Yes!!! Obamacare under attack!

Trying to fix this bill by amending it or modifying it is like trying to fix a totalled car's damage with Bondo.....

 

Right on the money. This socialist entitlement program will be repealed by the US supreme court as it is unconstitional for a government to make the citizens buy something and punish them for not doing so. For the benefit of the uneducated it is not like auto insurance. If for some bizarre reason the SJC doesn't then it will simply be unfunded when America overthrows the SOG in the November elections. For the next 7 months we just have to bite the bullet while the SOG does its best to destroy America. Hopefully, the American and world economies won't suffer catastrophic failure in the mean time, as history could repeat itself, as it did in the 20s and 30s with Russia playing the role of Germany. Although I do sympathize with the Russians as of late and hope they kick the crap out of those Chechnyan terrorists.

 

Rather than a link let me simplify things here:

The Democrat bill in nearly 3000 pages does nothing but change who pays for health care. It leaves intact for all intents the current system. If anything, it only complicates it.

That isn't change it is a procedural reorganization masquerading as change. It is bureaucratic, managerial thinking at its worst. It gives the illusion of progress and change when there actually isn't any. This sort of thinking sinks corporations in the private sector.

Real change involves actually altering the system in some way that it isn't being done right now. I have suggested elsewhere the following (and others have done likewise):

1. Eliminate health insurance for routine medical care entirely. You need a physical or shot simply pay for it.

2. Make all personal expenses for medical care 100% tax deductable.

3. Enact real tort reform. Limit lawyers to say 5 to 10% earnings above expenses and then work to reduce expenses within the legal system. Make frivolous lawsuits and "fishing expeditions" pay everyone's costs if they lose by the law firm bringing them.

4. If you want a public plan make it a catastrophic insurance option with a deductable of say $5000 to $10,000 one time for an occurance.

5. Allow medical savings accounts by both employers and individuals to say $5000 to $10,000 per year. Make these pre-tax deposit accounts. Also, give employers a tax break if they use left over per year funds to split with employees for being healthy. That is, if the employee has say $3000 in their account at the end of the year the employer splits that with the employee as a bonus for not being sick. The employee and employer enjoy the returned funds at a lower tax rate or as non-taxed income.

The idea here is to eliminate health insurance from the mix as much as possible. Then to eliminate the government from the mix as much as possible. We should be putting the burden to pay for health care directly on the consumer and provider wherever possible. That is real reform. It stops and then reverses the horrible system started by FDR using wage and price controls in WW 2 (note the neat tie in to our board here....).
The European social welfare system is wrong just as the Soviet socialist system was wrong. Markets work when governments don't interfer but do ensure that the participants play nice.

 

With my apologies if I disturb you, a fact: Here, Every bed in private hospitals (with agreement wit the public health care ) cost a half that the same bed in public hospitals.

 

I think there are even more coming...like the creation of a Ready Reserve Corps (a civilian security force which will probably NOT swear allegiance to defend and uphold the Constitution) under the Obamacare law.


