No. But you are saying – or at least broadly hinting – that any instance of any pre-existing condition, or at least any instance of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or heaven forbid adult onset diabetes, will result in automatic rejection for a pre-existing condition.
To my certain knowledge, this isn’t true. We just hired someone at my level, a program director for DOD programs, and as it happens he has high blood pressure. It’s controlled by diet, he hasn’t had any medical visits on it for more than six months, and his insurance came through just fine. I learn this because my mother ALSO has high blood pressure and I was researching at-home blood pressure monitors at work and that sparked the conversation.
Of course, a more serious instance of the malady would be a different story. But the point is: it’s by no means an automatic rejection, and when your side paints as as such, it’s misrpesenting the truth.
Yes. Things cost money. And in the DC area, just to throw a counter-data point, $1700 isn’t even half a mortgage payment.
I am, for all practical purposes, uninsurable. That’s why I moved my family and business out of the USA. I have a pre-existing condition (genetic) that has cost me less than $10K in almost 40 years.
Because of this condition I was declined by every private insurer in my state. Since they can’t reject you on a group plan, I tried that route (my wife and I are both employees of our own company). For the two of us to be insured, the cost was going to be $5,400 per month ($4,700 for me and $700 for her). We are in our mid 30s, don’t drink or smoke.
This is with a $10,000 deductible.
$1,700 for 6 weeks seems cheap by comparison since it works out to $1122/mo.
Needless to say, I didn’t feel $5400/mo was sane, so I left the USA, hired a foreigner and don’t invest anything in the USA any more.
This October my foreign residency will expire and I will then have to move countries every 90 days to avoid being an illegal alien. I did that for several years and while not fun, it beats living without insurance.
And when your side paints it as truth that no matter what…if you try hard enough, and work hard enough and do all the right things you will be forever covered by your “platinum insurance policy” *you *are misrepresenting the truth.
The TRUTH is that most of us in the US don’t have your type of insurance coverage. We aren’t assured of anything upon retirement. We aren’t even assured of anything from year to year. That is the bottom line truth.
So you know one and only one person who has high blood pressure and is able to control it by diet and he got insurance just fine. Congratulations…A director of DOD programs. Why am I not surprised? How does this relate to the average American who isn’t a DOD program level director? Or someone who’s blood pressure isn’t controllable by diet? Or someone with diabetes? Or someone with cancer. Or, or, or, or, or…
So you believe that this reflects the general health, security, and (for lack of a better word) “sanity” of the current health insurance system? Are you arguing that this means no major changes need to be, or should be, made?
Are you sure? It always seems like more of an “ant and the grasshopper” scenario, or “who moved my cheese.” Are they really satisfied or are the “most of us” simply complacent or ignorant. I would argue the latter, and I blamed it entirely the massive amount of misinformation (ie death panels).
It almost seems more like basic human nature. Why make changes if things are okay? Change is scary, change brings unknowns. Will their be rationing? Will a death panel kill my grandmother or mentally retarded baby? Will I get to choose my own doctor? Will I have to pay for someone else care, someone who is irresponsible both in their inability to pay and their poor health choices? Will this make us socialist? Does this mean the communists won?
I love how your counter-date point is to show that housing costs MORE than what was previous quoted. His point was “holy shit health care can cost as much as housing.” And your response was, “nu uh, housing in DC costs twice as much.” Still means health care costs a fortune and is out of reach for a lot of people. Also means that housing costs can make it difficult for people to live.
Oddly enough, during your mental gymnastics you failed to notice that if someone in DC has a mortgage that is twice as expensive, they have even less money to spend on health care. Or if they make the mistake of choosing to spend their money on the ability to stay alive, they won’t be able to afford a place to live. Screw’m
The concept here is twofold: 1.) instead of everyone having to get a group plan through an employer, that would cover them and their family through retirement. You offer one massive, single, group plan for the entire nation. As if everyone works for the same company. Nobody gets rejected, nobody gets dropped.
instead of a fix yearly cost, your premium is a percentage of your income. That way, those that don’t make a high yearly salary aren’t crushed by 50% of their income going to medical expenses.
