I’m actually agog. I’ve been pondering how to respond to this all night and I still don’t know. You referencing David Cay Johnson, whose whole body of professional works stands behind the things that I usually talk about- how the complex and unnecessary bureaucracy and overabundance of unneeded regulations give ample opportunity for rich people to game the system in their favor-I’d be less surprised to see the Devil quote scripture or Marx reference Freedman. After thinking about it, I think I may have come up with a response. I decry the system that allows this to happen, while you decry the people who use the system to their advantage. What they do is perfectly legal (heh), so if it’s a problem, shouldn’t the laws be changed to prevent it? In a broader view, what rich people do is no different than what unions say they do for their members (in my experience, unions work for THE UNION, individual members be damned) or what the NFIB or the NASE does for me, a self employed person. They all try to influence things to their advantage at other people’s expense. We all get back more than any of us put in, that’s the problem. Why should the people of Tennessee think that screwing the people of Kentucky out of money to benefit themselves is a good idea? That’s the pork game, and it hurts all of us. I don’t blame rich people for trying to tilt the playing field their way, why shouldn’t they? We do. Government takes and takes and takes far more from successful people than they ever get back. OTOH, Government takes and takes and takes far more from everyday working Americans than we ever get back. Where does it end? Other groups do the same thing every day. What’s the difference? It still seems to me that what you decry is that some people have resources that you or I don’t have. OK…like I said before, so what? As long as I have the resources to support my family, why should I care? I disagree mildly with some of Johnson’s conclusions, most especially with the idea that it’s somehow “right” for rich people to give up a greater percentage of what they earn, but he’s spot on about the problems inherent in the system. The solution is not more of the same, it’s less. A simpler, broader playing field where each one of us contributes about the same, proportionality, and then goes about our respective business. What I said was true: 5% of us pay more than half of the tax revenues collected from all of us. So what if they try to limit it to that, it’s more than fair as it stands. To my mind, that’s more than doing their share. Asking for more is nothing more than pure class warfare, jealousy and raw greed.
You’re not making any sense. Answer me this one question: What is different about health insurance from everything else? Health insurance isn’t “inherently unprofitable”, that’s absurd. Your big canard seems to be that health insurance only makes a profit at the expense of health care. You keep repeating it like it’s an unquestioned statement of fact when it’s anything but. If I run a health insurance company with 100 clients, who make an average of $1000/ year each in claims, which I pay, and my operating expenses to administer the policies are $20K per year and I charge each one of my clients $125/month for this insurance then I make a profit of $30K each year. Why is this so hard to understand, and what’s wrong with that? Seriously, what is wrong with this scenario? It seems to me that you are operating from a false premise. The market works for car insurance, homeowner’s insurance, flood insurance, life insurance and disability insurance. It works for TVs, radios, boxes, q-tips and beer. It works for cars, tractors, trucks and widgets. It works for books, cups, vacuums, lumber and dolls. It works for computers, refrigerators, carpet, paintings, doors and cigarettes. What is it about health insurance that makes it any different?
OK, Dave, it’s not good for everybody. In the same sense that incarcerating rapists is “not good” for the rapists, taking money away from the richest 5% to distribute among the rest of us is “not good” for that 5%. But it is “good” for 95% of us; & the basic structure of our economy is so “good” for the richest 5% that they can buy capital & make even more money, so it balances out. Besides, they’re the richest 5%. They aren’t exactly starving, are they?
What right do “you”, “me” or “us” have to any more of their money? They’re already funding half of “our” spending, by what agent do you think we’re entitled to more than that?
Actually, if your beloved President Obama takes office, and runs this nation into the ground as he says he plans to, I have far, far more confidence in my ability to come out of it in good shape because I have several things that you utterly lack: Honor, integrity and a work ethic. Be the good lapdog that you are and slurp up the scraps that your masters deign to toss you to keep you quiet you dishonorable parasite. After your wife dies from the lack of care a socialized system imposes, and America comes to it’s senses and throws Obama and his fellow thieves out on the street things will improve. There’s a difference between people like you and people like me. People like me always look at the situation and adapt to it as it changes and through our intelligence and hard work we prosper. People like you…once a sniveling worm, always a sniveling worm.
