ObamaCare Can't Be 'Fixed'

The Patriot Post ^ | 03/09/17 | Larry Elder

[savagesusie]

Yep. It is all they do-—try to control everything we can do and say, etc., even something as private as our interaction with a doctor. Controlling our choice, our money and our lives and our families.

The power to tax is the power to control and destroy.

It is ALL so very unconstitutional and EVIL.

First of all, TAXES NEED TO BE SLASHED NOW and Flat Tax created with the evil billion-dollar bureaucracies abolished, like the IRS, Dept. of ED.-they are evil and unconstitutional and just sets up a cartel and money-laundering system.

[Jack Black]

If you DO believe healthcare is a right you have no business calling yourself a conservative.

Do you favor getting rid of Medicare, then? And replacing it with pure private insurance?

I suspect many people on FR would not agree with that position, though no one is coming out and admitting it on this thread.

[Jack Black]

It is not true that veterans who served only a few years and no service related injuries qualify for Tricare. Tricare covers families of active duty, retirees and their spouse. There are very few exceptions to that. Most veterans qualify for VA care, but not Tricare.

Thanks, I will admit I don't know the exact details of military medical insurance.

And, I was using this purely as a 'devil's advocate' argument. People who say keep the government out of healthcare are ignoring that they (prior to Obamacare) provided health care to about 30% of Americans, via one mechanism or another.

As a taxpayer for 35 years I have had the responsibility to pay for lots and lots of healthcare for other people, but have gotten none myself.

In other countries, the same rough percent of taxes paid would have also paid for my health insurance (which might not be as great as what I get for my $500 a month via employer)... but still, I'm paying twice.

My veteran example is based on a friend of mine. He did one tour in the Navy in the mid 1970s, got no where near anything hostile, by his own description, and used the VA for his healthcare (sadly, until he died last year).

I don't begrudge anyone anything that they have bargained for in good faith at some point in the past. I'm just pointing out that a lot of bad deals were struck back then.

It's like the city workers in Detroit. They did their 30 years driving a bus or working for the sanitation department and then retired, and had a pretty nice pension. They worked all those years expecting it -- but then the contracts were not made with clear funding, and now the city doesn't have the money to pay for them.

Detroit extracted more money from the State by holding the artwork in the Detroit Institute of Arts hostage, and so when they emerged from bankruptcy *most* but not all of the pension obligations to city of Detroit workers was honored.

In all, 32,000 active and retired city workers are affected by the pension cuts and reductions in health care. Babiarz said it may be a "harsh reality for many living on fixed incomes."

Retired Detroit Health Department worker Walter Knall is expecting a reduction of about 30 percent, factoring in health care cuts and the recoupment of past interest earnings ....

General workers will endure a 4.5 percent base cut in pensions and the elimination of an annual cost-of-living increase.

Declaring federal bankruptcy isn't in the cards yet, but it might be a more honest way to deal with where we are at as a nation.

I suspect inflation will be used to screw down a lot of obligations that were made that are too expensive (in real dollars) to continue with.

Link from Detroit News story quoted above: here

Another lesson is that the people who will inherit these debts and obligations might not care about them much.

Certainly, in the case of Detroit the current government really saw the Detroit Institute of Art as just a assett of no real value. They were more than willing to sell it off to the highest bidder to have more millions of dollars to pay off the (mostly black) employees and pensioners. The DIA is, after all, a very white sort of institution. It's not like the Motown Museum or something that most of the current residents consider part of their cultural heritage. Renoir isn't a rapper.

So, as The New York Times reports, they took the museum hostage and basically sold it back to the white people of the states for cool $800 million dollars.

A plan to save the collection from sale — which came together over the last several months and is being called “the grand bargain” — raised more than $800 million from foundations, private donors and the State of Michigan essentially to ransom the museum from city ownership. The bargain provided the money to help save public workers’ pensions, as long as the museum was protected and owned by an independent charitable trust, as are most large American museums.

Who knows what the new Latino majority will feel like paying for in 20 years. They might be as uninterested in paying healthcare for old Anglos as the government of Detroit is in having a world class European Art Museum.

[Jack Black]

Time and time again, it has been proven that the more we allow the government to get its grubby little fingers into ANYTHING beyond that expressly outlined in the Constitution, the worse it gets.

As Stalin was fond of saying: who, whom?

If you are a dirt-poor Mexican peasant and you sneak across the border while pregnant the American System is a huge blessing. You get to have your baby in an American hospital, not the back room of your dirt hut. Your baby gets to be an American citizen, immediately qualified for welfare, like WIC, and via the little dude you will be able to get social services ...

So, the government is doing great things for some. It's all about who gets to do what to whom.

They seem quite insistent that it's their country now. Not ours. The Jose Rammos interview". on Tucker Carlson last night was very revealing.

[wildbill]

The myth that selling insurance across state lines will bring down costs in any major way is a myth. Says who? Republicans repeat it as a mantra, but where is the statistics that prove it.

You cannot insure a burning building or a building with termites without spreading the total cost of ‘care’ over lots of folks. You cannot insure medical care for pre-existing conditions without spreading the cost over lot of young folks who normally have lower health care needs. And they don’t want the coverage. They stayed away during Obamacare and they will stay away during Republican care.

[pgkdan]

The myth that selling insurance across state lines will bring down costs in any major way is a myth. Says who?

Says every capitalist economist since the dawn of time. Free and fair access to markets increases competition and incresed competition drives down prices. Simple.

[wildbill]

You notice any major cost reductions in any other form of insurance that is sold across State lines.

Since it will be the same huge companies that previously entered the market, and they are all national companies, I doubt they will seriously compete for a losing proposition. Small companies don’t enter this market because they can’t underwrite a profit.

The real secret about health insurance is that the companies anticipate a underwriting loss every year but hope to make a profit from the interest and investments earned from the huge amount of cash available.