Healthcare Debate Hits The Floor

[pdubyoo]

The debate for the Dem healthcare bill hits the senate floor today. The CBO announced this morning, that the Dem healthcare bill will raise insurance premiums...WHAT??? Didn't see that coming!!

It will be interesting to see how many Dem politicians start jumping ship. The Repubs are unanimously against it.

[Zee]

My premiums have gone up every year for at least the past 12-14 years.

[Dudley]

Why are you surprised? Higher costs are common when a government nationalizes any industry.

[92f-fan]

Why are you surprised? Higher costs are common when a government nationalizes any industry.

look at the deficits that the post office is running
They have been delivering mail for how many decades ?
Doubled Postage how many times ?
Provide REALLY crappy customer service AND lose billions in the process..

Lets help them take over health care .........

[mr.72]

Lets help them take over health care .........

Yeah, they did a great job with Amtrak too...

The government is guaranteed to be the least efficient possible means of supplying any good or service due to the confluence of factors: 1. they are always a monopoly and 2. they do not have any incentive to make a profit or improve efficiency.

"The cost" of any government program is its life-blood. If "the cost" doesn't go up, then the funding doesn't go up, and if the funding doesn't go up, then the heads of the agencies and departments that run these programs don't get to build their empire by hiring more people and gaining more power. So you can be quite certain, "the cost", and therefore "the need for funds", and subsequently your taxes, will go up for every single government program ever enacted, period, end of story.

And much like Amtrak and the USPS, if not a protected government monopoly (USPS), at the very least it will become untenable for private competitors in the market so they will find little need to compete with government. Entrepreneurs and business people will just look elsewhere for a market in which to do business. Either they will do their thing somewhere else, or they will do some other thing. Doctors and other health-care providers are no different. It is only the fool who thinks doctors, hospitals and health-care providers are doing their thing only for the pure motive of the good of humanity. These people do this because they get paid to do it, and once the incentive of being paid based on the quality of your work goes away, the motivation to do the job will go away for everyone who could have been good at it.

Witness public schools if you want to see this in action. How often do we inexplicably find ourselves clamoring for better teachers, and at the same time, more pay for these better teachers? It's like somehow we know intuitively that more money attracts better performers, but we think that miraculously the inept and incompetent who are working in the field now will magically become great performers if we pay them more regardless of their performance. Look 20 years down the road at health care and it will be like public school. Those with means will have quality private care. The majority of us will have incompetent health-care providers in government-run hospitals and clinics provided by our tax dollars at two or three times the price we are complaining about paying for quality private care today.

Only because many, maybe even most, Americans are uneducated (gee, I wonder where they got their education?), don't understand history and don't understand economics, can the wool be so effectively pulled over their eyes. Since so many Americans are easily deceived, the politicians think that may very well be the majority and if they can fool them into thinking this is a good thing then they can buy a majority of votes. Funny how those who understand economics and the history of American government dismiss these dumb ideas out of hand, but those are far and away the minority. Small wonder our government schools are not teaching future voters about the folly of socialism and merits of smaller government's link to liberty.

[Oldgringo]

mr.72 wrote:

Small wonder our government schools are not teaching future voters about the folly of socialism and merits of smaller government's link to liberty.

Well spoken!

This just about sums it up...in a nutshell.

[Purplehood]

I thought that the public school analogy was quite instructive.

[pdubyoo]

Why are you surprised? Higher costs are common when a government nationalizes any industry.

I'm not surprised. It was my attempt at sarcasm. I have been expecting healthcare costs to shoot to the stratosphere, and someone has to pay for it.

[Liberty]

In my case my healthcare may actually go down. being over 50 my costs are phenomenally expensive and with the new Obama lead increases I simply may not be able to afford it anymore. I thought the idea of Obamacare was to make it more accessible to all. Driving the costs up just makes it more unaffordable for more folks.

[Abraham]

Go without medical insurance and hope for the best.

If something spouts blood head to the emergency room.

Then, when cancer, stroke, heart attack, (choose your favorite) arrives, plan on that doing you in without further ado.

Easy.

With or without medical insurance, you ain't gettin outta this world alive...so relax.

[Liberty]

Go without medical insurance and hope for the best.

If something spouts blood head to the emergency room.

Then, when cancer, stroke, heart attack, (choose your favorite) arrives, plan on that doing you in without further ado.

Easy.

With or without medical insurance, you ain't getting outta this world alive...so relax.

When the prices go up the choices will be removed for many people. Health care now cost me about 35% of my take home income. Taking a chance against a disease we don't have against the certainty of losing ones home or going hungry, might make giving up health insurance a not so difficult decision. The costs have been increasing at absurd rates in the past, the Obama tax is going to put a lot of people over the top. The funny thing is that it will be the healthy people dropping out, and the sicklier people left. driving the rates up even higher.

Where is John Galt?

[Dudley]

Where is John Galt?

He relocated to a country with tort reform and cut his health costs in half.

[Purplehood]

Where is John Galt?

He relocated to a country with tort reform and cut his health costs in half.

We had that here in Texas recently and look what it didn't do for us...

[mr.72]

Tort reform will not fix anything as long as the consumer of health care products and services is not the one bearing the cost of those products and services directly and has no incentive to choose products or services based on value, risk, and price.

The best thing we could do to fix this whole health care thing would be to outlaw employer-purchased health insurance plans and make every individual choose their health insurance on a one-by-one, month-by-month basis, according to their own needs and paid out of their own pocket. I guarantee you the cost of health insurance would go down necessarily as soon as you regular people have to write that check every month out of their own budgets.

[frazzled]

Tort reform will not fix anything as long as the consumer of health care products and services is not the one bearing the cost of those products and services directly and has no incentive to choose products or services based on value, risk, and price.

The best thing we could do to fix this whole health care thing would be to outlaw employer-purchased health insurance plans and make every individual choose their health insurance on a one-by-one, month-by-month basis, according to their own needs and paid out of their own pocket. I guarantee you the cost of health insurance would go down necessarily as soon as you regular people have to write that check every month out of their own budgets.

The problem of course is that health care is not like car insurance. As an absolute, unless you halt on an absolute basis technology and drug development, the cost of healthcare per person is going to rise. All those neat gadgets cost gobs of money. If you're going to have those neat gadgets then the cost is going to go up. After all, we went back to 1920s era healthcare, we could afford that with ease, but most of us would be dead before we hit 60...