WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama says requiring people to get health insurance and fining them if they don't would not amount to a backhanded tax increase.
"I absolutely reject that notion," the president said. Blanketing most of the Sunday TV news shows, Obama defended his proposed health care overhaul, including a key point of the various health care bills on Capitol Hill: mandating that people get health insurance to share the cost burden fairly among all. Those who failed to get coverage would face financial penalties.
Obama said other elements of the plan would make insurance affordable for people, from a new comparison-shopping "exchange" to tax credits.
Telling people to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase, Obama told ABC's "This Week."
"What it's saying is, is that we're not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore," said Obama. "Right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase."
I still reject that analogy for two reason. One, not everyone has a car, and if they don't want to pay for car insurance, they can just not drive. Second, you'd have to create a massive government bureaucracy in order to investigate and prosecute people for not getting health insurance.
It would probably cost more to enforce the "you must get health insurance" rule than it would be to just let people buy insurance if they want to.
Regardless, Obama has embraced the "we must make private insurance companies wealthy beyond their wildest measure" paradigm, which makes him a giant douchebag liar, trading in his campaign promises for political expediency.
Obama is a douchebag.. and I do not support him in any way, measure, or form, and I'd rather have an even bigger, giant douchebag of a Republican candidate beat him in the next election than suffer more of the same. At least with the Republican douchebag, they might not be as big a liar as Obama.
....
Tomorrow let's check the stock prices of the insurance companies at the closing bell.
You do remember me telling you to take very single nickle you can get your hands on and buying health insurance company stock.. right?
Always remember my #1 philosophy.. before your political ideology.. look out for yourself first.. and that means getting as much money as you can get get, as quickly as you can get it. The political game, in every nation, is for suckers.
6 comments:
I don't think you'd need a massive new government entity. Just have people send in a declarations page with their w-2s and stick it into tax code.
Thing is all of this whining that the republican's did about the public option and health care reform in general is most likely a ploy.
It will all go bad there will be massive public outcry and the republican's will then be able to string the whole mess around the democrats necks because they were the ones in power.
You watch for it being a key point in the next elections party politcal ads.
australia has a disincentive scheme for those not taking up private health cover after their 30th birthday - there is a 2% fee loading applied for every year after your 30th birthday for which you don't have, or let lapse, private insurance.
if however you get it and keep it before you're 30, you lock in that rate potentially for life (only adjusted for CPI).
you can shop around, change providers, up and downgrade your cover as your lifestyle changes, as long as you stay above some key threshholds.
i think it's a brilliant idea. it stops the geriatrics needing a hip replacement soon, jumping on when they're 70, and driving up the cost for the generally healthy young adults.
as i've said before, i have comprehensive hospital and extras cover for $60 a month.
worth noting of course is the platform we started from - nationalised healthcare thru our medicare system. that's also how they track it, you give your insurer your medicare number and your tax file number and medicare keeps track of when you are and aren't covered privately.
this is my long way of saying i think Obama's motives are sound, perhaps just the methodology is lacking.
I like Hillary Clintons comment on the current health care reform...
"It's interesting that what we are proposing is fundamentally so conservative compared with so many of our friends and allies around the world who do a much better job than we do in covering everybody and in keeping costs down and yet some of the political opposition is so overheated,"
I guess the other thing that comes to mind is that if you are going to propose that insurance companies can't drop people for pre-existing conditions and can't discriminate based off of them then there has to be some offset if you don't have a public option. That offset, in this case, is mandatory coverage.
I guess thinking about it, it makes me more skeptical that a public option would be fair competition, considering that not only would you be, assumingly, cutting into the ammount of people each insurance company insures, but also how much money they make because of dropped coverage.
To clarify, I'm not saying the reforms are bad, I whole heartedly agree with them, and I also agree that having a public option solves many of these inconsitencies. However, if you are going to stay with basically subcontracting to private insurance I don't think this is a bad way to do it.
I also think this still gets everyone who need healthcare healthcare, which ultimately is the #1 goal even if it does so inefficiently.
The reality is that a bill with a mandate isn't going to pass. You start with the assumption that the Republicans are going to vote against any bill regardless, and the progressive members of congress opposing it, and it's toast.
Kind of amusing, but yesterday the insurance lobby sent a letter to Bauccus, telling him they liked the bill. That's how bad the bill is.
I'm pretty sure that nothing is going to get done now, which is probably for the best. I suppose they could just pass a bill that would restrict insurance companies from exluding pre-existing conditions, or terminating very sick ppl, etc., but all that will do is provide the insurance companies the justification for raising rates again.
I think the situation will have to get far worse before a good bill can get passed.
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