Top Ten Disasters of the Health Care Reform Overhaul | The Heritage Foundation

Top 10 Disasters of Obamacare

Published on March 30, 2010 by Kathryn Nix
President Obama recently signed gargantuan health care legislation into law that will have major ramifications for every man, woman, and child in the United States. This newly enacted law originates from the Senate health care bill (the “Patients Protection and Affordability Act”) and a sidecar reconciliation bill that originated in the House. Between these two bills are countless provisions that grow federal spending, increase burdensome taxes, and put federal rules and regulations between Americans and control over their health care.
Outlined here are the 10 major ways in which the Left’s so-called health care reform will hurt Americans.
1. New Spending Grows the Federal Deficit
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the official scorekeeper for Congress, sets the projected cost of the health care package from 2010 to 2019 at $940 billion, reducing the deficit by $138 billion.[1] Unfortunately, the true cost of the new law will be far greater.
The CBO is proficient at its work, but it is required to score legislative proposals based on assumptions about the future behavior of Congress—not according to its more likely behavior. The authors of this legislation took advantage of this in crafting the language of the bill, employing several budgetary gimmicks to make it appear cheaper.
These include omitting cuts to Medicare provider payment rates, known as the “doc fix,” double-counting savings from Medicare and the CLASS Act, indexing benefits to general inflation rather than medical inflation, and delaying the expensive provisions of the bill. When these costs are accounted for, the new law is more likely to cost closer to $2.5 trillion.[2] Such levels of spending will not only negate any projected deficit reduction but increase the federal deficit further than would prior law.
2. Bending the Cost Curve in the Wrong Direction
The provisions of the legislation aimed at reducing health care spending are reactionary, addressing the symptoms rather than the root causes of growth in spending.[3] Instead of reducing spending in health care, the bill will increase overall health spending in the U.S. by $222 billion between now and 2019.[4]
In addition, CBO reports that premiums in the non-group market will increase by 10–13 percent as a result of the bill.[5]
3. New Taxes and Mandates Hinder Economic Growth
The new law requires employers who do not offer insurance deemed adequate by the federal government to pay a fine of $2,000 for every employee, exempting the first 30 employees. Employers forced to pay this penalty will have to reduce wages, cut jobs, or rely more heavily on part-time workers. Any of these options will be bad for the economy.[6]
The health care package also taxes investment income as a means to provide additional revenue to pay for the bill. The tax will discourage investment in the U.S. economy, thereby decreasing capital and reducing the potential for economic growth.
Heritage Foundation analysts Karen Campbell, Ph.D., and Guinevere Nell found that this tax, at President Obama’s proposed rate of 2.9 percent, would reduce household disposable income by $17.3 billion a year.[7] The rate included in new law is 3.8 percent, so the actual effects are likely to be even more dramatic.
4. Regulations Grow Government Control over Health Care
The new law empowers the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to define a required benefits package that every health plan in America must include. Moreover, the law now allows the federal government to dictate the prices that insurers set through new age rating regulations and medical-loss ratio requirements.
The bill also opens the door for a de factopublic option by creating government-sponsored national health plans to compete against private health plans in the health insurance exchanges the states are required to establish. The national health plans would be administered by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which currently runs the Federal Civil Service and also administers the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which serves federal workers and retirees.[8] OPM would make the rules for these government-sponsored plans.
Because of this difference in regulatory authority, it would be very easy for the OPM-administered health plans to secure an unfair advantage against other plans in the state insurance exchanges. The reason: They will not be subjected to the exact same rules and regulations that are set by HHS for private health insurers. This could result in a gaming of the system in favor of the government-sponsored health plans. It is also possible that the government-sponsored health plans could be protected from insolvency through taxpayer bailouts.[9] Government sponsored enterprises are usually “too big to fail.”
5. Expanding Broken Entitlement Programs
Under the new law, Medicaid will be extended to all Americans who fall below 133 percent of the federal poverty level. This is one of the primary means through which coverage is increased among the uninsured. According to CBO, of the 32 million newly insured in 2019, half will receive their coverage from Medicaid.[10]
As it stands, Medicaid is a low-quality, poorly functioning program that fails to meet the needs of the Americans it serves. In most states, Medicaid beneficiaries have great difficulty finding a doctor who will treat them at the program’s low reimbursement rates and are more likely than the uninsured to rely on emergency rooms for care. Heritage Foundation Health Policy Fellow Brian Blase reports that, following an expansion of Tennessee’s Medicaid program, health outcomes in Tennessee actually deteriorated and Tennessee’s mortality rate declined at a much slower rate than surrounding states that did not expand their Medicaid programs.[11]
6. Burdening State Budgets
The reconciliation bill ensures that the federal government will cover the expansion of Medicaid benefits in all 50 states until 2017. Federal matching rates will decrease from 100 percent in 2017 to 93 percent in 2019, resting permanently there. Moreover, the 100 percent federal match rate does not include administrative costs, which Heritage analyst Ed Haislmaier finds will accrue a cost to the states of $9.6 billion between 2014 and 2019.[12]
The health care reconciliation bill further adds to several states’ new costs by changing Medicaid funding formulas. The new law would increase payments for primary care providers to match Medicare payment rates. In the initial years of the expansion, the federal government will provide 100 percent of the funding. However, after two years, federal funding for increases in provider payment rates will end, leaving states to either find a way to pick up the cost or go back to lower reimbursement rates. This provision would thus only temporarily solve the problems Medicaid beneficiaries have finding primary care, instead digging an even bigger financial hole for the states, whose budgets are already in the red due to decreasing revenues.[13]
7. Neglecting Medicare
Medicare is due to become insolvent in 2016, and long-term unfunded liabilities exceed $38 trillion.[14] To address this, Medicare provider payment rates are scheduled to decrease annually according to the Sustainable Growth Rate. However, Congress votes to suspend these cuts every year, as it is a well-known fact that severe cuts in provider payments would result in many physicians refusing to see Medicare patients altogether.
Congress did not include a permanent way to repeal and pay for the cuts to physician reimbursement rates in their health care bills. Instead, they added a similar and even more unlikely “fix” to create savings in Medicare: more than half a trillion dollars in cuts to the program. These include billions in cuts to the popular Medicare Advantage program, which creates savings for seniors and gives them more options and control over their care. These savings—assuming they ever occur—will be used not to extend the solvency of the Medicare program but to fund the new entitlement programs that are now law.
8. Creates Discrimination Against Low Income Workers
The employer mandate requires employers to offer a federally defined level of insurance or pay a fine. Moreover, even if an employer does offer insurance but their low-income employees qualify and elect to enter the health exchange instead, the employer will pay a $3,000 penalty for each employee who makes this choice. This is in addition to the cost of offering insurance.
In several cases, depending on the proportion of an employer’s workforce that comes from low-income families, it would be more beneficial for employers to drop coverage altogether rather than pay for the increased penalty for employees in the exchange. This creates an incentive for employers to avoid hiring workers from low-income families, hurting those who need jobs the most.[15]
9. Exchange Eligibility Creates Inequity
The new law will create generous subsidies for Americans to purchase insurance in the newly created health exchanges. However, these subsidies will be available only to those who fall between 133 and 400 percent of the federal poverty level and are not offered federally defined sufficient assistance by their employer to purchase health insurance. All other Americans—including those in the very same income bracket—will not get subsidies but will instead rely only on the current tax exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance for federal assistance to purchase coverage. For workers with comparable incomes, the difference between this and the generous subsidy to buy insurance in the exchange will be thousands of dollars.[16]
The federal government will thus create a gross inequity between Americans making similar incomes. It is unlikely that this will be tolerated for long by the American public, which will instead demand that the subsidies be made more equitable. However, doing so will add enormously to the cost of the government overhaul of the health care system.
10. Questions of Constitutionality
The new law requires all Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty. This represents an unprecedented extension of congressional power—never before has the federal government required Americans to purchase a good or service as a stipulation of being a lawful citizen.[17]
The health care overhaul also diminishes the federalist system upon which the U.S. was founded, which grants certain powers to the states in order to limit those of the federal government. The new law undermines state authority through the individual mandate to purchase insurance, a mandate to expand Medicaid (a state–federal joint program), and several new federal regulations of the insurance industry.
The End of the Beginning
These disasters are only the beginning of the vast effects the President’s health care overhaul will have on the U.S. As bits and pieces of the law are implemented, its effects on states, businesses, and Americans of every ilk will become manifest. Congress and the American people should not view passage of the liberals’ health care package as the end of the debate on reform. Rather, the long and tedious journey toward restoring personal control over health care dollars and decisions is just beginning.
Kathryn Nix is a Research Assistant in the Center for Health Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

