On my dime? Because they can’t be bothered to live within their means? Which is what it boils down to - instead of buying a private policy, these people choose to spend their money on something else. Somehow, somewhere down the line, people have gotten the idea that no matter how poor they are, they deserve the “American dream”, right now, whether they have come close to earning it or not. And the handwringers support this idea by continuing to petition the taxpayers to give the “poor” more and more.
I have no idea why those 38% don’t have insurance, and your rather biased cite doesn’t say either, just that they can’t get it thru their employers any more. That doesn’t mean they can’t get insurance.
Thats … scary.
Yes it isn’t just the poor that can be irresponsible, but it is them that you all want me to cover with my taxes, not doctors in La Jolla.
So, then, buying a house wasn’t exactly a good idea was it? You think it responsible to put all of your money into buying a house on the assumption that you will be able to continue to work for the next 15-30 years? Or maybe it might be smarter to wait until you have savings/investments/whatever that you could fall back on to pay the mortgage? How much could the mortgage on a $330K house be that they got so far behind so fast that they face foreclosure?
See above. Just because they cannot get group coverage thru an employer doesn’t mean they cannot get insurance at all.
They don’t? Then who is it that is driving this desire to fund health care for those who cannot get group employer coverage?
Look at it this way. A family disaster could be because Dad got squished by a car. In California we are required by law to carry car insurance (or prove we are rich) or we don’t drive. Noone steps forward and hands those who cannot afford car insurance money to go get a policy, noone petitions for the government to socialize car insurance. Why the difference with health insurance? You aren’t worried about the individuals, you are worried about the “families”, which means the children. Fine, make a law that you cannot have children unless you have health insurance. Problem solved.
I didn’t say they didn’t try these things, I said it was illegal for them to refuse to cover something that is in the policy. As for you 50,000 anecdotes, I imagine that one of the things that insurance companies count on is that the masses are asses.
I’m 51 and oh, yeah, those two things really go together… :rolleyes:
They do cover the indigent, which is what you said.
Mexicans do not all currently live in California. If we have free health care for all, we are going to be covering even more illiterate, unskilled people whose church tells them to have babies by the bucket load. Fun times.
Ah. OK, so there is another reason not to be self employed, or at least not running a business so small that you cannot qualify for a group policy.
You could at least come up with a realistic example. How often do you think folks are bankrupt by medical bills because two people in the family came down with expensive diseases at essentially the same time?
And even if this does happen all the time, how does it become my responsibility? Why am I to pay to make sure that you don’t lose your house? If you all keep upping the taxes, I might lose my house and quite frankly, I am more concerned with that than your house. You chose to have a kid, you chose to have a “decent nest egg for” your age and income, whatever that means. But if the chips are down, I’m supposed to pay your medical bills?
It must be refreshing to latch onto a little rhyming phrase that you can repeat over and over again, freeing you from the burden of thinking.
My point was that intelligent people can have basic misunderstandings. It pays to question your stances and check with experts. Your gut intuition about how the healthcare industry works may not be right. Just because it *seems *to you like adding people couldn’t possibly be cheaper doesn’t mean that’s the case. We pay twice as much per capita as the next closest nation and ignore 1/6th of the country and under-insure millions more. The way we do it has tremendous waste and inefficiency. The market doesn’t work for medical insurance.
If your health care would definitely stay the same and would cost you no more than you are paying now in premiums (although the cost might be in taxes instead of going to an insurance company) would you be for UHC if it covered every single person in America, even the poor and masses of asses as you like to call them?
Or would the idea of someone getting free medical care upset you so much that you would deny it to spite them, even if you would get the same coverage for the same money?
It’s on your dime already. strassia mentioned the hospital jacking up fees for people who can’t pay. As has been cited many, many times, in the US we are paying more taxes for healthcare than Canada as well as our own money. You like paying more?
As for buying a private policy, surely you as a former professional know how much they cost. Cheap ones have high deductibles also. You think the kind of people working jobs without insurance can afford these? Your welfare Cadillac stories went out with Ron. If the American Dream means a family being able to take their kid to the doctor and still eat, I’m all for it.
