I’m not thrilled about a mandate to buy health insurance, but at the very least I feel a tax would have not been as intrusive or in-your-face as forcing people to pay out of pocket (unless they have insurance through work of course).
Here’s my idea of how, if we have to have mandatory insurance, it should have been done. Have an open enrollment like businesses do. Allow insurance companies to operate all states so people can have a wide range of choices. After the insurance is chosen, take out x amount in the form of an income tax (unless you have insurance through work, or are rich and buy your own out of pocket.)
So, what would be wrong with that? If it’s automatically taken out in taxes you don’t have to worry about yet another bill you’ll now have to pay, and I think, although there will always be people in the middle who will not have enough money to pay for a policy, yet the government will say that they do and fine them for it, it seems like less people would fall into that position if money was just automatically taken out of their paycheck or however they get paid.
So anyway, since forcing people to buy insurance amounts to a tax, why didn’t they just make it an actual tax in the first place?
Because it’s harder to pass a bill with an explicit tax increase in it? And one with a pretty explicit “government-run health care” feel to it?
Of course, once you get into the realm of “pay the government for health insurance” it quickly becomes obvious that just letting people buy into Medicare is a much easier way to accomplish the same thing. Why pay a tax just for the government to turn around and give it to an insurance company when the government already provides the same services (to a subset of the population) with less overhead and no profit motive?
It might have been a good idea, but not enough representatives voted for it. That’s why it wasn’t passed.
Someone could come up with the greatest idea in the history of mankind, but if you can’t get a majority of congressmen to vote for it, it won’t be enacted. That’s just the way things work.
I’m often disppointed in the outcome of congressional votes, but I see no way around this fundamental problem.
It is a better idea (medicare, medicaid, VA, etc are funded via taxes) than the loophole ridden private sector care method of reimbursement. But a bill like that would require hundreds of billions a year in new taxes and that would make it easier to villify and harder to pass.
I don’t know how well the reimbursement method works in MA, but my impression is it has some problems.
This way keeps the insurance companies in the game, and with a wider pool of premium payers, too. It would simply not have been possible politically, given the magnitude of their influence and of their ability to get the rabble roused, to cut back or eliminate their business, no matter that it is far less efficient and far more expensive than a government-run single-payer system would be.
Whilst that’s true in any democratically elected legislative body, it does seem far more the case that your representatives/senators don’t vote for things that make sense disproportionately. Then it stops being a matter of “that’s just how things are” to “this is a fault in the American political system”.
How many bills have fallen to the near permanent filibustering that the Republicans are doing in the Senate right now?
The Pubs are just doing to the Dems what the Dems did and will do to the Pubs when the congressional balance tilts again. It is a fault of the system, but it also protects the minority party from being meaningless.
I just wish they went back to real filibustering. Just saying filibuster is bullshit.
That’s a matter of opinion, and also indicates a degree of presentism. In the 1930s and 1940s the representatives were voting for a lot of things that were quite forward for the time. The political system was the same, only the people were different.
I was talking about now - and if your system doesn’t function NOW then it’s not really much help to say that it did at some earlier point in history. It’s all well and good to say that it’s just the people are different but it’s people that make a political system.
I’ve voiced my opinions before about the limitations of your political system and how little room you have to adapt it when you encounter difficulties, and the response I’ve had in the past is to essentially be told that I either have no understanding of US politics or that your system is special and can’t be compared to anything else. I don’t mean to attack your system particularly, simply point out that from where I’m sitting as someone who works in another government, it doesn’t seem to function nearly as well as you claim it does.