I can sympathize. The point about arguments about whether some people can get away with not paying the tax / fine completely misses the issue about how do we close the gap on insurance.
So you admit that your post was not factual? Why would you post something that isn't true? We get the government out of it and leave health care and the markets to bring down prices. We sever the tie between employer and health care. We let people opt out of government programs then eventually abolish them. But instead we have a tyrannical government imposing fines for (certain) citizens not spending hundreds of dollars on a particular product. So hopefully the government will be completely in charge of your health. Wonderful.
I'm glad you are having to now pay your own way. I'm tired of supporting you and your free-loading friends.
Huh? That is a wonderful fantasy but you do realize that health care can't respond perfectly to market forces because you can't comparison shop when you are having a heart attack. The market works well when you can have open competition. Health care can never work that way because emergency services cannot be provided solely on the basis of competition. Now I will agree there are a lot of things that can be done on the basis of market competition, such as immunizations and most preventive care. I think the Walmart clinics are a great step in that direction but that doesn't address emergency care. The only way you can address emergency care through a market is through insurance. The problem with that when it comes to health care is that for the insurance market to function profitably they will need to be able to determine who they sign up, who to drop, and when to deny care (ie rationing). Again health care doesn't work that way because doctors and hospitals are ethically and legally bound to provide emergency care whether or not someone has insurance or not. The only way to deal with that is to mandate that insurers expand coverage and to mandate that more healthy people get insurance. This increases the risk pool that insurers can draw from. What you don't seem to get about the ACA is that it isn't government in charge of your health since they are still relying mostly on private health insurers to provide the insurance. Yes you are now required to buy health insurance but frankly it is very irresponsible of you to not have it already. While you are argue about your lazy friend possibly leeching off of the system under ACA you completely ignore the fact that your lazy friend already can.
I do pay for my own insurance and pay for my own healthcare. I didn't need to do it under government threat of penalty.
WTF? The markets want to make profits and have made our system a hell for most ordinary people. That is why this reform came into place. THINK
Would couldn't be more wrong. Government interference ruined it. REALLY THINK. ---------------- 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?
It would be interesting to go back in time (I could just stop right there), call it a tax from the beginning and see how the debate shakes out. I imagine the outcome would be roughly the same. I suspect a few more democrats may want to have distanced themselves from it, but not enough to change the outcome.
On one hand you are b****ing about people who are out of work not paying their fair share and calling this law "socialism". On the other you are defending the right of those who work, and choose not to buy health insurance, to mooch off of the system without paying their fair share. It is hypocritical and demonstrates your ignorance of the fact that we all pay for both sets of people without this law. Why do you support paying for health care for workers who are uninsured? Are you a Socialist?
I don't think they should mooch. Either pay for your stuff or suffer the consequences. But I want the government out of health care and dismantle employment-based tied health care so that the costs go down and be affordable as possible.
I already pay a tax to fund your friends insurance needs. Do you understand that? So does everyone who chooses to work. We working people are already paying for your lazy friend. When his lazy ass gets heart disease and has to go to the ER for a heart attack and runs up hundred's of thousands of dollars - who pays for that? Not him. Nope. You think the hospital does it for free? Nope. Have you ever wondered why a one night stay in a hospital runs $2,000????? Guess what, you are paying for a product that lazy unemployed people use more than you do already! You are just too ignorant to know it.
Actually Roberts appeared to have done a favor to conservatives 1) cemented the fact that this is actually a tax 2) provided states more rights to "hit eject", even though they'd lose Medicaid funding... those calling this a landslide win for the liberals may not understand the ruling fully.
You forgot the article title and link again... _____ Yes, let's do for child care what we did for health care By: A. Barton Hinkle | Times-Dispatch Published: November 29, 2011 link
Logic fail. This is an obviously false statement. If the descriptions are different then one description could be legal and the other could be illegal. Math fail. In one instance you have $0 and the other you have $50. Language fail. You are saying a baseline is not a baseline, and an incentive is a penalty. I understand what you are trying to say, but you are really twisting math, logic and language to get your example to work. Sure, if you do everything completely different than the way it is implemented now, you can end up with the same results, but it is a different system. It is not logically, mathematically or semantically the same thing. It's fairly simple. In the system you are describing, you get an incentive for buying insurance. In the system as implemented, there is a penalty for not buying insurance. Both are ways to get more people to buy insurance, but they are different ways to do it even if the end results might be equal.
The Supreme Court is not going to rule on two identical actions differently because of how they are worded. That would be extraordinarily stupid. And we confirmed that with this decision, where they confirmed that the tax penalty is no different than incentives to purchase a home. Try again. You should try reading what you quoted again. In either setup, you have $50 for making an A and $0 for not doing so. I'm saying there's nothing illegal about changing the baseline level of tax. Actually, it's exactly the same thing. And John Roberts reaffirmed exactly that in saying this: Congress’s use of the Taxing Clause to encourage buying something is, by contrast, not new. Tax incentives already promote, for example, purchasing homes and professional educations. … The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax. Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.
