6) How much does it cost? The price for all that isn’t cheap — $943 billion over 10 years, mostly because of the subsidies to help people buy insurance. The country spends nearly $2.5 trillion each year on healthcare now, though. The bill is mostly paid for, in part by new fees on pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers of medical devices and other industries that will benefit from the expansion of access to healthcare it would allow. Those companies will all make more money, the theory goes, because they’ll have millions of new customers who don’t have insurance now. Other fees, including payments from people who don’t buy insurance despite the mandate, penalties on companies that don’t provide insurance, and a higher payroll tax to cover Medicaid and Medicare for people who make more than $250,000, would help make up the rest of the tab.
Mike Madden, “The Health Care Bill: 10 Things You Need to Know, Salon, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/03/19/healthcare_facts_slideshow/index.htm; http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/03/19/healthcare_facts_slideshow/slideshow.html#
(Emphasis added on “the theory goes.”)
Number six was my favorite: the government will charge industries, in exchange for those industries getting more customers. How does that work? And which customers, by the way?
We know that there are not 45 million perpetually uninsured Americans. That would make us a Banana republic, and since I live here, I’m pretty sure that’s not what the United States is, in fact. Actually, very few are without insurance for the long-term, and those that are, are largely comprised of people who choose not to buy (but could otherwise) due to the exorbitant costs. The exorbitant costs are due to seventy-five years of federal tinkering with health care, in addition to more than 1,800 state regulations on the health care industries.
On that note, aren’t liberals the ones who think every state action poses a Commerce Clause issue? Why not eliminate these state burdens in one fell swoop by letting Americans buy insurance, interstate; and let health insurance companies flock to the state with the least regulations, ala, Delaware (Because of Delaware’s lax corporate tax policies and regulations, most U.S. companies are incorporated under that state).
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) states that 74.7% of the current uninsured will become insured within one year, 84% within two years, and 97.5% will have insurance within three years. Yet, in three years time, we will again have “45 million” uninsured. The cause is simple: employer provided health insurance has been incentivized by the federal government since the 1940s. Thus, when one loses his job, he tends to lose his insurance. We he gets a new job, he regains insurance. (With health savings accounts, proposed by Congressional Republicans and every one with a brain [two groups which sometimes overlapped], one would not lose his insurance between jobs.)
So, I ask again, from where will all these new customers come? How shall companies make even more money….. you know, as the theory goes.
That industries will make “more money” this way when they are be taxed to pay for more patients is absurd. Is this the logic being applied by the people at the CBO who say we are going to cut $138 billion over 10 years?
How? Which variables are they counting on occurring that assures us we will cut this much? We could just assume, for instance, that if everyone in the United States who smokes, quit tomorrow, the new plan would cut $1 trillion over the next fourteen days. Or, we could theorize that medical companies will get to add all sorts of new customers, while costs remain constant.
Or we could assume, as President Obama has informed us, that premiums will decrease by 3,000 percent…… I see…..
To be sure, my favorite cost saving provision is the magic beans subsidy, which I believe is item fifteen on page 8 billion.
Keep in mind, also, the CBO ALWAYS under estimates the cost of government programs. (Medicare was also supposed to reduce health care costs, how’s that working out?) And let’s say it did save all sorts of money: would that make it good?
Another favorite section of this cost-saving bill, is the establishment of the Independent Medicare Board. That board will be required to (1) reduce Medicare costs by $500 billion and (2) evaluate which drugs and treatments Medicare patients get to have. That’s an interesting set of prerogatives. I wonder how that will work.
Madden snidely refers to people crazily raving about a “socialist scheme,” and yet Obama himself (as well as countless advisors, Congressmen and Senators) has (have) said on numerous occasions that he (they) envision(s) a single-payer health care system in the United States “10, 15 years down the line.” There is no question that lawmakers have been pushing for incremental steps toward a single payer system for decades. Why should we believe that they will not institute a public option in five years (that is, once we find that, like with Medicare five years out, the magic formula didn’t work, and costs keep rising)? Dennis Kucinich certainly thinks this will happen.
Let me put it this way: if the government were doing things that are Socialist in the area of health care, what would that look like? Liberals are experts on what IS NOT Socialism (i.e., everything Obama ever attempts to do) yet we never hear what Socialism would actually be/look like. So what is it? The government strengthening its regulatory role in an area of the economy that it’s already spent the last seventy-five years destroying (health care) seems to me to be Socialism.
Tens of millions of Americans have moral, philosophical and economic objections to Socialism. Telling tens of millions of people to just get over it and accept what the government is planning for them is dangerously close to totalitarianism. I would find it laughable that so many liberals and Obamabots maintain mirthful irreverence to the “tea partiers” and their crazy shrieks of Socialism, if not for the fact that they are dancing my country down their merry path to Hell with them.
Obama acting like there are just no possible alternatives to his federal program in the face of countless reforms, all of which would increase access, decrease cost and remove third party-oversight into people’s medical decisions (government, and insurance companies), indicates that Obama simply likes government regulation. I call this a Socialist and anyone who does not needs to go find out what Socialism is all about.
So much for a right to privacy once 7,000 new health boards are working together to benevolently decide which drugs and treatments we get to enjoy. Then, I suppose public concerns for privacy, human dignity, constitutional violations, Socialist economic planning, and outrageous spending that will prompt either increased taxation or serfdom to our Chinese lenders, is just “political noise” to this Salon columnist.