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Originally posted by Shakka I assume you paid for your house yourself, and you paid your taxes which provide for those services. I hope you're not implying that I should foot the bill for your house.

I'm not implying anything, I'm directly stating it. Does your taxes that you pay for firefighters only go exclusively to YOUR house if it burns down, or does it foot the bill for others as well? What exactly are you implying here yourself?

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Because adults should be exactly that...adults who can responsibly take care of themselves (yes, there are exceptions, but I don't subscribe to 40 million people simply are victims of the man when so many of them voluntarily choose to risk it an not have insurance and then expect a bailout like so many others when things don't go their way, or the millions of illegal immigrants who we would also be asked to subsidize despite their non-tax payor status). Children are different.

You do realize that most of these adults choose not to have health care not because they're choosing to risk it and "expect a bailout" when things go bad. They choose not to have insurance because it would literally eat up their entire paycheck and they'd have little left for, you know, food, rent/mortgage, electricity, and other vital necessities:

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It has been estimated that nearly one fifth of the uninsured population is able to afford insurance, almost one quarter is eligible for public coverage, and the remaining 56% need financial assistance (8.9% of all Americans) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health...e_United_States source: http://www.cms.hhs.gov/EMTALA/

I think we can both agree that the cost of insurance premiums flat out suck and are getting worse every year. What's worse, co-insurance and deductibles are only going up, thus shifting the burden on the consumer more and more. As I've said before, the current system simply is not sustainable, and I see no reason why Conservatives who love to shout "FREE MARKETS!!" and "CAPITALISM!!" want to run to the hills when we have the government as another competitor in their capitalistic utopia.

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To enforce rights, not to provide them or to subsidize them at the cost of others.

Guess we need to privatize the firefighters then, huh.

Besides, are we even talking about everyone paying for public insurance right now? Because based on what I've seen from the preliminary estimates, we'd be saving money. The CBO estimates we'd be saving $150 billion:

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_...-it-s-good.aspx

Commonwealth has us saving $250 billion:

http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/new...ml?id=259000012

And the CBO looks at the current bill in the House giving us a $6 billion surplus:

http://www.speaker.gov/blog/?p=1872

If that's at the "cost of others", gosh that really can't be too horrible.

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Basic, perhaps, but don't tell me that a person who doesn't pay for their coverage is somehow entitled to all of the bells and whistles of premium care that I pay thousands of dollars for. Maybe we pay too much for our healthcare here (and I don't dispute that), however you get what you pay for.

Yeah, it's probable that you get squadoosh when the shit hits the fan no matter what you pay with the current system. Better pray that recission problems don't hit you or your family, because you could pay premiums on time your entire life and when life-threatening times occur, you could get dropped just as easily as the cheapskate buying cheaper insurance:

http://tauntermedia.com/2009/07/28/unconscionable-math/

http://www.slate.com/id/2223680/

And, IMO, we don't get shit for what we pay for, especially with $1500-3000 deductibles, $35-50 co-pays being the norm now with rising premiums through the roof. Not to mention the fact that $14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every day:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...ance-every-day/

This current system is broke. The public option offers a vital safety-net to everyone SHOULD THEY SO CHOOSE TO HAVE IT. Of course if you love your high-ass premiums and shitty coverage, and love the fact that your insurance company (who's spending a $1,000,000/day to kill the public option, BTW) can drop you like a bad habit on irrelevant technicalities any time they so choose, then by all means keep it. Knock yourself out. Just don't deny others having the option to choose something better.

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

I don't consider myself a socialist by any means, but I saw this and thought it was appropriate for the topic (I am for some sort of universal health plan). It's basically an "in your face" for all those crying "socialism" and how we need to keep the USA devoid of it's evil influences.

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I AM AN AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE SHITHEEL This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration. At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issed by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school. After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it's valuables thanks to the local police department. I then log on to the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.

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Originally posted by MisterOpus1 I'm not implying anything, I'm directly stating it. Does your taxes that you pay for firefighters only go exclusively to YOUR house if it burns down, or does it foot the bill for others as well? What exactly are you implying here yourself?

