Those aren’t murder, they’re justice.
The whole health care reform thing scares the shit out of me. I work in the health insurance business (specifically Medicare) and I pray everyday that this “government takeover” of health insurance doesn’t cost me me my job. My biggest worry was that we would have the “public option” to compete against. I’ve heard Odumbo say over and over again that it wouldn’t effect anyone who already head insurance, but I don’ think he realizes that most insurance companies can’t compete against the goverment. I work for the third largest health insurance company in Western New York, but we are non-profit, which makes our profit margins wafer thin in a good year. If there was a public option that we’d have to compete against, we wouldn’t survive.
Well that’s what you get, isn’t it? Gonna have to be a people greeter at wally world now.
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To make a real post, there was a pretty cool rider attached to the bill that I 100% support:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/the_student_loan_reform.html
The student loan reform
Attached to the health-care reconciliation bill is a major reform of the student loan program. The easy way to explain this is that the current student loan program is both about education loans and corporate welfare. To keep rates down, the government guarantees these loans, which means that lenders get paid back even if the students default. Which means that the lenders aren’t really serving any purpose.
Cutting them out will save taxpayers more than $60 billion over the next 10 years, with most of that money slated to go to Pell grants. Past attempts to reform this program have been blocked by a mixture of Republicans and Democrats with big lender companies in their states. But as Jon Chait says, “the fact that this is a straight majority vote means the usual coalition of every Republican plus a couple Democratic shills won’t be enough to stop it. This would be a major advance for the cause of good government reform.”
Not that this will go much further in bringing down the cost of college, but it will definitely help some students in the bottom half
Obama’s claim is very misleading. The instant an insurance plan needs to be renewed (often every several years), there is a “new plan” subject to the new rules. The moment an employer wants to alter the type of insurance it provides, there is a “new plan” for all employees, subject to the new rules. You can grandfather in an old plan, but it is not likely to last long.
My main complaint about the health care overhaul is its one-sidedness: it ensures better coverage, but does little to cut down on wasteful spending. It ignores tort reform and moral hazards, which are the primary factors in why health care consumes more of the GDP every year. We want doctors to make decisions on what tests to run on patients based solely on their medical expertise. Instead, because doctors fear multimillion dollar medical malpractice tort claims, they run every feasible test on every patient, then charge for those tests. Tort damages have increased tremendously in the last 40 years, to the point that they distort doctors’ incentives away from practicing good medicine toward self-protection. Tort reform would fix this. Plaintiffs would be free to collect compensation for every dollar of actual damages suffered. Their additional damages for “pain and suffering” would be capped at, say, $250,000 – a pretty nice sum.
Democrats claim that limiting damages would prevent medical malpractice victims from recovering sufficiently. But nobody wants to limit compensatory damages, which pay for all the harm done to victims; only the supplementary pain and suffering damages. In truth, the new laws lack tort reform because plaintiff attorneys are among the few rich, reliable campaign donors that Democrats have. Plaintiff attorneys get paid contingency fees based on the size of recovery. Democrats appease plaintiff attorneys by ignoring tort reform, despite the wasteful incentives for doctors that current tort excesses create.
The moral hazard problem stems from a tax issue. Both employers and employees can fully deduct the cost of employee health insurance. Nobody is taxed for it. This avoids the taxes the employee would pay on his salary. For example, an employee wants $15,000 of health insurance. An employer could pay the employee $100,000, of which $25,000 (25% of $100,000) might be taxed away, and the employee would spend $15,000 on insurance, leaving $60,000. Or the employer could pay the employee $80,000 plus $20,000 in health insurance, of which $20,000 (25% of $80,000) would be taxed away, also leaving $60,000 – but giving the employee $20,000 in benefits, rather than $15,000. Obviously, the taxpayer will take the employer insurance and its better coverage, since he’ll be left with $60,000 either way. The effect is that taxpayers subsidize employer health insurance at the expense of other governmental services. The biggest losers are the unemployed, small business employees and independent contractors, who pay taxes to support excessive employer health insurance, from which they do not benefit.
Once an employee has this extensive coverage, he has an incentive to take advantage of it as much as possible, getting prescriptions for every minor cold, getting chiropractor appointments for mild back-aches, getting prescription sunglasses, and so forth. This is true even if he did not want those extra benefits enough to pay for them on an open market. The tax deduction basically gives him $5,000, but he can only spend it on goods and services he does not want enough to pay for them.
This moral hazard leads to silly waste. If we want to help unhealthy poor people, we should get rid of the employer health insurance deduction, and use the extra tax proceeds to subsidize cheap insurance for only the needy, not every employee.
Because one man’s mediocre career is clearly worth more than the physical well-being of an entire nation. I say we all rally behind BX and start a petition to get this reform revoked. HOW DARE people who can’t afford health insurance finally get the care they desperately need at the cost of a few useless and defunct insurance companies who have only ever affected most people by flooding airwaves with shitty commercials?
Wait a sec, did you just call him “Odumbo”? I changed my mind. I’m out.
Hasn’t Obama been claiming to help the small businesses which run America? How does what you are saying coincide with that? Sounds like this plan just fucks over the small businesses which are already struggling, putting more in unemployment, no?
