“America was on life support election night 2008. She gave up the ghost yesterday. RIP USA.”
That’s the old fighting spirit that made this country great...
Cripes, WTF is wrong with the people on this board today? We have almost every state in the union getting ready to challenge this bstrd in court and we are acting like it’s all over. The challenges haven’t even begun yet.
The one thing I’m reasonably certain of is that the system enacted yesterday won’t survive the decade. It is a house of cards balanced on the twin pinheads of the Medicare cuts and the individual mandate.
The individual mandate will be knocked out by the courts (it’s the only provision which I’m confident will be) and the Medicare cuts will be knocked out by the political process (the senior lobby is much too powerful).
Without the individual mandate, it will be almost completely irrational for any healthy young person to own health insurance. After all, why pay for health insurance when you’re healthy when you can simply wait until you are sick and can be guaranteed the right to purchase it then at the same price? The same thing that happened in New York after their “health insurance reform” will happen nationwide on a much larger scale - the number of uninsured will skyrocket. With the risk pool almost exclusively populated by the sick and injured, premiums will skyrocket as well.
In fact, the same thing may happen even if the individual mandate survives. I know my current insurance premiums are already more than double $750 penalty, and I am a healthy 30-year-old male with no pre-existing conditions. Furthermore, the bill precludes the imposition of criminal sanctions for failure to purchase insurance, and also precludes the imposition of tax liens to collect the penalty. The individual mandate is a lot weaker than a lot of people think.
Without the Medicare cuts, the cost of the program will go through the roof, and taxes will have to be increased for everyone, not just the rich. That isn’t going to make the bill’s proponents, from the President on down, any more popular.
With both taxes and insurance premiums increasing, as they inevitably will, the new health care system will become politically untenable, just as most of the analogous state systems have been where they’ve been attempted. Once the house of cards collapses, it remains to be seen whether it will be replaced by a single-payer system or a return to a market-based system. I suspect we’ll be back to the drawing board before the decade is out, and the next fight will be even nastier than this one.