7 thoughts on “Health insurance”

  2. Listens to Laura Nyro and reads Carl Hiassen. Your cohort in Philly must bear an uncanny resemblance to mine in Atlanta.

  3. The difference between insuring cars and houses is that the bank owns them. So I guess if we want health care we need to officially become slaves so the banks will consider us someone’s collateral.

  4. Lots of people own cars free and clear. So why does the state get to force me to buy insurance? Same principle.

  5. I think the argument against mandating purchase of private for-profit insurance has merit, actually.

    Social Security is mandatory — but it’s not a for-profit company providing SocSec; it’s a shared government program. Same with Medicare.

    Gee, Obama coulda expanded Medicare – Improved and Expanded!- and the Repubs would have had no grounds to go after a requirement that people pay into it. BUT, Obama had deals with the private for-profit health insurers who were seeing their customer base eroding as more and more people could not afford their offerings. These parasites were after mandates as the only way to keep and grow their customer –er, make that, host— base.

    And they got the IRS to provide the muscle to make people buy into those private for-profit offerings. So, some people may not pay, finding the IRS penalty easier to bear, but some will buy the catastrophic does-nearly-nothing-for-them plans just to keep off the IRS radar.

    Obama’s plan was for health insurance reform and profit protection; it was not for health CARE.

  6. And, from Jon Walker…Big oops for MA Romney/ObamaCare: Private insurers are not holding down costs in MA, even with mandates…and why should they? They’re guaranteed customers. Parasites do what they do.

    A report from the MA Division of Health Care Finance and Policy (PDF)

    adds even more proof to the mountain of evidence that private health insurance companies in America are a total failure at cost control. The study found that private insurance health care cost in the state grew much faster than public health insurance cost.

    Spending by private payers grew faster than spending by public payers. The rate of growth for spending on privately insured people from 2007 to 2008 also outpaced the growth in spending for Massachusetts residents in Medicare (4.8 percent) or MassHealth (2.8 percent) during the same time period (Figure A). The rates of growth for both private and public payers in Massachusetts continued to outpace increases in per capita state gross domestic product and wages. (Slight editing of verb agreement and tense mine)

    Even more important than the fact that private insurance cost grew faster that public insurance is the reason private insurance cost went up. It was not a result of the people covered by private insurance using more health care services but mainly a result of providers charging significantly higher prices for the services they did use.

    Obama took single payer off the table. Too bad for us. Also, going to be bad for him, I think. Actually, what’s really bad for him is that he simply is not a real Democrat; he’s pure Neolib Corporatist, with strong St. Ronnie yearnings.

  7. i refuse to ever vote again – i completely don’t give a shit any longer since it’s all going to end badly anyway and it doesn’t matter who’s at the wheel when it happens (they won’t be able to do anything about it anyway). Besides that, voting has turned out to be a big sham and the powers that be are now exposed to us as using government to their own ends. So they’re creating a prison country/police state to try to “control” us once the shit hits the fan (food and water scarcity, lack of livable-wage jobs, and millions of guns all put together add up to some really bad times ahead).

    Good luck with your future.

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