Defining healthcare affordability and a possible solution

The median income in the US is around 50K. You can make regional and demographic adjustments if you like by going to census.gov, but I am trying to keep this simple. Here is my worksheet for affordable health insurance for the American People.

IF a household has income of 50K, let's assume that they are spending approx 30% for shelter, 14% for Fed taxes, 2% on state taxes, 13% on federal taxes - taking out about 50% of income at this point (I am using the percentages that Marcy Wheeler assigned in her worksheet here:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/12/16/the-mybarackobamatax/ (I really don't know if her percentages are exactly right, and I don't really care about exact figures - we all know that all Americans spend money for food, shelter, and taxes - assign whatever exact percentage you want to, but I think 50% is a workable number to start with.)

NOW - what else do Americans need to do with that other 50% of income? They need to spend the rest of the money on clothes, transportation, retirement, education, utilities,debt service to our credit card overlords, and other "stuff" to keep our consumer economy running. What is a fair and reasonable figure to ascribe to the costs of healthcare/insurance? I personally believe that a figure between 5-7% of gross income is "reasonable"- 7% would mean healthcare for a 50K household would run about 3500 ayear or about 73 dollars a week. My friends - THAT is an affordable figure. (Bear in mind Canadians pay about 1200 per year for their comparable if not better healthcare)

So instead of reforming healthcare from the industry side (how much will these suckers stand still for)? let's reform it from the people side (provide all Americans with affordable health coverage)

HEALTHCARE SPENDING FOR ANY AMERICAN HOUSEHOLD OR INDIVIDUAL WILL BE CAPPED AT 7 % OF GROSS INCOME.
This will include insurance premiums, out-of-pockets AND drugs. The moment the out-of-pockets go OVER 7% of Gross income, then federal subsidies will kick in to cover the difference. And I don't mean tax credits. I mean where you say to the hospital - "I maxed out my 7%- this bill goes to the Federal Healthcare Re-insurance Fund"

Now that would be real insurance reform. It's a sliding scale. Those who could pay more due to their income would pay more. I don't think anyone would care if insurance was public or private or for profit or non-profit or mandated or unmandated. The insurers would know exactly how much they could get from you. Eveyone would be covered. It would be up to the feds to police and regulate the insurers so that the 7% paid by the public isn't eaten up in 20 minutes with CEO bonuses, but, hey, that's their problem.

You could say a post like this is a waste of time to both write and read, but I keep being told that real reform comes from the bottom up and not the top down. If HCR doesn't pass this time around, or even if it does, reforming the reform will happen almost immediately. What they are proposing is simply unaffordable to the in-the-trenches citizen. To be honest - those are the only costs I really care about. If they want to increase our deficits with out of control healthcare spending that they leave unreined due to their own corruption, so be it. With my proposed caps at least Americans will still be able to go to a movie or eat dinner out once in a while we are going down the tubes due to their malfeasance.

And I haven't seen the increase letter yet that will probably make me cry.

As I said before, if you're poor you'll be fine probably, if you're rich, you're already fine. Their plan seems to be to make the middle class poor and then maybe we can get some healthcare after eroding away all our other assets.

Anyone who makes 133% of poverty gets Medicaid. Anyone who makes 150% only pays about 3% of their income for premiums (with strict out of pocket caps). Anyone who makes 300-400% pays about 9.8% for health insurance. There is more out of pocket assistance from 150%-300%.

So not as good as 7% for all costs for everyone. Some people will have to pay less than 7%, and most will have to pay more. But there is still a guaranteed maximum (at least for people making 400% of the poverty level or lower).