Health care reform bill

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1,900 pages. Very few have read it fully. Very few have understand it. From what I read and heard this bill has too many flaws. I wrote to my members of the house and senate to take action to block its passage.

There are better solutions. This is not one of them. Please tell your representatives to do the same. http://whoismyrepresentative.com/

In short, I think we should cut the crap and use the single-payer healthcare system to all levels of American society. And cut back on military spending to fund it.

A single-payer healthcare system is what the bill proposes, but it also does worse than that.

Do some research.

q[cut back on military spending to fund it]q

Agreed. Why is America even in Afghanistan? No one knows why we're there, and no one have given a clear reason why we need to be there.

The devil is in the details. Just what kind of single-payer system would you propose? And what specific cuts would you make to the military?

Instead of objecting to the health care bill head-on, I suggest pushing for the Read the Bills Act in one of its incarnations, to force every Congresscritter to personally read the 2000+ page bill in its entirety before voting on it. I prefer this one, because it has real teeth to enforce it:

http://www.downsizedc.org/page/read_the_laws
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read_the_Bills_Act

This one seems far less effective, but has a lot more popularity:

http://readthebill.org/

I disagree with cutting defense spending. We need it right now to finish the war in Afghanistan because it is a base for a terrorist organization that is a major threat to America. The problem with the healthcare bill is that it is too ambitious and needs to be scaled back.

And transferring our entire military budget to health care will not fully fund health care anyway. We will be in the pink of health when we are overrun by Jihadi thugs.

ruveyn

kxmode wrote:

I’m sure you’re right but the alternative is having NOTHING as when since president Clinton tried and failed and that has been ten times worse. I envy those people in France, Germany, Cuba etc. The private health insurance is an unmitigated failure for maintaining the health of our citizens same as the public school option has been for maintaining the education of our children for decades. How dare you suggest that we turn ourselves over to the Bernard Madoffs and Kenneth Lays of society.

That's a failure of government. I don't want the people who failed to create a good bill in charge of running a bad system.

But feel free to put your money where your mouth is, and get together will all the others wanting a public option, and fund your own system. If it's good enough, I'll donate.

Or write your own bill and get it sponsored in Congress. No need to depend on the incompetent people who wrote the current bill. (Better would be a bunch of small bills, each targeted at a very specific objective, and easily comprehensible to congresscritters who are not health care experts.)

Monster emergency bills that no one understands is how we got the PATRIOT Act, and how we got into the banking mess. We don't need more of the same.

Nice article in Reason about the bill:

http://reason.com/archives/2009/10/30/m ... e-theater/

This was recently sent to me by my representative:

I want to draw your attention to the most recent iteration of Congress’ attempt to set in motion a government regulation of health care. As you have probably heard, Speaker Pelosi unveiled the 1,990-page health care overhaul late last week. The Affordable Health Care Act for America (H.R. 3962) is about 7.5 inches tall and literally weighs in at over 19 pounds. But there are some more numbers you may be interested in.

The unemployment rate is 9.8 percent nationally and 12.2 percent in our state. Given this reality, the number one priority of Congress should be jobs. However, the House Leadership has decided it is more important to pass health care legislation with a vote expected as early as this Thursday. What would this health care legislation do to jobs, your income, and the overall economy?

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the 111 new programs, boards, bureaucracies, and commissions contained in H.R. 3962 would cost $1.055 trillion just through 2019. To pay for this enormous expansion of government, the bill includes a 2.5 percent tax on individuals who fail to purchase health insurance, a 2.5 percent excise tax on medical devices, a 5.4 percent surtax on high-income filers (over 50 percent of which are small businesses), and an 8 percent tax on employers who cannot afford to purchase government-approved health care benefits, affecting 42.3 million workers. Most shockingly, these income thresholds are not indexed for inflation, meaning that as time goes on, more and more individuals and small businesses will become subject to these taxes – much like the Alternative Minimum Tax. H.R. 3962 also doubles the penalty for non-qualified health savings account (HSA) withdrawals.

