Posted on 06/22/2005 4:47:29 PM PDT by inquest
Massachusetts residents who choose not to obtain health insurance would face tax penalties and even the garnishing of their wages under a proposal Governor Mitt Romney unveiled yesterday.
-snip-
Under Romney's proposal, uninsured Massachusetts residents would be asked to enroll in a plan when they seek care.
If they refuse, the state could recoup the medical costs in several ways, Romney said yesterday: The state might cancel the personal tax exemption on their state income taxes, which is worth about $175. It could withhold some or all of their state income tax refund and deposit it in what Romney called a ''personal healthcare spending account." Or, it might take money out of the person's paycheck, as it does now to collect child support.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
If you're a healthy 25 yo and paying $600/month for the type of plans I'm talking about, you are getting screwed. All I want is that people that can afford insurance not be a burden on those of us when they get sick. I actually first heard of this idea when Newt Gingrich talked about it a while ago. Why is this such a foreign concept to you?
LOL!! So the feminists might actually get bit by the monster that they have helped to create.
IS HE A COMMUNIST?
How about just refusing treatment?
It's a tough lesson, but some are examples and some learn fom examples.
Geez, what a bunch of crap!
Would you like to tell me how someone on the lower end of the wage scale is supposed to make car payments(so he can get to work)car insurance,gas, house or rent payments, food,clothing, and STILL have $400+ to spend on health insurance??????
Let's say he makes $8 an hour and works lots of overtime trying to make ends meet; he will need to spend ONE WEEK a month after-tax pay for health insurance that also won't help with the common, minor ills ,so he best put aside another $100 a month for those things.
Maybe we ought to dump 90 percent of the darned administrators and regulators and insurance leeches;imagine if the money just went to doctors and nurses,healthcare might be affordable!
The quality of service, not to mention the time you get to spend with a doctor, has steadily dropped over the years. Meanwhile insurance has skyrocketed. We are told inflation has been 2-3% over the past decade. Yet premiums have more than quadrupled over that period. Something sure smells funny about the whole damned business.
The concept is not foreign.
The boots on the gound implementation is a whole other story.
Stop smelling the imaginary theoretical roses, and start dealing with factual reality.
Then NH would be an enclave in Canada, not good. Actually then we could just invade and annex Canuckistan, fix their liberal problems and make it Conservative again.
Ooh, I have three felonies then.
That's not only wrong, it is, I would wager, economically counter-productive for the companies charging that much. I would LOVE to see the figures on how many of these $200+ bills they end up writing off, versus how many would go unpaid if they charged the same $40 that they charge Aetna.
The only thing that's kept me from calling the local pols to give them the all-time winning issue and solution is that I cannot think of a solution that doesn't involve yet another huge bureaucracy.
The gist of it needs to be, "You may not charge anyone in excess of 50% of the *lowest* rate that you charge someone else for the same service."
Pick your number ... 50% or 100%, or whatever, but 500% ... well ... there ought to be a law!
I can't BELIEVE I JUST SAID THAT!!!!
Oh, well ....
But not if you are an illegal alien.
Hey, here's the solution to the medical insurance problem: Eliminate medical care all together. You get sick; you die. Simple eh? No more worring about who's paying what (or not) for medical coverage. Everyone can rest easy on that issue.
It also takes care of that pesky overpopulation problem some seem to think we have.
Survival of the fittest, yep, that's the way we should do it.
But seriously (or not), whether someone has insurance or not, we're all paying for everyone else as it is. Semantics is the only difference. Your (and ours) isurance premiums are paying for someone elses medical bills, not yours. Seeing as how insurance companies are playing the averages and are actually making money - LOTS OF MONEY -. It doesn't matter, someone else will be paying YOUR bills be it government or insurance companies.
Think about it. Do you seriously thik that what you pay in premiums for one year, or ten, will actually cover one serious medical stay at a hospital for a month or two?
I didn't think so...
North Carolina is OVER RUN with illegals.
Pretend you are an illegal and you can get free health care at any ER.
That's true, but usually their incomes are too low to pay taxes, so those folks you worry about won't be affected.
