Republicans' Plan to Repeal Healthcare?

[turbo]

One can make the above argument to argue that it would be better if everyone purchase health insurance, but that doesn't justify forcing people to buy health insurance IMO.

What? The Government is forcing me to buy education for children that I don't have. My wife and I have no kids, but over half of our property taxes go directly to paying for public education for children of others. If you want a system with no mandates, no social contracts between government and citizens, you'll be hard-pressed to find one.

 

[adrenaline]

Yeah, since I ride my mountain bike to work, ( heck I almost ride on the grass the whole time since rednecks run me off the road) I should not have to pay taxes for road construction when I buy gas to fill my lawnmower...

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Based on a news report, I estimated one year that we paid almost exactly enough Federal tax to pay for the warhead, IIRC, on one cruise missile; this for a war that I didn't support and that was shown to be folly.

 

[Nebula815]

What? The Government is forcing me to buy education for children that I don't have. My wife and I have no kids, but over half of our property taxes go directly to paying for public education for children of others. If you want a system with no mandates, no social contracts between government and citizens, you'll be hard-pressed to find one.

Well for one, I do not really agree with taxing people to pay for other people children's education, nor do I agree with property taxes either. Government is not supposed to be able to tax property.

Just because the government has gotten away with infringing on our freedoms in a few ways doesn't justify further infringements.

And this isn't really a tax in the classic sense. It's a mandate that you have to purchase a product, or be fined.

 

[Nebula815]

I did not agree with the individual mandate, ( originally designed by Mitt Romney it looked like ) trust me, I opposed this health care reform bill but it is the only way to prevent the insurance industry who are now forced to cover preexisting from going bankrupt.

Yes, but they to prevent the health insurance industry from going bankrupt, they might have just put the country on a path towards bankruptcy. There were other alternatives we could have worked on for fixing healthcare, things to fix that drive up cost; Medicare and Medicaid themselves are partially responsible for driving up health insurance costs too.

 

[Astronuc]

Well for one, I do not really agree with taxing people to pay for other people children's education, . . .

I'm sure one's education was paid by taxpayers.

. . . nor do I agree with property taxes either. Government is not supposed to be able to tax property.

Governments have taxed property since there were governments.

Government can tax whatever the government decides to tax.

 

[noblegas]

So you think that K-12 education, the interstate highway system, the space program and the U.S. military are similarly immoral?

Most certainly. there lots of parents who homescooled their children, who send their kids to private schools, or don't have any kids at all but still they are forced to subsidize the costs of public education. It would be just as immoral to force a person to pay for someone else education as it would be to force a person to buy any product on the market that they did not want to spend money on.

 

[Nebula815]

I'm sure one's education was paid by taxpayers.

Yes, I'm saying I'm not sure I agree with having such a system. I mean the system is now established, no un-doing it, but if we were having a national debate over whether to institute a taxpayer-funded K-12 system, not sure I'd agree. Maybe with a proper voucher program to promote competition.

Governments have taxed property since there were governments.

Governments have also enslaved people since there were governments. That's why our Founding Fathers spent so much time thinking about how to design our government, because there never have really been any good ones.

Protection of private property rights is one of the most important aspects of a free society. When government can tax your property, this means technically you no longer own your property, because even if you pay it off, if you stop paying the taxes, you find out who really owns it.

Just because government can do something doesn't mean it should.

Government can tax whatever the government decides to tax.

Not our government. Our government can tax whatever the people allow it to tax since it is a representative government, but that requires a vigiliant citizenry.

 

[noblegas]

I'm sure one's education was paid by taxpayers.

I certainly received a better quality education outside my public school than I did while I was in public school. Most Kids I know forgot what they learn within a month, despite the thousands of dollars being invested in their education

 

[Astronuc]

Governments have also enslaved people since there were governments. That's why our Founding Fathers spent so much time thinking about how to design our government, because there never have really been any good ones.

Protection of private property rights is one of the most important aspects of a free society. When government can tax your property, this means technically you no longer own your property, because even if you pay it off, if you stop paying the taxes, you find out who really owns it.

Just because government can do something doesn't mean it should.

The US government owned all the land that was not owned by private citizens. Those citizens had purchased the land or had received grants from the King.

The government determines land rights - and always has.


The government (like Caesar) giveth and taketh away.

Public education was necessary to maximize literacy in the population. Left to private/personal means, we'd have ~90% illiteracy, as was the case in England and the US in colonial times. Women were essentially excluded from education.

