Obungacare: All pigs equal but some pigs get waivers...

one pf the worst written opeds Ive seen in a long time. The problem with blogs is that they are like assholes, everyone has one and some use em as another source of communication. He doesnt mention the tax credits invested in the "carrot" side of the insurance requirements.

Ill bet you havent read the damn LAW. You can download it on the Congressional website. I urge you to read the AHCA and then perhaps come back (or not) to discuss rather than seek out moronic blogs and fringe pubs to get your pablum.

Somebody who didn't know better actually would get the impression you knew what you were talking about...

Read the lawwww?? All 80,000 pages of it???

Again I can describe what the country actually needs in the way of medical reform in a page and a half and have done so:

Once again:

The country does need medical reform, but not Obungacare.

The size of obungacare indicates to me that it is about power and not about health care. Likewise Mark Steyn notes that the job of director or head of public health has become the biggest govt. job in European countries which have public health care i.e. it would be a step upwards from PM or President or King or Grand Duke or anything else to head of health care. In other words, European health care is ultimate bureaucracy.

If I had the power to I would institute a sort of a basic health care reform which would be overwhelmingly simple and which would resemble the thing we're reading about in no way, shape, or manner. Key points would be:

1. Elimination of lawsuits against doctors and other medical providers. There would be a general fund to compensate victims of malpractice for actual damage and a non-inbred system for weeding out those guilty of malpractice. The non-inbred system would be a tribunal composed not just of other doctors, but of plumbers, electricians, engineers, and everybody else as well.

2. Elimination of the artificial exclusivity of the medical system. In other words our medical schools could easily produce two or three times the number of doctors they do with no noticeable drop off in quality.

3. Elimination of the factors which drive the cost of medicines towards unaffordability. That would include both lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies and government agencies which force costs into the billions to develop any new drug. There should be no suing a pharmaceutical for any drug which has passed FDA approval and somewhere between thalidamide and what we have now, there should be a happy medium.

4. Elimination of the outmoded WW-II notion of triage in favor of a system which took some rational account of who pays for the system and who doesn't. The horror stories I keep reading about the middle-class guy with an injured child having to fill out forms for three hours while an endless procession of illegal immigrants just walks in and are seen, would end, as would any possibility of that child waiting three hours for treatment while people were being seen for heroin overdoses or other lifestyle issues.

All of those things would fall under the heading of what TR called "trust busting". There would also be some system for caring the truly indigent, but the need and cost would be far less than at present.

By far the biggest item is that first one. I don't know the exact numbers but if you add every cost involved in our present out-of-control lawyering, it has to be a major fraction if not more than half of our medical costs. The trial lawyers' guild being one of the two major pillars of financial support for the democrat party is the basic reason nobody is saying anything about that part of the problem.

Other than that, you almost have to have seen some of the problems close up to have any sort of a feel for them.

Item 1, this is what I saw in grad school some time ago, although I do not have any reason to think much has changed. In the school I attended, there appeared to be sixty or seventy first year med students walking around and all but one or two of them would have made perfectly good doctors, they were all very bright and highly motivated. The only way the school should have lost any of those kids was either they discovered they couldn't deal with the sight of blood in real life or six months later they changed their minds and went off to Hollywood to become actors or actresses; the school should never have lost more than ten percent of them. But they knew from day one that they were keeping 35% of that class.

That system says that you know several things about the guy working on your body: You know he's a survivor, and that's highly unlikely to be from being better qualified than 65% of the other students; You know he hasn't had enough sleep (he's doing his work and the work of that missing 65%); You know he's probably doing some sort of drugs to deal with the lack of sleep... One of my first steps as "health Tsar" or whatever would be to tell the medical schools that henceforth if they ever drop more than15% of an incoming class, they'll lose their accreditation.

Item 2. My father walks into a pharmacy in Switzerland with a bottle of pills he normally pays $50 for in Fla. and asks the pharmacist if he can fill it. "Why certainly sir!", fills the bottle of pills and says "That will be $3.50." Seeing that my father was standing there in a state of shock, the man says "Gee, I'm sorry, Mr. Snake, you see, we have socialized medicine in Switzerland and if you were a Swiss citizen and paid into the systemn, why I could sell you this bottle of pills for $1.50 but, since you're foreign and do not pay into the system I have to charge you the full price, certainly you can appreciate that."

The guy thought my father was in shock because he was charging him too MUCH... Clearly whatever needs to be done with drugs amounts to trust busting, and not extracting more money from the American people.

Item 3. A caller to the Chris Plant show (D.C./WMAL) the other morning, an ER nurse, noted that much of the costs which her hospital had to absorb, as do most hospitals, was the problem of people with no resources using the ER as their first and only point of contact to the medical profession. She said that there were gang members who were constantly coming in for repairs from bullet holes and knife damage and drug problems, that they could not legally turn any of those people away, and that there was zero possibility of ever collecting any money from any of them, and that the costs of that were gigantic.

Clearly throwing money at that problems is not going to help anything either. Again if I'm the "Medicine Tsar", those guys would be cared for, but not at the ER or at least not the part of the ER where normal people go, and they would not be first in line. Mostly they'd be dealing with medical students who needed the practice patching up knife and bullet damage.

well then how can you even have an opinion about something that you admit not having even skimmed
AS I SAID the Congressional website (and several others) have made DIGESTS of the law so that even mildly retarded folks (like yourself) can understand it without using too many multi syllable words


Of the points youve mentioned (that you would do if you were literate) They are IN THE LAW.

