There aren't that many people who vary from month to month on whether they buy health insurance. Overall in the economy the insured vary as people are between jobs with insurance. People who have health insurance generally through their jobs if it provides it. People don't call their HR departments and elect month to month. It might be possible, but if you did it too often they might fire you.
One of the biggest problems affecting American workers it the loss of health insurance because of switching jobs. Suddenly, pre-existing conditions come into play. Potential employers don't want to pay for your pre-existing condition through increased health insurance costs. If you are laid off and trying to get a job, you find that you can't get insurance unless it is absurdly expensive and has a ridiculous deductible. I know people in this situation and it happens all the time. We need universal healthcare in one form or another. Anyone who says we don't should be without insurance for awhile, have a pre-existing condition or a family member with one, and try to get insurance. Good luck. It ain't like it used to be, folks. The insurance companies and the healthcare industry, along with the pharmaceutical companies, have Americans by the balls and are squeezing hard. Impeach Bush.
Simplistic. Ignores how it is cheaper if all are insured and some of the healthy and younger folks can't opt out. Once everyone has to be insured insurance companies can reduce expensive overhead used to try to screen out the unhealthy. Also ignores simple things you could do like the government could reduce payroll withholding from those who are low income, essentially giving them an Earned Income Tax Credit, paycheck by paycheck. Ignores how we all pay higher taxes to treat the uninsured in emergencies rooms and charity hospitals. If you are for all being insured, what is your plan if any ? So far the GOP just seems to pretend that the poor and uninsured pay enough taxes somehow that if you give them a rebate, they can purchase insurance or let them contribute to health saving accounts (even funnier!)
i think you underestimate how many people work for small businesses. and how many small businesses no longer afford health insurance for employees at all.
This is the biggest myth of the whole thing. When the government mandates the purchase of something, even something with relatively unlimited supply like an insurance policy, the price always goes up. Don't believe me, look at your auto insurance policy. On mine, the premiums for the part that is mandated (liability) is 4-times the voluntary (comprehensive and collision) part, even with the same liability limits. That's not covered by taxes. Believe it or not, uninsured in charity hospitals are payed for charity donations. In emergency rooms, they are payed for by higher premiums on paying customers.
Not really. I know a lot of small business folks and I know some can't afford expensive health insurance, just like a lot of poorer individuals. Many small business folks, even if they have employee or two are not well off. The stuff is expensive and getting more so every day. You have just made an argument why what is best is to have medicare for all, do it out of taxes and ignore the roll of employers. Medicare operates at an overhead rate much smaller than any insurance company. I think it is a critical moral issue to insure everyone., If Krugman is right and Obama insures just half of the uninsured, I think it will further put the issue on the back burner and we will go another 20 years without this aspect of a decent society and wasting money on private insurance company bureaucracies. I have never been without health insurance, since I was young and had virtually no health problems, but have talked to many who have not had it and it is indeed a frightening and dangerous spot to be in. This issue dampens my enthusiasm for Obama. Hopefully he is just playing a politico game as the "mandate" fear can gain him some votes and make him look like a moderate or independent.
I don't believe it. If you live here in Houston and Harris County and many other counties and cities around the nation you pay for their care with taxes. Do some research and just don't guess. I suppose if you live in some rural county what you say could be true.
I believe glynch is right, that's one of the issues with illegal immigrants, paying their healthcare costs through taxes.
well, we certainly share the common value of healthcare for everyone...just different ways of making that happen.
How do you see it happening? Without mandates or medicare i.e. government insurance for all. After all when all is said and done. Most of the uninsured can't afford it and neither can their small biz employers. All the countries that have done it do it through taxes i.e. "garnishment" from people's wages. In 50 years by resisting this we have done worse and worse in terms of the number uninsured. Why should not the burden of proof be on those who reject the only way that has worked to the best of my knowlege in any country on earth.
I don't think telling people that can't afford health insurance that it will simply be garnished from their paycheck is a solution. I can't afford a lamborghini...the solution to that isn't for the government to garnish out payments for a lamborghini. That seems like an extremely regressive tax to me. If you wish to create a new system funded by the taxpayers, then do it. Raise taxes. Don't try to hide it. Tell the American people what it will cost and what it will take.
<object width="425" height="373"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/VeC8BE-2T_k&rel=1&border=1"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/VeC8BE-2T_k&rel=1&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="373"></embed></object> <object width="425" height="373"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/QwjnT4eJJvs&rel=1&border=1"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/QwjnT4eJJvs&rel=1&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="373"></embed></object> What a pretentious crook.
What people don't realize is we are paying for universal health care already. When someone that doesn't have health insurance has a heart attack or gives birth, the hospital takes them in and takes care of them. Since the patient can't pay the bill, the costs get spread to those who do (the insured). At least in a universal health care system, everyone pays into it unlike now and it allows more preventive medicine which is much less expensive than a emergency room visit. The system doesn't work if you don't force everyone to participate. My only worry is that once we start giving it to people, then the recipients will automatically assume that the government should cover every treatment known to man such as costly experimental procedures which is a very costly proposition. Whatever program that comes out should have a very defined list of treatments that it will provide and if people want alternatives, they need to buy additional insurance.
