Great post Jae. I might get to it later though. I'm going to jump around in these anyway.
Joe wrote:I was referring to Ben's post (although I'm not even sure I got it right,) I didn't know the actual number of uninsured people
My number's more correct. The 46 million uninsured number includes as I said about 90% who shouldn't really count, a third of that is undocumented citizens, another third is people eligible for government programs who have not signed up or even applied, and the last third is people who can afford it but don't buy any. The true number of uninsured, but can't afford and aren't eligble for government programs is more like 1-3% of the population. This is, as I explained, why "universal coverage" was dropped as a reason for the reform.
badman wrote:I guess you were luckier than I was. Until my wife co-signed to finance a new HDTV, all the previous applications that I had done on my own were denied, whether it's for a stupid cell phone, a car, a new computer,...
Wow. There was your problem. Outside of a car you shouldn't be taking loans to buy any of that stuff. (Even a car is debatable.) I'm going to have to say it you know. (And this is lighthearted.) El_badman caused the credit crisis and economic collapse.
I'd disagree, for is overall quality, nothing justifies its costs
What about "some people want to pay whatever it takes to get the best"? When Bill Gates pays for that fancy newfangled million dollar operation or Grant Hill has his ankle remade every six months, while you and I are buying our generic $4 pills at Wal-Mart, per capita costs go up but you and me still paid $4.
It's considered absurd in other countries for healthcare to cost so much. You should not be penalized for being sick or injured.
I'm not saying it's necessarily for free, but all things considered, when you look at what's been deducted from you at the end of the year, you do end up paying much much less than here for equivalent or better healthcare. I don't see what's wrong with that.
I don't care if the government is involved or not as long as the end result is the same for me, but obviously that's an unbearable moral issue for some people.
Here's the thing. All the countries in the world with state-provided health insurance are smaller, have a different population makeup (usually less diverse, always less overweight, generally smaller funding base) and gain their cost advantages through shifting of the costs to other markets.
This is the entire way health insurance works. Everyone pays in, and those in need get paid for. It's already a shifting of the costs. In private insurance it's shifting from the healthy and lucky to the unhealthy and unlucky, and most importantly, it's voluntary. In public insurance it's from the rich and healthy to the poor and unhealthy, and it's against your choice.
As I noted above, currently Canada and other countries can negotiate lower prices and set lower prices because companies can shift the cost to the largest market, the United States. We already see this on a small scale example
within the US. Medicare/Medicaid refuses to pay full costs, so doctors who don't drop, shift the costs onto their non-Medicare patients.
Once the federal government begins attempting to set prices it destroys that market advantage for other smaller countries which will cause a rise in prices and drop in care. The government has already shot up medical costs by mandating specific coverage in health insurance plans. It is illegal for insurance companies to not offer plans with coverage for various things. That increases costs, because instead of you paying for your Botox, it might be mandated for the insurance to pay for that.
Other foreign countries are already facing a medical cost and pension cost crunch, despite their lower costs. Here in the United States, Medicare/Medicaid, which covers only a third of the population (while paying almost half of the costs in the US...showing how well a federal program will lower costs here)
is already facing $75+ trillion in unfunded mandates and that bill comes due in the next decade.
Enacting a forced public plan in the United States will be a disaster. It will force massive tax increases on the middle class to pay for it and enforce legally a two-tier system. Everyone who is not super-rich will be trapped in the public plan and be failing to pay for the entire thing, the rest not only won't pay for it they'll still be able to buy the best care. Care will worsen as it's run through the government ringer, and coverage will depend on political decisions. (Kinda like education!) "Pre-existing conditions" won't disappear, they'll be enforced by the law as you see in the NHS where to control costs they're taking steps towards denying coverage to smokers, alcoholics, people who are too fat, etc. unless they change their ways. Now you have the federal government regulating everyones personal lives.
Since no other large "modern" country has ever attempted a full scale state-run health insurance program except the Soviet Union, we have to look at them. The government controlled 90% of the economy. It had a balanced budget every year because of this. It also provided health care for every citizen. Now, we know that care depended on your political ties, and they simply didn't give a shit about the peons. It'll be the same here, but not to that extreme. The biggest problem however, was despite having 90% of the economy to play with, the Soviet Union still ran into a funding problem for their shitty health care. They were assholes who didn't care about the non-party members for sure, but they also couldn't fund it. They had to make it even worse otherwise it was going to consume their entire budget, and they really really really wanted tanks and nuclear missles.
Right now you have not only a federal government, but state governments who cannot stop adding more and more non-health care related spending to their budgets. President Obama proposed a $3.6 trillion budget for 2010. Only $800 billion of that was related in any possible way to health care. (I'm including HHS, etc.) Social Security consumes $700 billion, the defense department $650 billion. This is his
proposed budget. Only about 1% of the time does Congress pass a budget lower than the President. And this is the Congress that has now passed two major cost (i.e near the $1 trillion a year range) bills in a rush without ever reading them, and that would've been three if the health care bill hadn't fallen apart. Think they're going to scale back the rest of the government to pay for health care? Does government ever give up programs and money?
I'm not talking about political decisions like "this guy voted Republican, kill his health insurance!" I'm talking about the massive Leviathan we all hate subjecting all health questions to a political process. People think the lobbyists we have now are the worst thing in the world, they're going to love when the government assumes control of health care. When the feds see that paying for cancer is too expensive, you're going to need a cancer lobby to make sure the government doesn't cut that. If you do get cut, guess what, you can't sue the federal government like you can a private insurance company.
