Ah…well, I’d be fine if my take home was about the same, if that’s how it works out. i.e. if I’m currently bringing home around $4.5k a month paying $1100 in taxes and it winds up with me bringing home $4.5k a month by paying $1700 in taxes then all well and good. Bring it on. Heck, I’d be ok with bringing home around $4.3k per month for similar health care if it meant basically universal coverage. Bringing home $3.9k a month however would kind of be a bit much for me and probably a lot more folks to swallow.
I believe Taiwan in the mid-90s. They did a huge project of examining all the healthcare systems out there for cost, efficiency and what kind of problems each might lead to.
The way I read the post, his taxes pay for everything. Infrastructure, education, healthcare, military defense, welfare, pensions etc. Offhand, I think pensions are generally the biggest outlay of most governments.
Canadian public healthcare spending is about 3700 per Canadian. US public healthcare spending is 4500 per American (2014 numbers). So about 18 % below. And that is just the government spending.
I’m not American. I’m from Norway. I make roughly 100 000 $ in Norway, depending on the exchange rate, and pay 25 % tax on that income. Local and national. That covers healthcare, infrastructure, police, a pension, education through university for me and any children, a years total paid leave for each child, any unemployment benefits I might need, military spending, firefighters, snow removal, the lot. (Except water/sewage. Go figure)
If he is spending 1700 per month on taxes, that is over 20 000 per year. To me, that seems way way too much money to be going just to healthcare.
[QUOTE=Grim Render]
The way I read the post, his taxes pay for everything. Infrastructure, education, healthcare, military defense, welfare, pensions etc. Offhand, I think pensions are generally the biggest outlay of most governments.
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Sure. My taxes also pay for everything…that’s my point. If you combined my taxed AND what I’m currently paying for healthcare, plus my social security AND my pension it comes out to $1100 a month right now. That covers both my local And federal tax btw. Plus my own employer actually taked 10% out non-voluntary for our pension retirement package (we still have to pay social security as well). All that combined along with my portion of what I pay for healthcare comes to $1100 a month. Now…if we are taking what my employer also pays for their portion, giving that to me in increased salary then taxing it, and if my take home pay remains essentially unchanged (or even goes down slightly), it’s all good. That might be where the disconnect is for me. My assumption was that if I go from paying $1100 in taxes to $1700 that would be $600 a month less in my pocket. But if I am given a ‘raise’ of, say, $500 a month then my taxes go up $600, I’m only out $100 a month for my take home…and, at least for me, that’s do-able.
I think we are talking past each other here. I don’t think either s/he thinks that all $1700 of their taxes go to healthcare, nor do I. Taxes go to a variety of things. The comparison, however, was between what the poster is paying for taxes including healthcare and what I’m paying for taxes, which also include healthcare (and in my case I bundled in everything basically, including my pension and SS/medicare which I pay on top of what I pay for all the rest).
Yep. Just keep the ACA text verbatim, and call it the Totally Responsible Universal Medical Provision Act. Or, the TRUMP Act.
But remember your paystub doesn’t list all of the taxes you pay. Different jurisdictions have different taxing schemes and also provide different services, and that makes it difficult to compare. I live in the US and checked my paystub - $947 income taxes and $323 for SS and medicare and another $208 for my health insurance - for a total of $1478 per pay period( and I don’t overwithhold to get a big refund). That doesn’t include the at least $12K my employer pays for my health insurance. Or my deferred compensation contributions. And BTW, that’s on a barely six-figure income, not a high six-figure income. But my city has an income tax in addition to the state income tax , low real estate tax, no school tax ,no personal property tax and I do not pay separately for services that some jurisdictions don’t include in their taxes (like trash pickup or firefighters). So for you to compare my taxes to yours, it would take more than just looking at our paystubs (is your property tax higher than mine, do you have to pay separate school or library taxes, or subscribe to a volunteer fire department or trash pickup service, etc)- and the same is true when comparing one country’s taxes to another’s. Between my taxes and my share of my health insurance- I’m paying more than Grim Render- but just going by what he mentioned in his post, mine don’t pay for a college education or a year’s paid leave for each child.
As others have noted though, our taxes in the US pay for what is doubtless a slightly larger military than Norway…
They do- but that’s also part of what I meant by it’s not enough just to look at the paystubs.
