Repeal of Obamacare

[Armistead]

Originally Posted by August

- Federal District Court Judge Henry Hudson

They already force us to buy a healthplan...Medicare. They also force us to buy a retirement plan....SS.

[August]

Originally Posted by Armistead

They already force us to buy a healthplan...Medicare. They also force us to buy a retirement plan....SS.

And neither of those are private entities. What you're saying is there is no difference between paying excise tax to your town or paying excise tax to some private company.

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by Armistead

They already force us to buy a healthplan...Medicare. They also force us to buy a retirement plan....SS.

which are both pretty much bankrupt and cost huge heaps of taxpayer money.

what does that tell you about the upcoming Obamacare plan?

fact remains that we are living in a time when our government needs to be reducing the deficit, cutting pet projects from the budget and spending less money - when in fact what they are doing is spending record sums of money.

[GoldenRivet]

15 "rights" you will have when it comes down to the new health care law (from Texas Insider Magazine)

1. You will have the right to lose your job as employers struggle to comply with expensive mandates. According to labor economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, those hit hardest will be younger, less-skilled workers. The cost of employing them will soar as employers are required to buy health insurance that may cost as much as a lower-wage person’s annual earnings.

High-tech workers will be hit as well. The $20 billion tax on medical-device companies, to take one example, will force companies to lay off researchers and curtail development of new products. And tens of thousands of insurance brokers will lose their livelihoods because of arbitrary regulations from Washington.

2. As a taxpayer, you will have the right to see the federal debt soar as Congress’s budget gimmicks face economic reality. According to former CBO director Doug Holtz-Eakin, Obamacare will cost nearly $1 trillion more than estimated as employers begin dropping health insurance and sending people to the new taxpayer-subsidized exchanges instead.

3. As a business owner, you will have the right to comply with the expensive new mandates in Obamacare or drop coverage and pay fines instead. You will have the right to keep the IRS informed about the coverage you are offering and its cost. And you will have the right to stop hiring and keep your business smaller than 50 people to escape Obamacare’s fines and mandates.

4. As an employee, you will have the right to lose the coverage you have now as you and 80 to 100 million people (according to McKinsey & Company analyst Alissa Meade) are switched to other coverage when Obamacare takes effect in 2014.

5. As a citizen, you will have the right to have the government decide what health insurance you must have and to either buy the expensive policy or pay a fine.

6. If you are a young person, you will have the right to pay higher premiums for mandatory health insurance to subsidize people who are older and sicker.


7. If you are a senior, you will have the right to see half a trillion dollars taken out of Medicare to pay for new health-insurance entitlements — a move allegedly designed to make Medicare stronger.


8. If you are in a Medicare Advantage plan, you and 7 million other seniors will have the right to go back into traditional Medicare and take your chances at finding a doctor who will see you.


9. If you are already on Medicaid, you will have the right to compete with millions more people trying to get appointments with doctors, especially specialists.


10. If you are one of the estimated 16 million people who will be added to the Medicaid rolls in 2014, you will have the right to wait in hospital emergency rooms for even routine care as the program swells to 87 million recipients by the end of the decade. (As many as 900,000 additional emergency room visits every year are expected — primarily by new enrollees in Medicaid — and from many of the 23 million people who will remain uninsured.)

11. If you are a doctor or nurse, you will have the right to receive lower Medicare payments while filling out mountains of new paperwork to satisfy government “quality reporting” requirements.

12. If you have child-only health insurance, you have the right to lose that coverage as more insurers exit the market. And you have the right to lose dependent coverage entirely as many employers decide it’s just too expensive to offer.


13. If you are an insurance company, you will have the right to figure out how you are going to continue to pay claims as government adds more expensive, mandatory benefits but caps premium increases at less than the cost of providing the coverage.


14. If you have a preexisting condition and are in a temporary high-risk pool, you and 8,000 others enrolled in the $5 billion program will have the right to pay high costs for your health insurance in the poorly designed program.


15. If you are a governor or state legislator, you will have the right to figure out what state services you will cut further — education? transportation? public safety? — to comply with the federal mandate that you expand Medicaid and set up the huge health-exchange bureaucracies. You also have the right to sue the federal government to protect your state’s rights.

[gimpy117]

2nd time...who brought up the tax credit idea for mandatory health insurance first? I'm pretty sure it was designed by you know who as an alternative to "hillarycare".

But im getting on my soap box now and saying this:

hospitals have become so expensive that the spiraling costs have started to jeopardize people's right to life.

much like college. who's skyrocketing costs are also threatening to ruin my generation's right to the pursuit of happiness.

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

fact remains that we are living in a time when our government needs to be reducing the deficit, cutting pet projects from the budget and spending less money - when in fact what they are doing is spending record sums of money.