Right now, health care IS a tax. What’s worse is that it is a flat tax, so a plan could cost $800 a year for a person making $20,000 and for a person making $80,000 and for a person making $800,000. I say “worse” because in percentage terms it is hurting the lower class dramatically more than the upper class. That policy is 0.1% of a rich guy’s salary, but 4% of a poor guy’s salary.
And I know, you don’t like poor people. But there is also currently a corresponding cost for businesses both small and large. So small businesses are CRUSHED by the same flat tax system. As a Republican/conservative that should bother you way more than most things. Why tax small businesses so heavily. It creates a system where a small business owner can not possibly compete with a goliath.
I’m refuting the argument that “most of us” can’t get good health care because it’s crazy expensive. That was the argument until I pointed out the inconvenient fact that the majority of working Americans are pleasd with their health care. The people that aren’t pleased with it tend to be - shocking - the people that want to get it without paying for it, and the people that want others to get it without paying for it.
This is the bottom line. Most people agree that there’s a list of things society should provide to people who are too poor to get it themselves. There is wide disagreement on what things are on that list. This board, being to the Left of mainstream America, has more things on that list, in general, than mainstream America does.
The question before us is simple: does a group-type health care plan belong on that list?
Yes. Except the “work” that some peopel will do for the “company” won’t involve generating any “income” for the “company.”
And again, if their low yearly salary is in fact “zero,” or even “negative,” in that the “company” pays them money because they don’t have any other source of it, the “company” STILL pays for their health care, right?
My father was an immigrant from El Salvador. He came here, quite literally,with the clothes on his back. Growing up, we were poor, poor in a way I expect you think you understand but probably don’t.
But my father’s chief lesson to us was that our poverty didn’t entitle us to demand anything. If we wanted something, we had to work to get it. And when we pointed out that oher kids had things just given to them, he said that that was life.
I don’t hate poor people. I’ve been poor people. And I learned one lesson: the way for a poor person to stop being a poor person is NOT to be given things.
One of many. Small businesses don’t have the buying power. Small businesses don’t have the infrastructure. Small businesses don’t have the depth of talent. Yes, large businesses have advantages. Right. And?
You don’t think $1700/month is crazy expensive? “Most of us” doesn’t just mean Bricker and his coworkers.
Yes, they are pleased with it until they get laid off, or their company goes bankrupt or their company stops offering health care insurance and then they find they can’t afford it or can’t get it at any price. Oh wait, you have the solution:
I guess the Republican Health Care plan really is get sick/die fast. It’s God’s will.
Lots of people within a company fail to generate any income. The entire HR department is simply managing stuff. Engineers build/design things, the sales team sells it, the HR department deals with payroll and harassment complaints. The HR department still gets to be part of the group plan that the company has to provide. Spouses and families get to be included as well, why? They aren’t contributing to the company, by your argument only profit generating employees are entitled to the group plan.
Sure, why not? Perhaps they are doing things like raising children, have a disability, in retirement, or going to school, or are too young to work. It sounds like under your system the only valid members of society are those currently in the work force making more than $50k a year. We could adopt a system where we cull the herd of people that aren’t producing as much as we’d like. Just seems a bit unnecessary. People not currently in the workforce can still contribute to society in other ways.
My father wasn’t an immigrant, and he wasn’t poor. He worked hard to provide a good life for us. The chief lesson he took away from that was that as an intelligent, hard working, white man, he was able to kick in a little extra, to make society better for everyone. He put in slightly more than he took out. But was okay with that, because it means a better quality of life for everyone. We could have walled ourselves off in a self-sustaining compound. But instead we lived in a society with roads and parks and police and stuff. Things we paid taxes for benefited everyone, including us. Now, if you told him he had to pay for a park that his family couldn’t use, he’d be pissed. If he was going to pay into it, he wanted access to it. If you told him he had to pay into a system that provided parks and roads only available to the very poor, or the very old, he’d have laughed and moved to El Salvador.
He was also smart enough to know that he would only be paying into the system for the main productive years of his life. He didn’t pay as a child, or while in university. He won’t pay in when he’s retired. But he was smart enough to know that he got something from the system during those times. He’s well aware of how much medical coverage will cost for him in his retirement, and is happy to have contributed while he was working. His life, and the life of his family, was better because he didn’t worry about medical bills. Looking back on the various health ailments my family has had, we would either be dead or destitute if we had grown up in the American system.
