So you basically don't agree with the idea of providing health services to poor people. It isn't the case that everyone can afford to pay a market rate premium. barfo
Depends on what the government needs to offer. For $250/year or ~$20/month, even a poor person can afford a premium that covers a couple of preventive care type office visits. I'd really like to see the government open a bunch of cheap clinics, and to find ways to pressure the hospitals to cover serious injuries or sicknesses something close to pro bono. It's not like 30% of the people are uninsured - the number is more like 10% (30M out of 300M) and only some fraction of those need a heart surgury or whatever.
I wonder if all of these taxes will be paid by 5% of the population. After all, weren't we guaranteed that 95% of all families would not see a tax increase?
Actually he did, and he even enumerated many kinds of taxes he said he wouldn't raise to emphasize the point. I don't hold that against him, though. I simply don't like taxes, period.
Actually that's not true. No insurance company will insure those who really need it. They would hurt the bottom line. They cherry pick and only insure those they can profit from. On top of that, the entire healthcare industry subsidizes the insurance industry by charging un-insured patients nearly double what they charge the insurance industry for the same procedures/treatments. Most of these un-insured people end up losing everything because of these enormous bills and find themselves with no alternative but to seek public assistance for food and shelter. These programs are funded by taxes. Taxes subsidize the insurance industry.
I had no health insurance for a decade (by choice) and I was consistently given ~50% discounts on all my medical services, including when my wife was hospitalized for 3 days.
Now everybody will have to have health insurance, and if they don't, they will be fined or put in jail. If that isn't trampling all over the Constitution, I don't know what else to call it.
50% discounts off of what price, though? If I give you a 50% discount, and I give everyone else an 80% discount, are you getting a good deal? barfo
On one hand, in most states (if not all), you are required to have auto insurance if you want to drive legally. On the other, you do have the choice to take the bus or a taxi or whatever and not pay for insurance. You may well be right that requiring people to buy health insurance is unconsitutional. The govt. does have the right to tax and to provide for the general welfare of the people, but this isn't a tax.
If the federal government required all of age citizens to purchase auto insurance, regardless of if they owned a car, it would be un-Constitutional as well. I had this same debate at a dinner party we hosted last night during the Duck game. One of my more liberal friends brought up the car insurance argument, and I pointed out that the gov't did not mandate that all citizens own a vehicle and insure it, whether they planned on using it or not. He had no response other than to say that mandating health insurance is different. I then asked him why he brought up auto insurance as a comparative in the first place. We both laughed and went back to watching the Ducks come back against Arizona.
If everyone owned a car, everyone would need car insurance. Everyone does own flesh, so it is not unreasonable to require everyone to have flesh insurance. You can't claim you aren't planning to use your body. In the future, perhaps some of us will be using robotic bodies instead of flesh ones, and those people won't have to buy flesh insurance. barfo
Well, that's an opinion, but it kind of goes away from the "it's my body" line the liberals (correctly, IMO) use in the abortion debate. If the government can dictate what we do with our bodies, and how we must protect them, then the final liberty has been lost.
It's not a choice to be flesh and blood. Therein lies the really big difference. Would you be in favor of requiring a tax on children, and if a woman can't afford to pay the tax she'd be forced to have an abortion? Hail Mao!
I wonder how they'll be able to get all those unemployed people to buy health care. It would seem rather silly to throw them into jail as that would surely cost a lot more than it'd be worth.
Unemployed people will presumably qualify for subsidies. It's highly unlikely anyone will ever go to jail over (just) this. barfo
It's not a strawman at all, unless you have some special definition of strawman that the rest of us don't use. The taxes are necessary if we have the services; they are not necessary if we don't. The question at hand is not whether to have taxes or not, but rather whether to have (a) services and taxes, or (b) neither services nor taxes. Separating the taxes from the services and only discussing one or the other doesn't seem terribly useful. barfo
