Many of us have expressed concern about the pork-laden appropriation bills and stimulus package this year. Just as Republicans showed little restraint in spending in the war bills, Democrats have treated the economic recovery bills as a license for unlimited spending. Now, massive taxes and sur-taxes are being proposed. New York officials are complaining that, if passed, the rate for some of its citizens could reach almost 60 percent. Some Democrats are now seeking to reduce a proposed 5.4% sur-tax to 1 %.
The taxes are being proposed to reduce the towering deficit and pay for the national health care plan — which the Obama administration is pushing through as a breakneck speed — demanding passage by the August recess. This reminds many of us of the Patriot Act where precious little time was allowed to consider its implications and language.
However, the New York Times has an editorial detailing the fairness of the plan and questioning the criticism over tax increases. I happen to support the policy agenda of the Administration in this area, but I think that the administration can be faulted for pushing such an important piece of legislation through on an expedited schedule.
Biden reportedly entered the fray today with a classic statements: “Well, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, I’m telling you.”
Nevertheless, opposition to the sur-tax is growing among Democrats and Pelosi is indicating that she may try to reach a compromise, here.
For the New York objections, click here.
In a way the medical profession has brought this on themselves. In my opinion this happened over a couple of decades and was started by private health insurance. Once people were paying less for health care, in their minds it was almost free because of a trivial co-pay, the sky was the limit and doctors were able to increase fees. Then you had Medicare and Medicaid and a further reduction in consumer cost. What all of this did was to reduce market based realities as to the actual cost of medical care and prices rose commensurately with additional money available for health care with government and private insurance being widely available.
Additional restrictions on the market through government regulation of private insurers further disassociated health care costs from market forces and you end up with health care being a disproportionate segment of our national economy.
As an example of a free market take a look at laser surgery for vision correction. This is within the reach of most people in terms of its cost. Insurance does not pay for it and neither do government programs. The cost has dropped to about $1,200 bucks per eye and you can negotiate with most offices about cost or financing and the quality has increased significantly. This has occurred without government and insurance company subsidization.
Free markets do work and are the only real means to control health care costs and improve quality. Competition is not evil, quite the contrary it is necessary to efficiently allocate resources. Obama is sowing the seeds for the US to become a third world country and he has certainly set in motion a second great depression.
And Bush and Paulson gave him the moral cover to do it through TARP, they both should be in prison.
“Will the doctors be reimbursed any better under the proposed plan? If not, why would anybody spend the time and money to become a doctor?”
Jim,
As someone whose health requires me to have at least two Doctor visits a month I have some knowledge of the field in general. Also too when I was working in various positions I had doctors who worked for me. One would hope that people who were dedicated to working as healers would become doctors, there are a great many who do just that and the fact is by dint of becoming a doctor one is assured of a fairly high standard of living. See salaries of Resident’s compared to the average population. Beyond that it is in all of our interests to bring down the cost of becoming a Doctor, since outside of most urban areas there is a tremendous need for competent Doctors.
However, there are two components of being a Doctor in practice that can raise their profit, even while lowering fees. The first is the major expense that has become medical billing under the current system. An industry of medical billing experts has had to arise just to deal with the vagaries and recalcitrance of the Health Insurance Industry, which has raised it rates arbitrarily three to four times higher than the cost of living. Same is true of Universities and Med Schools. Simplify the billing and you lower the cost of a Doctor’s medical practice considerably and thereby raise their profit margin.
The second is that the Malpractice Insurance rates have risen, far above the actual expense of the Malpractice Insurance Company’s obligations, simply as a tool of these companies increasing profits and raising top executive salaries. There should be a governmental malpractice plan offered that by spreading the risk will lower costs, or barring that legislation to prevent these companies gouging the medical profession.
These are only two aspects of a revision of medical care in this country, but if you build it the doctor’s will come. By the way I write this as someone who has been blessed with great health insurance and would have been dead or bankrupt without it. However, I saw the problem up close when my children could no longer be covered, were still in school and I had to go into debt to finance needed medical attention for them. Thank God they are now both insured, but I don’t know if I’ll bee called on again in the future because their coverage is poor. Incidentally, both are employed and doing well, so this issue has little to do with ones ability to work and much to do with the greed of those running the current system.
