One More Time….!
You will not lose your Medicare Coverage. Medicare will stay the same.
You will not see costs go up, either in the private sector or with the new public option. If anything, they will go down and probably go down dramatically.
There will be no rationing. Don’t tell me why this must be or why that must be. There will be no rationing. End of life issues are the same for everyone. Let’s face it. If you are over a hundred and want a hair transplant, you pay for it. If you need a heart transplant…you pay for it…unless your job in which you are still active at 100 is performing transplants of one kind or another. Let’s get REAL here. The insurance industry plants are raising these issues just to keep you from getting health care and killing their golden goose.
So, if they say:
The system will go broke. No it won’t. Your taxes will not go up unless you make over $250,000 and if you do you just had two tax breaks in the last 8 years. You are simply going to lose those tax breaks. They were on tap to be retired anyway. Millionaires making $20,000 to $40,000 per million can afford to pay up to $9,000 of those tax breaks on top of all the others they receive. If you make less than $250K, stop buying into this propaganda, designed to HURT you, dummie!
If you are on a private system you will probably see your costs go down. But your insurance company will not go broke unless they are charging exorbitant rates and have commensurately luxurious business habits. If they do…tough! FORTUNE AND FORBES and others are going to write that your corporation will not be able to afford the adjustments that they will have to make in five years. Five years. By that time, whatever adjustments necessary will have been made. The CEO of GE, one of the biggest ERISA self-insurers is enthusiastically on board with these plans, which all have this provision. Once again, if you look at the articles on the net, see how shamelessly they run insurance ads next to the article and other insurance ads on any second page. The health insurance companies want your money, your house, your car and they don’t care what they have to do to keep you from getting health care.
It’s going to cost too much. I need a bigger subsidy. Grow up. If you are under $40,000 you’ll basically be subsidized. If you make, say, $80,000 you won’t and you may have to spend a few bucks each month for health care. Hey, that’s life in the big city. And if other countries are any indication, you will have better health care, complete coverage if you lose your job or move at no additional cost. That’s the plan, folks. To make health care affordable and accessible! Get a brain cell! Stop being pushed around by your health insurance company or their allies in the pharmaceutical companies and big hospital networks. They won’t lose any sleep whether you get health care or not. Their boats will be ten feet shorter and their beach houses will be smaller. That’s all. But your kids will never have to worry about health care as long as you are a responsible parent, not necessarily a wealthy one.
The country can’t afford it. Wrong. We can easily afford it and it stupid to say that we cannot. The country can afford a war that costs a billion dollars a week? And we got from that….4,000 dead soldiers? Was that a good thing? 30,000 wounded to free Iraqis who then killed our soldiers and are STILL killing them? We had a chance to get Bin Laden in Afghanistan and we blew it. So maybe we should get out and let them fight and come home and protect the United States of America! So, the country can afford $600 billion a year in defense while 19 hijackers killed 3000 people in our biggest city?
The country can afford to research turtles and send astronauts to the moon and George W. Bush, completely out of touch with reality, wanted to send people to Mars. If we are going to be nutty, let’s be nutty for health care. The second George W. Bush tax cuts alone, if we used all of the money for this, would pay for this and we would have to do nothing else. NOTHING. The only reason we don’t discuss this is because Democratic Senators are wimps and Republican Senators don’t give a damn about the people. Let’s repeat that. Republican Senators don’t give a damn about you. There are dozens of examples to prove it and nothing to dispute it. Use the Bush tax cuts to the rich to fund health care. They will have to pay, poor babies, 39% income tax rates…on which they eventually end up paying, on average about 23%. Big deal. With FICA we all pay more than that right now.
Health care standards will force prices up. Bunk. Every state has health care standards now. In fact, if you live in Connecticut, you can get a hair transplant or in vitro fertilization. I doubt those will be on the basic standards that all plans will have to have. Since we already have higher standards set by law, prices will not go up. Too bad, health insurance industry. Nice try, but costs will go down. If they would go up, you would be the first ones for it. Naturally there have to be minimum standards but that is routine.
You won’t be able to find health care. Ridiculous. That is the whole point of the exercise. The plans call for regional or statewide insurance exchanges where you can go to shop for health care insurance. That is why we need the public option. If there are only two companies controlling a market for some reason, the public plan will step in to make sure that they don’t charge outrageous prices. If the plans come out of Congress without a public option, then this will be much more difficult. That is why WE MUST HAVE A PUBLIC OPTION. If not, the marketplace will be controlled by the number of private plans, which could be only two, in your area. Consequently, your prices could go up, severely, without a public option. Unless you trust the insurance companies to voluntarily lower their rates or ask more insurance companies to come in, thereby lowering their profits. How has that been working for you so far?
COBRA will disappear. It won’t be necessary. You will have far less costly options. You will be able to take your insurance with you when you go at the rate you had been paying, not the total amount of the insurance payment or you can opt for the public option. Either way, you will have insurance whether you are employed or not, whether you live in the same place or move. You will never lose insurance unless you simply decide to stop paying insurance premiums while gainfully employed.
Small businesses with payrolls up to $250,000 will be exempt from offering health care but those over $250,000 will pay 2% of payroll, up to $400,000. (roughly a total of $8,000 on $399,999) Over $400,000 companies would pay 8% or in the case of $400,000, obviously, it would be $32,000. If you had ten employees, therefore, it would be about $3,200 annually per employee skipped. Actually it would probably work out much better to drop the private health care, let the employee use his or her own health care, whether public or private.
We will not be able to reduce costs. Wrong. First, by doing away with Medicare Advantage we will save something like 15-20%. Big billions in savings. Second, by streamlining procedures at both Medicare and Medicaid and assisting all levels of medical delivery with more efficient methods of administration, such as the complete encoding of all medical records, now underway. Third, by expanding the number of people on the public option, many more people will be in the system. This will reduce costs per person dramatically. The total of those cost reductions will be huge. By introducing competition, not only will the public option compete, but each company will not have to compete on a regional basis. If there is insufficient competition, the public option will fill the void. Caps will be set on all fees by private insurance so that once reasonable limits have been reached insurance companies will not be able to throw costs to the insured. (We assume this will be done through a gigantic risk pool in which all insurance firms may participate. That may be a private enterprise, but either way, one would assume that there will be underwriting for the catastrophic segment of the insurance. That will drop costs enormously.)
Costs will go sky-high to the tax payer. Taxes will go up. Wrong. The fact is that every economist who has any knowledge of the universal health care systems around the world says that costs will go down on our much more expensive way of delivering health care until the costs are paid for by whatever system we put in place…premiums, combination of sin taxes…whatever. Other countries do this and much, much more for half the cost or less than we spend now. So prices won’t go up. They’ll go down. That means that, just like Walmart, big time purchasing and lowest costs, wil still mean that a more efficient system will be more and more affordable the longer it is in operation.
One thing is for sure. If the Canadians voted it in and the Brits voted it in, they could vote it out. They don’t. With whatever faults it has, they overwhelmingly love it. They modify it now and then to make it better by lobbying government with their votes. We certainly have the patent on lobbying. So let’s make it lobbying for the People for a change.