Dies from lack of care…stop making shit up you fucking idiot. Far more likely under the sickening for-profit ‘healthcare’ system currently running. The only thieves here are people involved in the health insurance industry. People like you…once a fucking sociopathic buffoon with no respect for human life or dignity (unless they can afford to pay), always a sociopathic buffoon.
There is a fundamental difference between people like you and Fear Itself. You’re a complete cunt and he isn’t.
But you’re pretty fucking stupid, won’t that be a hindrance?
You’re a tough guy on the intarweb mister Dave. Pity you’re such a fucking cowardly, unpatriotic lump of shit.
Because you simpering fucknugget, that profit of 30k a year makes it inefficient. That means that the government could charge 30k less and for the same coverage.
For someone who wants to suck the market’s invisible dick, you sure don’t understand much about it.
Businesses want to maximize profit. Insurance companies maximize profit by limiting payouts or increasing rates. Or both. They will and do try everything they can to save a buck, including denying care.
Look, I suspect that your mom was involved in a drinking contest with a Samoan powerlifter during your first trimester, but try to massage your spiderwebby brain meats into something that allows coherent thought and get back to me.
This.
The fucking insurance vampires maximise profit by denying, by reducing. They profit from the misery of others and every motherfucker involved with them is a worthless piece of shit
So, you read Johnston (notice the proper spelling of his last name, btw) and then cherry pick the parts that support your premise. In seriousness, since you recognize that the system is broken and unfairly gamed by the rich, WHO THE FUCK do you think has the wherewithall to keep it broken? Don’t you get that the poor have no leverage in changing the system (apart from trying to vote in people who will actually fight for them)? In terms of paying for favoritism and access and power to maintain the broken system, obviously only the rich can do so. There is a clear and stark point at which your thinking is shattered. (Plus, you seem to fail to recognize the irony of Johnston’s use of the title Perfectly Legal.)
You also seem to regard the rich as a group that has somehow come to America from somewhere entirely removed from us - perhaps some other planet. They’ve generously bestowed upon us some of this extra-terrestrial wealth and we have the temerity to just take more of it! No, the wealth that they have is generated by BEING PART of the system. They have benefitted by the American system to the point of being dramatically wealthy. They have an obligation to ensure that the American system which they have benefitted so greatly from continues to function well, don’t they? Isn’t it only just that they do so, so that future individuals have their shot at taking advantage of the benefits of being American and becoming wealthy as well? Or would it be more fair if past individuals had, say, taken the opportunities America presented for them, sucked up all the resources America had and kept all of that to pass along to likely indolent offspring? Sometimes I think that non-wealthy conservatives would like to have been serfs.
In short, it is my turn to be agog that someone could read and appear to be supportive of Johnston’s books, and yet come away believing in the inherent right of the wealthy to use their wealth to the detriment of the American way of life.
Nobody with any integrity would say such a thing.
You don’t know anything about this, do you? First of all, you can’t run a health insurance business with 100 clients - five of them might have bills one year for $10K, and wipe you out. The more people in a pool the more efficient that pool is, so a pool of everyone under UHC is going to be better than the split up ones we have today.
Second, your proft is $300 per client. In your scenario of healthcare this low, don’t you think that more people would be able to join the system at $300 less a year?
The difference between healthcare and those other things you mention is that a kid without a doll might cry, but a kid without healthcare might die. More likely, the delay in seeing a doctor will make the government funded treatment more expensive. Your profit costs me more taxes, or a bigger deficit.