“I know some people need help and I dont begrudge the truely needy part of my income, I think as Americans we should adhere to the barn raising philosophy our forefathers had. But I think this needs to be done in freedom and not by the force and power of the federal government.”
IS,
As I’ve suspected you have a conscience and the ability to find sympathy for those in harsh circumstance. That to me is what separates good people from bad people, despite their political beliefs.
Given that you think aid should be given to the truly needy let me expand my thoughts a little bit and see if you agree. My overall premise is that there is a powerful faction in this country who like the idea that people are poor. Their reasons are twofold. The first is psychological and let’s leave that as some people need to feel they are “better” than others, so they feel better about themselves. The whys of this become too long a discussion so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
Reason Two is that by having an impoverished class lower wages can be paid to workers at all levels. This works because the middle and working classes have the fear of losing their jobs and falling down into the poverty class and are therefore less likely to demand fair compensation for their work. Also it sets up a situation where those in poverty are willing to take the really menial jobs, that really pay badly.
Now some can and do say that well this is the way the ball bounces, some have the ability to succeed and some don’t, but this is not quite so. The Federal Reserve, through its’ history has time and again tightened the money supply when the level of people out of work has fallen below 5%. This slows the economy and with that economic slowdown wages, which given a true market would rise, begin to fall and people also are being laid off due to a slower economy. This has been a steady pattern since the Fed was implemented and the thing is they have even admitted time and again that they were doing it to depress wages.
Another angle of this is that in the 1980’s the Reagan Administration played with the unemployment rate figures. They declared that anyone who hadn’t found a job within six months of their becoming unemployed, was no longer looking for work and were no longer figure in the unemployment rate. This almost halves the unemployment figures that we get so the unemployment and the consequent poverty rate is almost twice what the figures tell us.
The only good thing I can say about Alan Greenspan is that he was very honest with what he was doing each time he slowed the economy and that occurred when unemployment dropped below 5% (Which was probably more like 8% or 9%). He would say that wages were rising too quickly. Now in a so-called “free market” society shouldn’t salaried people have the right to benefit from business success and the greater wages due to job scarcity? I think so. The fact that there is this extra governmental (The Fed is not really of the Government) intervention belies the whole “free market” concept. The consequence is that there are economists of the Greenspan ilk who believe that unemployment rates need to be from 5% to 9% in order to effectively run the economy. Given this people being in poverty is an artificial creation and rather than damn them, we have a duty to support them.
Another interesting historical modality that has been used to create this “underclass” of the impoverished has been immigration. It may shock you that I am against free immigration, given other views I’ve expressed and the fact that my family history in the US goes back to the 1890’s, but let me explain. Immigration has been used as a policy to drive down wages since at least the 1840’s and the Irish Potato Famine, brought in Irish people in droves to our shores.
Isn’t curious how many Chinese worked on building the Trans-
Continental Railroad? Not really because they worked for much cheaper wages. After the Civil War with the further rise of the Industrial Revolution jobs were plentiful and black people could find work away from the cotton fields. However, with the full backing of racists and Southern Politicians the gates were open, immigrants began flooding in and most blacks had to settle for picking cotton, tobacco or working on the farms leased to them by their former masters. Those blacks that went North to seek their fortunes were then in conflict with the European immigrants and with laws that worked against them. The migrant farm worker game is an obvious one. This has occurred time and again and we’ve seen it happen again since the 1980’s. The dichotomy is that the mixture of cultures has in good times been wonderful for the country, I spent many years living in and working in the Borough of Queens in NYC. It is the most culturally diverse county in the US and it is a wonder of cultures, great ethnic foods and people living together.
The thrust of my point though is that government has worked hand in glove with business interests and the banking industry to create and maintain poverty in the US and all of its’ resultant horrors. It is therefore Government’s responsibility to clear it up. The government is supposed to be us and we have a debt to pay. Especially because many, like myself, have benefited from these policies by dint of my ancestors immigration. I don’t express this as guilt, because frankly that is unneeded. I address it as basic equity and the fact that the more prosperous the people of this country are, the less poverty, the better off we will all be.
