Prickly City by Scott Stantis for September 02, 2013

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    doggiehouser  about 11 years ago

    Anthony Weiner’s hero!

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    KPOM  about 11 years ago

    Actually, I believe it does require mental health to be among the required coverages.

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    Badfisherman  about 11 years ago

    You’re correct! Pelosi & those who wrote it have NO mental health.

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    Potrzebie  about 11 years ago

    ACA should help with dental.

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    PastStepOne  about 11 years ago

    ACA can’t fulfill it’s name. The word Affordable does not mean jack up rates by 50-550%. And that’s only in year 1. Big government programs like this never work. Private competition between companies always works to deliver the best possible product at the lowest possible price. Mandating coverage just jacks up the price more. You don’t need to go to the doctor for every little hangnail or sniffle. But if you have coverage that makes it seem free, many people will go to the doctor for no good reason, which will in turn drive rates up again. All most people need is a major medical coverage that kicks in to cover catastrophic costs. Mandated coverage has made it impossible to find just major medical insurance. The little stuff would be far cheaper if we just paid for it with cash. The costs go up dramatically when you introduce a third party payer. Half or more of many doctor’s staff are simply stuck dealing with insurance, all that cost is added back in to the cost of care, and therefor the insurance premiums. The average 20 something uses between $500 and $800 worth of medical care per year. Under Obamacare those people’s insurance premium will be around $5500 per year. This is being done to make the young pay more so the old can pay less and average out. one major problem is the young are the poorest and the old are the wealthiest. So we are in effect taking from the poor and giving to the rich. The young have not lived their lives and accumulated any wealth yet, and with programs like this and many others, they will never be able to accumulate wealth. All their extra income gets soaked up by government making it harder to save anything significant for retirement. Over time the whole populace gets poorer.

    The government breaks up monopolies if they occur in the private sector, then they create their own monopolies in the public sector and expect it to work differently.

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    KPOM  about 11 years ago

    @CharlieTuba, just because the Heritage Foundation proposed a bad idea in 1989 doesn’t make it a good idea when Obama proposed it 21 years later. Obama himself claimed the individual mandate was a bad idea back in 2008. He was right.

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    KPOM  about 11 years ago

    @CharlieTuba, just because the Heritage Foundation proposed a bad idea in 1989 doesn’t make it a good idea when Obama proposed it 21 years later. Obama himself claimed the individual mandate was a bad idea back in 2008. He was right.

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    PastStepOne  about 11 years ago

    You missed my point. If we didn’t have a third party payer involved the price would be lower. Ask a hospital what it would charge you if you paid cash. It will be far lower. It’s the cost of having insurance companies paying that makes things cost more. If you negotiated the price on your own you’d never pay $20 for an aspirin or whatever. Just the fact of not paying it for yourself leads to increased charges. The hospital has to pay for all the costs of doing business with all the different insurance companies. Much of the increased cost is due to people that don’t have any insurance and don’t pay. Hospitals are forced to provide service to anyone that needs it. That’s fine, but here is an increased cost because of that. Everyone that does pay has to pay for all the people that don’t or there isn’t a hospital for anyone. If the government hadn’t made it impossible to get major medical insurance by mandating coverage on things most people don’t need you could get coverage for anything over say $5000 for around $30-$60 a month. No one would be completely wiped out by an illness and it would be affordable for almost anyone. Family Friends and charity could help the most needy and it would be far cheaper for the rest of us. If you want to buy additional coverage for up to the $5000, it would be available. If you want coverage for stuff like acupuncture or chiropractors, you could buy it. But don’t force me to by those coverages when I will never use them. You didn’t deal with anything I said.

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    PastStepOne  about 11 years ago

    NO! Again my point was missed, man I thought I wrote long enough replies to keep from having confusion. lol. Single payer doesn’t work either. We have laws against monopolies for a reason. With single payer there is no incentive to get prices down by becoming more efficient. In fact the result is usually the opposite, they become more and more bloated with bureaucracy and prices go up. You have to have at least 2 competing and they can’t be allowed to talk to each other if there are that few. The only thing that gets you the lowest possible price is competition. One company has to try to beat the other. They will get into a price war to gain subscribers. After a short time they will have the price down to the lowest they can operate with a profit. Profit is not evil! If they can’t make a profit they cease to exist. There is no point in doing all the work it takes if there is no reward. If there is no profit there are no taxes paid either. The amount of money made on each policy is minimal. I think I read the average is well under 2% of the price is profit. In reality you pay less for the product than you would from a government controlled entity with private competition. The government gets all its money from the private sector. They can’t print money without consequences. If the government grows too large and takes over too much of the private sector it goes broke because there isn’t enough money being generated in the private sector to pay for the public sector spending. Sound familiar? So having the government take over 11/6th of the US economy (that’s what the medical industry is) is a really, really bad idea. The government has already grown to the point it’s unsustainable. Trying to grow it more puts more stress on an already overtaxed economy. A balance must be maintained, but government is bent on power at this point in time. Most of the growth in this country happened when we had a much weaker federal government (at least domestically). The states had more power domestically, and in the states there is competition, just like in the private sector, states prosper by being run well. An imbalance can happen for a time where a poorly run state does well, simply because it has a large population and sound businesses in it or even favorable climate, but if things stay bad for too long, people and businesses start to move to states that are more favorable. Competition always works if not overly interfered with by government.So what if someone at the heritage foundation once talked about it? Even good organizations occasionally come up with bad ideas. And I’m sure it didn’t function anything like Obamacare if they did have an idea for a healthcare system. That’s just a silly argument to try to get conservatives to love Obamacare. By the way, Obamcare isn’t designed to work. It’s designed to put private healthcare companies out of business. Say you’re a 20 year old. Which would you rather pay? A $95 fine or $5500 for insurance? The first 2 years the fines stay low. Only after the 2016 election do they go up dramatically. Since pre-existing conditions have to be covered by the insurance companies from day 1, all you have to do is buy health insurance on the way to the hospital if you need it and you’re covered. Where is the incentive to pay a monthly premium? The insurance company has huge payouts on policies that have only been open for a short time and less than the needed number of regular premium subscribers to cover the losses. They either have to raise their premiums even higher, causing more people to just opt out and pay the fine, or go bankrupt immediately. Then we’ll be told that “oh, we tried to keep the private sector insurance but it didn’t work, now we have no choice but to go to public insurance.” Hillary already had a plan for public insurance and it was soundly rejected, as Obamacare would be if it were put to a public vote. In Hillary’s proposal, med students would be told what specialty they have to study based on need, and where they had to practice. Doctors become slaves. I’m sure we’ll have lots of people wanting to be doctors with rules like that… Good luck finding a doctor… The next step will be to require anyone over a certain IQ to go to med school. Yeah, land of the free… “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.” Thomas Jefferson (At least that’s who its most often attributed to)Intentions don’t matter, results do. — Me

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    LOWRIDER84  about 11 years ago

    It doesn’t have much to do with ANY kind of health.

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    LOWRIDER84  about 11 years ago

    The hospitals have to recoup the costs from free care to the parasites that flood the emergency rooms every day. My son broke a leg playing footbal and the bill (payed by my insurance) was over $20,000. I asked the doctor how a broken leg could cost that nuch. He said that the broken leg was only a part of the cost. I was also paying for a gunshot wound, two stabbings, and a birth to people without insurance.

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