Obama Healthcare Is A Nightmare
I love how the Obama administration keeps saying that nobody will be forced to switch plans. This just isn’t true. Here is why: Private insurers will not have the ability to compete with a taxpayer funded plan. The government can run its plan at a loss every year indefinitely because they can always borrow money to pay for it or raise taxes to pay for it. Private insurers cannot do this. Private insurers have to actually make a profit.
The government plan will do things like cover procedures that no other private plans would cover. The government plan would accept anyone regardless of circumstances. There is simply no way that a private company could compete with that.
Americans will be forced to switch to the public plan because of the perceived cost savings to them. In reality, there won’t be a cost savings. It’s just that part of the costs will be funded through taxpayer dollars instead of checks made out to an insurance company.
It will cost us more when everything is totaled. There is no way that a government agency can provide services more efficiently than the private sector. There is no way. Plus once all of these procedures are essentially free to the average citizen, you will see a massive increase in the number of procedures being done. The demand for healthcare services will explode. It will be funded on the backs of the American taxpayer.
People Are Underestimating The Significance Of Obama Healthcare Reform
The thing that really scares me about the proposed healthcare reform is how much it is going to expand government entitlements. People have to realize that once we go down this road there is no turning back. This is not something that we can try for a couple of years and then repeal if we don’t like it. The new entitlement will be permanent.
The way our American political elections work, it virtually guarantees that any politician who would propose removing an entitlement such as this would be committing political suicide. Our politicians are power hungry by nature. There is no way you will get a majority of them to vote for something that will cause them to be voted out of office. They just won’t have the political will.
Look at other entitlements that are broken. Will the politicians ever abolish them? I think not. Welfare and Social security come to mind.
Anyone with half a brain would not support this government takeover of healthcare
Don’t do it people. Do not support any plan that involves the government competing with the private sector. It will most certainly lead to a government healthcare monopoly. It will lead to a system where we all sit around complaining about how great it was before we let the socialists take over our country. We will be talking about the good old days when you knew your doctor by name.
The House bill involves cutting 500 billion from a giant goverment entitlement program. It appears we CAN cut these programs. Still trying to figure out shy republicans are against a cut in medicare.
We have had publicly funded universities for hundreds of years and they seem OK. You probably went to one. Post office vs UPS compete with parcel services. That seems OK. Public/private competition also exists in trash collection, ambulance services, high school education, airplane parts manufacturing, defense contracting and hundreds of other industries. Often works great.
We are cut welfare in the 90′s. We’re looking at cutting medicare now. Public programs contract all the time.
Futhermore, Fox News and the CBO have reported that the Republican bill would only insure 3 million people.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/11/05/house-gop-health-reduce-uninsured-million/
Webster,
Those examples you provided are all areas where government competition has proven a failure, not a success. It costs more per student to educate a student in the public sector than it costs per student to educate in the private sector. Look at Catholic schools.
The postal service is going broke because they cannot compete on par with private shippers like UPS and Fedex. Plus they can’t even come close to delivering the same quality of service.
Have you ever seen a UPS man at work? They hustle and get paid well for doing it. I don’t know about you but I have never seen my mailman jog anywhere.
Trash collection is cheaper when outsourced to private companies which is why you see so many cities do it. The ones who do not are primarily union controlled Democrat administrations. Get the picture.
Ambulance services are also cheaper outsourced. I have no idea where you are getting your information from. We just went through a big fight over this where I am from. Private sector ambulance is way less costly.
Universites operate on a combination of public and private funding. They are not examples of public vs. private. IF you are talking about high end private universities then you are not comparing apples to apples.
The simple truth is that the private sector is more efficient, hands down, no comparison.
i bet u have health care. u just give a shit about yourself. let everyone die as long as its not u and yours.
my insurance went up after i retired, i paid 103 dollars a month
on the job. now since i retired it went from 350.00 a month to 907.45. i dont want it free but at least affordable. yea go ahead let the big health insurance companies fix the structure. they proved to me i have no choice but to pay. i will be like the other 50 million that dont have insurance. if u have a large pool the cheaper the cost. no one gets it.
republicans started this f-ing mess when bush cut taxes for all the rich, medicare d. 2 wars, 1 was a lie, no regulation on nothing.
i could go on on on. conservatives my ass. u guys are full of it u guys havent paid for anything since stealing the election.
party of no hell no unless its for big companies.
where did the jobs go ? let im all go to the communist 8-million.
take away social security, medicare, welfare, see what happens to your base. keep watching fox, palin, glen beck listen to rush oxicontin limbaugh. bunch of lying hipocrits.
