US Healthcare Bill – just checking the facts
The Washington Post comments section didn’t help an outsider much on the Health Care Bill but this page put it more succinctly [still long though] and it was largely as surmised – a monster of a Bill costing trillions and delivering only a percentage of what is officially intended to be given back to the public it purports to cater for.
Not only does it give to 30 million new people what the other 138.5 million [and progressively reducing] will pay for but a whole raft of intrusive legislation is swept in with the Bill. I thought I’d best read it up a bit before commenting here but it looks a bit like the NHS:
1. As it subsumes the functions of healthcare, of course it will provide value of sorts but at the cost of fewer choices, underfunded providers and a massively stretched health care delivery system, slow service, oversubscribed hospitals you’re told by the government to go to, employers must enrol employees in the public option, there’ll be a burgeoning taxpayer funded bureacracy etc. etc.
2. It raises the spectre of the same old arguments – that people will always fall for the word “free”, as in “don’t have to pay”, while they very much pay, an analogy being 0% interest rates; meanwhile anything the government touches, whatever it touches, turns to ashes or is cocked up somwhere along the line, with huge wastage.
3. The moderately greater numbers of the employed, which will steadily reduce [part of the socialist gameplan to get everyone onto the State teat] will be burdened as never before in US history and the result will be higher and higher taxes, much of it stealth taxation, unemployment and the breakdown of free enterprise as few will be able to set up new ventures.
This then leads to the welfare state mentality and we all know about that over here. Bring on the ASBOs, the malingerers and the foreigners utilizing the system.
Why will it pass? People are deluded into thinking they’re getting something for nothing, they see someone else paying for them and that’s good in their eyes and it looks humanitarian and kindly, doesn’t it – to help out the poor of the nation?
Socialists just don’t get it, do they? They can’t embrace the concept of “incentive”. They see a national pie to slice up without considering how that pie got there. It’s only a spin-off from the incentive of people in employment to provide for their own families and themselves. Take away that incentive, as in the UK and the pie shrinks while the payouts continue. Result – enormous debt and borrowing from foreign sources, e.g. the IMF who are the very global socialists themselves in the first place. Bye bye sovereignty. Ho hum, this is getting boring again ………
Filed under: Politics & economics
Ok James- if the system Obama wants is part of the conspiracy to make the American public dependent on the state fine. But what system would you use to give healthcare to the 30 million Americans who have no insurance currently and therefore no health care?
I don’t think 30 million Americans don’t have healthcare? More like 15 million have no insurance and non insured people receive about half the level of healtcare $ per person as insured do.
Most healthcare seems funded by employers. The unemployed don’t receive that.
But pregnancy and maternity in the UK is funded by employers so its not that odd.
I confess to not knowing much about US health care other than its ruinously expensive and even our NHS system seems a cheaper alternative.
Give it specifically to those 15 million but don’t create a State leviathan for every person. It’s quite simple really. One is the common sense, Anon, that you refer to and the other is a socialist panacea – two completely different animals.
Still unconvinced James- how do you give it only to those 30 million or 15 million (still a bloody big number)- how do you organise this?
Similar to how the dole will be here after the election – means tested, prior history, prospects of work, genuineness of disability etc. but a bit different in some ways – not for dependents but delivered to the breadwinner who signs for any care the dependents receive. Conversion of existing offices to house the bureaucrats who are out of work in other areas due to reduction of the public sector and now swing over to this.
It wouldn’t be the whole 15-30 million who’d get it but the 7 million or so breadwinners. The essential thing would be to prevent it burgeoning into a vast bureaucracy with administrators by the dozen. With existing databases, it would be relatively easy to ascertain eligibility online, according to guidelines, with those transferred bureaucrats mopping up the special cases.
Many bloggers point out that no Americans are without “health care” – what they lack is insurance. If they have no insurance, and no cash, and lack eligibilty for Medicare or Medicaid, then they get their health care at A & E. Or so I understand.
So lets assume that you aren’t a breadwinner- and you get cancer. You can’t go to A and E because it is not an accident or emergency- according to your system James you die painfully?
You say you don’t want a large bureacracy but having a means tested health benefit will create a large bureacracy in order to work out who meets the means test. There is a lot of literature on this subject- you need to refine your ideas here.
No, that’s just silly, Anon. Why are you putting extreme strawmen? Naturally that comes under the special category I mentioned where the redeployed staff look at it. It begins with those under a certain income, cuts out those who go to this situation soon after the scheme is floated – the whole thing being to stop abuse and works through everyone after that.
There are two words which Labour doesn’t seem to understand [over here] – common sense. Nothing draconian – just pure common sense which covers all bases and doesn’t rip off the taxpayer.
having a means tested health benefit will create a large bureacracy in order to work out who meets the means test
One of the misconceptions always trotted out. It just needs a reading on a screen. It’s done every day and requires no more staff unless you are a leftist dedicated to bureaucratic staff for the sake of it.