(09-11-2014 07:35 AM)Machiavelli Wrote: Gentleman,
You are going to pay for it here or there. The people who were propping up the system before were those who themselves were sick or those who had family members who were sick and when you talk about MediCaid. Those guys had the gold card. So let's say you did have a debilitating disease. Do you purposely go bankrupt?
We need to put a national sales tax together. Charge 1% for health care. If the right really wanted to get creative you would find a way to tie it in with a VAT and try to eliminate all income taxes to 15% or there about and up the VAT.
Now let's go back to 2009. It's always better to be in the room making decisions than on the outside bitching about decisions. You may not get what you want but you can influence it. Your party tried to tank it. That will have proven to be a colossal mistake. Mark my words. Mark it DOWN!!!!
Yes. Step number one SHOULD have been total honesty and transparency about what was happening. We should have either implemented a new tax as you describe, or simply increased the medicare tax rate. Instead, we got this whole... it IS a tax, it ISN"T a tax shell game from a President who promised to be transparent.
Step two should have been to increase the supply of healthcare by increasing funding for residency slots through Medicare, as opposed to shifting hundreds of billions of dollars AWAY from medicare. Its a bit of semantics (the shifting of the money) as the power to spend was merely given to a DIFFERENT (and new) government bureaucracy as opposed to the existing one... and lord knows we need more bureaucracy.
Step 3 would have been to direct some of this 'new' healthcare supply to the poor by offering incentives to doctors to provide care to the less wealthy in exchange for tuition credits or business loans.
Democrats want to try and argue that people against Obamacare are against more/better healthcare for everyone. That's a lie, and merely an attempt to shift the focus away from the fact is that despite spending trillions, Obamacare doesn't create more or better healthcare... It merely shifts around the existing healthcare, which by definition is good for some and bad for others. They trot out those for whom it is good, and dismiss those for whom it is bad. Obvious obfuscation... ESPECIALLY in that for many of those for whom it is bad, they are healthy young people who are paying for FAR more healthcare than they will use... and they argue that this is somehow 'good' for them. .. to steal from the Farmers commercial... they are paying to insure a Lamborghini, but they drive a Honda.
This is actually quite a common tactic in politics... You write a bill that doesn't help people... and then accuse the other side of not wanting to help people... and then when they point out that the bill they are against doesn't really help people... you claim that it was really their idea in the first place and/or trot out a few anecdotes.
Healthcare reform COULD and SHOULD been completely transparent. Instead, it is an absolute quagmire of immaterial measures of success (the number of people complying with the law and/or taking the free handout) and stories of 'winners' in a zero-sum game.
G-man, you're right that it isn't really a zero-sum game overall... but healthcare delivery essentially is. By that I mean, we're merely providing one group of people with more/better care by taking that care away from another group. We aren't producing more or better healthcare. What MAKES it NOT a zero-sum game is that we are paying far far more in aggregate for healthcare (because while the rate of increase may be slowing, it is impacting 100% of people, including those who are healthy and didn't have insurance before... and not just the insured or sick as it did. I don't know the specific numbers... (how many people use virtually no healthcare) but a 3% increase on 100% of the population is equal to a 3.33% rise on 90%. You 'decrease the rate of inflation' merely by applying it to a larger population.