8 years of crap. no raises milk 4.00 gal more than gas.
i hope the americans dont forget what happend from 2001 2008 and get out and vote. so we can at least keep going forward.
tired of all the bull shit lies. bush chaney set us back 50 years.
thanks for the forum
Ron,
I was thinking of writing a nice long response to your comment. After thinking about it, I decided to just let it stand as is on its own merits. People can judge for themselves.
This health care bill is nothing but a disaster waiting to happen. Its supposed to help our country out of debt?? how, when it is a non profitable organization basically. Raising our taxes isn’t going to help people financially, and its putting private practices out of business. Yes health care is really important to have, but this is not the way to go about it. Adding 940 billion dollars to our countries 11.7 trillion dollar deficit is just insane! I personally don’t have insurance and even with this plan my family still cant get it. So what happens to families like mine?
i think this is where communication between republicans and democrats has been lost. The right-wing keep saying mentioning things like ‘death-panels’ and ‘rationing’ when on the subject of government healthcare – but these are the things that insurance companies have always been about, literally denying people healthcare because of obscure previous conditions. It seems like conservatives are convinced that the american government are some other, communist race trying to hold power over the public, and that putting healthcare in their hands just means taking the ‘death-panel’ power from the insurance companies and giving it to someone else. But this is exactly what government healthcare prevents – because they are not trying to make any kind of profit (and they don’t need to) they can provide more facilities than any private insurance company could. There’s only one thing I can think of that might spoil the idea of universal healthcare (but not justify the idea of only private healthcare) – and that is the fact that america is one of, if not the most unhealthy nations in the world, and that a lot of taxpayer money would be going towards healthcare procedures that are happening purely because of excessive consumption etc. but this isn’t even the primary argument of conservatives for stopping government healthcare, and yet this is the only thing that could sway me towards and private healthcare point-of-view. Aside from that, you’ve lost me as to why you wouldn’t want healthcare for all?
A November 5th Newsweek article I read this morning “Why Healthcare Reform Will Survive” is the best assessment of the Republican plan for health care reform that I have seen yet.
The article was written by Wendell Potter, the former insurance insider and head of PR for CIGNA health insurance for 20 years. Potter basically says that the health insurance industry has been working behind the scenes with the GOP and Blue Dog Dems and actually LOVES multiple parts of the “Obamacare” plan that passed the house and the senate, even going so far as to write several portions of the original health care reform bill. For example, Potter says that the health insurance industry actually very much loves the part of the health care reform that requires everyone to buy insurance because they stand to make a huge amount of money in new health insurance clients. The original intent of the provision, when first proposed in the house, was to cause people who couldn’t afford health insurance at private industry rates to be able to get very low cost public government/Medicare insurance or non-profit-private-pools of insurance that would compete with the private insurance providers. By lobbying to keep that provision requiring people to have to buy insurance, private insurers stand to make a killing now. Of course, private insurers do want Republicans and Blue Dogs to do their bidding when it comes to repealing things that they don’t want in health care reform, like the requirement to provide affordable policies to children and adults with pre-existing conditions who can’t otherwise get insurance. Here’s a good excerpt from the article by Wendell Potter’s “Why Health Care Reform Will Survive”:
“The real reason insurers want the GOP leading Congress again is not to repeal ‘Obamacare,’ but to try to gut some of the provisions of the law that protect consumers from the abuses of the industry, such as refusing to cover kids with preexisting conditions, canceling policyholders’ coverage when they get sick, and setting annual and lifetime limits on how much they’ll pay for medical care. Insurers also hate the provision that requires them to spend at least 80 percent of premium revenues on medical care, as well as the one that calls for eliminating the billions of dollars that the government has been overpaying them for years to participate in private Medicare plans. (Be on the lookout for a death panel–like fearmongering campaign to scare people into thinking, erroneously, that Granny and Pawpaw will lose their government health care if Congress doesn’t restore those ‘cuts’ to Medicare.)”
Republicans and Blue Dog Dems, was it worth it? Were all your creature comforts and wads off payoff money for re-election worth your soul?
-Damn Dem