Absolutely. They will price their plans below cost, and that will trigger the bailout. Raising rates will be ruled out because that will be “unfair”. This is the camel’s nose in the tent, as I have said, and they will do all they can to get the rest of the camel in. And camels are ill tempered smelly beasts, that you don’t want in your tent.
That may be misleading. I heard on television sometime in the past couple of weeks that when you exclude homicides and car accidents from the numbers, that the U.S. is one of, if not the highest in life expectancy. (Sorry, no cite.)
Well, that’s a comforting thought. We’d live longer if we weren’t all being murdered.
No, it’s quite simple actually because you’re talking apples and oranges. There is a considerable difference between someone making a supposedly factual claim that 36 countries have better health care than we do (a claim that is almost certainly the result of pro-government health care bias) and the perfectly obvious fact that technology has produced diagnostic and treatment equipment (and medications) that are all all very costly to utilize.
As far as (c) and (d), that goes to what I said above: insurance companies are not going to price themselves out of the market. If they could provide their service for a lesser price I’m sure they’d do so. They are no more eager to go out of business than any other company and I’m sure they agonize over the ramifications of it everytime they have to raise their rates.
Sure. Private industry is not benevolent and, unlike the way liberals tend to look at government, no one regards it as such. However, private industry has checks and balances that do not exist when it comes to government. There is competition from other companies and there are contractual obligations that can result in lawsuits and sizeable penalties for noncompliance. Government, on the other hand, can do whatever it wants and people have no recourse.
I know this wasn’t addressed to me but I thought I’d offer my .02. If Obama can’t give a reasonable explanation for how the plan will be paid for, it causes me to wonder why and to wonder how he knows he can be paid for the way he thinks.
I also disagree with the meme going around that the system sucks and has to change. I think the system is pretty damn good and serves seventy to eighty percent of the population very well. I am not inclined for a moment to think it would be better to replace it with a system that will eventually provide long waits and mediocre care for everyone and whose only benefit is that the twenty to thirty percent who currently don’t have coverage will gain it. As I said above, most of that twenty to thirty percent don’t even need treatment at any given time anyway. Why not a plan for those who need care when they happen to need it, and leave everyone else alone?
False premise. I don’t believe anyone has said that peoples’ fear or concern about change is Obama’s fault.
In the first place, tax cuts are not ‘paid for.’ This is a liberal meme that presumes entitlement services anyway and that if taxes are cut the revenue must come from somewhere else. The idea behind tax cuts is to stimulate investment and production, and to reduce spending. Liberals, viewing the U.S. as a huge golden goose who can never run out of eggs they way they always do, think the idea of cutting spending is ridiculous, especially if businesses (gasp) benefit. Somehow they never seem to realize that business actually, you know, employs people and provides livelihoods, as well as economic growth.
And in the second place, the war was not only viewed as necessary and a good thing, but temporary as well. In other words, the money being spent on the fighting in Iraq is not money that is going to be spent in ever-growing perpetuity by a deeply entrenced government beaurocracy.
Such a plan is generally know as “insurance”.
Or who perhaps has a century of government behavior to act as a guide?
Oh, no! Mrs. Smith, I didn’t mean it. I know better, I was just in a hurry. (Besides, you should have seen what it looked like before I ‘corrected’ it. :D)
That did it. She jumped.
No, I’m talking about some sort of after-the-fact program, similar to the way we provide foodstamps for people in time of need, that will provide for care for the few out of the 20 to 30% who aren’t insured at the time they acutally need care. It would be far cheaper, IMO, to provide care for them than to try to insure the entire population segment who is currently uninsured, and it would allow the 70 to 80% who already have good coverage to retain and to keep their care out of the hands of government.
Maybe not. She must be over 115 years old by now. Perhaps her legs just gave out.
RIP, Mrs. Smith. I loved ya. You really made reading come alive.
It’s not at all obvious to me. Could you give me some specifics? Some procedures that used to be cheap but are now really, really expensive?
I’ll dig up the cite if you insist, but right now, there is a virtual monopoly (or at least an oligopoly) in many states. Obama called out Alabama specifically. In such a situation, where one company provides 95% of the insurance services for a given locale, it’s impossible for them to price themselves out of the market.
That’s so adorable!
Er, except you in the last sentence did just that.
Or, to put it another way, we’re only talking about 60-90 million of the 300 million in this country. No big deal. :dubious:
This must be another one of those “perfectly obvious” facts. I know you’re going to point to Canada as a cesspool for health care, and I’m going to point to a dozen other countries that demonstrate the opposite, so if it’s all right with you, can we just pretend we already had that discussion?
I’d love a system like that – I only pay for insurance when I need it. The only way I can think to implement such a system is to allow me to purchase insurance retroactively, i.e., I don’t have to carry insurance now, but if I get into a car accident, I’m allowed to start a policy after the fact and get everything covered. You on board?
And it’s a good thing all the troops are home, precisely by the deadline that was set by George W. Bush, a man whose farsight was so uncanny, it has led many to dub him a Prophet.
I simply must be missing something here, otherwise, this is pefectly ridiculous.
You are suggesting that people who have no health insurance go to the doctor when they are sick and the government pays for it.
In this way, we avoid the dreadful prospect of them going to the doctor when sick, and their insurance pays for it. Because if the government pays for the insurance that pays the doctor, thats expanded government, but if the government pays the doctor, that isn’t.
Huh?