My cite does give the number of people without any insurance. The point of it was to give the number of working people who didn’t get it from employers, and contradict your assertion that all they have to do is find a job with insurance, as if jobs without were rare. Does it seem fair to you that those making good money also get employer paid insurance, while those making bad money have to buy it for themselves?
Why? I think this kind of thing is pretty standard these days. It is much better to pick and choose, after all. It also keeps younger people from gaming the system, while still letting them pay less than I do.
and the poor can be responsible also - just poor. Or working poor. Why are you assuming that anyone without insurance is irresponsible? Maybe they are unlucky. Maybe they aren’t smart enough to get good jobs, and the concept that full time jobs should pay livable wages is not popular with conservatives these days. Lots of people are in trouble because they lost their jobs due to illness.
Who, besides the rich, have savings that can pay a mortgage without working? Who doesn’t buy a house under the assumption that you’re going to be working? Plenty of people here didn’t buy, because for the past 8 years house prices rose faster than any savings, and they got further and further behind. Not to mention that in most cases houses get bought with baseline money and get paid off with inflated money after career advancement, and so are a good deal.
And if you have a kid when you have insurance, and then lose it, do we throw the kid down a well? Plenty of people drive without car insurance, I ran into one 10 years ago. The difference is that it is cheaper, it is only needed for people who can afford a car, and is somewhat voluntary, unlike getting sick.
If the insurance company suddenly inherited the advantages of 1) a very large insurance pool (entire population of USA) and 2) the progressive tax income of the country which includes enough wealthy people adding extra money to balance out the less taxes from the poor… then sure it could afford it.
Apparently it is freeing you from the burden of thinking so I’ll write out the whole thing. A big number, maybe a majority, of those 50,000 folks didn’t get whatever benefit they were supposed to get because they didn’t have enough brains to figure out their coverage. Insurance companies are not going to chase these folks around trying to give them money.
OK, then, prove to me that it would cost me less to be paying into an insurance policy where hundred of thousands of the participants are not paying any premiums. Except, you can’t because so far no expert has come forward with a plan that will do that, otherwise we would have UHC already. Your gut intuition that this is a really great thing that won’t add to my tax burden may not be right either, ya know?
I’ve already said that if such a thing were possible, it would be fine with me. My position is that there is no way that the US government would be able to pull that off - either it would cost more or the quality of care would drop.
I see. My desire to try to hold on to what little we have left translates into this to you? Interesting.
Again, it cannot be proven that UHC would be cheaper for me. Do you really think that hospitals would drop their prices? As for us paying more than Canada, I imagine we end up paying more for quite a few things than they do. Shall we socialize all of those too?
Oh, so now health care is only important if someone else pays for it? Anyone who has to choose between being able to take a kid to the doctor or feed it shouldn’t have had the kid in the first place. Yeah, I know, horrible idea but this idea that anyone and everyone should have as many kids as they want whether or not they can afford them is reason 1,243,903,703 that taxes keep going up and up.
I went to one insurance company site and found that I can get a policy for just under $400 a month for my husband and myself. It has a high deductible but if something serious happened, we would be covered. Don’t have $400 a month to spend on insurance? What is this person doing with a car, a kid?
Life is not fair. If a person doesn’t work in a field that has jobs with employer provided insurance then they will have to buy it themselves. Just like those jobs that don’t provide a company car, the employees have to buy their own. Or the jobs that won’t make you rich means you won’t be able to buy the things that rockstars do.
Must be a non-west coast thing - I’ve never heard of a group coverage that you have to pay for.
I am not assuming that at all, it’s just a conclusion you leap to because I’m not falling all over myself to throw what’s left of my money away. I have said that there will be times a responsible person needs help, but if you start digging into these stories you’ll find many many irresponsible ones. The ones that buy the new cars, who have herds of kids they can’t afford, drop out of school to start working, blow their money on drugs and on and on thru the stupid things that people do.