I’m going to try one last time. As irrational as you people are about profits, don’t you see that the same limiting factor on the government is budget? Whatever budget you provide for health care ( and we’re talking truly staggering numbers here, we would have to double the entire federal budget just to fund the current amount of care administered in this country ), demand would soon exceed it. That’s a basic law of supply and demand. Since an unlimited budget is impossible, at some point you are going to have a government bureaucracy denying or limiting care. It occurs in every single system with UHC, it will occur here, and people will die because of it. Tell me, oh champions of the great and compassionate hand of government, how that is any less “immoral” that what you’re railing against private companies for. Remember, if private companies deny coverage unfairly, you have the right to appeal to your state’s insurance commissioner who can make the company pay (no matter what RNATB says, I confirmed it with the MD Insurance Commissioner’s office personally). When government denies your care…where do you turn then?
Oh, and Lobohan, you completely ignored when I posted earlier that these same things, denial of coverage, happen just as frequently when the insurance companies in question are not for profit agencies. How do you explain that?
Really? You think I’m making shit up? Hmm. Maybe you should go to Oregon and ask Barbara Wagner and others like her.
Link
What is the Oregon Health Plan you ask? Why, it’s the plan that the government of Oregon provides for people in their state. Now I’m not aware of any private insurance companies that pay for suicide but not care. There may be some, and if there are I’m sure you’ll provide a link, but until then…yea, I stand by “more likely to die”.
But it is. That’s how capitalism works. When money is hoarded, either with government or with a few chieftains of commerce, then capital generation becomes impossible. Wealth can’t be generated without money moving from one source to another.
You’re right. The insurance companies will happily pay for neither care nor assisted suicide.
To what are you referring here, because I cannot fathom your meaning. This sentence is quite simply factually incorrect - most UHC systems around the world function quite well. Please clarify.
Our health care system is the most costly while achieving only mediocre results. Only a desire to pass more wealth to insurers could make anyone supportive of it.
I used to work for United HealthCare. A certain number of people will just pay claims if they are denied. So you deny claims - not all of them, just some of them. Sometimes, when they call you say “oh, miscoded, talk to your doctor” A certain number of people won’t bother to follow through with their doctor to argue over it. The overhead in Doctor’s offices is high just so that they can get paid.
You also drop doctors during the middle of someone’s treatment plan - now they either have to switch doctors to stay covered, or pay out of pocket.
Its a horrible industry that - at least at UHC - is making a few people very wealthy by denying covered treatment - in addition to the other things that they do.
There were some good people working in the executive offices at UHC trying to do the best within the system they had. But they were the exception to what was functionally an organization that tried to be as profitable as possible - and I think was (at that time, I haven’t worked for them for ten years and McGuire is out now) corrupt.
Yes you make shit up to support the unsupportable. Just ask the estimated 26000 Americans who died early deaths in 2006 due to not having insurance. Or the ones who have lost everything they ever had trying to pay the bills. You support that system. You are vile. Absolutely vile. You have all the human grace of a cockroach. Although perhaps that isn’t fair to cockroaches. You think it just fine to let people die, to let people lose their life savings and go into perpetual debt - so long as somebody is making profit from it. Pondscum is of a higher moral order
Weirddave,
The government can afford to charge less than the private sector because when expenses are more than income with the government they can just print more money to cover it. They don’t need to worry about having extra money in investments to cover when a large amount of people have large claims like a for profit (or not for profit) private company would.
They will also save a lot of money by limiting what they will pay for prescrition drugs. Canada does this and saves a lot of money. But since we are the ones that pay for new drugs to be developed not those countries that limit and disallow the drug companies to recoup R&D costs there will also be a big savings with no new drugs to look at for anything.
You are no worse off than I am in regards to public health care. Canada spends 6.8% of their GDP on public health care, and the U.S. spends 6.9% of their GDP on public health care. In other words, your taxes are no higher, and you have the exact same ability to pay for private insurance and, presumably, get your wife’s operation in two days as I do. The difference is that (depending on the nature of the operation), the fact that you chose not to buy/could not afford private insurance didn’t prevent your wife from getting the operation.