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Obamacare is not perfect but at least somebody finally got rid of that stupid pre-existing condition ban. That finally makes it possible for hardworking, job-creating entrepreneurial folks to buy insurance on the same footing as government and corporate employees. That was LONG overdue.
This is why my premium went up 26%. People who bother to take care of themselves get shafted to subsidize people who don't understand how arteries work.
This is why my premium went up 26%. People who bother to take care of themselves get shafted to subsidize people who don't understand how arteries work.
Consider yourself lucky. I switched to an employer plan, but the plan I had went from $80/month and a $3K deductible to $215+ for a $6K deductible.
The OP's complaint seems to be that those on the cheapest premium plans (Bronze plans) have high deductibles (that is the way health insurance has always worked), and that "we have nothing different than we had before other than for catastrophic care." Yes, catastrophic care is now available with no cut off limits and no denial for pre-existing conditions. Thanks Obama.
Those cheap plans were designed by the crafters of Obamacare to give the illusion of affordability - and thereby ensnare people in the individual mandate - while not actually being affordable.
What good would that do, when the GOP holds the House and has been successful in keeping anything from passing in the Senate? What magical powers do you think Democrats have to get past the firmly planted monolith of the GOP, who is intent on doing absolutely nothing?
Put the blame where it deserves to be, and that's not on the Democrats. If not for conservatives, we might have single payer right now.
Dem controlled Congress and WH apparently didn't want that or they would have gone for it when they had carte blanche numbers to pass it.
Good point. It is actually a portal for individuals to get access to PRIVATE Insurance. I know of no private health insurance companies that give away free health insurance.
Yes, you are now required by law to purchase the product of a very profitable private corporation.
Even worse, you are required to buy a product that is MORE EXPENSIVE than their previous MOST expensive insurance product--because insurance now must cover an extensive array of things to function as "one size fits all" insurance, and you can no longer choose to pay for only the coverages you might possibly need.
999 out of every thousand people over age 35 who never abused drugs, and never had a mental illness, will NEVER require drug abuse rehab and counseling, nor treatment for mental illness--but all 1,000 now have to pay for insurance coverage for these things.
1000 out of 1000 people past child-bearing age, who never had children, will NEVER need insurance coverage for pregnancy, maternity, newborn and pediatric care and coverage of children under age 26. But all 1,000 will pay for this coverage.
Obamacare is a $1 trillion transfer of wealth into the pockets of Big Insurance. It is also a $2 trillion cost to the taxpayer over the next 10 years. On top of that, everyone now pays MUCH more for health insurance. Primary care doctors, already in short supply, are retiring in record numbers rather than accept the losses imposed on them by Obamacare.
Thanks to Obamacare, businesses are now shifting the ENTIRE cost of health insurance to their workers--and workers will then be paying for their health care insurance with AFTER-TAX dollars. Big Government and Big Business get yet another windfall, while the worker loses more and more financial ground.
We are told that Obamacare gave us "affordable" health care and ensured "quality" health care for everyone--even though just as many will be without health insurance in 2020 as before Obamacare, even though the higher insurance prices are 100% paid by the taxpayer or the ratepayer, even though Obamacare did NOTHING to improve care, even though it did NOTHING to reduce costs, and even though the new mandates massively increased costs and made sure that increasing demands on the health care system were accompanied by a mass exodus of those primary care doctors providing the care.
Those cheap plans were designed by the crafters of Obamacare to give the illusion of affordability - and thereby ensnare people in the individual mandate - while not actually being affordable.
Yep, it's like the car salesman who uses tactics to confuse the easy consumer sell the car. The first thing they want to know is the monthly payment you can afford, then confuse it with trade in, by the time their done with you if you're not smart is they are making a "killing" on you.
I think the people who pay more than you do should have the right to kick you off their roads. After all, by your way of thinking, they deserve to use them more because they paid more for them than you did. It seems like you owe a lot of people a lot of money if you plan to use their roads. Same goes for every other kind of government service that you take advantage of every single day of your life.
You yourself have admitted you're a moocher--just like everyone else. I'm just taking your own argument to it's natural conclusion.
Most small business owners will tell you that the government hinders their business. They pay more for the use of the roads, vehicle registration fees which are based on weight and therefore more expensive for heavy commercial vehicles. Business owners pay more for services than average folks do. In effect, business owners often subsidize these very services for others.
Unlike individuals, businesses also provide a key governmental function: collecting and remitting to the government sales taxes. They receive no compensation in return. The tax system, the one that funds public education and other services, such as the construction and maintenance of roads and bridges upon which Obama based his attack, it would not work without business owners' cooperation.
Again, the dead beats, they don't contribute in anyway, they only suck off the government offering nothing of value in return.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HeyJude514
Sure you do. If you live in this country, you are living off of other people's money every single day. Unless you are building your own roads, schools, hospitals, providing your own fire and police service, inspecting your own meat--the list goes on and on and on. Where do you think the money comes from for all of those services? Are you providing all the cash to fund that stuff?
From that conservative bastion called Forbes Magazine:
"Most economists thinking seriously about the depth of our deficit agree that the Employer Sponsored Insurance (ESI) tax subsidy is a significant part of the problem. ESI subsidies date back to the freeze on wage increases during World War II. To offset the freeze, the ESI allowed companies to use pre-tax dollars to pay for generous health benefits tax-free.
Today, the ESI subsidy encourages overspending in health care by allowing money to be taken out of the normal wage tax structure and put into a safe haven if spent on health plans. The tax structure encourages the misappropriation of fund towards bloated health plans and is regressive.
Rather than simply repealing the old tax structure, the Obamacare solution is an additional tax, a penalty imposed on “Cadillac” or very high cost health plans.
