What a purposeful ***** you can be when you're trying to tailor what I actually said, to what you want to try to depict what I said as...
I keep hearing that personal attacks mean you do not have a valid argument.
It's very simple. You start a universal health care pool and charge people, all people employed or not a very low premium.
How is this different from the current system, outside of the fact that the poor people will now have to pay a premium that they cannot afford. If you charge a lower premium than is currently being charged, you will be losing money left and right.
It isn't a tax anymore than insurance premiums are taxes. (Oh goodness knows they're much wor$e) Think about it. The premium is earmarked soley for the health-care pool of which we all draw from when we need to. And if there is a deficit in the pool, the government can bail that out and not Wallstreet. A much cheaper price friend..
Can you opt out of the premiums? Do the premiums that are charged differ based on how much you earn? You will have to create a huge bureau to oversee this, which will spend a ton of money on staffing and other things.
Further, consider that the federal government's General Accounting Office (GAO) estimates that for every $10 spent on Medicare, $1 is lost to errors, waste, and intentional fraud. A January 2003 GAO report also placed Medicaid on a list of government programs at "high risk" of fraud, waste, abuse or mismanagement.
Seeing as how in 2004, Medicare spent around 260 billion dollars to cover only 41 million people, that would mean that 26 billion dollars was wasted.
This means that for each person covered by Medicare, the government wastes around 630 dollars per person per year. In what Medicare wastes yearly, most of these people could pay more than half of their premiums.
Further, given the above statistics, (26 billion dollars a year is wasted) it would seem to me that the "bailout" cost is not a better price. Given that you will have to continue the funding of this year in and year out, as opposed to a 1 time bailout (that might actually make you money), I do not think it is a good comparison.
Medicare was enacted in 1965. This was 43 years ago. So, if current trends continue and are accurate, in the next 43 years of Medicare existence, we can expect to
spend $10,750,000,000,000 and
waste and astonishing $1,118,0000,000,000.
Our $700,000,000,000 rescue package pails to the money that will just be wasted by Medicare.
Stabilizing health care IS stabilizing our economy. The root of everything lies at jobs not being availible. Jobs aren't availible because the american employee isn't attractive to business. They aren't attractive to business because they're expensive (duh...business 101 here folks). They're expensive because they don't have health care coverage and must be provided with said.
Many companies do not offer benefits to people just starting out. Many companies certainly do not give benefits to people working at minimum wage. How does cutting the minimum wage slightly and basically nationalizing healthcare fix anything you are advocating?
They demand higher wages because they cannot afford private health care premiums and the inflated cost of living due directly to lobbying connected at it's very source to big profiteers raping the poor.
It is not lobbyists that set healthcare costs.
The 800lb gorilla in the room that nobody wants to talk about is greedy mega-insurance companies. And guess who we just handed a big fat check to when times got tough for them? It was their own fault investing in mortgages that they themselves stripped americans of being able to afford!
In fairness we gave the rescue money to financial wings of companies and to banks. Yes AIG gives insurance, but it was not AIG insurance wing that caused their problems, it was their financial group.
Speaking of regulation in the banking industry, did anyone else notice that AIG had to ask the government for permission to loan its financial branch money from one of its profitable branches. That does not make much sense to me. It would seem with no regulation they simply could have just done so.
AND WE BAILED THEM OUT!! How's that for your ultimate stupidity? They said bailing them out would help because they're such a big part of the world economy. Well guess what actually happened? CEOs took the money and ran (shocker!) and the world economy is swishing down the toilet at exactly the same rate as if we hadn't done a thing..
The credit market has improved, and that is the first step. Panic selling around the globe is still in full swing, but the bailout worked to unfreeze credit markets (its intended goal) and that is the first step to a turnaround.
What we are witnessing is the dragon finally devouring the very last bit of its tail (its head) before it disappears. See now how trickle up is the remedy? It needs to throw up all that it devoured and return it to the tail for awhile before the feast can begin all over again..
No, trickle up is not the remedy.
