Health Care Bill

[celtic]

I want to talk a little about this health care bill because I may be a little confused about why people are so furiated over this here is the article from sott.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/205765-American-brownshirts-call-to-vandalize-Democratic-party-offices-over-passing-of-health-care-bill

I am suggesting it is because of the tax's the federal govermnent is making us pay.

"The central fact of the health-care bill is this, and we find it tyrannical and unconstitutional on its face," Vanderboegh said. "The federal government now demands all Americans to pay and play in this system, and if we refuse, we will be fined, and if we refuse to pay the fine, they will come to arrest us, and if we resist arrest . . . then we will be killed. The bill certainly doesn't say that, but that's exactly and precisely what is behind every bill like this."

federal government should not have the ability to command us to buy something that it decides we should buy," Vanderboegh said.

I just wanted to know if you all feel the same way? This Vanderboegh guy does seem to have an agenda and nobody else seem to have a problem with it except
these tea party protestors and Vanderboegh.

 

[Mr. Premise]

Here's my take:

Most of the people who are upset about it are white people who think they are self-reliant and who resent (due to listening to too much talk radio and Fox News) what they see as freeloading minorities (blacks and illegal immigrants). The Tea Partiers, in other words.

Part of it is the taxes and part of it is the mandate. The mandate, where you are strongly incentivized to buy health insurance, is part of a grand bargain with private health insurers. There is a clear need to have a system where people aren't kicked off their existing health insurance plans or denied covereage by insurance companies because they are very sick and will cost them money. Why else would you have health insurance except to be covered in case of serious illness, so you and your family don't go bankrupt? But insurance companies say that they will go out of business if they are forced to accept people who already have a cancer diagnosis, for example. So the grand bargain was this: the government will make it so most everyone buys insurance, including young, healthy people, who don't cost much in health care dollars.

In exchange for that (lots more money to insurance companies with less costs) the insurance companies can no longer deny coverage for "preexisting conditions" or because you lost your job. They also can't impose lifetime limits on how much they will pay any individual. They used to be able to impose a 2 million lifetime cap, but two serious bouts with cancer or one cancer and a bad car accident can reach those levels. But, since the U.S. is keeping private, for-profit, insurance companies, they need to get all the healthy people paying into it in order to afford to pay for the sick people. But a lot of those people who are healthy and don't buy insurance can't afford insurance. So the Obama plan has a carrot and a stick. The carrot is some financial help for those who can't afford it and the stick is fines if you don't sign up for insurance. The carrot will be paid for mostly by taxes on rich people, which angers Tea Partiers. And on reductions in medicare which scares elderly people

The way I see it this is a much better system than what the U.S. had. It is not ideal, but it removes some of the worst things.

 

[FireShadow]

Thank you Mr. Premise for such a clarifying explanation! It put things in perspective for me. I like the simple terms you used.

You managed to take out some of the punch of a "trigger" for me. I have been "hung" in regards to deciding if I thought this plan had any merit at all. Although I have read up some, I still could not seem to really understand what the plan was all about. I think it was because I was "hung" on the mandate part. I tend to get "uppity" when mandated to do something...another of my programs! My, how those reactionary programs can block understanding!

 

[Hildegarda]

I want to talk a little about this health care bill because I may be a little confused about why people are so furiated over this here is the article from sott. [..] This Vanderboegh guy does seem to have an agenda and nobody else seem to have a problem with it except
these tea party protestors and Vanderboegh.

People who violently oppose the Health Care Bill usually have very nebulous ideas of what it really is about. In reality it is not that different from a Republican plan of early 1990-s, which they put together as an alternative to Hillary Clinton's (who was First Lady then) universal health care proposal (which was buried). HCB lacks public option and benefits insurance companies. But now that it is coming from Democrats and coached in a different language, they are incensed by it.

The uproar is due to the fact that they are reacting viscerally to the idea of "government control" which to them means "socialism" which means everything foreign to what they supposedly hold dear. Both of those words, when used in an american political discourse, have already lost any rational meaning they ever had, so they are really talking about is not organization of society, but how they personally view the world on a deep emotional level.

It has baffled that the same people get so freaked out by "government control" seem to not at all mind, and even at times welcome, being fleeced by corporate entities which are just as big and bad. E.g., in this insurance debate, people are afraid that "the Health Care Bill will allow the government to institute death panels (i.e., to decide, who gets treatment and who doesn't). Whereas it's the medical and insurance corporations who are actually rationing health care all the time, deciding who will get coverage and services, etc.

One explanation I came up with is that these people are hard-wired to identify the very idea of a government with a controlling, abusive and authoritarian father figure who is out to get them. But corporation is perceived as a popular and successful peer whose material wealth they also hope to achieve one day, regardless of their actual chances. Never mind that both government and corporation are stuffed by the same types of individuals.

