forced by penalty of law to buy health insurance from private companies. I don't know if that is unconstitutional but it is regressive and the Senate bill also has a stiff penalty for people who decide to forgo buying insurance, the so-called Max tax.
If you don't own a car then there is no chance you will be involved in a car accident.
There is nothing analogous for health care. There is no such thing as a "healthy person" who has no risk of being hit by a bus or diagnosed with cancer or what have you.
If one of those things happens to someone without insurance, the government or the hospital will be stuck picking up the tab. Those costs are real. Acting like we all have the option to opt out of health problems ignores those very real costs.
conditions would be affordable? Do you want folks to buy into the insurance pool only they fall sick? Or do you want to continue the current system where pre-existing conditions are not covered and uninsured have only one option to go to emergency rooms when they are critically sick..
There is a huge tussle between expanding coverage and providing greater benefits (increases costs) and reducing costs.
The reducing costs side won. People don't want to pay for someone else's pre-exiting conditions to be covered. Let them suffer and we'll all save a few bucks, which is what really matters!
(liberal) thought that we don't mind paying a little more in taxes in case it helps a broader group of people, especially one who need the help. It is really disheartening to read some of the comments here.
It would be far more imposing than that of car insurance because driving is optional, whereas the health insurance mandate would be a strict condition of citizenship.
Also, there is no obligation to purchase car insurance for operating a vehicle on private land. In this sense, the mandate could obliterate what is left of privacy protections by allowing the feds to inspect someone's property to determine whether that person was in possession of health insurance.
I feel as though the function of the "recommend" button has essentially become that of the "like" feature on Facebook. I mean, not to criticize the depth of the analysis here or anything.
Yea, it is, which is fine with me, the new platform has the whole "Rec" feature acting much more as a Like feature, and it will encompass fp posts, diaries, comments, and breaking blue posts all together, making the whole site much more fluid. You'll also be able to sort them by the above.
yea, I (we) realized that we had to rebuild it from scratch (what we were using for OrganizeVirginia.com), so we did... it really is just about finished, I have it up at staging.mydd.com and staging.breakingblue.com The last two weeks have been taken up with migration of the archives and its a lot. 1.3M comments ain't easy to move.
I will have the site up before the HCR gets signed, or I will eat mydd's logo.
Why wasn't anybody screaming about Mandates when there was a PO in the bill. Based on CBO scoring premiums did not go down with the PO. Just saying.
This is not about that.
If liberals have to give up the Public Option, then moderates better give up something too. The mandate it is!
Vicky's statements about how anybody who doesn't follow their leaders off a cliff is not a "real" progressive or Democrat or whatever...
it is because we believed that premiums wouldn't go up as fast with a PO, that's why.
the reason why the CBO said premiums would be more expensive is because the PO would disproportionately cover the sickest and most expensive.
if you compared apples to apples (which the CBO did NOT do), the PO would be cheaper for people.
Won't most people simply choose the cheaper plan though? Except for the sick...
So private insurance companies would be even BETTER off... they would get all the healthy enrolles, and all the sick workers would be dumped on the PO. Then in 5-6 years the GOP would clamor - look, the PO is more expensive, it's not saving any money, kill it! And they and 5-6 conservadems would go along and it would be dead...
Part of the issue with the CBO is the set of assumptions it makes are not always true. One of the early victories of the Conservadems was to argue that they are.
That's true enough, but it cuts both ways. Without the CBO score (which have generally been favorable to our side) there is no independent benchmark to use.
We would then have to base our stats on experts and academia, who take ages to analyze and put out statements, meanwhile we would be going against paid industry groups from the other who shout doom and gloom very loudly and very quickly.
There is a plenty of data already out there on the subject in minute detail. it does not cut both ways unless you mean the CBO has tended to underestimate the value of the PO throughout the process. Wonder why that is the case.
Oligopoly Economics: A mandate with cost containment in the form of the public option would overtime in theory produce cost savings by adding new people to the roster of insurance enrollees because the public plan would be cheaper, and thus forcing overall market price down. When the plutocrats in Congress were claiming that the Public Option would drive private insurance companies out of business- this was a lie. What they were really saying was that it would eat into their ability to obtain oligopoly pricing.
A mandate without public option would not produce cost containment. Why? Because a) the insurance industry is an oligopoly or monopoly in many regions and b) that means pricing is entirely set by the insurance companies rather than normal market supply-demand.
Increasing the number of consumers without competition that will drive down cost in an oligopoly does not result in reduce pricing because of the reason I just stated. Think of it like Ma Bell with the telecoms or any other public utility. The number of customers will not affect pricing.
Indeed, with subsidies and mandates now, the pricing is more likely to go up. Again, this is according to simply understanding the nature of the market- which is being glossed over.
By the way, among the provisions that are being driven out of the bill includes the attempt to repeal the antitrust exemption that the health insurance industry enjoys as well as other real pricing mechanism like drug re-importation.
exactly.
to those supporting this steaming pile of chit,
especially vecky,
can you please stop using false arguments like "it will cover 30 million more people", "the poor will now be able to afford health care", or other arguments that are not true?
can we get some actual legitimate arguments in favor of this bill please?
? You don't know...
It's 900 billion dollars - going straight to the working poor and lower middle class.
The Bush Tax cut was 1.2 trillion - but most of that went to the top tax bracket, those making 150K or more. In this case everything is going to folk who make less than 60K a year. And it's completely paid for too.
no, i mean i want you to elaborate on this $900 billion that is supposedly in the health care bill for the poor.
and this better not be the Subsidies that will go directly to the insurance companies with no restrictions on those same companies from still raising premiums
eh? A tax cut to individuals goes directly to whatever private company they choose to spend that money on. Right? I don't see you complaining there.
This subsidy is not going directly to the insurance company - it's going to the individual, who then can choose to spend it. It's the largest tax break any have ever received from the government.
Do you have private insurance?
you are trying to have it both ways.
you can't claim both that this bill will insure 30 million more people
AND ALSO
claim that a lot of people are not going to spend it on insurance.
So which is it? Which stance are you taking? You can't take both.
looks like the labor unions might also oppose this bill.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/16 /labor-holds-emergency-mee_n_394070.html
anybody who wants real health care reform should follow suit and oppose this giant giveaway to wealthy insurance execs that doesn't help the people of this country.
Who is your insurance provider currently?
As I understand the current state of play, we willstill have a mandate and a "non-discrimination" rule, which more or less abandons any pretense that insurance is about managing risk (which is to say, that it's actually insurance).
In other words, we're eliminating the rationale for the role private insurance companies play in our system, but insisting that it continue to revolve around them and, even better, handing them an enormous subsidy.
But we've eliminated the counterweight [the "public option"] designed to check costs, because that part, according to a logic I completely fail to fathom, is especiallysocialist.
What's remarkable about this is how naked and brazen it is. That is, I can't come up with any remotely coherent pretext for thinking this particular policy combination makes sense. Which isn't to say the same system with the public option was much more coherent.
Contemplate how extraordinary that is: There's almost always at least some fig leaf of an ideological principle or an economic argument strung up in front of even the most naked interest group grab.
But nobody seems to be even pretending this compromise amounts to anything but an open bribe to the very insurers whose existence it renders unjustifiable.
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2 009/12/15/reverse-stone-soup-saves-lives /
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myDD - skin
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