The mandate to purchase health insurance

How is this right?

If you can't afford it then tax dollars will flow to the private sector health insurance vultures so you can?

Isn't this just legal extortion enriching the very corporate entities, with our tax dollars, that have caused this mess?
Isn't this just more corporate welfare?


---

If you get rid of pre-existing condition exclusions but not mandates, then so many people would refuse to buy insurance until they got sick, and then purchase it that it would drive prices up 5 times faster than they're going up now.

These things become problematic when you have a Congress hellbent on crafting legislation protecting insurance company profits over the needs of the people.
This is why H.R. 676 never made it to the floor much less ever getting an actuarial from the CBO.

---

for single payer in one gulp. The votes for even this incrementalist approach were barely there in the House, and even the House approach will be too much for the Senate.

Just like the bill that left the House.

Wait until the Senate waters down the Bill some more.

Incremental my butt, this Bill is boon to Insurance Companies

It has virtually no public option either.

Nothing would of been better. At least with nothing we could hang defeat on the Repiggies and the Teabaggers.

Now it will be us being blamed for a unworkable unconstitutional bill.

proof that the Democrats are incapable of governing.

And, I take it you don't have a pre-existing condition.

maybe then they would garner popular support.

This very bill is proof the Dems are as dirty as the Repiggies.

And yes we do have a pre-existing condition and I am out of work.

that the Dems are incapable of good governance?

The teabaggers hate it because the think it's socialist, the left hates it because it's a corporate boondoggle, independents hate it because it's bloated and undecipherable. Where, outside of corporate board rooms, is the support for this bill?

Two years later 45 is the qualifying age.


Perpetrating the system that isn't working and in fact doesn't work seems to me to be a waste of a good opportunity. We already know private insurance is a losing proposition.

Trying to force square pegs into round holes seems to me like a exercise in futility that in the long run will cause much more death, disease, and impoverishment than just solving the problem would.

The fact that our leaders are completely unable to deal with real world problems is just being ignored by most people.


That the votes aren't there for a solution tells me we are in far worse trouble than a broken health care system.

Lol, because as we know it's those conniving citizens that are the problem, trying to cheat the poor innocent insurance companies.

I never heard a Canadian complain because he/she had access to health care. You don't hear the Federal employees complaining because their programs are too good. Affordable, comprehensive health care is not an issue....we need to work on getting that for all.

which is why I oppose it.

I've heard many arguments on this board for it, all of them political-Pollyanna spin.

The bottom line is that the government is forcing taxpayers to prop up the insurance industry, which is a load of crap, imo.

If you want to provide real healthcare to people, that's one thing. Insurance is not healthcare. It is a scam.

Fix the problem, and the rest will take care of itself. The problem is that BigMed has gamed the market such that actually using that insurance costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The problem is corruption and cronyism. Fix that. Don't bailout corrupt institutions.

but keep those opinions to yourself because the thought police will be knocking on your door.

However, I understand fully why they can't go from where we are now to single payer with the stroke of a pen. Many people work in the insurance industry, and we'd rather not have them all pounding the pavement looking for work - there's not much work out there. So, it's a very hard line to walk.

There are a couple of bright points bout it, though. They'll lose their antitrust immunity, and they have to pay out 85% of what they receive in actual health care for people. The 15% that's left over has to go for overhead, pay, bonuses, and profits to shareholders. That arrangement/limitation is bound to make things more reasonable, if they enforce it as law. You wouldn't believe how much price fixing goes on in your "free" market.

From GMsnbc:


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33531099/ns/politics-health_care_reform/

Edited to add link

whos products we are required by law to buy.

That's all there is to it.

than providing people with healthcare.

Gotcha.

That would be required for BASIC DECENCY, I think, if you are going to use the guns and courts of govt to make people buy something.

Well before Switzerland passed a legal mandate for individuals to purchase health insurance (passed 1994 going into effect in 1996), they passed a legal mandate on insurers to provide basic health insurance coverage at NO PROFIT. That is the only thing you are required to buy. Insurers can sell you bells and whistles add-ons to basic insurance but nobody is required to buy it. (Supplemental bells and whistles are also optional purchases in France and Canada, both of which have automatic enrollment in government funded national health insurance). Because Switzerland had forbidden profit taking in the broadest part of the health care market¹ (essential or basic care is typically 70 to 80 percent of the overall health care market of a nation) by the time they took the step of mandating purchase of insurance, 95% of Swiss citizens already had coverage. They could afford it because of the legal obligation ON INSURERS, not because of enforceable obligations on citizens. They had achieved what we could consider universal coverage² by controlling costs (banning profit) without any govt. imposed mandate to buy.

Only in America would health insurance reform be approached as an opportunity to force people to fatten FOR-PROFIT corporations (enriching the same pirates who wrecked our system in the first place) and as opportunity to throw people into the clutches of the criminal justice system. The US government and the financial sector are increasingly one and the same criminal crony capitalist enterprise. This is a paternalistic relationship between govt and citizen, but in the same way that the mafia don has a paternalistic relationship to the people in the turf he rules over and "protects". The don eats first from the wealth of the people, his royal favorites eat second, and the people make do with whatever is left over.

-=-=-=-=-=-
1. France and Canada cover basic, essential, catastrophic, and chronic health care for their citizens through national health insurance funds. The share of the overall national health expenditure borne by the Canadian medicare system is 70% . In France, the share of the government in overall national health expenditures is 79.9%. This range, 70 - 80 percent, can be thought of as a rough guide to what a western democracy will typically define as "essential" or "basic" health care. Basic and essential is the broadest part of the health care market.

2. Massachusetts has legally mandated purchase of insurance to achieve "universal coverage". Their rate of coverage is in fact only 95%, similar to what Switzerland achieved without any mandate to purchase insurance. As for the proposed universal health care plan for the U.S. as a whole, the CBO is estimating the House bill now passed, to cover only 96% of the population - no significant improvement over what Switzerland achieved without any individual mandate.