The insurance companies still exist. I’m fairly certain Olympia Snowe killed the public option. All this bill really did, besides laying the groundwork towards some other more socialized system of health care, was engage in corporate welfare. All people have to buy insurance. If they can’t afford it, the State will pay for it instead. It was basically a huge bill that says “you must buy health insurance or else you’re a criminal.” The insurance companies will continue to exist and will in fact thrive. Mandating that 33 million (I believe that’s the number) buy insurance will do that.
Also. Death panels.
I still can’t believe the Democrats actually got something done for once (even though it required the political equivalent of moving Heaven and Earth to accomplish that). 0.o
The new laws include a tax credit for small businesses that implement employer health care. This may compensate them for the expenses of setting up employer health care, putting them in the same situation as larger businesses.
Of course, this doesn’t fix the moral hazard problem, which predates the new laws. Tax deductions for health care still mean people will buy more health coverage than they they would buy otherwise. They’ll still have an incentive to exploit the excess coverage for all it’s worth, to get cheap prescriptions for minor colds, massages, sunglasses, and so forth. My girlfriend gets superb health insurance from her mother, who is in a teachers union. She exploits the benefits for all they’re worth, and I don’t blame her. She agrees with me that the benefits are excessive.
I have no problem with giving cheap health care to the needy, but tax deductions mostly help the wealthy, who pay the highest taxes and buy the most health care. If you’re in the 35% tax bracket, and you deduct $10,000 for health insurance, you save $3,500. If you’re in the 15% tax bracket, and you deduct $1,000 for health insurance, you save $150. Even if you (crazily) paid $10,000 for health care just like the wealthy man, you’d still only save $1,500 in taxes. This pointlessly funnels taxpayer money toward rich people with big insurance plans.
Still not buying the moral hazard argument. Not saying it doesn’t exist at all, but anecdotes aside, I’d still wager that the benefits of people going in for more regular checkups would easily outweigh people going to the doctor for every small issue or taking too many pills. Why? Because more severe problems would be caught early on, thereby saving billions in dollars of wasted money spent treating diseases that didn’t have to happen, but did happen because people couldn’t afford to go to the doctor. Since we’re all making arguments by anecdote here, I guess I’ll throw out that I, everyone I know in my family, certainly most of my friends would not go to the doctor much more often than we do now (which is very rarely) even if we had more coverage. Going to the doctor is still gonna suck and be a pain in the ass, in fact probably even more so with the increased demand for services from the newly insured. If I find a lump on my balls though, I’d be a hell of a lot less likely to shrug it off as a zit and get my ass to the ball doctor. I could be wrong about this, but I don’t think there is any stipulation in this bill that deductibles have to be lower either. I believe insurance companies simply can’t turn down patients, but I’d be willing to bet most of these new health care recipients will be stuck in shitty high-deductible plans that only cover catastrophic events. Plenty of people will still be in those plans, just as they are now, in fact more people probably will thanks to the rising costs of health care, and none of those people will be able to “abuse” the system, as you put it.
I have no problem with giving cheap health care to the needy, but tax deductions mostly help the wealthy, who pay the highest taxes and buy the most health care. If you’re in the 35% tax bracket, and you deduct $10,000 for health insurance, you save $3,500. If you’re in the 15% tax bracket, and you deduct $1,000 for health insurance, you save $150. Even if you (crazily) paid $10,000 for health care just like the wealthy man, you’d still only save $1,500 in taxes. This pointlessly funnels taxpayer money toward rich people with big insurance plans.
100% agree. That’s why health care should not be insurance-based, it should simply be a universal tax, and thus the situation would be easily reversed. It would be nice and progressive and scale up according to your income. Also, capital gains (outside of retirement accounts, college savings funds etc.) should be taxed at the same rate. It’s so simple even a dumb American like me could figure it out.
X-wing’s moral compass is such that he thinks people are too soft because they don’t believe in killing living things, but that he is aghast at the thought of a girl being seen by a boy when she is applying make-up. So, yeah, I wouldn’t buy any argument he makes about a moral hazard, either.
explanation plz?
Saying that people will abuse the system is absurd. People actively avoid going to the doctor. The minority of people that would do ridiculous things does not make much of a dent in the greater picture, where drugs will cost tens of thousands of dollars / year to treat people with actual problems.
I don’t disagree with the finer economic/taxation points that were brought up and its not really my field to comment on. However I will point out that its not because something isn’t perfect that people should just raise their arms in the air and give up. The fact that Obama got this far is monumental. I think that finding solutions to the high costs of the medical system in the US is much more pertinent and will have far more of an impact than tax minutia.
I’m making a strawman out of him for the lulz.
Yea I know doofus I’m asking what you’re specifically referring to because I don’t know.
One was in that ridiculous argument where I said gendered bathrooms were stupid, and one of his reasons they were necessary to the moral framework of our society (or whatever stupid argument he was making in response to my stupid argument) was something about girls having to put on make-up in front of boys. The other one is the sort of thing he used to post all the time in threads about politics/vegitarianism/etc.
oic. personally i’m against unisex bathrooms cause I don’t want to see bloody tampons all over the place. Also I kinda agree vegetarians are pussies and our bodies were designed to be able to consume meat, though it does sorta frighten me the kinds of shit and drugs being pumped into all of the meat we consume these days. but oh well, i still encourage vegetarianism because it will ultimately reduce the demand for meat and therefore lower prices for me :adamsmithsmug: