Sure, if you own property like a house or car. Not just for being alive.
You aren’t forced to buy either of those by the U.S. government. The question of whether or not Congress has exceeded it’s power under under the U.S. Constitution is what the judge ruled on today.
I think it is your mortgage company that requires you to purchase property insurance on your house.
You need auto insurance in most states to OPERATE a car on public highways, not even just to own a car. Though what would be the point, eh? The point would be that it is more or less impossible to use a car in a purely private sense.
The mandated health insurance is a back door tax, but we don’t want to call it a tax, because we want to show that UHC saves money, not costs money. If we called it a tax, it would never have passed. Part of the mass appeal of UHC is that a large number of voters think someone else is going to pay for their coverage, so it will be “free” to them. Most people I talk to who are in favor of UHC, especially single payer, keep on an on about how health care is “free” in Canada and England.
The main problem in the US wrt getting to some form of universal coverage is that we are somehow conditioned to getting stuff for free. We don’t want to pay the taxes to get the goodies we want from the government. And because our currency is the de factor reserve currency we can get away with it, until we can’t.
The only way to get to universal coverage without exploding the cost is to control prices paid to providers. Doctors, pharmaceutical companies, nurses, pharmacists, lab technicians, lab owners, the whole lot. That would be one ugly political fight, as well.
So we have two fights we need to win in order to get what the majority say they want. Higher taxes on SOMEONE and lower incomes for people and corporations in the medical business. We keep trying to finesse this issue, and we keep getting nowhere.
To be more precise, that is one of the few ways to get universal coverage without exploding costs. The others include (a) decreases in overhead costs and middle-man profits, (b) more efficient uses of resources (i.e. treating diseases in the most cost-effective ways), (c) reducing overall consumption of health care (either by reducing demand by making it more price-sensitive or by refusing coverage for certain treatments).
As you mention, absolutely none of these are popular in either the established insurance community or with the general public. The current Act attempts a very little bit of all three, as well as your initial recommendation (in theory the large exchange-based plans can negotiate better prices from doctors than smaller plans can). Ultimately, yes, any workable plan will end with doctors (and specialists in particular) making less money. I don’t see any way around this.
As to the OP, this is a ruling by a district court judge that goes against rulings in similar cases at higher levels. If the circuit court upholds it, then it will likely end up at SCOTUS (which it might anyways). It is altogether unsurprising that there is one district court judge in the country that would rule this way.
I know the left likes to tell themselves this, but I think that’s bullshit. Since 84% of the public was happy with their healthcare before Obamacare was passed, then Obama was trying to fix a non-problem (or as a conservative would say, he’ was using a trumped up issue to advance a socialist agenda).
Either way, it was a problem that didn’t need solving.
And if anyone knows our beloved 4th circuit court of appeals in Richmond, then you know that decision is going to be intact at SCOTUS-time.
It didn’t get through congress that way because it would have been even more blatantly uconstitutional than this kluge was. Direct taxes and apportionment and all that.
Yeah, socialist. Too funny. If Obama were after a socialist agenda, it would have been a single-payer universal plan. This is a big wet kiss to the private insurers.
At least as many people dislike this “reform” bill because it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough to the left as dislike it because it’s too far left.
Basically the whole thing falls apart. If you can just wait to the last minute to buy insurance when you are sick, what is the incentive? What the health bill was trying to do was allow everyone to have the same access to insurance as those who work in a company with benefits. There is no exception for pre-existing conditions in a group plan, and somehow the insurance companies manage to make money.
The 4th currently has 3 Obama nominees, 3 Clinton nominees, 1 Clinton/GWB nominee, and 2 vacancies. What has in the past been a very conservative court is certainly not nearly so conservative anymore.
Either way this will likely be decided by SCOTUS. And if the individual mandate is ruled unconstitutional then the whole new system will likely fail (certainly the pre-existing conditions provision will have to go away or no individual insurance will be affordable) and we’ll be doing this all again the next time the Democrats have a large majority.
To add some fuel to the fire:
Really? It wasn’t a problem that insurance costs are increasing faster than wages? It’s not a problem that insurance is not portable when you lose/change jobs or start a business? It’s not a problem that American companies have to pay more for workers’ insurance than other countries do, making our labor costs higher? It’s not a problem that a major reason for bankruptcy is health care costs?
What would a problem look like.
The US pays far more for health care than any other industrialized country, yet we have worse results and do not cover everyone.
Well, until recently there was no pre-existing conditions with employer group plans as long as you could document that your coverage with a prior plan was still in effect. If not, then there absolutely was for a period of time (used to be 12 months)
No really, the ultimate issue is that medical providers are seeking some kind of abnormally high compensation, relative to the rest of the poplulation, by taking advantage of the fact that most consumers aren’t the payors, and that politicians are happy to mandate coverage for this and that. That is the problem you have to fix. Much of the cost involved in health insurance involves trying to shift costs around, and policing overbilling by providers. Government programs are doing the same thing. Everyone i trying to get someone else to pay. Whatever little cost control there is is coming from the insurers, medicare and medicaid. You can’t really make this work unless there is some kind of monopsonic power. If that power comes from even bigger insurance companies, there will be even more leakage into insurance profits instead of health care.
I’d like to see some politician come out and say that they are in favor of limiting mammograms or prostate cancer treatments, and having a medical necessity review board to determine whether you need that new drug, or are just as well off with the old, side effects be damned. You want to play chicken with the pharmaceutical companies over whether or not you will cover that new drug, you are going to have to be prepared to actually deny coverage to some patient, somewhere, or to simply expropriate the drug. Let’s see someone declare in advance that this is what single payer means.
You can’t get to where Canada, UK, Japan etc are without breaking some eggs. It is just not honest to pretend as if it can all come out of insurance company profits. People don’t believe that line, because they are not quite that stupid.
Really??? Seems odd then that those who are able always chose to come for treatment in the US when they have a serious health issue.
As for the “do not cover everyone” - show me where in the US that patients are denied treatment.
As everyone on both sides was saying at the time, the reform is inherently unstable without that provision. If you can’t force people to buy insurance, eliminating preexisting conditions doesn’t work, because it undermines the entire point of insurance by rewarding you for not buying insurance until you need it.
Personally, I’m glad to hear it got shot down. Providing the same tax incentives for individually purchased health insurance as for employer-funded health insurance would have been my preferred solution, but either leaving it as-is or moving to single payer health cover would have been acceptable. The insurer-fellating Frankenstein’s monster they came up with needed to die.
If its true that 84% were happy with the healthcare system we had then nobody would’ve even tried to pass any reform. The fact of the matter is that that 84% number is spin. Most of the people were not happy with the healthcare system in January 2009. After all the deathpanel nonsense, the number who didn’t want it rose, as did the number who were dissatisfied with the plan because it didn’t go far enough. The Repubs combined the number who didn’t like it - including those who believed in death panels- added that group to the number who thought it didn’t go far enough, and conjured up a fact. IMHO.
This bullshit keeps getting trotted out in every one of these debates. First, 84% aren’t “happy” in the first place. 46% are “very satisfied” while 37% are “somewhat satisfied.” The reason that 83.5% of the public falls into one of those two categories regarding their health care is because health insurers are happy with 83.5% of their customers. I am personally somewhat satisfied with my health insurance (except for the fact that I could get it cheaper with UHC), because other than a yearly physical, I rarely use it. My wife, on the other hand, is not even close to happy, but then she actually has medical needs, which is what the insurance was supposed to be for in the first place. Under a single payer system, both of us would be happy. As an aside, only 67.6% of those polled are using the HMO/PPO system. The rest are a scattering of government programs and the non-insured.
Some of the findings that get left out of the right-wing sites that parrot these numbers are:
[ul]
[li]Pre-existing conditions should not be a factor in rates or covergage[/li][li]The government should spend more on medical research[/li][li]Increase taxes on those making over $250K to help pay for insuring all[/li][li]Charge higher rates to those who smoke, are overweight, and don’t get vaccinations or cancer screenings[/li][li]Bump Medicare age from 65 to 66[/li][li]Cap the price of medicine[/li][li]Standardize medical forms[/li][li]An equal number support and oppose expanding Medicare to families making up to 150% of the poverty level[/li][li]A majority want to have either Medicare for all or a federally sponsored insurance coop[/li][/ul]
I’ve yet to see a poll of how many people are happy with their insurance, but where the only people polled are costing their insurance company more per year than they are paying in. If you find that 84% of those people are happy with the status quo, then I’ll never argue for a single payer system on this board again. You have such a poll handy?
Including link to the actual poll(Warning: PDF) that is the basis for this claim that keeps getting tossed out. The poll has issues, but that’s for another thread.
I agree with both of these points, as well as the fact that the public, by-and-large, aren’t willing to stomach the reality of the situation (primarily because, for the most part, folks get covered by their employer at not-quite-unplatable rates, and the number who get royally screwed isn’t big enough to demand change). However, there is little doubt that having multiple, independent payers does come at a cost relative to single-payer systems (both in overhead and in profit). So saying it all has to come out of providers isn’t correct either.
If the individual mandate goes, however, and costs keep going up and up, something is going to have to give. I guess we’ll see what that is when it happens.
Why does that seem odd? It’s perfectly possible to have an overall poor grade in health care, yet have the capability of doing an excellent job for those willing to pay a huge premium.
Are you serious? Keep in mind that coverage isn’t the same thing as performing life-saving emergency medical treatment. I’m betting your neighborhood neurologist isn’t going to see you without insurance or money.