I don’t see how that has anything to do with what I said.
Well, I don’t want to turn my small comment into a massive thread hijack, so I’ll just agree to disagree. To me, if you deliberately don’t do something, then you can’t honestly say you wanted to do it.
I don’t know about the “many” keeping employer sponsored insurance as a retirement benefit anymore. Even so, those that do, often have HMO plans that have a fee schedule lower than Medicare and therefore do not pay that 20% but leave it to the patient. Which means, Medicare is primary, pays its share and the private insurance pays nothing while still collecting the premiums. Perhaps a start would be making Medicare secondary in every instance where there is another policy in place that isn’t a Medicare supplement.
Thanks for the info on the CHIP program. I will pass it along.
No, that’s not more accurate. The whole “taxation is robbery” or “all taxes are collected at the point of a gun” attitude is bullshit. If you (or anyone) really feels that way you’re free to move to Somalia or go live out in the woods somewhere. But if you want to live in a civilized, democratic society and enjoy all the benefits thereof you have no basis to complain about taxes. That’s like going to the a store and complaining that you have to pay.
Well, when you are ready to talk about the millions of people who cannot afford health insurance, come back and talk. That is the problem, not stubborn twenty-somethings with money but no responsibility.
I could support Paul’s position IF basic insurance and health care services were very cheap. 25.00 a month to cover you and no more than 100.00 for an ER visit? I’d have little pity, but that simply isn’t the case. The costs are rising at a nearly exponential rate and I’m not seeing anything done about THAT. If we don’t have the collective nuts to corner the drug, medical, and tech industries making whopping profits off this then I don’t see how we can justify letting people die because they are poor.
I meant you don’t know where the money you give a private company goes, although your concern for the working conditions of trash truck drivers and lettuce pickers is noted.
What I meant was: are they giving their employees livable pensions ? Decent health coverage ? Are they instead tossing them out on their ears when someone has a work accident ? Are they forcing them to work unpaid OT ? If they were mandated by the government to pay their lettuce pickers 40 bucks an hour, would you know whether they did just that or hired illegals instead ? No. No you wouldn’t. Probably don’t much care, either. Especially if it means you get cheaper lettuce. Everybody’s got their own problems.
Which is why it’s better to have all that stuff handled in the open, by a government the public takes part in, with money direct from the public’s pocket. Then by some miracle, you *do *care !
OK, so you don’t care in the right way. It’s a start 
Ah, I see. Since you pay taxes you can sleep just fine at night on your money bags. Fuck everyone else who is not helped by your taxes. Did you know that the money you pay for internet service could feed a family of 4 for a month in some poor country. That extra degree lower you set your thermostat at night could have paid for a vaccination for some poor kid in Africa? How do you sleep?
You assume, like many others here, that if the government doesn’t do it then it won’t be done. This is incorrect and, I would argue, the reason people don’t donate more to charity. Granted, Americans donate an assload to charities but I wonder how much more they would donate if, like you, they didn’t feel that their duties ended with the payment of the tax bill.
The point I am trying to make is that people can cheer a reduction in government spending for any particular welfare program without actually wanting people to suffer. The Left has done such a good job of demagoguing the issue that many believe any resistance to an expanded welfare state means that evil people want to, as you so eloquently put it, sleep on their money bags instead of helping those in need.
No, that’s not it at all. It’s not that it won’t get done, it’s that the government can do it in a way that comes closer to being fair and universal. It’s not some utopian ideal or anything. Of course government run programs can screw up and be inefficient, but so can corporations or other private organizations, but at least the government programs are accountable.
Take roads for example. Sure, if the government didn’t build them, someone probably would, and a lot of people would probably pay to use them. And it might even be cheaper by some metric. But if a company doesn’t think they’ll make enough money to build a road to some podunk town in the middle of nowhere, they won’t. And then do you think police or firemen (assuming those haven’t been privitized as well) will want to drive out there on some crappy dirt road? Trucking companies certainly aren’t going to want to send their trucks out there either.
This actually came up in the recent thread on the post office. If UPS (a private company) doesn’t feel like delivering to a particular address, they just slap some stamps on the package and hand it off to the post office (a government program) who is required to deliver it. Whether that constitutes a government subsidy of a private industry is beyond the current discussion.