I agree: the thing that I find silly about this proposal is that they aren't garnishing wages to pay the med bills. Forcing people to pay health insurance seems downright un-American, too me. But it would be perfectly appropriate to collect on the actual med charges. Do that, and suddenly people will find a way to buy some kind of insurance - the ones who really can afford it, anyway.
That's a voluntary "harm" that society chooses to bear. No comparison whatsoever to the highly involuntary form of harm incurred by uninsured drivers who crash into you. Sorry, but it's pure sophistry to draw any kind of equivalence between them.
If this had been part of the plan back when it was first proposed that the state help reimburse hospitals for patients who don't pay their bills, then that proposal never would have passed in the first place.
Just to keep the discussion on track, this proposal pertains to people who can afford to be insured. If they can afford to be insured, then the state should not be subsidizing them in the first place. And if they incur a bill that they can't pay off because they didn't get insurance but could have, it should be treated no differently from what happens when you can't pay off the mortgage.
Dear inquest,
"That's a voluntary 'harm' that society chooses to bear."
Since you view this as a "voluntary harm," then you should have no problem with us undoing the harm, no?
We can undo that harm by introducing legislation that permits folks to avoid insuring through a health insurance company of their choice by guaranteeing that they will self-insure, indemnify society against medical costs they cannot afford, and permanently foreswearing any medical treatments that they cannot pay for, cash on the barrelhead, upfront, before treatment begins.
Are you on board with that?
sitetest
Dear inquest,
"I'm on board with what I described at #56."
"And if they incur a bill that they can't pay off because they didn't get insurance but could have, it should be treated no differently from what happens when you can't pay off the mortgage." - from post #56
Well, actually, that's how it's done now. That's how the system works, now.
Believe me, if you have any assets, and are uninsured, and wind up racking up high medical bills, they'll come after you, your income, and your assets.
Unfortunately, plenty of times, folks run up bills that outrun their assets. That's why a significant percentage of bankruptcies are due to medical bills. The problem is not that the doctors, hospitals, etc., won't come after folks' assets. The problem is, even after taking most of their assets, it often doesn't cover the whole bill. Or even a significant part of the bill.
The difficulty is that a mortgage is a secured debt, and the medical bills of an uninsured person are not. Thus, if the mortgage lender lends the buyer $300,000 to buy a house, even if the buyer defaults, the mortgage lender is liable to get near to 100% of his money back, in most cases. When the lender sells the house at foreclosure, every net penny of the sale goes back to the lender, as the secured creditor of the mortgage. And, if the lender has a loan-to-value ratio of under 80%, he even requires the buyer to purchase mortgage insurance, in case of foreclosure, to cover the last little bit that may open up between the amount of the mortgage PLUS all the lender's costs, and the net proceeds from the sale of the house.
But the uninsured person who receives treatment is incurring an unsecured debt, and there is no guarantee that the individual will have substantial assets to cover the debt. Hence, many of these folks go to bankruptcy, and the hospital, doctor, or other healthcare provider, as an unsecured creditor, often gets little or nothing.
In fact, the problem is further exacerbated by two facts. Often, folks who could afford insurance, but don't have it, are nonetheless not terribly high income, and thus have not had enough income to accumulate much by the way of assets. And often, folks who finally accumulate some significant assets often understand that they need health insurance to avoid being wiped out by medical debt. Thus, the uninsured who can nonetheless afford insurance will predominantly come from that part of the population with few assets.
You can run up quite the hospital bill in a short period of time. My mother was in the hospital a mere six days before she died. Ran up a bill of $114,000. Nineteen grand a day. And that's WITH the health insurance company discounts.
No, just saying we'll make folks pay for the bills they incur (and let lots of 'em off the hook through bankruptcy) is what we're doing now. If folks who CAN AFFORD IT BUT OTHERWISE REFUSE IT aren't going to be required to protect the rest of us from their failure to act prudently in this regard, by having health insurance, then they ought to be required to foreswear all medical treatment that they can't pay for upfront.
Whaddaya think?
sitetest
This is idiotic and very un-conservative. I know many people who lack insurance, and negotiate fees with their doctors for cash.
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