Many here may not recall that Hillary blatantly violated laws by keeping the meetings secret, and by lavishly compensating the cronies she put on that committee. I hope her disregard for inconvenient disclosure laws doesn't take long to surface in light of her candidacy.
Additionally, what everyone is overlooking in this discussion is the enormous cost of providing health care in the emergency room to 12-15 milliion illegal aliens, who don't pay taxes. The elimination of that alone would make possible a HUGE reduction in costs which are now shouldered by those who pay for their care, or for medical insurance. Not that insurance companies would do so if they had a chance to avoid it.
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I believe that the government should be able to step in and take control when the nature of an important service like healthcare does not result in a free market. There seems to be little "free market pricing" of hospital charges and what little there is seems to be dictated by the insurance companies.
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This is incorrect. There is extreme control over hospital charges.
Example: You have no insurance, and you need an operation. The first thing you should do is get an estimate of the charges from the hospitals and start negotiating. Let's say your estimate is $25 k.
The insurance companies will already have negotiated a price for their customers. It will probably (no exaggeration) be $15k or less. That should be the starting point of your negotiations. This IS a business. Therefore, you need to be an informed consumer. It isn't difficult, except in the case of emergencies.
Why the difference? The hospital has to recoup the costs of providing care to the people who show up in the ER and pay them nothing, i.e. the poor (or those who choose a big screen TV over health insurance) and illegal aliens. They can't collect it from people who have contracts via their insurance, or from people who have no money, so who is left? People who have SOME money, but no insurance.
Want proof? Check statistics from the labor and delivery wards of border towns. Those are places where it is illegal to ask if the patient is entitled to be here. It's also where a great many US "citizens" start their lives, if their mother was able to sneak across the border. You can thank the government that you would like to have "step in" for that situation.
I agree about self-employed getting the same tax break, and there have been a few steps toward that under the Bush administration. In any case the rich can't take the blame for this one.