I like the concepts posted in this article. I have two concerns. 1. Congress and this admin. will pass ( or ramrod ) a bill giving everyone coverage with no real plan in place. The 65% subsidy was passed and it was weeks before anyone connected to benefits or employers really knew how it worked. 2. Dismissing the role that qualified agents have in explaining and solving problems for employers and insureds is a mistake. Unfortunately, people spend most of their time in “their” business and not health benefits and don’t have a clue until they have to use the program and I don’t see it changing with a national program.
How do you prevent ending up with healthy individuals covering themselves using the tax credit and leaving cost-prohibitive sick & elderly left as the only participants in employer-provided plans?
This combined with elimination of tax incentives would incentivize companies to simply stop offering these benefits.
He mentions preventing cherry picking, but I fail to see how you can keep a private market but mandate that it uniformly selects and prices risk.
Everyone should ask yourselves if, right this minute, you would trade in your employer-provided health benefit for a $2,200 tax credit.
Not to say we should not reform wasteful spending or should not look to reform abusive practices like retro cancellations for minor omitted facts on applications that are not even material to a claim, etc. But I for one am extremely wary about actions which may eliminate employer-provided health care.
Pardon me if I am more than a little skeptical that we can realize massive cost savings, or more specifically that even if we do realize those savings that it will result in any real price or quality benefit for the consumer.
Finally, I would just like to point out the outright paradox of recent statements from the right. If we can trust our government to wage wars, manage a military, deliver mail, and manage a justice system, how can we claim with a straight face that it cannot competently administer health care benefits?
Our government supposedly can wage wars, manage a military, deliver mail, and manage a justice system, but nobody claims with a straight face that it does any of these functions perfectly. There are factions that are always Monday morning quarterbacking all of these functions, especially the military things. Some of these factions go back many years and rewrite history to make some claim or another that something was done incorrectly, and if we only had elected them, things would be perfect. Right… Beside these obvious points, you have to the consideration of tons of money being handled and siphoned off by bureaucrats while citizens clamored for more of whatever the money was supposed to be providing for them. This would amount to a runaway train that would never stop bleeding money. Government insurance would yield massive rationing (under the guise of “cost control”) of the worst kind; that of denying coverage to elderly and non-politically annointed groups.
Like the Cleveland Cav’s and LJ, Obama is interested in one thing only … a long lasting legacy as the man that “fixed” … “socialized” medicine. The math is really, really easy. Because of medicare, longer life span, and mandatory treatment at ERs …we are spending more on medical care than we can afford once the baby boomers start getting their “free medical” care at 65. With unemployment approaching 12% and most likely to increase in the coming years, there is just less payroll tax and federal tax money to support increasing medical spending. The money will come from middle class individuals, private business, increased deficits and all forms of creative taxes. Instead of private insurance, a public super-medicare would provide post office type of service lines for basic medical care and a mass exodus of highly trained primary care physicians. The groups of hospitals, specialized physicians, nurse unions, pharmacy, nursing homes, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals will grow despite meaningless concessions because now everyone has insurance and only the middle class taxpayer and the remaining US businesses will be burdened with the tax bill. Its a catch-22 for baby boomers (free medical care but destroy the US economic system (high unemployment, high taxes, less business/jobs in the US(as companies outsource jobs where they don’t pay for health insurance payroll taxes), no jobs for their children and grandchildren, for future generations or pay out of pocket their hard earned 201K retirements funds on healthcare.)
I like the concepts posted in this article. I have two concerns. 1. Congress and this admin. will pass ( or ramrod ) a bill giving everyone coverage with no real plan in place. The 65% subsidy was passed and it was weeks before anyone connected to benefits or employers really knew how it worked. 2. Dismissing the role that qualified agents have in explaining and solving problems for employers and insureds is a mistake. Unfortunately, people spend most of their time in “their” business and not health benefits and don’t have a clue until they have to use the program and I don’t see it changing with a national program.
How do you prevent ending up with healthy individuals covering themselves using the tax credit and leaving cost-prohibitive sick & elderly left as the only participants in employer-provided plans?
This combined with elimination of tax incentives would incentivize companies to simply stop offering these benefits.
He mentions preventing cherry picking, but I fail to see how you can keep a private market but mandate that it uniformly selects and prices risk.
Everyone should ask yourselves if, right this minute, you would trade in your employer-provided health benefit for a $2,200 tax credit.
Not to say we should not reform wasteful spending or should not look to reform abusive practices like retro cancellations for minor omitted facts on applications that are not even material to a claim, etc. But I for one am extremely wary about actions which may eliminate employer-provided health care.
Pardon me if I am more than a little skeptical that we can realize massive cost savings, or more specifically that even if we do realize those savings that it will result in any real price or quality benefit for the consumer.
Finally, I would just like to point out the outright paradox of recent statements from the right. If we can trust our government to wage wars, manage a military, deliver mail, and manage a justice system, how can we claim with a straight face that it cannot competently administer health care benefits?
Our government supposedly can wage wars, manage a military, deliver mail, and manage a justice system, but nobody claims with a straight face that it does any of these functions perfectly. There are factions that are always Monday morning quarterbacking all of these functions, especially the military things. Some of these factions go back many years and rewrite history to make some claim or another that something was done incorrectly, and if we only had elected them, things would be perfect. Right… Beside these obvious points, you have to the consideration of tons of money being handled and siphoned off by bureaucrats while citizens clamored for more of whatever the money was supposed to be providing for them. This would amount to a runaway train that would never stop bleeding money. Government insurance would yield massive rationing (under the guise of “cost control”) of the worst kind; that of denying coverage to elderly and non-politically annointed groups.
Like the Cleveland Cav’s and LJ, Obama is interested in one thing only … a long lasting legacy as the man that “fixed” … “socialized” medicine. The math is really, really easy. Because of medicare, longer life span, and mandatory treatment at ERs …we are spending more on medical care than we can afford once the baby boomers start getting their “free medical” care at 65. With unemployment approaching 12% and most likely to increase in the coming years, there is just less payroll tax and federal tax money to support increasing medical spending. The money will come from middle class individuals, private business, increased deficits and all forms of creative taxes. Instead of private insurance, a public super-medicare would provide post office type of service lines for basic medical care and a mass exodus of highly trained primary care physicians. The groups of hospitals, specialized physicians, nurse unions, pharmacy, nursing homes, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals will grow despite meaningless concessions because now everyone has insurance and only the middle class taxpayer and the remaining US businesses will be burdened with the tax bill. Its a catch-22 for baby boomers (free medical care but destroy the US economic system (high unemployment, high taxes, less business/jobs in the US(as companies outsource jobs where they don’t pay for health insurance payroll taxes), no jobs for their children and grandchildren, for future generations or pay out of pocket their hard earned 201K retirements funds on healthcare.)