For the most part, from my observations, governments are run like corporations. Corporations (governments) serve mainly the management (politicians) rather than the investors/employees (people).

 

[rewebster]

Ramming down the throats of the American people, jamming it through Congress, need to start over, have to hit the reset button, have to go step by step, government take over of the entire health insurance area, Ramming down the throats of the American people, have to hit the reset button, have to go step by step, Americans want are common-sense, responsible solutions that address the rising cost of health care and other major problem, fresh start, run away spending, Ramming down the throats of the American people, have to hit the reset button, raises health care costs, jamming it through Congress, Ramming down the throats of the American people, start over, fresh start, have to hit the reset button

paraphrase of John Boehner last 60 speeches, and of the last 60 speeches of most republicans...

say it enough times and republican followers will repeat, again, say it enough times and republican followers will repeat, again, say it enough times and republican followers will repeat

 

[adrenaline]

Yes, but they to prevent the health insurance industry from going bankrupt, they might have just put the country on a path towards bankruptcy. There were other alternatives we could have worked on for fixing healthcare, things to fix that drive up cost; Medicare and Medicaid themselves are partially responsible for driving up health insurance costs too.

you realize that the most verbal opponents were the medicare recipients?



When you retire, if medicare is not there, you realize you will have to brave purchasing shoddy individual coverage when you are over the age of 65 and have a fixed income? It also spared private insurance plans from insuring the oldest and the sickest, it left the younger working force to buy their plans.

You realize we spend 400 billion dollars a year on health insurance bureucracy?

Medicare and medicaid is a joy since i only have to hire one biller and coder for them. I have an army ( 45 employees with 5 docs do the math) doing precerts prior auths , fielding phone calls, 6 check in and check out to check insurances on where i can draw labs etc.

Your delusional if you think medicare/medicaid contributes to the cost of health care in this country. I have to pay salaries, workman's comp, disablity, insurance premiums etc for an army of women whose only job is to deal with private health insurance. Tell me that is not wasteful?

as for public education, I am a product of it, my parents subsisted on total salary of less than 35,000 a year after my dad lost his job. My younger brother went to princeton, i went to dartmouth and my sister was too smart and quit Emory to become a ceo of her own software company. There was no way they could afford private education on Long Island New York when tuition over 20 years ago was at least 15,000 a year.

so what you are telling me is that only the rich deserve to educate their kids? My mother cleaned houses and my dad worked so there was no home schooling. I don't think you realize even home schoolers have the luxuary of having one working parent? Guess what, in this recession those homeschoolers are back in public school, now that their housing developer dads or real estate dads are completely broke. The wives are cashing in their nursing degrees, or being full time nannies etc.and going back to work. Thank god this country gives that to me should I ever go broke.




there are numerous studies that show public education does its job.

 

[noblegas]

Public education was necessary to maximize literacy in the population. Left to private/personal means, we'd have ~90% illiteracy, as was the case in England and the US in colonial times. Women were essentially excluded from education.

).

Where are your stats to back up such a statement? According to new york award winning teacher John Taylor Gatto, Literacy was near 100 percent in the United States before the formal introduction to public schools in America , at least amongst the non-slave population.

Before forced schooling, in 1840, literacy rates in New England approached 100 percent, and the popular best-sellers of the time included books the likes of Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, and Ralph Waldo Emerson—all bought by a population consisting mostly of small farmers. Have you ever sat yourself down for a relaxing afternoon with a little leisurely reading—a thirty-page long Emerson essay loaded with Greek mythological allusions, complex sentences with multiple nested appositive phrases and dependent clauses, intricate logic, and a vocabulary that would challenge most graduate students today? I find I can only access early 19th century literature with a great effort at concentration. My attention wanders, I lose the train of the argument, and soon find myself passing my eyeballs over the page, uncomprehendingly.

source : http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter5-6.php , The underground history of american education by jon taylor gatto. . If public education doe s such a fantastic job of educating our american school children, why are 42 million american adults illeterate and 20 percent of all high school graduates classified as illiterateI (http://education-portal.com/article...ndicate_Americans_Have_a_Reading_Problem.html). There is no evidence that being in public schools increase adult literacy and not attending public schools or formal schooling does not mean that you will become illiterate. If that were the case , people such as Ben Franklin , Mark Twain or Malcolm X would not be able to read.