The other assumption they are working on is the idea of scarcity. They take it as a given that there is not enough financial and material resources to satisfy everyone's needs. Therefore, they say, "do not believe the government/socialism -- when they are saying that they will give you something, what it really means is that they will take away from YOU and give it to someone else [it is implied that the "someone else" is a member of immigrant minority who doesn't deserve anything]". Funny enough, they themselves are more likely to be the one receiving help rather than giving it (like that guy V in the article who is receiving disability checks ). Additionally, if even a half of US's monstrous military budget was to be given to the population, everyone would have free healthcare for ever. There is no real scarcity, there is only what one deems important. But that's not how they think.

fwiw

 

[Joe]

Thank you Mr. Premise for such a clarifying explanation! It put things in perspective for me. I like the simple terms you used.

You managed to take out some of the punch of a "trigger" for me. I have been "hung" in regards to deciding if I thought this plan had any merit at all. Although I have read up some, I still could not seem to really understand what the plan was all about. I think it was because I was "hung" on the mandate part. I tend to get "uppity" when mandated to do something...another of my programs! My, how those reactionary programs can block understanding!

Well, you're forced to pay income tax too! And part of your income tax should be used to pay for health care for all. There would be more than enough money from income tax to do this if the government was not using most of that money to pay for military invasions of other countries, the profits from which go directly to corporations and indirectly to the members of government who have close links with said corporations. The issues over health care are a fake problem in that sense.

 

[Mr. Premise]

To put the costs into perspective. They had to trim the healthcare bill so that it came in under $1 trillion for ten years. So it costs about $100 billion a year. According to Wikipedia, U.S. military expenditures are $663 billion a year:

For the 2010 fiscal year, the president's base budget of the Department of Defense rose to $533.8 billion. Adding spending on "overseas contingency operations" brings the sum to $663.8 billion.

...This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance, cleanup, and production, which is in the Department of Energy budget, Veterans Affairs, the Treasury Department's payments in pensions to military retirees and widows and their families, interest on debt incurred in past wars, or State Department financing of foreign arms sales and militarily-related development assistance. Neither does it include defense spending that is not military in nature, such as the Department of Homeland Security, counter-terrorism spending by the FBI, and intelligence-gathering spending by NSA.

The intelligence budget is secret. Which is totally unconstitutional, but you don't hear Tea Partiers screaming about that! But the official story is that it is about $50 billion a year. But it's probably a lot higher because a lot of it is camoflaged in other budget categories and even more is privately funded by profits from CIA-owned corporations and various criminal schemes. So the evil stuff is officially about 3/4 of a trillion a year and probably closer to a trillion a year, yet they are saying we can't afford 100 billion, one tenth that, for healthcare. We could still do almost all the evil we now do if we cut the evil budget by 10%!

Thank you Mr. Premise for such a clarifying explanation! It put things in perspective for me. I like the simple terms you used.

You managed to take out some of the punch of a "trigger" for me. I have been "hung" in regards to deciding if I thought this plan had any merit at all. Although I have read up some, I still could not seem to really understand what the plan was all about. I think it was because I was "hung" on the mandate part. I tend to get "uppity" when mandated to do something...another of my programs! My, how those reactionary programs can block understanding!

Well, you're forced to pay income tax too! And part of your income tax should be used to pay for health care for all. There would be more than enough money from income tax to do this if the government was not using most of that money to pay for military invasions of other countries, the profits from which go directly to corporations and indirectly to the members of government who have close links with said corporations. The issues over health care are a fake problem in that sense.

 

[FireShadow]

Thank you Mr. Premise for such a clarifying explanation! It put things in perspective for me. I like the simple terms you used.

You managed to take out some of the punch of a "trigger" for me. I have been "hung" in regards to deciding if I thought this plan had any merit at all. Although I have read up some, I still could not seem to really understand what the plan was all about. I think it was because I was "hung" on the mandate part. I tend to get "uppity" when mandated to do something...another of my programs! My, how those reactionary programs can block understanding!

Well, you're forced to pay income tax too! And part of your income tax should be used to pay for health care for all. There would be more than enough money from income tax to do this if the government was not using most of that money to pay for military invasions of other countries, the profits from which go directly to corporations and indirectly to the members of government who have close links with said corporations. The issues over health care are a fake problem in that sense.

Exactly!

On the other hand, our "mandated" fees to buy health insurance will be substantially more than our "mandated" taxes would be for universal health care...

 

[Al Today]

Excuse my noise but I have a need state that perhaps we don't realize just how many people sleepwalking through this here Big Blue Marble who really are happy about all this...

That's the way it is though... I like to say: "I'm not paranoid, I know they're out there." Yup. Kinda wants me to give into the urge for seclusion. I'd go out and vote if I thought that would even really matter...