Yes, I pay taxes that help to fund those services. I expect that everyone that owns a home pays their property taxes (at least generally speaking). Is locally provided fire insurance in the same league as nationally subsidized healthcare? I see what you're trying to get at but I don't think it's a very good comparison.

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You do realize that most of these adults choose not to have health care not because they're choosing to risk it and "expect a bailout" when things go bad. They choose not to have insurance because it would literally eat up their entire paycheck and they'd have little left for, you know, food, rent/mortgage, electricity, and other vital necessities:

So does that mean that the default conclusion is that it MUST be provided by the government on somebody else's dime? I don't mean to sound callous, but I hate the argument that if something is broken, it is the responsibility of government to fix it (with massive deficit spending at the expense of those who are already paying for it). Surely there are more innovative solutions than what is being proposed in 1,000 page bills that nobody has time to read??

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I think we can both agree that the cost of insurance premiums flat out suck and are getting worse every year. What's worse, co-insurance and deductibles are only going up, thus shifting the burden on the consumer more and more. As I've said before, the current system simply is not sustainable, and I see no reason why Conservatives who love to shout "FREE MARKETS!!" and "CAPITALISM!!" want to run to the hills when we have the government as another competitor in their capitalistic utopia.

Yes they do suck. Healthcare is expensive as fuck, and probably needlessly so. But I'd prefer to stick with the tactics that go after the cause of high premiums instead of band-aid fixes that only add up to more and more debt for future generations. Making something "more affordable" by subsidizing it (making it more expensive for the guy who now pays for his own insurance as well as yours) is not a solution. More government and higher taxes are not a long-term solution to any real problems, imo.

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Guess we need to privatize the firefighters then, huh.

Who knows. Maybe it would be a good idea, maybe it wouldn't. I don't really see that as a relevant tangent at this point.

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Besides, are we even talking about everyone paying for public insurance right now? Because based on what I've seen from the preliminary estimates, we'd be saving money. The CBO estimates we'd be saving $150 billion: http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_...-it-s-good.aspx Commonwealth has us saving $250 billion: http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/new...ml?id=259000012 And the CBO looks at the current bill in the House giving us a $6 billion surplus: http://www.speaker.gov/blog/?p=1872

We must be reading different stories. Maybe the $6B surplus you're talking about comes from massive tax increases, not savings.

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ObamaCare’s Real Price Tag The funding gap is a canyon by year 10. As ObamaCare sinks in the polls, Democrats are complaining that the critics are distorting their proposals. But the truth is that the closer one inspects the actual details, the worse it all looks. Today’s example is the vast debt canyon that would open just beyond the 10-year window under which the bill is officially “scored” for cost purposes. The press corps has noticed the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that the House health bill increases the deficit by $239 billion over the next decade. But government-run health care won’t turn into a pumpkin after a decade. The underreported news is the new spending that will continue to increase well beyond the 10-year period that CBO examines, and that this blowout will overwhelm even the House Democrats’ huge tax increases, Medicare spending cuts and other “pay fors.” In a July 26 letter, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf notes that the net costs of new spending will increase at more than 8% per year between 2019 and 2029, while new revenue would only grow at about 5%. “In sum,” he writes, “relative to current law, the proposal would probably generate substantial increases in federal budget deficits during the decade beyond the current 10-year budget window.” (The House bill has changed somewhat in the meantime, but not enough to alter these numbers much.) The nearby chart shows this Grand Canyon between spending and revenue, including CBO’s long-term predictions. While these are obviously very coarse estimates, there’s also a projection of a $65 billion deficit in the 10th year—and “deficit neutrality in the 10th year is . . . the best proxy for what will happen in the second decade.” That’s not our outlook. That’s what White House budget director Peter Orszag told the House Budget Committee in June. He added that “If you’re not falling off a cliff at the end of your projection window, that is your best assurance that the long-term trajectory is also stable.” The House bill falls off a cliff. And the CBO score almost surely understates this deficit chasm because CBO uses static revenue analysis—assuming that higher taxes won’t change behavior. But long experience shows that higher rates rarely yield the revenues that they project. As for the spending, when has a new entitlement ever come in under budget? True, the 2003 prescription drug benefit has, but those surprise savings derived from the private insurance design and competition that Democrats opposed and now want to kill. The better model for ObamaCare is the original estimate for Medicare spending when it was passed in 1965, and what has happened since. That year, Congressional actuaries (CBO wasn’t around then) expected Medicare to cost $3.1 billion in 1970. In 1969, that estimate was pushed to $5 billion, and it really came in at $6.8 billion. House Ways and Means analysts estimated in 1967 that Medicare would cost $12 billion in 1990. They were off by a factor of 10—actual spending was $110 billion—even as its benefits coverage failed to keep pace with standards in the private market. Medicare spending in the first nine months of this fiscal year is $314 billion and growing by 10%. Some of this historical error is due to 1970s-era inflation, as well as advancements in care and technology. But Democrats also clearly underestimated—or lowballed—the public’s appetite for “free” health care. ObamaCare’s deficit hole will eventually have to be filled one way or another—along with Medicare’s unfunded liability of some $37 trillion. That means either reaching ever-deeper into middle-class pockets with taxes, probably with a European-style value-added tax that will depress economic growth. Or with the very restrictions on care and reimbursement that have been imposed on Medicare itself as costs exploded. On the latter point, the 1965 Medicare statute explicitly stated that “Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize any Federal official or employee to exercise any supervision or control over the practice of medicine or the manner in which medical services are provided.” Yet now such government management of doctors and hospitals is so pervasive in Medicare that Mr. Obama can casually wonder in a recent interview with Time magazine how anyone could oppose the “benign changes” that he supports, such as “how the delivery system works.” Oh, is that all? Democrats will return in the fall with various budget tweaks that will claim to make ObamaCare “deficit neutral” over 10 years. But that won’t begin to account for the budget abyss it will create in the decades to come.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...2075560890.html