 

[noblegas]

so what you are telling me is that only the rich deserve to educate their kids? My mother cleaned houses and my dad worked so there was no home schooling. I don't think you realize even home schoolers have the luxuary of having one working parent? Guess what, in this recession those homeschoolers are back in public school, now that their housing developer dads or real estate dads are completely broke. The wives are cashing in their nursing degrees, or being full time nannies etc.and going back to work. Thank god this country gives that to me should I ever go broke.

I don't think he ever said that. Whether you want to acknowledge this apparent truth or not, the private sector provides better quality knowledge than the public schools Thanks to the internet. Children don't learn subjects effectively when they are in a setting where they are coerced to learn subjects in a curriculum that they did not create. Why should millions of american children all learn from the same curriculum? We are all born differently and grow up in different environments, so children are not going to want to learn from the same standard curriculum.History was taught to have on a matter of fact basis and we never had any true discussions about why certain historical events occurred . If people received all of their education from public schools , there would never be discussions on the merits of anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism. If kids received all of their education from public schools, you probably wouldn't be taught that the Federal Reserve bank contributed greatly to the economic crash of 1929. If you received only your education only from public schools , there would be no discussions on the topic of athiesm versus theism. Public schools are no longer relevant imho in a society where you can go to youtube and acquire information on your topic of interest whether it be complex variable, the Haitian Revolution are revolutions in particle physics or austrian economics and both the poor and the rich have access to this wonderful tool called the Internet.

 

[turbo]

I don't think he ever said that. Whether you want to acknowledge this apparent truth or not, the private sector provides better quality knowledge than the public schools Thanks to the internet. Children don't learn subjects effectively when they are in a setting where they are coerced to learn subjects in a curriculum that they did not create. Why should millions of american children all learn from the same curriculum? We are all born differently and grow up in different environments, so children are not going to want to learn from the same standard curriculum.History was taught to have on a matter of fact basis and we never had any true discussions about why certain historical events occurred . If people received all of their education from public schools , there would never be discussions on the merits of anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism. If kids received all of their education from public schools, you probably wouldn't be taught that the Federal Reserve bank contributed greatly to the economic crash of 1929. If you received only your education only from public schools , there would be no discussions on the topic of athiesm versus theism. Public schools are no longer relevant imho in a society where you can go to youtube and acquire information on your topic of interest whether it be complex variable, the Haitian Revolution are revolutions in particle physics or austrian economics and both the poor and the rich have access to this wonderful tool called the Internet.

Would you like to post any links to back up this fantasy?

 

[Char. Limit]

http://www.seattlepi.com/opinion/331395_waslfactory13.html
http://www.curewashington.org/waslbro.htm

Here's something that needs to be fixed in the education system in Washington... a reason to homeschool, I'd have called this...

It's been replaced by the Herpe Test... er, I mean the HSPE Test, so that may be a fix, but it may not.

Only one thing I'd really disagree with:

#10 The WASL discriminates against minority children, gender and ability level.

Why wouldn't we discriminate against ability level?

 

[mheslep]

Public education was necessary to maximize literacy in the population. Left to private/personal means, we'd have ~90% illiteracy, as was the case in England and the US in colonial times. Women were essentially excluded from education...

How did you arrive at this viewpoint? Almost the exact opposite is true. Literacy in colonial New England, which has been studied by several historians, had high rates prior to 1800, some historians claiming 90%. Women also had high literacy rates there. In the South during that time the literacy rates were nil obviously for slaves and the poor, but then of course that was because of the government so the public-education-is-necessary theory doesn't hold there either.

 

[mheslep]

Volume 340:928-936, March 25th, 1999 #12
I have not renewed my subscription to nejm, so i could not get the full text sorry
but you may have access to it

And this was not in any way related to people in phnp

The abstract reports a 1997 managed care vs fee-for-service poll. In other words, isn't this the 1990's HMO vs PPO debate? HMOs lost. How does this pertain to a government single payer plan? Is the phrase "fee-for-service" loaded in some context that I've missed?

ABSTRACT

Background and Methods Views of managed care among academic physicians and medical students in the United States are not well known. In 1997, we conducted a telephone survey of a national sample of medical students (506 respondents), residents (494), faculty members (728), department chairs (186), directors of residency training in internal medicine and pediatrics (143), and deans (105) at U.S. medical schools to determine their experiences in and perspectives on managed care. The overall rate of response was 80.1 percent.

