Health Care Passes in House 220-215

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

You're not required to buy auto insurance.

[mtnbkr]

You're not required to buy auto insurance.

I do believe you are fined if you either don't have insurance or pay the "uninsured motorist fee", which was $500 in Va last I looked.

Chris

[Iain]

Why don't young people need health insurance?

I'm still not totally up with how your system works - but who ends up paying for the young guy who crashes his car/gets cancer/has previously undiagnosed heart condition?

[Ben]

I do believe you are fined if you either don't have insurance or pay the "uninsured motorist fee", which was $500 in Va last I looked.

Chris

But again, these only apply if you drive a vehicle on a public road. You can drive around your 40 acres all day long with no insurance, no registration, and no license. Plus you have the option of taking public transportation, riding your bike, etc. on public roads. So you have choices regarding how you get around. Not super great choices, but choices.

With health insurance, it becomes a requirement to pay for the service simply to live in this country. If you make $10 million a year and want to pay your own way regarding your medical needs, you can't without becoming a criminal. As per the bill:

Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses. Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.”

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

I do believe you are fined if you either don't have insurance or pay the "uninsured motorist fee", which was $500 in Va last I looked.

Chris

Sorry.  Let me be more precise.  You are not required to buy auto insurance for yourself.

If you choose to drive on public roads, you are required to be financially responsible for any damage you might cause to others.  You are not required to buy any insure for yourself.  You're welcome to take whatever financial risks you want with your own property.  Other peoples' property?  That you are required to protect.  Insurance happens to be the most practical method for most people to do so, but there are other legal means too, I believe.

There is no sane argument that you pose a risk to others by not purchasing health insurance.  Thus there is no sane argument for requiring everyone to buy it.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

Why don't young people need health insurance?

I'm still not totally up with how your system works - but who ends up paying for the young guy who crashes his car/gets cancer/has previously undiagnosed heart condition?

Who pays?  The guy who crashes the car or gets cancer or has a heart condition pays for his treatment, same as any with any other age group.

[Iain]

I thought people received medical care all the time that they don't pay for and would never be able to pay for.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

Yes, and what does insurance and age demographics have to do with any of this?

[Iain]

So someone else pays?

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

The person needing the treatment is responsible for paying for it.  If he can't, then nobody pays and the hospital has to eat the cost of the treatment (usually, it's complicated).

This is a big part of the problem with medical costs and insurance costs.  Hospitals and doctors must overcharge their paying customers to make up for the non-paying customers.  The hospitals know how much the paying customers' insurance plans are willing to pay out for any given treatment, and they routinely bill based on that amount rather than on what the treatment costs or is worth.  By billing slightly higher than the insurance is able to reimburse, they're able to maximize the amount of revenue possible at every opportunity.  This allows them to better cover the unpaid costs from other patients, but it also drives health insurance prices sky high.

[Iain]

Thanks, very useful. After reading that I can see the many ways that compelling people to buy insurance would would ensure you pay for anothers costs.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

The problem is that we're compelled to pay for other peoples' costs once in a while, when we go to the doctor and they spread the spread costs around.  The proposed solution is to compel us to pay for other peoples' costs all the time, by requiring everyone to buy government-manipulated or government-issued health insurance.  

This is patently idiotic.

The proper solution is to stop the compulsion.  But our government seems to have a problem with solutions like that.

[sanglant]

The insurance companies were against it until Obama offered up the notion of mandating insurance for everyone. Now young people who don't usually need health insurance are required by law to buy it. Because they're buying it to subsidize the costs of health care for older people, the premiums will be higher than they've been in the past for young people.

I wonder if the young voters who turned out for Obama understand this, or care?

After the vote, Nancy Pelosi compared the health care bill to two other great achievements of the US government, Social Security and Medicare. That's reassuring. 

there still so high on obama's hopey change they don't know if its day or night

[Gewehr98]

You've never been cited for lack of auto insurance?

There are actually two states in the U.S. that don't require auto insurance.

Wisconsin is one of them, as is New Hampshire.

That'll change for Wisconsin soon since Doyle just signed a law mandating it effective June 1st, 2010.

[lupinus]

In truth I am only surprised by the margin of just five votes. That seems way to close for comfort for Pelosi and closer then she would have allowed had she as much control over so called blue dogs as was thought.