But even more tax hikes and benefit cuts are needed to make this bill deficit-neutral (as promised by the President). This is why the bill cuts more than $150 billion from Medicare Advantage, a program that provides private options for more than 42,000 seniors in California’s Third Congressional District alone. It imposes a new tax of $2 billion on insurance policies, which will be passed on to the consumer in the form of higher premiums. CBO estimates that Medicare Part B premiums will rise by $25 billion and Part D premiums by 20 percent. Especially troubling to those of us in California, the bill imposes an unfunded mandate on states to pay for expansions of Medicaid – meaning that our state (which is already drowning in deficits) will be expected to pay for 10 percent of the bill’s Medicaid provisions beginning in 2015.

The real kick in the pants (if you haven’t felt it already) is the stand-alone Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act (H.R. 3961). The provisions of this legislation will cost $200 billion and raise Medicare premiums by $70 billion (according to a CBO score of similar Senate legislation). This legislation was not included in H.R. 3962 so that its cost (which there has been no attempt to pay for) would not be used to calculate the final cost of H.R. 3962.

So what does all this mean for jobs? According to the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), this legislation could trigger the loss of up to 1.6 million small business jobs. Using Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer's model, total job losses could reach 5.5 million. This is on top of the 3.4 million jobs already lost since January 2009. The House Leadership is working hard to come up with taxing-and-cutting proposals just so that the Congress can create a government-run public option which the Lewin Group projects will cause 114 million individuals to lose their current coverage.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that the solution to our health care problem is to exacerbate our jobs problem. We – you and I – can do better than this by improving our health care delivery system without costing jobs or placing a crushing debt burden on future generations. For some of the ideas I support, please visit http://healthcare.gop.gov.

Sincerely,

Daniel E. Lungren
Member of Congress

The link at the end of his email doesn't work, but this seems to be what he was intending to point at:

http://www.gop.gov/blog/09/11/03/common ... are-reform

(There are links to PDF documents that promise to be more complete, but I didn't check them out.)

ScratchMonkey wrote:

The best way to keep someone from catching or even getting him to drop the ball is to throw a whole lot of balls at him. Save that strategy for your school yard it won’t work here.




Good point. A good example of the hypocrisy of all the same people who are supposedly opposed to a “Monster” big government. Those same people who supported the PATRIOT Act and the corporate bailouts are now against the HEALTH CARE REFORM Bill. Proving that they don’t care what any bill says as long as it says what ever their generous lobbyist wants or doesn’t object to.

Note that I am not one of "those" people. I object to all the big government, including the stuff created by the GOP. Not just the stuff concocted by the current people in power.

I'm confused. What balls are we talking about?

I understand that the job problem is more important than the healthcare problem. However, the healthcare blues that America has now will exacerbate FUTURE job woes and threaten American economic competitiveness, because if we do not rein in healthcare costs now, I can envision a future of America falling the way Soviet Union did in the 80's --- structural fiscal problems that prevented it from supporting either the economy or the military --- against a not-so burdened country called C****.

And in addition, much as I loathe the mess in the current Democratic adminstration, I think the prevailing alternative --- that is, no healthcare reforms --- is actually more detrimental to American society as a whole. More and more people, including many of us Aspies, are losing health insurance because we either cannot pay increasing insurance dues, or that our treatments run in higher costs and hence we would have used out all the life insurance payments for our treatments.

I loathe big governments, but I hate the people to suffer more as we are increasingly unable to accept medical treatment. And if traditional low-cost treatment methods can hale the same ailments that we have as before, why not use them, as long as it works we should try them.

So I think the best solution now for the healthcare reform bill is still a single-payer system funded by the people, through the extension of Medisave or other similar schemes to all, but there should be conditions attached to ensure that the whole system is financially sustainable while ensuring that Americans are as free from life-threatening and life-restricting ills. And, if necessary, America should scale back unnecessary military commitment that are not really effectiveagainst the current state of non-state terrorism AND economic tussles.

Add this in. Abortion should not be funded by governmental dollars, this will be an exception to what's above because abortion means murder!

I do not want a Universal Heatlh Care System, it'll only screw us over more. *shrug*

The first two items on the GOP's list (buying across state lines, allowing pool buying outside one's employer) seem pretty reasonable to me, and don't appear in the current bill. Let's get those enacted first.

These are reasonable.

Well, to WittenKitten, please help us think of a better alternative that will ensure that our health needs will be covered while America will still be fiscally sustainable.