You don’t need to be rich to plan ahead and have savings! Is that what is wrong with this country? No one saves? My husband and I were both unemployed from 3/1/08 to 11/1/08 and we weren’t even late on any of the mortgage payments. Now granted our mortgage is only $1800/mo but that is because the husband has owned this house since 1984 and we have only taken equity out of it once, to do renovations. This meant that with the lower than average payment I didn’t have to use all of our money in the savings account and didn’t touch any of the non-liquid stuff at all.
We also don’t have credit card debt and both of our vehicles are paid for. We just don’t do the “buy now pay later” thing, because there is always a chance that we wouldn’t be able to pay later!
As for buying a house under the assumption you’re going to be working, that isn’t what I said.
Don’t really care what you do with your kid, it is your responsibility not mine. If you have a kid, you jolly well shouldn’t be expecting someone else to take care of it (and you) should something happen, such as losing a job that provides cheaper insurance.
People do drive without insurance but it is still illegal which indicates that that state thinks that it is very important that drivers carry insurance. Its generally cheaper to get auto insurance because drivers are generally less of a risk than people who get medical insurance. Having children is totally voluntary.
Hell, if the rich were taxed at the rate the middle class is we could afford all kinds of things! However, why is it the responsibility of the rich to take care of the rest of the world?
Once again, no. For one thing it really hasn’t been proven that if you dropped Germany or Canada into the US and made them pay our prices for things, that it would actually be cheaper. For another, noone has really said how those UHCs get paid for - is it just the premiums or are other taxes going to it? They do pay more taxes over there.
And, those other developed nations installed their UHCs years, even decades ago. With all of the private and government insurance plans we have running around here now, it is highly unlikely that a UHC could be installed anything close to cheaply.
The well to do can try to make all the rest forget that the rich also have to suffer life, but it is a tale that us not working as well nowadays.
Taxation is set that way because the rich use a bigger chuck of the infrastructure of America to continue being rich.
However, I see health care as part of the infrastructure and ignoring now that America is losing jobs nowadays because of the current health care costs is being reckless.
The U.S. isn’t an aristocracy, so a person doesn’t gain wealth without social opportunity.
The richest Americans are direct beneficiaries of an advanced civilized society that provided well funded public education, exceptional universities, courts, contract laws, research, public libraries, and highly developed markets. Someone like Bill Gates would not have enjoyed the same opportunity or great wealth in a developing country. Therefore, people who benefit the most from society have a greater duty to maintain that society by paying taxes.
I’m aware of that, and usually I refer to university as “post-secondary.” If you scroll up some you’ll even see I made specific mention of this earlier in the thread. The reason I said you can’t opt your children out of primary education is because in most states around High School age your kids can stop going to school and avoid running afoul of truancy laws.
As for home schooling, you’re still being required to educate your child. Until a certain age you have to give your child some form of education (whether it be home schooling or public schools or private schools) and you don’t have the option of outright not educating them. Furthermore, whether you home school your child or not, your property taxes are still feeding the public school system. There is generally no opt out of payment for public schools and there’s no opting out of providing the “educational service” to your children until at least around age 16 or so.
You could have just decided not to spend all your savings on the sick person.
Uh, Paris Hilton? Or any of the others that just inherited their pile?
Simply because a rich person might have gone to public schools or used a public library doesn’t mean they are required to be responsible for every other person that comes after them, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we should keep raising taxes until there are no poor people left, because that is simply impossible.
In the real world, I’m all for trying to get the rich to pay a bit more in taxes in order to lighten the burden on the middle class. In fantasy, I’d rather that the government learn to use what they already have in a much better, more efficient way. Socially, I’m tired of people demanding that those who have should hand it all to those who don’t. Sometimes I think the goal is to make everyone equally poor!
Liquid assets are often invested, & private wealth can therefore grow into private income. Simply abolishing the capital gains tax & treating capital gains as regular income would bring in a lot of money from the venture capitalist subclass, without having to work out a wealth tax, per se.
And while we’re advocating policy changes, we certainly could have a small wealth tax for say, ‘net worth > 1000 x mean net worth.’
The difference is that it is cheaper, it is only needed for people who can afford a car, and is somewhat voluntary, unlike getting sick.