The only things that were FORCED into the Bill by the REPUKKKLICANS were the overall directive wherein Insurance companies (not physicians) are STILL in the drivers seat of doling out medical care. BUT , the safety net for drs is there, based upon a decrease in the requirements of overlapping tests and needless procedures

I don't know who this Justin Washington guy is, but he's much better at coming up with insulting nicknames than you are, GungasnaKKKe. By the way, how is that "Obunga" thing coming? Still gaining momentum?

Pubbies didn't have the votes to force anything into anything when that **** happened and near as I can tell with possibly a handful of exceptions, all voted against it. You gonna tell us how Jews were responsible for Nazism too??

Hey Farmer where do those tax credit's come from? That money just doesn't appear out of thin air?

Here is a partial listing of new taxes we were not supposed to have:

Here are some of the new taxes you're going to have to pay to pay for Obamacare:
A 3.8% surtax on "investment income" when your adjusted gross income is more than $200,000 ($250,000 for joint-filers). What is "investment income?" Dividends, interest, rent, capital gains, annuities, house sales, partnerships, etc. Taxes on dividends will rise from 15% to 18.8%--if Congress extends the Bush tax cuts. If Congress does not extend the Bush tax cuts, taxes on dividends will rise from 15% to a shocking 43.8%. (WSJ)
A 0.9% surtax on Medicare taxes for those making $200,000 or more ($250,000 joint). You already pay Medicare tax of 1.45%, and your employer pays another 1.45% for you (unless you're self-employed, in which case you pay the whole 2.9% yourself). Next year, your Medicare bill will be 2.35%. (WSJ)
Flexible Spending Account contributions will be capped at $2,500. Currently, there is no tax-related limit on how much you can set aside pre-tax to pay for medical expenses. Next year, there will be. If you have been socking away, say, $10,000 in your FSA to pay medical bills, you'll have to cut that to $2,500. (ATR.org)
The itemized-deduction hurdle for medical expenses is going up to $10,000. Right now, any medical expenses over $7,500 per year are deductible. Next year, that hurdle will be $10,000. (ATR.org)
The penalty on non-medical withdrawals from Healthcare Savings Accounts is now 20% instead of 10%. That's twice the penalty that applies to annuities, IRAs, and other tax-free vehicles. (ATR.org)
A tax of 10% on indoor tanning services. This has been in place for two years, since the summer of 2010. (ATR.org)
A 40% tax on "Cadillac Health Care Plans" starting in 2018.Those whose employers pay for all or most of comprehensive healthcare plans (costing $10,200 for an individual or $27,500 for families) will have to pay a 40% tax on the amount their employer pays. The 2018 start date is said to have been a gift to unions, which often have comprehensive plans. (ATR.org)
A"Medicine Cabinet Tax" that eliminates the ability to pay for over-the-counter medicines from a pre-tax Flexible Spending Account. This started in January 2011. (ATR.org)
A "penalty" tax for those who don't buy health insurance. This will phase in from 2014-2016. It will range from $695 per person to about $4,700 per person, depending on your income. (More details here.)
A tax on medical devices costing more than $100. Starting in 2013, medical device manufacturers will have to pay a 2.3% excise tax on medical equipment. This is expected to raise the cost of medical procedures. (Breitbart.com)

Nothing is for free, someone always pays.

Not a problem for me, I make nowhere near that level - and neither does, oh 90% of the population. Those who do are, in large part, in a comfortable class, whose income has skyrocketed over the last two decades, while everyone else has seen no real increase in income or wealth. I weep for them not a single bit, and I don't believe this surtax will change their behaviors even slightly.



Once again, not a problem for me.



Fine with me, that's nothing but a way to dodge taxes anyway.



See above.



Yes, because you are basically lying in order to dodge taxes, if you put money in an HSA and then use it for non-medical purposes. No problemo.



Nobody cares about this.



This is a legitimate gripe.



Who cares? If you are buying over-the-counter meds, you should be doing so with taxable income. There's no reason it should be tax-free for you to buy Excedrin.



That's correct. There's an easy way around it, though - just buy health insurance. If you can't afford it, you are exempted from this tax. So, practically nobody will actually pay this one.



Expected by who? Breitbart's site? Those medical devices often have gigantic markups thanks to the patent schemes that ensure only one or two companies can make them. They can soak up a 2.3% tax without even blinking.



That's totally correct.

Cycloptichorn

BALDIMO is all over the map with every tax except the "Johnstown Flood Tax"Heres what I was getting at:

AND even this is rather simplistic because, how many health insurance plans we as employers offer , will remain the same.

OF course there are adjacent rises in taxes(non ACA dependent) that will affect those who make above a annual amount in ordinary income an the shelter rates for income as dividends and options will rise in order to keep all these Bush year tax dodges into permanent tax dodges. Of course all te GOPers are including the fact that most investment vehicle hve not been reporting ANY income so the tax dodging looks even better.(Fact is that noone pays taxes when noone earns income).
I dont think the congress and the pres have the balls to return to a pre Bush tax rate. Although it would , just like continuing the SS tax for all ordinary income, do away with much of the defecit and render SS solvent for the future.
Congress never makes the tough decisions. EVEN ACA is a compromise. Even though the GOP basically backed away from it, in committee they fashioned a number of clauses that were lwft in to "please them"