Speaking of Hillary and disagreement between Democrats on healthcare... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/opinion/05brooks.html?_r=1&oref=slogin February 5, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist The Cooper Concerns By DAVID BROOKS I’m not a Hillary-hater. She’s been an outstanding senator. She hung tough on Iraq through the dark days of 2005. In this campaign, she has soldiered on bravely even though she has most of the elected Democrats, news media and the educated class rooting against her. But there are certain moments when her dark side emerges and threatens to undo the good she is trying to achieve. Her campaign tactics before the South Carolina primary were one such moment. Another, deeper in her past, involved Jim Cooper, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee. Cooper is one of the most thoughtful, cordial and well-prepared members of the House. In 1992, he came up with a health care reform plan that would go on to attract wide, bipartisan support. A later version had 58 co-sponsors in the House — 26 Republicans and 32 Democrats. It was sponsored in the Senate by Democrat John Breaux and embraced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, among others. But unlike the plan Hillary Clinton came up with then, the Cooper plan did not include employer mandates to force universal coverage. On June 15, 1993, Cooper met with Clinton to discuss their differences. Clinton was “ice cold” at the meeting, Cooper recalls. “It was the coldest reception of my life. I was excoriated.” Cooper told her that she was getting pulled too far to the left. He warned that her plan would never get through Congress. Clinton’s response, Cooper now says, was: “We’ll crush you. You’ll wish you never mentioned this to me.” In the weeks and months following that meeting, the Clinton administration reached out to Cooper. As David Broder and Haynes Johnson wrote in “The System,” their history of the health care reform effort, President Bill Clinton invited Cooper to go jogging and play golf. Others in the Clinton White House thought Cooper was right on the merits, and privately let him know. But Hillary Clinton set up a war room to oppose Cooper, who was planning to run for the Senate in 1994. As the Broder and Johnson book makes clear, Clinton and her aides believed Cooper was pursuing his own political agenda. They accused him of crafting his plan in order to raise money from the insurance and hospital industries. They said he was in league with the for-profit hospitals to crush competitors and monopolize the industry. They did this despite the fact that Cooper’s centrist health care approach was entirely consistent with his overall philosophy. At one meeting in the West Wing, a source told Broder and Johnson, Clinton “kind of got this evil look and said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this Cooper bill. We’ve got to kill it before it goes any further.’ ” Clinton denounced the Cooper plan as “dangerous and threatening.” Deputies were dispatched to Tennessee to attack his plan. Senator Jay Rockefeller said that Cooper is “a real fraud. I hope he doesn’t make it to this place.” According to Newsweek, Clinton brought an aide with a video camera to a meeting with senators and asked the senators to denounce Cooper on the spot. The Clinton effort backfired. It temporarily raised his profile back home. Her health care reform failed, too. She says she’s learned the lessons from that failure, but she remains icy toward Cooper. Her health care memos, including a three-page memo drafted in preparation for her meeting with Cooper, have not been made public by the National Archives. Moreover, the debate Clinton is having with Barack Obama echoes the debate she had with Cooper 15 years ago. The issue, once again, is over whether to use government to coerce people into getting coverage. The Clintonites argue that without coercion, there will be free-riders on the system. They’ve got a point. But there are serious health care economists on both sides of the issue. And in the heat of battle, Clinton has turned the debate between universal coverage and universal access into a sort of philosophical holy grail, with a party of righteousness and a party of error. She’s imposed Manichaean categories on a technical issue, just as she did a decade and half ago. And she’s done it even though she hasn’t answered legitimate questions about how she would enforce her universal coverage mandate. Cooper, who, not surprisingly, supports Barack Obama, believes that Clinton hasn’t changed. “Hillary’s approach is so absolutist, draconian and intolerant, it means a replay of 1993.” He argues that her more coercive approach would once again be a political death knell. No Republican will support it. Red state Democrats will face impossible pressures at home. It’s smarter to begin by offering people affordable access to coverage and evolve from there. Cooper is, of course, a man who has been burned in the past. But it is legitimate to wonder if adults can really change all that much. A defter politician would have reached out to Cooper and made an attempt to address the concerns he represents.
Of course, this ignores the reality that an increasing number of doctors refuse to take Medicare patients because they are not profitable and have proven to be the most likely to sue you if something goes wrong. Great...so we all will have the same second or third rate care. Before you go off on some nonsensical rant about how I am ignoring the plight of the uninsured, keep in mind that I am one of the uninsured. I started my business in October 2006, and have been trying to build my practice. I just cannot afford health coverage at this point. I want it, but cannot afford it. If the government mandates that I pay for it, I am dead in the water financially. I am all for universal coverage, but it has to make sense. So far, nothing does.