But hey, I guess in 10 years, Obama will be out so it'll actually be the fault of the next administration when suddenly the deficit goes hyperbolic.

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Yeah, it's probable that you get squadoosh when the shit hits the fan no matter what you pay with the current system. Better pray that recission problems don't hit you or your family, because you could pay premiums on time your entire life and when life-threatening times occur, you could get dropped just as easily as the cheapskate buying cheaper insurance:

I have said in this thread that there are certain changes in the current system that I'd gladly support. However a single-payor system that does nothing to address the problems and only creates more federal expenses and higher taxes is definitely not one of them. Surely we can come up with more innovative solutions to tackle the real problems without resorting to trying to cram through 1,000 page bills that nobody has read in record time without fully vetting the potential consequences. It's no wonder so many Americans are incensed and this platform is quickly losing steam.

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And, IMO, we don't get shit for what we pay for, especially with $1500-3000 deductibles, $35-50 co-pays being the norm now with rising premiums through the roof. Not to mention the fact that $14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every day:

What is $14,000 worth of Americans? j/k...I agree--the costs are ridiculous. Why are costs so high? There are several reasons--let's address them. What if insurance companies were run as non-profits and any surplus premiums collected and not spent were deposited into a general fund of sorts to cover medical costs for the less fortunate? And what if there was a means-based test to determine eligibility for access to those funds? (i.e. you were perfectly capable of buying insurance but chose to take a risk and not get insurance so you can't expect the public to be entirely responsible for your poor decision making?). I don't think that price controls really work, but maybe changing the pay/incentive structure of our healthcare providers would help (i.e. Obama's recent trip to the Cleveland Clinic where Doctors are paid flat salaries vs. procedure drive compensation?)

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This current system is brokeN. The public option offers a vital safety-net to everyone SHOULD THEY SO CHOOSE TO HAVE IT. Of course if you love your high-ass premiums and shitty coverage, and love the fact that your insurance company (who's spending a $1,000,000/day to kill the public option, BTW) can drop you like a bad habit on irrelevant technicalities any time they so choose, then by all means keep it. Knock yourself out. Just don't deny others having the option to choose something better.

Firstly, I don't know that I fully agree with the constant assertation that the system is "broken" just because Obama says so. No system is perfect and ours is no different, but when something works just fine for a vast majority of people it's not intellectually honest to talk about it like it's a 5,000 piece puzzle strewn across the floor. Parts of the system need change, but the general statement that the entire system is broken and is hurtling our country towards bankruptcy just rings a bit hollow with me. We might bankrupt our country if we pass currently proposed legislation on the subject, however.