Your political philosophy veers dangerously close to the shadow realms of existential speculation, tiresome thoughts about whether existence precedes essence. (Well, of course it does, tres duh!…but I choose to digress…)
There is no such entity as “government”, it does not exist as a discrete thing, having a nature that can be observed and ascertained. The government of Sweden is nothing like the government of Myanmar, Robert Mugabe is nothing remotely akin to Barrack Obama. Saying that both share an essential nature is like saying a gorilla is the same as a mouse because both have fur.
I didn’t say things used to be cheap and are now expensive. I said new technology and equipment are expensive.
Well, I’m sorry but that just isn’t so. If you charge people more than they can pay, you price yourself out of the market. The companies you mention may have a lock on which insurance companies a person can use, but that would avail them little if they charged so much that most of their current customers had to drop them.
And besides, since when has monopoly been justification for government takeover? Normally monopolies are broken up and forced to accomodate competition.Why is government takeover appropriate in this case but not, for example, in the case of AT&T?
I can tell you why: it’s because government health care is your goal and this monopoly is the excuse you’re using to justify it.
Why not? I’m pretty adorable myself.
No I didn’t. Insurance companies don’t try to keep their rates down out of benevolence, they do it because of competition and other financial pressures.
The figure I’ve consistently seen bandied about here is more like 50 million. And again, the vast majority of those people aren’t in desperate need of medical care, they just don’t have coverage. And I’m not willing to sacrifice the excellent coverage that 70 to 80% of our citizens have already to a substandard system whose only strong point is that is offers insurance to a huge group of people who aren’t currently in need of it.
Works for me. Most people already know about the wait times and financial pressures that are already plaguing nearly every one of Europe’s national health care systems anyway.
That’s not what I mean. I’m not suggesting insurance when needed for these types of people, I’m suggesting the government pay for their care outright just like they do with food stamps when people are in such dire straights that they afford to buy food. My belief is that it would be cheaper to set up standards by which people in dire straights can obtain the care they need at the time they actually need it, and then when their circumstances change they no longer qualify. This is something I just came up with off the top of my head though and it may not be workable, but it shows that alternatives exist that should be explored rather than just turning everything over to the government to administer and pay for.
When Iraqi war spending continues to balloon over the next eighty years or so like Social Security has, then get back to me.
The speech was just kabuki theatre. It’s so Obama supporters can watch and believe he really does want a public option and so won’t give him so much of the blame when the inevitable cave-in comes.
Ah, yes, I remember that you ran away from that discussion in the pit.
And then adding the fact that underinsured Americans are now going around the growing waits to see their doctor by going to the ER, then I have to say that our waiting times are not something to crow about.
Yep, provided they meet certain standards in terms of neediness and the care they require. I’m suggesting something along the lines of the food stamp program, only with regard to health care. You’ll notice that the government hasn’t attempted to take over administering everyone’s nutritional needs, and a health care system along the same line could assist people who are temporarily in need of health care without having to finance the cost of providing insurance and/or treatment for everyone.
That’s right. The government isn’t controlling the system for everyone. It is merely paying to provide care for on an as-needed basis for the segment of the population who lacks other insurance. You’ll notice that not many conservatives view the food stamp program as Big Brotherism, but they certainly would if the government was trying to take over administration of the country’s food supply.
Indeed you do.
Funny, you seem to think that insurance companies are entities that have a nature than can be observed and ascertained, so why not government? The fact that our government is different than Sweden’s is no more germaine with regard to the existence of government as an entity than is the difference between me and Michael Jordan as people. We are different in the way we go about things, but we are people nonetheless and as such we have observable and ascertainable characteristics in common. Governments are the same way, and there is no question that one can look back at the way our government has operated with regard to social programs over the last 80 years and extrapolate from that the way it is likely to behave with regard to a government health care program in the future.
Hey, now, its only about 20 to 30 percent, that is definitely a “gentlemans C”, maybe even a B minus!
You keep bringing up this idiotic argument, but I’m at a loss to understand why. Yes, people without adequate insurance may decide to go to ERs and take advantage of the fact that the federal government has mandated hospitals take care of people while at the same time making no provisions for payment of their care. What does that have to do with the virtual lack of wait times for the 70 to 80% of the American population that has good health care coverage?
Anecdotes are not data.
Once again you are grabbing cases that are not common, unless you can show that many in Canada want to change their system to what America has, you have only a red herring argument.
And you are only running away from the evidence.
Funny, they seem to be data when the subject is in favor of his country’s national health care system.
They were common enough that a provincial Supreme Court in Canada ruled that exceptions can be made in the case of ridiculously long waits and that in those cases private care for conditions covered by the Canadian system (care previously outlawed) must be allowed.
Bullshit. I don’t have to show that they want to change their system to ours or anyone else’s. All I have to show is that their system sucks and that we stand a very good chance of having the same suckage inflicted on us once we put our government in charge of our health care.
Yeah, right. :rolleyes:
Archer Daniels Midland loves the food stamp program So does Cargill, and General Mills. Their compassionate concern for the nutrional needs of the poor continues.
But anyway, the Starving Artist Plan. The government will pay the health care costs for the uninsured. When needed, right, none of this staying healthy stuff? Just when they are absitively posolutely gonna die sick? Rather shortsighted, don’t you think?
And whats gonna keep people writing checks to the insurance industry for seven, eight, nine hundred a month? Surely not another government agency, poking its nose into people’s affairs?
You sure you’ve thought this through, General Custer?
Well, then, aren’t you obliged to explain why they don’t want to change to our “system”? If, as you say, the suckitude is overwhelming, then either they are desperate to adopt our mediocre system, or they are incredibly stupid.
Which you don’t want to say, you live north, you meet some Canadians, and they are even more volatile and tempestuous than Minnesotans. Think Yosemite Sam in mukluks. Itchy, irritating mukluks.