No one really thought this legislation would not pass the house and that if there was any chance of stopping it that it would be done in the Senate. With a margin that close it's chances in the Senate aren't a slam dunk by far.

[Monkeyleg]

If this makes it to Obama's desk, I suspect the Democrat party will be wandering the desert for years. They'll take a beating at the polls next year, but the real bruiser will be after 2013, when the public gets a taste of socialized medicine.

But maybe by 2013 Obama will have been able to silence Fox, Limbaugh, Hannity and others, and he'll convince the public that this was GW's bill.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

If this makes it to Obama's desk, I suspect the Democrat party will be wandering the desert for years. They'll take a beating at the polls next year, but the real bruiser will be after 2013, when the public gets a taste of socialized medicine.

But maybe by 2013 Obama will have been able to silence Fox, Limbaugh, Hannity and others, and he'll convince the public that this was GW's bill.

When 2013 rolls around the Dems will blame the atrocious health care situation on the eeevil insurance companies or on Republicans or on greedy doctors or for-profit hospitals or, well, anyone but them.  And most of the voters will believe 'em.

If the average man-on-the-street type can't understand today how this plan will mess things up and skyrocket costs, I don't hold out much hope of him figuring it out any time in the future.

[Boomhauer]

I can't be the only one here wondering why the people on this forum who want socialized medicine for the US seem to live in countries that already have socialized medicine...

[FTA84]

I watched this on CSPAN last night ... it is no wonder the dems are pushing it.  It is really what half the country wants; irresponsibility and free money.

Most of the calls were either against it or "sob" stories like, "I didn't have insurance then I got cancer and now I have to pay for it! That is not fair!".  There were also the calls like "Who'd be against free healthcare?!?!  It's free!!".

[red headed stranger]

This Bill is basically a gift to the insurance industry.  That's why they aren't running ads 24/7 to oppose it.

In other news, spending five minutes in the emergency room before being declared dead is billed at about $30,000 in Sacramento, CA.

It'd be nice if there were some effort to make the costs of health care correspond at least roughly to the services and outcomes.  But that would mean cutting enormous profits out of the insurance and health services business, which I doubt any political party is going to do in the near future.

This was essentially Kucinich's reasoning for voting against it. 

[RocketMan]

In my view, the American voter asked for socialism in the 2008 election.  Obama did little to hide who and what he really is, a dyed-in-the-wool socialist.  Sure, some of his handlers and the MSM tried to portray him as a centrist, their thinking being that no one would vote for a socialist.  But Obama himself did nothing to steer the voter away from that understanding.  It was very clear to anyone who bothered to look into the man's background what his beliefs were.  The information was freely accessible from reputable sources.
So, the American voter voted for socialism the last time around.  They asked for it, they should get it, and hard.  I hope it hurts.

[FTA84]

I forgot to mention that I think even the Obama camp knows the unconstitutionality of mandated insurance.  I don't think they care as it is a legislative game.

They want to claim it is budget neutral (and get the insurance companies on board) and the mandate accomplishes this.

Either way, by the time one section of the bill gets determined unconstitutional, the train will already be moving down the track.

[De Selby]

This is a case of Obama doing the opposite of socialism - he's going with the private model and guaranteeing it more money, in a round about way, more longevity where it is unsustainable.

The private health care model is a failure in the most important respects: it has resulted in higher prices for the same levels of service as available in public models.  There's really no number-measure that gives the edge to the current system over any other public system in the industrialised world.  You need to start looking at places like Russia and China to find similarly poor per-price healthcare outcomes.

So instead of reform, we have the health insurance companies joining hands with the "socialists" to pump more money into the private system.  Most of that money will go to cover the armies of review teams employed by insurance companies to help them avoid paying on claims, and to profit. 

I'll support the next bill, in any incarnation and with any plan, that demonstrably reduces the cost of health care while delivering equivalent levels of service.  I seriously doubt any such plan is forthcoming, but it would be a simple matter to copy another system that already achieves that outcome.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

Yeah.  "Private"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk

[RoadKingLarry]

but it would be a simple matter to copy another system that already achieves that outcome.

Name one, anywhere in the world, go ahead.