I'd love to pay less. It cost me $3,000+ just to have a fucking child. It costs me several hundred dollars a month for something that I might use once a year at best. Yeah, I think I'm paying too much. But then again, that's what insurance is--you pay for something you don't need until you actually do need it. I pay $150/month for car insurance and I never use it because I'm generally a good driver and have been fortunate enough to not get into any accidents. And what's the first thing that happens if I do happen to need that insurance? Those greedy bastards raise my fucking premiums! Yeah--that boils my blood. I pay $100/month for life insurance that only works if I die--talk about a shitshow! But again, I contend that we need better, more creative solutions than what is being offered to us. We are all better than that. The default answer cannot be to lower the quality of the system for all (which current proposals WILL do), and do it through higher taxes on the evil rich.

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Originally posted by MisterOpus1 love the fact that your insurance company (who's spending a $1,000,000/day to kill the public option, BTW) can drop you like a bad habit on irrelevant technicalities any time they so choose, then by all means keep it. Knock yourself out. Just don't deny others having the option to choose something better.

When the "something better" involves government pointing a gun to his head and confiscating more of his property to satisfy those people, he has every right to try and deny it.

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Originally posted by Capitalizt When the "something better" involves government pointing a gun to his head and confiscating more of his property to satisfy those people, he has every right to try and deny it.

That's utterly ridiculous rhetoric and you know it.

___________________

It might be rhetoric, but it is what the expansion of every government program ultimately boils down to. Government is violence. If you disagree, stop paying taxes for a few years then try defending your property when the I.R.S. comes to seize it. Bang bang buddy.

My 2 neighbors are doctors (one is an endocrinologist and one is an ophthalmologist). I have had some interesting conversations with the endocrinologist on this topic before, and he has come down with interesting stances on several aspects of the issue. However, one of my main takeaways from him, that I happen to agree with, is:

Is the role of the government in all of this to be an active participant, or a referee? It seems like the current track of legislation is going to attempt to make the government an active player. Anyone with an ounce of common sense will tell you that you cannot compete with the federal government--that is a large part of why resistance from the private market players is so fierce and why you hear them say that they will be driven out of business--it is a legitimate concern.

On the other hand, with a government that acts as a referee, we'd have a non-active, non-partisan participant who would ensure "fairness." That pricing is not overly egregious, that people cannot be denied coverage due to pre-existing condition (but that government itself would not step in to provide said coverage for instance).

For me, that is a large part of how it comes down. Yes, maybe there is a role for government to play here, but I do not subscribe to the view that it's role is one of being an active participant in the industry.

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Originally posted by Capitalizt It might be rhetoric, but it is what the expansion of every government program ultimately boils down to. Government is violence. If you disagree, stop paying taxes for a few years then try defending your property when the I.R.S. comes to seize it. Bang bang buddy.

So you are an anarchist. Glad we got that out of the way.

___________________

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Originally posted by Krypton So you are an anarchist. Glad we got that out of the way.

Just pointing out what you fans of big government programs are really advocating in the end. UHC and other socialistic plans of direct confiscation and redistribution are little better than slavery. Truth hurts.

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Originally posted by Capitalizt Just pointing out what you fans of big government programs are really advocating in the end. UHC and other socialistic plans of direct confiscation and redistribution are little better than slavery. Truth hurts.

Public schools, roads, police, firefighters, military, justice, etc are all socialism enslaving the masses right?

___________________

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Originally posted by Krypton Public schools, roads, police, firefighters, military, justice, etc are all socialism enslaving the masses right?

Everyone pays for the military, the court system, roads, police, etc. Society must have institutions in place to settle disputes and protect citizens from theft and violence. Those are legitimate functions the government provides to everyone.

There is a vast difference between those "programs" and those that confiscate wealth from one class of people to directly redistribute it to others. Sorry krypt, there's just no getting around the fact that the welfare state is much more akin to slavery than anything else. The fact that "the rich" don't elicit much sympathy from the masses doesn't make taxing the shit out of them and giving their money to those who didn't earn it (via welfare payments, "free" healthcare, etc) any more moral.