The purpose of the Cadillac tax is threefold: to address cost of the ESI, to help finance the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and to reduce employer incentive to overspend on health plans and employee incentive to overuse services encouraged by these high-cost plans."
offers a solution to an important problem, but is fraught with unintended consequences.Ideally, the tax would prompt employers to offer more cost-effective plans, with some shift of risk to employees along with mechanisms to help employees spend healthcare dollars wisely. For many reasons, that is not likely to be the reality.
(emphasis mine)
OK, so we get introduced to unintended consequences, and how the idealism of a tax (which I lawl at even in theory) likely will not resemble the reality. Then comes this whopper
Quote:
Today, the ESI subsidy encourages overspending in health care by allowing money to be taken out of the normal wage tax structure and put into a safe haven if spent on health plans. The tax structure encourages the misappropriation of fund towards bloated health plans and is regressive.
So, government creates the wage ceilings after WW II, then creates the ESI to allow employers to use benefits to lure employees when they would have used wages, and now using the ESI to treat employees well, as it was intended when it was enacted, is "misappropriation of funds"? No shock an ex-Senator wrote this, because only politicians can be this unintentionally ironic and funny.
And then we get to the meat and potatoes:
Quote:
The purpose of the Cadillac tax is threefold: to address cost of the ESI, to help finance the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and to reduce employer incentive to overspend on health plans and employee incentive to overuse services encouraged by these high-cost plans.
So the purpose of the Cadillac tax is
1) Address ESI so that Leviathan collects more tax
2) Help finance ACA so that Leviathan collects more tax
3) Pay more wages instead of tax free benefits so that oh yes, Leviathan collects more tax.
Gotcha Senator, now it all makes sense. Because all problems are solved by Leviathan collecting more tax. Why not tax everyone at 100%? Wouldn't that cure disease altogether?
Then he dissects the three good possible outcomes of the Cadillac tax, but they are fraught with assumptions and hypotheticals to make this bit of tyranny work:
1) Employers will begin spending less on plans to avoid the tax, and these changes might have some positive impact if employees all of a sudden get a lot wiser in how they act regarding health care spending, but not so well if they avoid medical care to defray increased costs.
That's the summary of his whole first point, and read it a few times so you can see from where we conceive and begin to develop negative unintended consequences.
2) Based on the ACA dictating how plans are structured and what is covered, the employers will downgrade plans to the ACA levels, which will put their older and sicker employees onto the exchanges, and add to the exchange's already existing risk pool problem of not enough young and healthy people paying premiums t offset the older and sicker folks who are the primary enrollees.
Oh, so employers will simply downgrade plans to minimum ObamaCare requirements and if you want more you'll be essentially shoved onto Medicare, while young and healthy folks will take their bare bones bronze plans and not defray the costs as much your retarded projection math had planned for? Like this hasn't been predicted by anyone with common sense for the last 5 years.
3) In his own words - "Due to the misalignment of inflation and the cost of healthcare—healthcare costs rise faster than inflation—a subtle whittling of plans each year to avoid the Cadillac tax will eventually lead to an underinsured work force. We are already hearing stories about people taking on higher deductible plans where the deductible exceeds their ability to pay. In other words, the Affordable Care Act will result in unaffordable plans and an underinsured workforce."
Not much more needed past that.
But finally, we get this la la land fantasy only a politician could consider as even remotely possible:
Quote:
On the bright side, the Cadillac tax could have a positive impact on the pricing of healthcare if employers take into account the long-term effects of their immediate maneuvers to avoid the tax.Rather than scheming to avoid the tax at all costs, employers can accept some portion of increased tax while...
Yes, because when faced with artificially mandated higher costs, employers nationwide tend towards simply accepting the higher costs, while doing cartwheels over reduced profits in the name of social justice and political engineering of a command economy. So sure, this hypothetical scenario could work.
Let's rewrite it for common speak to see if anyone buys it:
"On the bright side, the Cadillac tax could have a positive impact on health care costs if employers look at the tax as an opportunity to reduce profit in the name of social justice, since everyone knows social justice is far more important than profit, especially to business. Rather than avoiding increased costs, employers will see those additional costs as a way to be awesome and really nice."
Anyone buying it?
And once again, the bottom line of the Cadillac tax is this: they created the wage ceiling after WW II, then they created the ESI so employers had a way to compete for labor, then employers found ways to get good at using the ESI to indeed attract good employees, compensate them well, etc. Then the government created Mediwelfare in its various forms and got in bed with insurance and drove costs up. Now, apparently, 70 years of Leviathan's meddling in the health care and insurance rackets is the fault of the citizen and they must be punished for having really good insurance through their employer, since yes that was the point of the ESI, but you weren't really supposed to take it this far.
It's tyranny in the present and future to fix the unintended consequences of tyranny in the past, and the saddest fact is that most of the country thinks the "problem" is something other than Leviathan's freaking meddling.
You couldn't even get DEMS to push through a public option. You know why, the public option was never an option. It was a joke.
Exactly. We have the wrong tax structure to support national health care, so our country can't afford to provide it. Other countries tax EVERYONE very regressively to fund their national health care programs.
Quote:
"UC Davis's Peter Lindert has argued in his book "Growing Public" that European social democracies were only able to develop the programs they did because they used efficient consumption taxes that didn't lower growth as much as progressive income taxes, particularly those on capital income. European countries needed tax systemsthat could raise a lot of money without hurting growth, and only regressive consumption taxes fit the bill."
Anyone think the majority of poor and middle class Americans will agree to substantially increase the taxes they pay to fund their national health care? I sure don't think so.
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