A case may be made that it was money well spent and the actual cost to taxpayer may be relatively low:

There is a compelling case that Obamanomics has produced results. An economy that was shrinking in size and bleeding more than 700,000 jobs a month is now growing at 2.6 percent and added 1.1 million jobs last year. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, known as the stimulus, produced or saved at least 1.9 million jobs and as many as 4.7 million last year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The much-derided Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, started by George W. Bush and continued by Obama, stabilized the financial sector, and the big banks have repaid the money with interest. According to a Treasury Department report sent to Congress this month, TARP will cost taxpayers $28 billion instead of the $700 billion originally set aside. The nearly $80 billion bailout of the auto industry may cost taxpayers only $15 billion, as the restructured General Motors and Chrysler come back to life with strong sales. The stock market has surged; corporate profits are setting records.

at the same time, there may be an argument that the stimulus spending was just too small to kick start the economy:

Obama’s instinct was to take on everything at once. “I want to pull the band-aid off quickly, not delay the pain,” a senior Obama official remembers him saying. “He didn’t want to muddle through it, Japan-style,” recalled Larry Summers, tapped to be director of Obama’s National Economic Council. Romer calculated how much government spending would be needed to fill the gaping hole of consumer demand and came up with $1.2 trillion, the highest of three options. Summers told her to leave that number out of the memorandum to Obama. Emanuel argued that such an astronomical figure would be politically explosive. Romer left it out but mentioned it to Obama during a briefing. “That’s what you’d need to do to definitively heal the economy,” she said, according to someone in the room. Still, she and Summers agreed on recommending close to $900 billion.

Liberals like the Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman argue that the $800 billion package of infrastructure projects, aid to states and tax breaks that Congress eventually passed was inadequate and poorly targeted. “The stimulus was too small and not well-enough designed,” Stiglitz told me. “Most of my concerns have turned out to be valid.” Romer, who has returned to teach at Berkeley, told me she now agrees about the size. In Washington, she said, “you’re not supposed to say the obvious thing, which is that in retrospect of course it should have been bigger. With unemployment at 10 percent, I don’t know how you could say you wouldn’t have done anything different. Of course you would have made it bigger.”

Given what was known then, however, she said the $800 billion was reasonable and the most that Congress would approve. “In my mind,” she said, “the problem was not in the original package; it was in not adjusting to changed circumstances.” Once it was clear that the situation was deteriorating, she said, the White House should have gone back to Congress for more stimulus money. “That was where we could have been bolder,” she said.

from "The White House looks for work"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/ma...nomy-t.html?hp

fairly long article, but which gives a fairly good overview of the economic theories of the Obama team.

[GoldenRivet]

Im fortunate enough to personally know a lot of the medical staff at one of my local hospitals.

a vascular surgeon, a radiologist, 4 CRNAs, an anesthesiologist, various therapists and numerous ER nurses and Doctors.

all total about 15 people

they all feel that the standard of care will be driven down by the health care bill

they all believe that fewer people will enter the health care practice because of the health care bill.

they all believe that many professionals will exit the practice of medicine due to the effects of the bill - themselves included

they all feel that the wages of the medical professional will be driven down by the health care bill.

and on the subject i asked them all"

"Would you go on working in the ER (or trauma, or surgery or whatever dept) if it werent for the money?"

unanimously the answer was "No." with the inflection in their voice as if i were crazy to even ask.




there has to be a better health care bill... just nobody has thought of it yet

[gimpy117]

well thats all well and good..but our system is broken. Cry all you want about "ohh less people going into the profession" or "lower standard of care" (if thats even true). But at the end of the day, when the time comes when its impossible for the average american to even afford a major operation, we'll all be sorry.

[tater]

Originally Posted by gimpy117

well thats all well and good..but our system is broken. Cry all you want about "ohh less people going into the profession" or "lower standard of care" (if thats even true). But at the end of the day, when the time comes when its impossible for the average american to even afford a major operation, we'll all be sorry.

Stop whining and go to med school, then work for free.

Nah, you'll just keep whining.

Government is the problem with our system to the extent there is a problem. 46+ % of US healthcare is already "government." The government care is why the rest is so FUBAR. The current expense of the US system is because those paying for insurance are also paying for the fact that the government systems pay too little. Fee for service, combined with artificial (and arbitrary) reimbursements means that there is incentive to "do more stuff" to the nearly 50% on charity care. That and CYA (defensive medicine).

Since no one is actually paying for the care themselves (insurance, gov care does), there is no incentive for shopping for cost, so there is no incentive to deliver savings. Look at cash-only medical practices, and you'll see that while they may keep their rates high, they always offer more and more for those rates. Better Lasik, more effective vasectomy reversal, etc. Lasik used to be really expensive. It's not any more. Why not? The government is not involved, that's why.

The current US system incentivizes all the wrong things, and almost entirely because of the government mucking around.

[Armistead]

Originally Posted by tater

Stop whining and go to med school, then work for free.

Nah, you'll just keep whining.