Well, the way I see for a poor person to stop being poor is to reduce the flat taxes that burden them. And to provide ways to get out of the poverty cycle. And to prevent bankruptcies that turn the rich into the poor. One way to stop people from staying poor is to provide adequate medical care for them, their aging parents, and their children. The fastest way to keep the surfs down is to tax the shit out of them to prevent them from ever getting a head. Under your current system, you can easily have people paying up to 40% of their income for a basic high deductible plan.
It’s not about giving to the poor. It’s about not taking from them like a feudal landlord. Leave them with enough to subsist, is that so wrong? Getting the flu shouldn’t be a major financial hardship.
And why burden them further with a flat tax that hits them extra hard. Why have a policy in place that prevents people from being entrepreneurs by locking them in a job for the health plan?
From my perspective, you are proposing a system in which only the rich can get ahead, and anyone below $60k keeps getting pushed down. Everyone pays $10k a year for medical whether they making $100k or $10k. If you ask me, THAT’S how you keep poor people poor.
Almost ironically, my father owns his own small business, and does a ton of work in the US. He his able to compete with larger firms in the US because he doesn’t have crippling medical expenses. I guess that’s another way the US is subsidizing the Canadian health care system.
They are indirect employees. They “generate income” by performing support tasks that allow the direct-billed employees to work and get paid.
Spouses and families are included as an employee benefit. They are entitled to participate by being familly members.
Perhaps they are. But this comes down to the meat of your claim: that society should cover the health care costs of people that raising children, have a disability, are in retirement, going to school, or are too young to work.
Why not? Those people are indirect employees too, they generate income by performing support tasks that allow the direct-billed employees to work and get paid. You draw the line at your immediate family, I draw the line a bit further.
I’ve never once heard a satisfactory answer about how health care is any different from the fire department or police services. You can use exactly the same arguments to deny those things to people who can’t pay for them.
What I’ve taken away from all these endless debates on health care is one thing: It all boils down to people’s gut feelings. It’s just a gut feeling that we shouldn’t have Universal Health Care. It doesn’t matter how many mountains of evidence there is that we could change things so that we can pay less per capita, get the same health outcomes, and cover everybody. For some people, It just FEELS wrong to cover people who are undeserving, and no amount of data can dissuade someone who takes the moral wrongness of UHC as an article of faith.
Unfortunately, 9 times out of 10 you are going to get a response of, “uh, ya, I shouldn’t have to pay for other people’s fires either. Poor people should learn to be more responsible.”
You might think I’m kidding, but there was a pit threat written in satire, to make fun of people that were against UHC, using the fire department in its place. Problem was, the satire was lost on the dozen or so conservatives who thought it was a great idea.
It really all comes down to the fact that a significant number of Americans want to live in self sustaining compounds, paying no more in taxes than is absolutely required for the military to keep the king of England off their front lawn. They will drive on their own roads, provide their own mail service, filter their own water, and bury their own garbage. Everyone not like them is thus a drain on society.
And while that would be fine, they are NOT living on self sustaining compounds, they are driving around city streets, making full use of public resources.
And for some reason, they choose to engage in debate. Which would be fine, if they simply said, “I want to live in my compound…” But instead, they come up with the dumbest possible reasons to oppose things.
Remember the Cash for Clunkers program? It wasn’t a great program, there were all sorts of valid reasons to be against it. But conservatives in unison seem to put forward the most ridiculous arguments (ie destruction of wealth). It took how many pages of debate before someone finally admitted they don’t have a problem with the program, they simply believe that no government involvement should be allowed, and that government spending can’t fix problems. Why not just say that?
I’m not even that big of a fan of UHC. I’d much rather a reasonable private system where I have catastrophic coverage, and new children came with a 10 year warrenty.
But what I hate more than anything else in the world is the bullshit that surrounds the anti-UHC argument. Death panels? Rationing? Having to pay for other people’s health care? Goverment cost overruns? Compete and utter bullshit.
If you simply don’t want to participate in society than say so.
And I think a lot more would be for it if they were actually informed about it. Unfortunately, the American public has been lied to and misled by very prominent politicians on both sides of the isle.
Actually, what you should be mad about is that 60% aren’t even sure what “public option” means, and if it is or is not in either the House or Senate bill.