Posted on 11/18/2013 8:16:06 AM PST by Hojczyk
At a luncheon in Washington last week, I stumbled across something new in the Obamacare debate.
Most of the attendees were reporters. The inevitable question came up: If not Obamacare, what? And when a Republican ran through an answer (equalizing tax treatment of insurance bought through employers and individually; allowing insurance policies approved in one state to be sold in all; HSAs and high deductible plans; medical liability reform), the reception was attentive, not dismissive.
In other words, Washington is starting to take seriously the prospect of repeal and replace.
An effective reform package will have more items in it that those mentioned at the lunch. Here is a link to short (four and a half minutes) video from Pacific Research Institute that lays out the main points of the widely accepted alternative: http://bit.ly/1jeZYv3. The video was produced to launch the Encounter Broadside The Cure for Obamacare by PRI president Sally Pipes (http://amzn.to/1fOpvLG), which goes through the agenda in detail.
I want to put out an additional reform – at least in concept. It has to do with FDA certification of pharmaceuticals and medical devices.
(Excerpt) Read more at hughhewitt.com ...
The Rs need to:
1 Acknowledge that we need to take care of those who need help. Job one is making healthcare more affordable for all.
2. Cannot be done with lying to the American people. Best to explode all the lies.
3. Reform must protect America's leadership in quality of medical care, technology innovation and job growth.
It is so irritating to keep seeing the discussion premised on the notion that the government MUST "do something" with respect to health care.
The government should do NOTHING. They have no business getting involved in it in the first place. Health care is not a "right", it is a product and a service, provided by people who are in it to help people, yes, but also to make a living commensurate with the amount of time and effort they have put into becoming good at what they do.
Any discussions that are premised on the idea that health care is somehow a right, is flawed, and should be rejected outright. Allowing the government to be involved in any way, shape, or form, is to acquiesce to servitude to the government, not just in terms of health care, but in all aspects of your life.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3049245/posts
Yes people are looking for real solutions. If a certain person wasn't so inflexible, the Freemarket alternatives could be supplanted in place of their "named" plan and still make said person look good and be done with it. Kinda like Clinton finally signing Welfare Reform.
But that would require said person to be a pragmatist. Nah, what was I thinking....
Free
Enterprise
Really?
No, not repeal and replace.
Repeal, and repeal, and repeal.
And then repeal all those stupid government interferences that Clintbilly and Hildabeast added back in their day, which at least doubled the cost of healthcare.
Republicans are supposedly in favor of states rights. Republicans claim that just because one state has legalized gay "marriage" doesn't mean that other states have to accept it.
But Republicans have also been saying for quite some time that they want to federalize business transactions, i.e. whatever business transaction is allowed in one state should be allowed in all states.
Nevada allows prostitution. Should all states allow prostitution? Colorado allows people to legally smoke marijuana. Should all states? I know there are people that believe that each state should individually legalize pot because the drug "war" has failed. But does anyone on FR think that because one state legalized marijuana that it should be instantly legal in all states without a vote of the people of that state or their representatives?
I thought that Republicans were against the ever-expanding definition of the Interstate Commerce Clause to encompass more and more of our lives?
I guess I was wrong. I guess the Republicans have been bought off.
I'm glad I got Medicare. I hope everyone has something as good when they get old. Old people are a cost like widows and orphans. I'm also glad I also got educated under the GI Bill.
What is a 'right' [benefit?] is subject to a vote in a Christian civilized nation.
The issue has always been people with pre-existing conditions, and those too poor to afford the premium.
Surely something can be done for those groups without blowing-up the system for all the rest of us.
Sadly though I think we’re stuck with the “stay on your dad’s plan to age 26” rule. Just polls too well, despite being nonsensical and counterproductive.
(equalizing tax treatment of insurance bought through employers and individually; allowing insurance policies approved in one state to be sold in all; HSAs and high deductible plans; medical liability reform)
Yep, that’s it. Though I don’t like the language of “equalizing tax treatment”. Sounds like they’re considering removing the tax deductibility of employer plans instead of making individual plans tax deductible.