Government is the problem with our system to the extent there is a problem. 46+ % of US healthcare is already "government." The government care is why the rest is so FUBAR. The current expense of the US system is because those paying for insurance are also paying for the fact that the government systems pay too little. Fee for service, combined with artificial (and arbitrary) reimbursements means that there is incentive to "do more stuff" to the nearly 50% on charity care. That and CYA (defensive medicine).

Since no one is actually paying for the care themselves (insurance, gov care does), there is no incentive for shopping for cost, so there is no incentive to deliver savings. Look at cash-only medical practices, and you'll see that while they may keep their rates high, they always offer more and more for those rates. Better Lasik, more effective vasectomy reversal, etc. Lasik used to be really expensive. It's not any more. Why not? The government is not involved, that's why.

The current US system incentivizes all the wrong things, and almost entirely because of the government mucking around.

The reason 46% of care is already government funded is do to what, the corporate take over of healthcare making it unavailable to most. The question remains, which is worse, government of corporate? Most look at the past and track the history of how we got here...corporate control, political monopoly, regulation for mass profit over health...all pushed by the GOP, check to see all of these new members advisors...lobbyist for large firms.

Since the corporate takeover, business being business, it's not about health, it's about mass profits, all plans are related to profits. Like meds, we all know the goal of pharma is not to cure, it's to keep you as sick as possible, as long as possible on as many meds as possible. Because of Pharma's basic contol of the medical industry, that seems to be the goal. Americans prescription use is up 100% just in 10 years, including children. Course we see all the new diseases and pill commercials everyday.

Let's face it, we have a great way to fix a lot of this....preventive care, but you'll never see that thanks to corporations, not enough money in it.

What a crisis we're in today, a larger one is coming, the upcoming generation will see a mass increase of chronic life long disease due to being obese, lack of exercise, ect...Many already are. They say this will cost more than the baby boomers. 40% of kids today are just fat, compared to my generation, about 2%. Big Pharma is celebrating.

The biggest issue is health is something we all want, profit is what big business wants. Business will make profits at the expense of health. All the players in health want big profits, med profession, Insurance, Pharma, not to mention the lawyers that make billions off them all. When health fails, it overloads the system, so who pays for it...not the players, but the taxpayers.

Seems we have 3 choices, fix mass profit for health, taxpayers flip the bill or we just say what most in the GOP would prefer...Get sick, pay high cost until poverty and bankruptcy....then just die and go away, that is until a GOP member gets seriously ill without coverage.

They could fix it you know, but they won't...doesn't suit the special interest of either side.

[MaddogK]

I have to laugh because my wife (who'se a NICU nurse of 30+years) tells me the hospital where she works must bill at 200% because medicare only pays 50% of the bills for their covered patients and expects the hospital to cover the rest. The hospital has changed hands 4 times in the last 15 years because all the 'freebie' care threatens to run the hospitals parent company into bankruptcy.

...if only the junkies and baby-momma's would stop coming into the hospital's ER they may stay afloat, and the bills would shrink, but NOOO, all these illegal 13 year old girls having babies are killing the industry...

Because they're ENTITLED to

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by MaddogK

I have to laugh because my wife (who'se a NICU nurse of 30+years) tells me the hospital where she works must bill at 200% because medicare only pays 50% of the bills for their covered patients and expects the hospital to cover the rest. The hospital has changed hands 4 times in the last 15 years because all the 'freebie' care threatens to run the hospitals parent company into bankruptcy.

...if only the junkies and baby-momma's would stop coming into the hospital's ER they may stay afloat, and the bills would shrink, but NOOO, all these illegal 13 year old girls having babies are killing the industry...

Because they're ENTITLED to

true

[tater]

Medicaid is way worse than medicare, too. A few years ago we had dinner with a friend who is a surgery dept head at the U, and he said their collection rate was 17%.

Ie: their end of year collections were 17% of what they billed "retail." The bulk of their patients are medicaid, followed by medicare, followed by BCBS (distant 3d).

BCBS pays "retail" the rest pay so low it is often below cost. The rest? Gets paid by taxpayers since it's a State university. The private hospitals are not so lucky. They are torn because they need to have an ER for their 'real" patients, but the ERs cannot turn away anyone unless on "divert," so the private hospitals are screwed, too.

Obamacare has a provision that makes making new "Doctor's Hospitals" impossible, too (many docs were talking about making new hospitals that ONLY took private pays, and therefor would drop off the grid of government care, but now it's impossible).

[August]

You guys have a point but so does Gimpy. The cost of even the most basic medical care is already beyond most peoples ability to pay without insurance or complete financial ruin.

Now I don't think that most Americans are gonna choose death, infirmity and disease over doing something drastic, like nationalizing health care, so if the the GoP want's to avoid this it would be wise to come up with an actual solution to the problem, if for no other reason than because just badmouthing the Dems plan alone isn't going to help them much in 2012.