how does the individual mandate work? can i get some evidence to support your claims too?
it’s not a gotcha or anything - i’m genuinely curious because i thought they worked the mandate as a “you don’t get the tax break” kind of thing.
nm on the evidence - I am reading the actual court filings in the case now.
I know that this is a whole other topic, but it seems to me that the federal government keeps expanding its power the Tenth Amendment has been ignored for a long, long time.
I suspect that one solution would be for the insurance exchanges to avoid ‘adverse selection’ (buying insurance after you get sick or injured) would be to set rates and enrollment periods to encourage people to buy insurance early.
Medicare already does this - if you don’t sign up at 65, you pay a higher rate - forever. Also, you can only sign up during an open enrollment period of a few months each year. Get sick the day after - wait until next year for coverage.
I suspect that both of those would be allowed under the existing bill but congress could also tweak the bill (after heavy lobbying from the insurance industry) to allow time-limited exclusion of coverage for pre-existing conditions.
Not as good as a mandate (from the insurance industry point of view), but they might be able to limp along with it and stay in business for another generation or two.
It will be interesting to watch - the insurance lobby and the tea partiers have opposing positions on the mandate. What is a member of congress to do?
I believe if you want a federally-backed mortgage (or, in practice, any mortgage) and the property is in a flood zone, you need to purchase and maintain the insurance.
Same with home (fire) insurance. Your mortgage likely requires you maintain it, not the gubermint.
True as far as it goes.
For the analogy to be better we’d have to pretend that owning a car was a fact of life. If you are a human being, you have a car.
The fact of being alive means you are susceptible to getting injured. It makes no difference how carefully you live your life, everyone is capable of being injured/getting sick. Most, indeed practically all, people will avail themselves of health care at some point in their life and there is no way to guess ahead of time whether they will need $500 of health service in their life or $500,000.
If that person opts out of the health insurance then you and I are left paying the bill and that person gets a free ride. The only other alternative is to card everyone seeking healthcare and if they cannot prove they are insured (or can otherwise pay) they are turned away at the door and left to die on the street (or more interestingly you can pay (say) $5,000 out-of-pocket and when that is up the hospital wheels you to the street and dumps you on the curb regardless of what state you are in).
Well, like I said, if they actually did a tax I would have no objections. A tax is transparent to most people. Except for small groups of people like the self-employed you don’t really do anything to have the tax taken out of your paycheck or unemployment check or what-have-you.
But with a forced mandate you have another bill to pay. On top of all of the other ones. And they you have to worry about being able to afford it. Oh yeah, the government will subsidize people who are too poor, but frequently, what the government considers too poor, and what actually is too poor are two different things. Then you have lots of people in the middle trying to decide if they pay their insurance bill, or electric, or buy some groceries because despite what the government says, they can’t afford, or can barely afford to buy their own insurance.
True, from what I’ve heard businesses will have to start paying insurance for part time workers, so for a lot of people their jobs will take care of most of it, but the if you get fired, laid off, or switch jobs and have time in-between then it becomes mandatory for you to pay, and that’s hundreds of dollars, even if this plan will lower prices over-all. And will all businesses be required to supply insurance for their employees, or just businesses with a certain amount of employees?
For these reasons and others, I feel that this is too intrusive and in-your-face and will cause financial hardship for the people who fall in the middle of those who can afford it and those who get subsidized.
Let me see if I’ve got this straight: you’re opposed because paying a bill is more onerous than paying taxes?
That’s not the only reason, but it’s one of them.