You might say "the government would never do that, they're all wonderful caring people who want to do what's best and what's just." Yeah, I don't trust people with absolute power. You may trust the guy in there now, but what if Ms. Palin becomes President? Do you want her in charge of your health care decisions?
You might also say that the democratic process will prevent the government from doing things its citizens don't like. You know, like with rendetion, wiretapping and budget deficits. But that's the entire problem. Look at social security, it's a failed program that will never work under it's structure but you can't say you're going to do shit about it or else you're tarred with "HE WANTS TO TAKE AWAY YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY!" Imagine once the attack line is "HE WANTS TO TAKE AWAY YOUR HEALTH CARE AND LET YOU DIE IN THE STREET!!!"
Now, what if we were to do the things both me and Christopherson have proposed in this thread? We'd free up the market and take it national, provide more choices (instead of one insurance company in your state, there's now competition across the entire country, and this would create more and smaller more specialized insurance plans and companies undermining the giants), let people not be double taxed on health expenditures, get rid of the market distortion which is the government, while still providing an independent and basic catastrophic fund (which can't be raided like FICA/Medicare) for emergency life-threatning situations primarily for the poor but could also assist in making up lacking of funds for everyone. (And could also back a percentage of loans along with sharing costs with insurance companies. i.e. your insurance company pays $5000 for your operation, the catastrophic fund matches or pays half what they do, etc.) I even threw out a proposal to provide subsidies (not insurance) like WIC to pay for an basic insurance coverage plan for the poor. We want a safety net, not the government running everything.
Of course, this is all pretending that this whole thing isn't illegal and unconstitutional. But we long since stopped caring about the rule of law.
Jaesus wrote:I'd put a two year limit on Centrelink benefits.
The Clinton-accepted Welfare Reform put a four year limit along with work rules that not only drastically lowered the cost, but took tons of people off the roles who never came back (until recently obviously) and killed a lot of fraud in the system making it more efficient. Although a number of the states continued to destroy themselves, and now the Administration and Congress wants to roll back that reform to the old system like the one that you describe.
I'd also buy back enough shares of various Australian-grown companies that have been sold to overseas firms so that they remain Australian based as opposed to being sent overseas. I'd also put a cap on the amount of work businesses can divert to India or Malaysia or wherever else is cheap. I'd strengthen laws protecting casual/temp workers because I think they are in prime position to be screwed over, I'd also find a way to regulate the amount of dominance supermarket chains can have... as it stands now the Woolworths and Coles groups essentially have a dual monopoly going on, there is not enough competition for them to bother keeping their prices down so I'd find way around this. I don't know what however.
I would suggest not doing what you said in the first, along with rolling back any regulations that affect supermarket chains. Companies that send work to places that are cheaper lower costs for you and provide jobs and improve economies of other countries. The best way to lower the dominance of a chain is to undermine it with competition. If the costs of entering the supermarket...market is too high for a new business then there would never be any competition that grows. Any regulations benefit the largest companies position in the market at the expense of the smaller.
A duopoly is tougher than a monopoly to break, but you could still investigate them to find if there was price-fixing, contracting shennagians, etc.
That's a good point but you also have to take into account the actual revenue we're talking about here. Like that 5% increase may not sound like much as a raw number like that, but consider what that 5% is of. Microsoft made 50 billion dollars last year, do you really think they'd forgo the chance to increase that by another 2.5 billion just because they could've made 5 if the government hadn't raised taxes? Increased revenue is a good thing regardless of the number IMO.
Here's the problem. You aren't going to increase revenue, especially with a 50+% tax. People who are rich enough to make millions are people rich enough or smart enough to find and afford ways to not give you their money. This is why tax increases on the rich can never pay for anything, you have to hit the middle classes ($50,000-$250,000) because they can't escape the tax and there's tons of them.
EDIT: I'll use an example to make it clear. I'm assuming here this is a flat income tax, not a wealth accumulation tax.
Let's take the guy making $10 million a year. Let's assume it costs him $1 million a year to move 90% of his income out of the tax. So he's down to $9 million, and he can move $8.1 million of that offshore. So his taxable income is now only $900,000, even assuming that is still in the 50% tax bracket you're only bringing in $450,000, not $5 million. People make this kind of decision all the time. It's why CEOs get paid $1 in salary, but make $25 million off stock options. If that was his income, he'd pay 35% of it, but capital gains tax is only 15%.
To maximize your revenue, you want to find the rate where he's no longer willing to pay $1 million and move 90% of his income away. At 10%, he pays you $1 million, or he pays $1 million to pay you $90,000. Let's give him some strong patriotism, he really fucking loves Aussieland. At 20%, he'll pay you $2 million because he loves his country enough to not save $820,000.
Here in the United States after The War, the highest tax bracket used to be 91%, then 70%. But that bracket never brought in any money. Reagan slashed it down to 50% and then 28% and revenues soared in those brackets. Indeed, despite the rate, revenues are always the same % of GDP:
but no one needs tens of millions of dollars to live off
That's where our disagreement lies. That's their money, they earned it. Nobody else should have a right to demand they give it up. Setting some kind of "acceptable level of compensation" and confiscating anything more than that is just an unsettling idea for me and my type. Saying "you're too successful, so that money belongs to the government!"
We had a couple of stimulus packages here recently in which people were given lump sum payments of $800 and $1,000, they all went to people earning less than 100k a year because the government reasoned they were the ones who would be more likely to spend it.
And it was irrelevant. Lower incomes spend larger percentages of their income, but they're spending consistent amounts on low level goods, food, clothing, shelter, etc. They aren't generating massive wealth production that happens on the high end. They're buying goods that are already democratized and have gone through economies of scale.