And if you want to argue that government programs and/or taxes directly affect charitable donations, you need to provide some data. Do donations fluctuate in inverse proportion to tax rates? Were charitable donations as a percent of GDP higher in say, the 19th century, or in other countries with fewer government programs? Do people give less to charity as their income and therefore tax rate increases? How much do you, personally, give to charities, and how much more would you give if your taxes were lower?
The problem isn’t that people are too cheap to buy insurance. That’s just ridiculous. The problem is that health care is so expensive. If someone is comatosed for a long period of time, their bill isn’t going to be something they can even dream of paying without assistance. It’s going to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can’t possibly save for that.
“Affordable” is a term that requires a definition. I can afford to drive a Lexus, but then I wouldn’t be able to save any money at all–to me, that’s living above my means. But technically a Lexus is “affordable” for me. When I was right out of grad school and making $32K with no benefits, I made enough to buy insurance. But I wouldn’t have been able to save any money while still paying my bills. That’s why it wasn’t affordable to me, even though on paper it was.
I guess I could have given up the car? Or moved out of the Hammocks to Liberty City? Or lived on prison lunches? Not bother saving anything? Yeah, I could have done those things, but I probably would have been more miserable than I ended up being. And being miserable is not good for your health.
I remember reading very recently about how little of each dollar given to charity actually ended up doing it’s intended purpose. So much went to salaries, overhead and whatnot. IIRC, it was more about money going for research and not about for helping individuals.
Does anyone have data about whether government or charity is more efficent about its use of resources?
Do you see this as a bad thing?
Certainly the case when the charity turns out to be a scam and the money is diverted by the execs - which is what happened in the late 90s with the ARC, the main French cancer research organization/charity/NGO. Very prestigious, had spots on TV all the time… until the day it was discovered that its founder & CEO had been embezzling donated money to a staggering degree.
The financial inspectors were first tipped off by the fact the organization declared it spent 72% of its income in overhead & publicity and only 28% funding actual research. Presumably non-shady NGOs are more balanced - said CEO tried to claim they actually did 45% research.
He got 4 years in the pokey (did 2, then got out on health grounds) and a multi-million francs fine, the ARC lost all its credibility in one shot. In fact, up until I looked it up on Wiki to get my figures straight for this very post, I could have sworn it had closed shop there and then since it so completely dropped off the radar.
There is no free market. Insurance rates keep going up because they have no competition and no regulation. There is no way around their high prices and rescission. Odd .that insurance is all the same isn’t it?
Stock Portfolio & Tracker - Yahoo Finance Here is an example. What do you do? Go to another insurance company/ Sure thing, once you are on the shit list, you are through. Of course if they were really competing. a case like this would have other insurers jumping at a chance to sell her insurance. But there really aren’t any. They share info, have the same prices and divide the customers up so they don’t actually have to offer better coverage and better treatment of their customers. That is America today.
Also what if they bought insurance, but not quite enough? You are assuming that you buy health insurrance and you are covered, period. That is not true.
You could have thought you were covered only to find out differently when you are sick.
What if you get injured in a car accident by a person with no insurance?
Leave it to charity? That’s a stupid system. Charities can discriminate. We’re a Christian Charity, We’re a Jewish Chairty. etc. The government can not. Of course the government standard on how poor you have to be before you can get the help you need from a system you’ve been paying into for decades is ridiculously low.
i’m a bit concerned about the people at the debates. they cheer for the texas death penalty and now going with the “die quickly”. it is a bit mind boggling.
Two weeks ago my daughter went to the ER with God’s Own Seizure. No insurance because we don’t qualify. We had just paid off her last visit a month ago. I consider myself heartless because my tears were both for her and wondering how we will pay for her treatment, especially the CT scan. I wish this pain on any parent who thinks that the gap between insurance provided by an employer and Medicaid is a happy place.
If Blitzer had a pair there should have been a follow-up question “What if it was a woman and her name was Terri Schiavo.”
If only for the pretty pictures the heads asploding from the cognitive dissonance would have created.
CMC fnord!
This is the NYS rate schedule for a crappy HMO plan
If you had to insure your whole family excluding adult children you’d pay about 46K a year.
Here is the rate schedule for a better plan, still not great but better
If you had to insure your whole family excluding adult children you’d pay about 72K a year.
With rates like this how could any middle class family choose not to buy insurance?
The problem is a for profit health system. Since we have accepted that the prime directive of a corporation is to maximize profits, however they can, you have to expect gouging and abuse. They are not in the business of providing healthcare to as many people as they can ,for as low a price as they can. It is to make it as expensive as they can possible get away with. That is what we have.