Results Respondents rated their attitudes toward managed care on a 0-to-10 scale, with 0 defined as "as negative as possible" and 10 as "as positive as possible." The expressed attitudes toward managed care were negative, ranging from a low mean (±SD) score of 3.9±1.7 for residents to a high of 5.0±1.3 for deans. When asked about specific aspects of care, fee-for-service medicine was rated better than managed care in terms of access (by 80.2 percent of respondents), minimizing ethical conflicts (74.8 percent), and the quality of the doctor–patient relationship (70.6 percent). With respect to the continuity of care, 52.0 percent of respondents preferred fee-for-service medicine, and 29.3 percent preferred managed care. For care at the end of life, 49.1 percent preferred fee-for-service medicine, and 20.5 percent preferred managed care. With respect to care for patients with chronic illness, 41.8 percent preferred fee-for-service care, and 30.8 percent preferred managed care. Faculty members, residency-training directors, and department chairs responded that managed care had reduced the time they had available for research (63.1 percent agreed) and teaching (58.9 percent) and had reduced their income (55.8 percent). Overall, 46.6 percent of faculty members, 26.7 percent of residency-training directors, and 42.7 percent of department chairs reported that the message they delivered to students about managed care was negative.

 

[Nebula815]

you realize that the most verbal opponents were the medicare recipients?

Yes, what about it? The plan calls for $500 billion in cuts to Medicare to pay for the program. Although I doubt that will happen (that government will actually cut Medicare outlays). The plan also double-counts Medicare, because it claims the $500 billion in cuts will make Medicare more solvent. Well yes, if put into a lockbox, it would. But instead the $500 billion goes to fund the other parts of the healthcare program, so it doesn't make Medicare any more solvent.

When you retire, if medicare is not there, you realize you will have to brave purchasing shoddy individual coverage when you are over the age of 65 and have a fixed income? It also spared private insurance plans from insuring the oldest and the sickest, it left the younger working force to buy their plans.

Programs like Medicare and Social Security are fine, but the way in which they are done is unsustainable and not working. A society needs to take care of people who likely cannot or will not be able to take care of themselves, such as its elderly, mentally disabled, physically disabled, etc...

You realize we spend 400 billion dollars a year on health insurance bureucracy?

It's only going to increase now. The amount of money required to fund the bureaucracy to administer this whole program will be monumental.

Medicare and medicaid is a joy since i only have to hire one biller and coder for them. I have an army ( 45 employees with 5 docs do the math) doing precerts prior auths , fielding phone calls, 6 check in and check out to check insurances on where i can draw labs etc.

Your delusional if you think medicare/medicaid contributes to the cost of health care in this country. I have to pay salaries, workman's comp, disablity, insurance premiums etc for an army of women whose only job is to deal with private health insurance. Tell me that is not wasteful?

Many doctors are grossly under-reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid to the point that they do not accept any more patients on Medicare or Medicaid. The loss of money from lack of re-imbursement to the private sector by these programs means the private sector has to make up the difference, which contributes to increasing healthcare costs.

as for public education, I am a product of it, my parents subsisted on total salary of less than 35,000 a year after my dad lost his job. My younger brother went to princeton, i went to dartmouth and my sister was too smart and quit Emory to become a ceo of her own software company. There was no way they could afford private education on Long Island New York when tuition over 20 years ago was at least 15,000 a year.

If, from the beginning, we had had a strictly private educational system, private schooling would likely be far cheaper, because there would be far more schools. Because the private sector of schooling is small, it is a lot more costly. Private healthcare in the UK is available for example, but you'd better have some $$$ if you are going to use it because it costs a bundle (plus the NHS will kick not allow you to continue getting services if you use private healthcare there).

so what you are telling me is that only the rich deserve to educate their kids? My mother cleaned houses and my dad worked so there was no home schooling. I don't think you realize even home schoolers have the luxuary of having one working parent? Guess what, in this recession those homeschoolers are back in public school, now that their housing developer dads or real estate dads are completely broke. The wives are cashing in their nursing degrees, or being full time nannies etc.and going back to work. Thank god this country gives that to me should I ever go broke.

Of course not. I'm simply saying that the public education system has many flaws and I don't know if I believe it should ever have been implemented the way it was. It was not at its core designed to educate. No there wasn't any conspiracy but the overall design of it from the various people involved in its development was overall not education. Now that we have it, it's not going anywhere, we can only work to reform it with various policies.

there are numerous studies that show public education does its job.

Sure, but there are also numerous studies I'm sure that talk about the problems within the system too. It has to do its job overall because our nation continues to lead the world in terms of scientific research and so forth.

 

[Nebula815]

The US government owned all the land that was not owned by private citizens. Those citizens had purchased the land or had received grants from the King.

And once you purchase something, it is supposed to be yours.

