American? Got private health insurance? Not for long, laddie. Welcome to the welfare state.Either the Democrats are run by Socialists who will stop at nothing , including political suicide, to grab power or they're a load of incompetent boobs who can't see the train headed for them. I'm not sure which is giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Update: Happy Dependence Day.
Update: Crossing the Rubicon.
9 comments:
ORLY?
Please point out the part of the bill that made private health insurance illegal, either directly or indirectly, and provide citations.
As the One likes to say "that's a false choice", after all, there's nothing to say that they can't be *both*.
Gauss: the bill doesn't have to make private insurance illegal, just unprofitable, which the no-pre-existing conditions rules do. Why should anyone carry insurance when they can just buy it when they need it, then dump it when they don't? There's no way the insurance industry can survive under those conditions.
That cartoon isn't correct. This thing doesn't begin stinking---busting budgets---for about five years. Good timing: well into Obama's second term (maybe...), or right in time to throw a wrench into his successor's first. I am a first-generation immigrant, so shouldn't say too many bad things about my fellow Americans, and indeed many are good people, et cetera, but I do not expect their memory to last as long as five years. Jimmy Carter is something other than a cuss word for 25% of Americans, more among the educated class, which should provide the society's memory and its long-term evaluation of history; QED.
My first thought when projecting consequences was similar to Mr. Steyn's, maybe because I'm a former Soviet citizen and therefore tend to mong war. A place to get money to pay for this, once we've sold all the IOUs anyone will buy, may turn out to be the military budget. I would bet (in today's world) that we'll pull back from Europe first, since the military infrastructure there was built to oppose a strong Soviet Union; Russia is weaker now, and we need bases in Asia because China isn't. (Heh, see how the socialism goes for those Euros when they need to pay for their own damned defense again.) On the other hand, one of the things that makes Interesting Times so interesting is the rate at which things happen. A major power retreating and leaving a vacuum in its place, makes for Very Interesting Times indeed.
gauss and Jason: I predict that the insurance industry will come back. ObamaCare will effectively forbid insurance companies from using actuarys' predictions to set rates. This will kill the industry as it is now: rates must either be too low to be profitable, or too high to afford. But government clinics are going to be a mess, and the best GPs and specialists are going to start seeing patients on the side, and charging for it. I predict that the result will be a two-tier system: inadequate government care from doctors who aren't good enough to go into business for themselves for hoi polloi, good care for those who can afford it. A new insurance industry, which sets its own rates, follows. If we are ever prosperous again, employers may even start offering this new insurance to entice people to come work for them.
In other words, this will come out to the same thing as raising taxes on everybody, and making everyone eligible for Medicare. Five, ten years, I think, before the new insurance industry is in place. Until then, I would suggest becoming very wealthy, and not getting sick.
Actually it isn't that bad.
The bill requires every American to take a private insurance, and if one cannot afford, the society will fund one.
It is pretty much the same model as in the Netherlands and Switzerland.
Nobody prohibits anyone taking a private insurance on their own.
Actually, it *is* that bad. The Federal Government doesn't have the authority to impose an individual mandate for one. For another, the minimum standards they want to impose on what qualifies as acceptable health insurance will drive up the cost for everyone, as will the fact that insurers are not allowed to assess risk, but must insure *everyone*, regardless of pre-existing conditions. That's a recipe for bankruptcy.
This bill is a massive power-grab, and will only lead to higher taxes and lower quality of care, not to mention less innovation and more bureaucracy.
I look forward to November. If the One stays true to form for the rest of the year (and I don't think he can do otherwise) then we might well see a repeat of 1994 in Congress.
Now if only we could get Newt back in the Speaker's chair...
Jason, if the Dutch and the Swiss (whom I would not exactly dare to call Commie Pinkos) have managed to get it work, why not the Americans?
Does the question boil down to "Why do the those poor contemptible Euros pay less for better"?
I don't believe the Americans really were that bad on arranging their economy and processes into something more efficient, more functional and less expensive than the current situation.
Face it, the current US system sucks like a vacuum cleaner. Any steps towards anything better would clearly be improvements.
The Euros have (or had) ethnically homogenous, small countries where most people were unwilling to abuse the systems. That's breaking down with the ongoing influx of unassimilable immigrants.
The US is a polyglot nation of over 300 million people. Yes, the system we had needed work, but that was mostly because federal and state interference in the economy was badly distorting price signals and creating bubbles. When there's no competition and no one knows how much anything costs and the payers and the consumers are not the same people, OF COURSE you'll get screw ups. But creating *more* bureaucracy and increasing the costs even more is NOT a viable solution. We're not making things better, we're making them worse.
I suspect the reason health insurance premiums and deductibles were and are going up is that the pool of payers is going down. When a lot of businesses stopped offering health insurance, not all of their employees picked it up on their own. So to cover those who were drawing on the insurance, the premiums/deductibles had to go up, and/or coverage had to go down.
However, the fall in coverage coupled with the rising rates and deductibles made it less agreeable to the young and/or healthy. After all, why get something that costs a lot and won't pay out when you need it. So the pool of payers shrinks, while the group that's drawing on the pool stays nearly the same, and rates go up again.
The rates go up, the coverage goes down, fewer people sign up in the first place, some drop their policies, and the cycle continues until it all implodes. That's the problem the health care insurers are facing. Since they've got the reputation of not paying out when it's needed and charging too much, they end up not paying out and charging too much. Sadly, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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