Leftists don’t like the idea of helping people with tax deductions, because their constituents, for the most part, can’t/don’t/won’t benefit from a tax deduction.
Big difference between a right and a benefit.
I’ll gladly help out people who really need assistance.
But when it’s called a “right”, that means that force can be used to MAKE me pay for it, and someone else will determine whether my property will be confiscated for someone with a “need”.
That’s not really true. Any citizen who is injured or such does indeed have a right to be repaired. Then they need to find a way to pay for it! I had severed my artery in my arm in an accident tears ago and I most certainly had a God given right to be sped to the hospital to be fixed up. Come on now...
* 35 States had high risk pools for Pre-Existing folks, IMHO a common sense approach would have been to add 15 more states, or 22 if you are certain person on the campaign trail.
* To poor to buy a plan? Make it tax-deductible to purchase plans as a gift for those that don't have a plan. Combine that with Churches offering policies ( they are a "natural group", they could and you have a winning combination.
* Also consider HSA's + Concierge Service ( aka Michigan's Pat Colbeck's idea ) for something that is speculated to be 50% less the cost of Medicare / Medicaid.
The answers are simple and empowering, the Statist don't like them, they can't pull the levers behind a curtain if you do, they enjoy playing the Great Oz to much....
Do you pay for schools if you don't have any children attending? What made education a right?
I don’t agree with that either. We homeschool AND pay for others to have their kids indoctrinated.
Stay on your Parent’s plan till 26 is really not that costly. But you are entirely correct. We can deal with the problem without the Obamacare hyper government regulation or single payor, which is really intended to put the politicians in DC in CONTROL, and nothing else.
The cure doesn’t address the corrupted pricing of healthcare.
We got the best system in the world. We vote on the kind of nation we want to be. Majority wins. That’s how health care will ultimately be decided.
Why else would Pelosi and Reid risk all their political capital, make themselves ridiculous cartoon-like characters by saying such non-sensical things as, "We have to pass the bill in order to see what's in the bill"?
Future generations, living under the "rule" of such charlatans, will wonder how current generations tolerated such doublespeak and deception by elected representatives in their government, as they systematically destroyed individual freedom.
Future President Ronald Reagan, when only a Hollywood actor, summarized the scene played out by this Administration and its Democrat Party Congressmen and Senators in their imposition of what they euphemistically called the Affordable Care Act.
Every American citizen, looking back on that Trojan Horse for socialism, should listen to Reagan's foresight and warnings in a 1961 speech: HERE.
Freedom of individual enterprise, the great principle which brought America from axes and hoes in the wilderness to space travel and from near-starving colonists to becoming the breadbasket of the world, has been under attack by men and women committed to a belief that they were "progressive" in turning the founding ideas upside down.
Such "progressive" regressives pretend to be intellectuals when, in fact, they are imperfect human beings like every other citizen, arrogantly assuming rights never delegated to them by either the Creator nor their fellow citizens.
Winston Churchill (that one whose bust no longer is welcome in the Obama White House) is quoted in William Simon's 1978 "A Time for Truth," as follows:
"I do not believe in the power of the state to plan and enforce. No matter how numerous the committees they set up or the ever-growing hordes of officials that they employ or the severity of the punishments that they inflict or threaten, they can't approach the high level of internal economic production achieved under free enterprise."Personal initiative, competitive selection, the profit motive, corrected by failure and the infinite processes of good housekeeping and personal ingenuity, these constitute the life of a free society. It is this vital creative impulse that I deeply fear the doctrines and policies of the socialist government have destroyed.
"Nothing that they can plan and order and rush around enforcing will take its place. They have broken the mainspring, and until we get a new one, the watch will not go. Set the people free - get out of the way and let them make the best of themselves.
"I am sure that this policy of equalizing misery and organizing scarcity instead of allowing diligence, self-interest and ingenuity to produce abundance has only to be prolonged to kill this British island stone dead."
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