Henry Ford, not one of my favorite people because he hated Jews, was nevertheless a man of vision. He insured that his workers were the highest paid in the industry. When questioned why he raised their pay he answered so obviously with:”So they can afford to buy my automobiles.” In our current society, where we have let ourselves be convinced that the bankers and stock speculators are the economy, we have lost sight of Ford’s simple, yet elegant concept. The economy is NOT the stock market, it is the ability of the people to have and spend money. It is not banking that this country was built on, but manufacturing. For our country to again return to its greatness we must reinvigorate our manufacturing capabilities via new technology (preferably green)and put people back to work. This is not a conservative, nor liberal viewpoint, this is the viewpoint of rationality and love of country.
GWLSM “doctors have been refusing to take medicare and medicaid patients for the last 12-15 years because they are reimbursed at a really low rate.”
Will the doctors be reimbursed any better under the proposed plan? If not, why would anybody spend the time and money to become a doctor? If we end up with less doctors, due to lower pay, can we expect the same level of care?
That’s my major concern with universal health care. Perhaps people will be crossing the border to get those jobs too. :>)
IS writes: well said as usual, but while you may save money in the short term your quality of health care will not be equivalent to what you are currently receiving. National health necessarily must lead to rationing of resources. It has in every other country where implemented. The elderly and disabled will be denied care and the very ill will receive care based on some government formula. You will need to purchase an additional policy as you can in Canada and you will probably end up paying up to 60% of your income to support this plan. I would not bet on any deductions we now enjoy. So you may save some money in the short term but eventually you will pay the piper. If you are over 70 your children will pay the price. there are no free lunches.
me: what I know about health care is this: all health care now is rationed. if you have an HMO your health care is rationed by the HMO. Your doctor gets to spend 15 minutes with you and in that 15 minutes must come up with a diagnosis and treatment plan that mostly takes care of your symptoms and generally does not permit allocation of resources to perform tests. this is called capitation.
people who do not have health coverage cost their local ER’s something between $450-800 per hour depending on where you live.
the elderly are denied health care all the time. doctors have been refusing to take medicare and medicaid patients for the last 12-15 years because they are reimbursed at a really low rate.
my elderly parents do have supplemental insurance and its really good, but they have it because my 85 year old father works for the state and cannot retire or he and mom will lose these benefits and mom is pretty sick. this is in addition to medicare and the aarp supplemental insurance that they pay for.
the health coverage I used to take for granted, even though it was pretty expensive, was paid for partly by my husband’s employer. they took the $300 every two weeks. now we have cobra. it costs $2700 a month.
oh, and anyone who thinks that they have all these great choices now…. if your employer decides to stop subscribing to that great PPO and the only choice you have is a subpar HMO, well then, your choice was just taken from you and instead of being able to see any doctor you wanted, as long as you stay in the network, you now get to go see whichever clinic doctor is seeing patients for 15 minutes that day.
bdaman/JB:
I understand what you are saying.
Mike Spindell:
I have not worked with the very poor and have no real first hand knowledge of their plight. I have seen the projects though up close and personal and it was a horrid place. It would wilt my soul if I had to grow up in the world I glimpsed.
I know some people need help and I dont begrudge the truely needy part of my income, I think as Americans we should adhere to the barn raising philosophy our forefathers had. But I think this needs to be done in freedom and not by the force and power of the federal government.
Thanks Jim, my flight has been delayed but will be leaving shortly.
IS
are you a conspiracy theorist?
I have two quotes from Gandhi to answer you.
Do not think something is not possible without first looking at the possibilities.
Even if you are in a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.
“Anyway your posts are certainly thought provoking”.
And if I have provoked your mind into thinking then you are exploring the possibilities.
IS,
bdaman left a message that he was heading out for the weekend, so I’ll field this.
I don’t think conspiracy is the correct term. Telling the American people a convenient lie may not be an evil plot, but it is an effort inw hich people conspire to hide the truth.
IS,
While I agree with much you say on this, I think your knowledge of the poor in this country is faulty. Their lives are quite difficult and the benefits provided by government are quite sparse. I know this for a fact since I worked in the field for thirty eight years, at all levels. The poor in this country are screwed worse than the middle and working classes, who are also screwed. The myth of their “comfy” lives on welfare are spread for the same reasons that the average white southerner was told he was better than black people, it kept the southerner from realizing how bad he/she was being screwed by the wealthy.
bdaman:
are you a conspiracy theorist? All the stuff you post is interesting but I get the feeling that you think every thing is a conspiracy. Not that that is bad but aren’t there other possibilities besides conspiracy?