The government determines land rights - and always has.

Sure. But it is also supposed to protect property rights, as those are essential to a free society.

The government (like Caesar) giveth and taketh away.

And thus we design our government so that no one can become like Caesar.

Public education was necessary to maximize literacy in the population.

Much of the public education system was originally designed to stunt literacy. The system was designed to benefit big business and big government, and the last thing either of those wanted was a literate population. All it takes is once literate guy who can read a lot who can create strikes and screw up the assembly line and rally the workers, etc...

 

[Borg]

My two or three cents.

First, I doubt that this will be repealed. It isn't perfect but, IMHO it is better than nothing. I also have no doubt that the Republicans will actively work at watering it down. If they can screw it up, they will say that it was doomed to fail and entirely the fault of Democrats (politics as usual).

I expected to read more about how hospitals are having to absorb the cost of uninsured patients (turbo and adrenaline touched on this in a couple of posts). According to this http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/09/healthcare_costs.html" from 3 1/2 years ago, hospital costs were $800 billion dollars alone. The article has a number of items that are mostly or equally incurred by younger people. We are all already paying for these costs in one way or another.

As far as the complaint that people are being forced to buy insurance, why should the rest of the taxpayers take on the risks (however small) of those who choose not to be insured? If a person lost everything in a fire because they chose not to be insured, they are the ones who have to rebuild everything. But, if they choose to not have health care and end up in the hospital, everyone else ends up paying for it if they don't pay the bill.

 

[Nebula815]

As far as the complaint that people are being forced to buy insurance, why should the rest of the taxpayers take on the risks (however small) of those who choose not to be insured? If a person lost everything in a fire because they chose not to be insured, they are the ones who have to rebuild everything. But, if they choose to not have health care and end up in the hospital, everyone else ends up paying for it if they don't pay the bill.

My understanding was always if you ended up in a hospital and didn't have insurance, all they were required to do was stabilize you. This whole bit about them having to treat you regardless I was unaware of. While an argument definitely can be made that it is better for the system if everyone purchase health insurance, I think it is bad to force people to purchase it. I think there are other ways to repair the system.

What this bill really was about, IMO, was the government grabbing control of one-sixth of the U.S. economy to get us on the road towards a European-style social welfare state. The most important step for that is to establish government healthcare in some form. And of course it allows government to control people's lives in other ways.

Ironically, the conservative radio guy Rush Limbaugh has said he would be okay with the government covering catostrophic healthcare stuff. Leave the private sector to handle everything else mostly (including the doing of the catostrophic things), but he is okay with government paying for/covering the really expensive, catostrophic things.

 

[mheslep]

Public education was necessary to maximize literacy in the population. Left to private/personal means, we'd have ~90% illiteracy, as was the case in England and the US in colonial times. Women were essentially excluded from education.

How did you arrive at this viewpoint? Almost the exact opposite is true. Literacy in colonial New England, which has been studied by several historians, had high rates prior to 1800, some historians claiming 90%. Women also had high literacy rates there. In the South during that time the literacy rates were nil obviously for slaves and the poor, but then of course that was because of the government so the public-education-is-necessary theory doesn't hold there either.

Example reference:
http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/mandrejevic/schudsen.htm"

Kenneth Lockridge's study of literacy in colonial New England is relevant here. Lockridge found that, in 1660, 60 percent of New England males signed their wills; it was 70 percent in 1710, 85 percent in 1760, and 90 percent by 1790. He estimates that half of those unable to sign wills could read. Thus, there was practically universal adult male literacy in New England by 1790.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Mann#Education_reform", who largely fathered the modern public education system as we know it today, didn't come along until 1838.

http://www.ncsall.net/?id=576"

If the ability to write one's name (rather than just making a mark on a document) is evidence of literacy, then, excluding American Indians and African Americans, there was near universal literacy, in excess of 80-90 percent, for both men and women by the end of the eighteenth century (Perlmann & Shirley, 1991). Of course, all such studies of literacy during these early years of the nation depend on samples of adults who do not represent the entire adult population of the colonies and so are contentious on the basis of sampling bias. For instance, Herndon (1996) presents data from documents of "transients" (nonpropertied persons) showing that, just as in contemporary times, literacy rates for New England's poor, including whites, American Indians, and African Americans, were considerably lower than the rates estimated on the basis of property document signatures.

 

[edpell]

For the most part, from my observations, governments are run like corporations. Corporations (governments) serve mainly the management (politicians) rather than the investors/employees (people).

Yes! Absolutely!