if I have to eat it to get health care then I damn sure will. The volt doesn't sound like punishment at all. What a silly argument from a silly man.

mandates that you purchase a private company's product for the sole reason of being alive.

If you ask the simple question of "what is to stop the Government from mandating that you purchase other things just for being alive?" you might get told the fallacy of "it's like auto insurance", when it really isn't; to avoid paying auto insurance you simply have to not own a car. How do you get out of the obligation to buy a private company's health insurance policy? By being dead. Most likely, though, you won't even get THAT flimsy auto insurance fallacy of an answer. Instead you'll get flamed and accused of spouting right wing arguments or whatever.

All you're going to get with that is more and more Americans asking, "What else will the Government order me to purchase from a private corporation, just because I happen to be alive"?

This question is legitimate. It will not die. It is not just being asked by right wingers. You cannot hide from it.

When middle class earners start finding that they're going to have to stop paying a car note to buy a private corporation's health insurance policy or pay a nasty new tax penalty, they will feel the hit on their finances. And then they come back very pissed off. You won't have enough flamethrowers to hold them back. This will bring the risk of a repeat of the 2010 election season.

"What else will the Government order me to purchase from a private corporation, just because I happen to be alive" SOMEONE will answer that question. That someone will probably be a Republican administration that seeking to capitalize on that decision.

if they forced you to pay the same amount in taxes and contracted out your healthcare (likely to the insurance companies because they already have the infrastructure to implement it).

Be it this plan, single payer, or any other approach at universal healthcare, you will be required to pay. Some ways of being required to pay are apparently more palatable than others.

Actually, what they did was raise your taxes and then provided a tax credit equal to the tax increase, that you can claim if you carry health insurance.

It explains why you would pay FAR less in taxes for Medicare for All than you would pay for private insurance coverage, for the same level of overhead and health care insurance coverage.

But then there's another reason why Medicare for All, aka single payer, would be cheaper: Medicare runs at a 3% overhead, versus 20-30% for private corporation-based insurance.

So, no, you won't have to pay the same amount in taxes for a single payer system as you will for private health insurance, for the same level of coverage. Not even close.

Right now, today, people pay less per capita in other countries for single payer insurance than we do here. So I would rather pay taxes or Medicare for All.


Edited to add: but in the end, none of this answers the question I posed.

Child support enforcement, TANF, and food stamps are now administered by subsidiaries of defense contractors. No one builds 1930's style agencies anymore. Services are contracted out.

Which companies have the information resources and personnel to administer healthcare benefits already in place? Any single payer plan will be administered by the insurance companies in this country in practical reality for this century. Many advanced countries do precisely the same. Profits will be controlled in the same manner as ACA does it. The MLR is first step in this direction.

The reason people pay less is that doctors don't get rich, and you don't have hospitals competing to have the very lastest high tech gadget to gain market share. Once you have the 10 million dollar proton beam generator, you better be using it.

Single payer is lovely, but the real deal is to eliminate most of the profit motive behind the disease industry. ACA is a vague start in that direction. I really don't think 25% of the people are now more depressed than 25% of the people were in the 1950s. We are just now pushing more and better drugs for it, there is tons of money to be made in depression.

It sounds like the main beef from the right is with the "forced to pay" part. That includes paying taxes for things they don't think they'd use themselves. And for the taxes they do pay, the same people want to see as much of that money as possible go to privatization of prisons, schools, city management (Michigan), etc.

The government - through taxes - forces people to pay for things deemed by the people to be for the public good. Even if you don't have a kid in school, you're paying in to support the school. Conservatives don't understand the "common good" part paying taxes, and would make the same broccoli argument for any tax.

Progressives have no problem with the concept of taxation, as long as that money is being spent for the public good. We want the services we pay into to go to the people who need it - in the most direct and efficient way possible. We all use roads, we've all been to school at some point, and we will all need health care, if we don't already. Paying into a health CARE system has evident public good, as long as that care is administered in the most direct and efficient way possible.

Our beef is that we're forced to pay a middleman whose job it is to stand in the way of delivering care, and pinch profits off the top.

So if there were a Health CARE plan that were payed into by a fair tax system, the left (and most other people) wouldn't have a problem with it - the proof being that this is accepted practice in nearly every other civilized nation in the world. But conservatives would still be talking about broccoli, and it would sound as ridiculous to me then as it does now.

So we have to defend the concept of paying into something as critical to the public good as healthcare (not cars, not broccoli). And we can do that without having to love the whole private insurance aspect of it.

This issue is different from mere taxes. It is different from paying auto insurance.

Taxes go to public agencies that are accountable to the voters. The only time it is NOT accountable is when they contract out to private contractors and DEAR GOD that almost always leads to fucking disaster. Which should have taught America a lesson that private contractors for Government services is stupid and should be done away with, but we haven't learned that lesson, so...

In any case, paying auto insurance is a burden you incur for driving a car. If you don't drive a car you don't need to pay for auto insurance.

Being ordered to pay for health insurance is not the problem when it comes to paying taxes to support Medicare for All. That's not the problem. Being ordered to buy insurance from a private corporation is the problem. Being ordered to do so just because you are alive, means you can't get away from this obligation.

Oh wait, no, mybad, I only WISH the situation was that good. You can just pay the tax penalty instead. How does the tax penalty help us cover the uninsured? And wait, can't they just pay the tax penalty and then go get insurance after they get sick?

And a lot of employers have bullied Obama into waivers precisely because they planned to drop hundreds of thousands of employees at the onset of the individual mandate in order to save money by paying the tax penalty instead. Even now we have consultants advising even more corporations to do exactly this. Southwest Airlines has the balls to come out and say they stand to save $300 MILLION by dumping their employees off their health care plan and paying the tax penalty instead. They're using the Individual Mandate as a justification for this epically psycho asstard behavior. Sir or madam, you should be accusing me of writing science fiction to come up with stories like what Southwest is considering. It's just too evil to imagine as being possible in a civilized society.

What utterly floors me about this is that DUers haven't launched into a howling BLOODRAGE over corporations using the Individual Mandate against us like this. Or that we somehow let this loophole exist. When companies like Southwest pulls this crap, you as the taxpayer will subsidize their miscreant behavior, and their employees will pay dearly.

... I guess that's alright.


I'm picturing a cowboy with a heard of tofu to "drive" to market on this one: that would be a pretty easy cartoon to draw.

if so, he/she could be working a laso through the moon roof. get on it. it has new yorker written all over it.

Does the VA? Does Medicare/Medicaid?

No they do not. This is a lie designed to instill fear in stupid people.

since there are A LOT of stupid people.

although not for his reasoning.

to being forced to eat tofu. Do these people even know what they're scared of?

That was the very argument used. The Court found that the Commerce Clause does not allow the federal government to regulate unless people are already purchasing something.

a mushroom cloud brought to you by a warmongering R who would not be adverse to having a hot war with Iran? Just askin'?

Good times.

Sid