Say stupidity, there is a saying that one shouldn’t attribute to evil what one can attribute to stupidity or something like that. Anyway your posts are certainly thought provoking.
Mike Spindell:
we have not had true capitalism in this country since the inception of the Federal Reserve and taxation in the early 1900’s.
What we have now is a crony capitalism/socialism hodge podge that accommodates the very rich and the very poor. And the average Joe gets the bill. It is extremely messed up, FUBAR even.
“I want a healthy America and I want everyone that needs it access to health care I just think rational self interest (capitalism) is the best way to efficiently allocate resources for the betterment of all.”
IS,
The system you think best is the system we have been working under and not only has it been an abysmal failure, but 47 million Americans are excluded and more than 50% of bankruptcies occur because of medical need. Our health care system is not at all close to being the world’s best and we rank 50th in the world in longevity. What ever happened to the US being a world leader in every field? That has been sacrificed on the alter of supposed “free market” capitalism, that in truth has been socialism for the rich and screw the rest of us.
The art of deception
Rafflaw:
I am not parroting Fox News or Frank Luntz. I am looking at various countries that have national health care plans and coming to some conclusions. While some countries do seem to make it work others do not.
If I offered a plan to eat dinner for free every night of the week where would you go? Probably some very fine restaurants as this would be simple human nature. If everyone is only eating at the good restaurants how are they going to feed everyone? At some point they have to turn people away (rationing tables) and how do the people that get tables do it? Probably by tipping the Matrie’d or by social connections (political pull).
I want a healthy America and I want everyone that needs it access to health care I just think rational self interest (capitalism) is the best way to efficiently allocate resources for the betterment of all.
Dr. John Fleming congressman from Louisiana proposed House Resolution 615, which requires those who vote for Obamacare to live under Obamacare.
Obamacare exempts members of congress from having to join a government run healthcare system.
He is quoted as saying, I have offered a resolution that would give members of congress an opportunity to finally be accountable for the decisions we make and how they affect the lives of ordinary Americans. Unquote
I hope this passes and lets see who votes. No need to be exempt
He who lives by the sword should also die by the sword.
Indentured Servant,
You have been watching too much Fox News. National Health care will not lead to rationing. This is a false talking point that the right has been throwing out there. I think it was the Republican spin master, Frank Lutz who suggested to the Republicans to use the “rationing” term and some others to scare Americans. The United States is way down the list on most health care comparisons with the rest of the Western world. Here is an interesting article that compares the US Health system with the rest of the world. I suggest that you take a look at it: http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Content/Publications/Fund-Reports/2007/May/Mirror–Mirror-on-the-Wall–An-International-Update-on-the-Comparative-Performance-of-American-Healt.aspx.
Mike Appleton:
well said as usual, but while you may save money in the short term your quality of health care will not be equivalent to what you are currently receiving. National health necessarily must lead to rationing of resources. It has in every other country where implemented. The elderly and disabled will be denied care and the very ill will receive care based on some government formula. You will need to purchase an additional policy as you can in Canada and you will probably end up paying up to 60% of your income to support this plan. I would not bet on any deductions we now enjoy. So you may save some money in the short term but eventually you will pay the piper. If you are over 70 your children will pay the price. there are no free lunches.
Hey old timers I hope you have good genes because you are going to need them. I would recommend copious amounts of veggies and fish with Omega 3’s.
Douglas Elmendorf, director of the CBO testified today that, Quote: Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run. Unquote
http://cboblog.cbo.gov/
Folks common sense tells you if you don’t have enough money in your pocket you can’t buy everything in the store. It does not matter your view of how we got here, there’s enough blame to go around. We can’t spend our way out of this mess.
With that said, the Vice president told a group at AARP that
Quote: unless the Democrat-supported health care plan becomes law the nation will go bankrupt and that the only way to avoid that fate is for the government to spend more money.
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=51162
Wow thats all I can say
I have to agree with everyone here that agrees that taxing the upper income people to help fund health care for everyone is reasonable and proper. During the prior 8 years, the Bush tax cuts cost the country as much as the tax increase being proposed so what is good for the goose is good for the gander.