The Bomb Buried In Obamacare Explodes Today-Hallelujah!

Is that correct? I know anesthetist ( anesthesia nurse practitioners) make around 150K and my cousins are who are anesthesiologist make much more than that. I've seen numbers for GPs much lower than that also.

 

Those are national average. Higher number in particular cities lowers income, etc. etc.

Essentially depends on what state you work in (tort reform/etc.), urban vs rural, academic vs private, and whether you take medicare/medicaid patients or not.

 

Without massive government intrusion we wouldn't be slaves to insurance companies in the first place.

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Yes, let's do for child care what we did for health care

By: A. BARTON HINKLE
Published: November 29, 2011


Nancy Pelosi once had trouble finding a babysitter. So her aspiration these days is "doing for child care what we did for health care reform" — pushing a comprehensive solution. In fact, it's not just an aspiration — it's at the top of her agenda.

This sounds like an absolutely wonderful idea. But if "we" really are going to do for child care what we have done for health care, the U.S. will have to take some intermediate steps in order to replicate the experience faithfully.

(1) First, the U.S. should create a labor shortage by launching a major war and drafting men and women to fight.

(2) Then it should impose wage and price controls, as Washington did during WWII, to prevent employers from bidding up the price of labor. (That would further drive up the prices for war materiel, which would be costly and inconvenient to the government. The Emergency Price Control Act of 1942, for instance, stipulated that its aim was "to assure that defense appropriations are not dissipated by excessive prices.")

(3) The president — Barack Obama, presumably — should then establish a War Manpower Commission with the power to forbid people to change jobs, as just such a commission did during WWII. This will prevent individuals from skirting around the wage controls by quitting one job to take another that pays more.

(4) Practices such as these will encourage employers to compete for scarce labor by offering non-wage benefits. During WWII, employer-provided health coverage was one such benefit. It is reasonable to assume employer-provided child care would be another one today.

(5) To facilitate the spread of employer-provided child care, Washington should grant it preferential tax status, as it does with health care. The IRS should back this up by declaring that child-care benefits do not count as wages.

(6) To further ensconce the third-party-payer system, the National Labor Relations Board should declare, contra the IRS finding, that child-care benefits do count as wages for the purposes of collective bargaining (just as it did with health coverage). This, combined with the favored tax status, will encourage labor unions to push for extravagantly generous child-care policies for current workers and for pensioners.

(7) Washington then should enact two major new entitlement programs akin to Medicaid and Medicare, guaranteeing government-funded babysitting for the poor and elderly. Washington should produce wildly low-balled estimates of the future costs of such programs.

(8) While all this is going on, the states should impose complex bureaucratic oversight of the child-care system — especially a "Certificate of Need" program through which bureaucrats, rather than the free market, would decide whether new child-care facilities are needed and may be allowed to open. That way, existing child-care facilities will have government allies in their attempts to limit competition that might hold down costs.

(9) Likewise, professional child care associations should lobby Congress for market-entry barriers requiring providers to obtain highly restricted licenses for performing even the most mundane procedures.

(10) Meanwhile, politicians at both the state and federal level should propose a host of various mandates on employer-provided child care — requiring such programs to pay for trips to the zoo, cultural institutions and parks; to cover weekend child care for romantic parents' getaways; and to cover full-time au pair services for parents of children with special needs. This will help drive up the cost of insurance even faster.

(11) As the share of GNP devoted to child care begins to spiral out of control and the government assumes control of 50 cents out of every child-care dollar, liberals and progressives should argue that this proves the current free market in child care doesn't work, so the government should stop sitting on the sidelines and step in to fix everything.

(12) Ideally, the stepping in would consist of a complete government takeover of child care: a single-payer system in which the government does all the child care in the country, and nobody else is allowed to.

(13) Short of that, Washington should pass legislation forbidding providers to turn anyone away, and requiring all Americans to buy child-care coverage — whether they have children or not. This should be part of a massive child-care overhaul that will drive costs up even further and prove equally untenable. Then the country can go back and try Step 12 — and we will all live happily ever after. Right?

 

Gleefully trumpeting the crashing of an industry that employs thousands of workers is something you don't see every day.

Thousands of people who've made a career out of selling insurance, administering claims, enrolling groups, working with brokers, handling continuing education of people on the sales and management side of insurance, etc. are going to see their career paths crushed.

Small Employers who relied on brokers to handle a good chunk of their HR administration and deal with insurance issues are going to have to pass more work to already overworked "HR" people or actually hire one to begin with.

 

yeah, this will make the insurance industry crumble.

that and nice way to move the goal posts

 

How so? Govt. intervention has nothing to do with what drove health care prices up.

 

Um...what goal posts did I move?

From the article itself:

The article celebrates the potential death of large parts of the industry.

And anyway, what goal posts are there to move at this point? The law is in effect.

 

Quite sad when one's entire political philosophy can be summed up on bumper stickers.

Despite the moniker, I take it that you're not known as a deep thinker?

 

the law doesn't "CELEBRATE" the death of jobs, and the goal post is being moved from intending to streamline healthcare to intending to kill jobs.

 

I didn't comment on the law, I commented on the article that was posted in the first post in this thread and the tone of the commentary that followed.

Maybe you missed the first post?

Edit: I also didn't move any goal posts regarding the "intent" of the law.

 

you're being dishonest

the intention isn't to celebrate loss of jobs, its intended to celebrate a fairer system. the article isn't celebrating a loss of jobs but rather better access to care.

 

No, I am not. You are being pgabs, which is worse than dishonesty.

The death of large sections of the industry is what the author wrote and celebrated. Specifically citing how the industry would not be able to operate under the ratio rules that will be in place and how that will kill the industry.

I don't care what you say about "intention," that is celebrating the loss of jobs.

 

so stating a fact or prediction is celebrating

I predict everyone will die at some point in time.

 

You would think they would be insured for just such an occurrence.

If an industry has profited on the suffering of others, I have no problem seeing that industry crumble.

I'm not necessarily saying that is the case here, but...

 

Without quoting all of the article again and leaving it to just the article, you tell me pgabs, is this a celebration or a mere "stating a fact."

You left off the hallelujah.

 

It's too bad we aren't crumbling the hospitals, doctor's offices and pharmaceutical companies. Do nurses, surgeons, pharm reps, ent docs, shrinks etc. profit on the suffering of others?

 

again dishonesty, the hallelujah is for more affordable healthcare and you know it. i like you as a poster but every once in a while you delve into troll trash and this is an example.

oh this article is about better healthcare access but its celebrating job losses. whatever dude. have a nice a day

 

Literally? Yes, they do; but in a whole different way than the insurance industry. Agree?

Let's tackle one problem at a time.

 

This article is not about better access. It is specifically about this portion of the bill blowing up the industry.

He even leaves open at the end of the article whether this will ultimately be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective. The VAST Majority of the article is about how the industry will not be able to operate under this code.

I'm sorry you felt the need to call my posting troll trash. I think you are simply wrong and I actually find myself offended that you are calling me dishonest (weird) and troubled that you seem to think an article that barely mentions whether this will be good for access to care is actually about that instead of the death of an industry which it spends the bulk of the time discussing.

 

the article is about more affordable healthcare which provides more access by making insurance companies spend more on healthcare and not other expenses.

thanks, i read it