I’m in the second highest tax bracket, and have very few deductions, being single with no kids. And that $1700 a month is for all my income taxes, not just health care.
Yeah, Canadian taxes are higher than the US on average, but I’m probably at an extreme compared to most people. You also have to consider that a person with a family that has the same overall income as I do actually gets a double bonus: lowered taxes due to additional benefits, plus, their healthcare cost isn’t scaled according to the size of their family. A single person in the US might be able to get away with a minimum-cost, minimum-benefit plan, but would that work out so well with the typical 2.3 kids type family?
Looking around, I found this:
So the average cost to the workers directly is about $440 a month. That’s an average, so of course lots of people would pay more. So if I was paying that out of my pocket, my taxes would likely be about $1250 a month or so. Higher, but not ridiculously higher. Add in the Employer costs, and health care alone is almost the same as all of my current tax burden.
But this also doesn’t take into account deductibles and co-pays. My deductible is $0 for doctor, emergency room and hospital visits, as well as for blood tests, ultrasounds, X-rays, CT scans and basically every other test I’ve ever had done. I’ve got a co-pay on my prescriptions, but for most drugs that’s less than $10, often less than $5, for a two to three month supply. I do have one drug that is $80 per month, but that’s an unusual case.
On the whole, I suspect I’m getting better value for my money than the vast majority of Americans.
I had an emergency room visit this past summer, while visiting a friend’s campground. I had pain that I thought might be a kidney stone. Literally, my only concern was if I could find the hospital in a town I’d never visited before. No worries about costs, or if the doctor/hospital was in my network. No debating if I should get the tests the doctor wanted. No bills for the drugs they gave me at the hospital. Show up, deal with it, go back to the campsite. That was the whole day.
How much extra is that worth?
The dog that caught the bus might not actually have the votes now that it’s real, and not just for headlines.
Not enough votes for Repeal and Delay, but that’s a good thing, since it was always a terrible idea.
But, that’s going to require bipartisanship, unlike repeal and delay.
If you want to pass it with 60, sure. But they can do a lot through reconciliation too.
BTw, one smart move is that they are keeping the Medicare cuts. Since those are just “savings” and do not impact benefits at all, honest to goodness, there’s no reason not to keep them.
You can’t create a new law without 60 votes.
Harry Reid demonstrated that those sort of requirements aren’t set in stone.
What did Harry Reid do that created a new law?
Reconciliation can be used to change budget outlays or other matters affecting the federal budget. For example, increasing tax credits to buy health insurance on the exchanges, closing the ‘donut hole’ in Medicare prescriptions, and committing the federal government to cover the full costs of Medicaid expansion through 2016 were all changes wrought by Reid’s use of budget reconciliation, but none of these created new programs. Medicare, Medicaid, and the exchanges were all in existing law (ok, the exchanges were in a law that had only existed for a week, but it still existed), and reconciliation merely changed the amounts allocated, or how the amounts were to be determined.
To create an entirely new program, though, how would you use budgetary reconciliation?
ACA exists, you just alter the parts that have budgetary impact to make what is almost an entirely new law.
That doesn’t get you a “we repealed the ACA” checkmark, though–that’s just tinkering with the hated Obamacare instead of getting rid of it.
Are you fucking shitting me? You’ve got to be fucking shitting me. Have you ever needed medical care, or had a family member who needed medical care? Because that must have never happened, if you can believe what you just wrote.
Again, have you ever had to navigate the so-called “system” here in the United States? Because a wonderful feature of our system is you can never, ever, ever be sure what something will cost, and who will be stuck with the bill, until after you spin the wheel. Oh, that’s a pre-existing condition. You needed approval for that. That was out of network. Not covered under the silver plan, you should have got the platinum plan. You didn’t fill in the correct form, and now you have to pay the whole bill. We reviewed the files from three years ago and you actually owe us for that procedure you had that you thought would be covered.
Again, we already have Death Panels, they’re just insurance company bureaucrats. Try negotiating with them, and see how fucking far you’re going to fucking get.
ACA passed 60 to 39.
If that’s how you want to spin it, you can certainly do it that way. However, repealing ACA in its entirety has never been realistic due to the 60 vote rule. But Republicans and Democrats alike still consider it effectively repealed if everything that it does that has to do with federal dollars is erased.