The_Dunedan

I'll take a crack

This includes my entire inbred, meth-cooking, welfare-cheating neighborhood. Since all of these people are "disabled," they are all below this number, despite the fact that most of them live better than I do, supplementing their income by selling meth and prescription drugs, working under the table, drawing every manner of public assistance they qualify for, and cheating their churches. Why you or I should -further- subsidise people like this is completely beyond me.

Hmm. This one I have dual issues with. I think everyone should have access to healthcare, but requiring businesses to take on customers who are never going to be anything other than a money-pit is a big part of what got the whole Sub-Prime mess started. When you start requiring a business to take on guaranteed losses, those losses have to be made up somewhere, which almost always ends up driving up prices and fees and lowering the quality of service. Alternately, as was the case with the banking industry, business owners sometimes choose to attempt to make up the losses through risky business practices and investments; I'd hate to see a hospital go the way or Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers.

This is just plain stupid. A sick person costs more, and those costs are immediate. Larger risk pools spread the costs out more, but with an aging (and obese) population soon to need large amounts of expensive healthcare, we're again talking about forcing a company to take on "customers" who will never do anything but lose that company money. Saddle a company with too many such "customers," and that company goes under.

Because having 50+ employees automatically means that you can afford to provide coverage in such an environment (increased costs to pay for those money-pit "customers", remember) on profit margins that are probably already in single digits.

For which they will only qualify under certain tightly-dilineated circumstances (enough diversity, "proper" wages, etc) which will have to be proven and re-proven to keep some meddling pencil-pusher with a degree in Sociology and zero work or management experience happy. Fall outside of those criteria, and the credit will be withdrawn. The "credit" will probably end up being offset by tax increases in other areas anyway.

Because the best way to force somebody to buy something they can't afford or don't want is to charge them money they may not have. And why is it the Gov't job to force me to buy insurance anyway? Oh yes, so the insurer will have -somebody- who isn't sick to pay for all those diabetic Rotundimus Maximiii they've been forced to take on.

Now -these- two I have no problem with. My only issue is that this comes down to appealing a Gov't decision to a Gov't employee who sits on a Gov't panel. Those sorts of things rarely work out well; ask anybody who's ever had to "appeal" a ruling of the ATF, FBI, or DHS.

Except that plenty of knowledgeable people -do- believe it. When the insurance companies are forced to take on huge numbers of "customers" who never do anything but cost them money, at rates which cannot differ from those they charge customers who -make- them money, they cannot compete with an entity (the public "option") which is subsidised and backed by the power of the Fed to simply throw money at it. AIG cannot force people to pay for its' product if they don't want to or if they're not buying; the amount of loss they can absorb is directly governed by how much money they can make from people who make the decision to transact with them. The Gov't doesn't have to worry about that; if it takes a loss, they just raise taxes, borrow money, or print a few more trillion dollars to cover it. No private-sector business can compete with the Federal Gov't for this reason alone.

Because none of those companies are being forced to take on guaranteed losses while trying to compete with the public "option."


The net effects of this bill will be to at least severely damage, and probably destroy, private-sector health insurance in the United States. Given the past statements by Mr. Obama and his associates and backers, I have a hard time believing that this is anything other than intentional. The combined results of the House and Senate bills will be to nationalize something on the order of 12-15% of our economy, drive healthcare costs through the roof for the average citizen who doesn't take advantage of the Gov't-subsidised public "option," and drive large numbers of physicians into retirement or Thailand. I see nothing good coming from this, nothing at all. The Law of Unintended Consequences always, ALWAYS bites you in the ass, and the bigger the -intended- consequences of something, the bigger the -unintended- consequences as well. Even assuming that this monstrosity -wasn't- created as a backdoor to fully-nationalised healthcare, that will be the likely result.