 

In Canada we just had a $20 fee tacked on for Doctor or Hospital Visits Not counting the Drug Insurance plan All Canadians pay every year $300.00+++ in taxes for the plan. BY Law must pay and the Drugs are not Free I still pay a percentage from %50 to %20 depending on each prescription.

The US is already in Massive Dept, and still printing $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$, You'll get a good reality check with Obamacare, theres no such thing as Free Health Care the Tax payers are the ones Paying for it in the end. Plus on my Tax return I pay for Medical on top of the Drug AKA Medication Tax and I have a Privet Insurance plan that covers many things our Government plan does not cover.

Just like the Government Bail outs on Wall Street, and the Auto Company's +++++. Just to let you know since OOOObama became Pres your in much bigger Dept then before, all the money he has carelessly spent and gave it to Big Companies C.O. Payouts. Let the Richer get Richer.

Obamatalks and bull-Pie walks, I did a quick calculation It will take over 150 years to pay the Dept of. I think the calculator is broken

 

Note of moderation : Couple of similar topics and threads merged into this one.

 

[youtube]HQe8Mk19_s4[/youtube]

 

Nobody is complaining about the election here. This thread is about the forced socialized healthcare that was rushed through and passed without knowing exactly what it will and will not do. I didn't vote for Obama, but he won, and he is el presidente now, like it or not.

My dad spend plenty of time and had major surgery in the VA hospital in New Orleans before it went the way of Atlantis. The treatment he received there was very good, but when he was forced to seek treatment in private hospitals in Baton Rouge, there was a marked improvement in overall services. Now, years later, we've come to accept the fact that nothing else will help him. The VA helped him a great deal, and I am not trying to put any stink on them. It's just that he got a little better treatment here in Baton Rouge. He still goes to the small local VA clinic for check-ups, but if he ever has to get something major, it will be in a private hospital.

The big thing is that he had a choice as to where to seek treatment, here in Baton Rouge, or 3 hours away in Jackson, Mississippi. That made things much easier on my mom. Would that be an option with Obamacare? Who knows. We don't know, and they sure don't either.

 

So, are you implying that Obamacare will do a better job of this than a civilian or VA hospital?.....

:O

 

You are whining before you loose the next one to use your own words. We are simply pointing out socialism isn't for America and doesn't work as I said before just ask the Greeks. My cousins say its an absolute mess in Greece right now.

The correct word is Tea Partier or conservatives. The word teabagger is offensive and I protest you using it, many in the Tea Party are veterans of WWII, Korea and Vietnam. Don't use derogatory words because you don't agree with someone's point of view because your a socialist . You are also a racist. The tea party is about the government under Obama overstepping the constitution, about the present Democrat controlled government spending money on Leftist agenda, not spending funds to help the economy. The average taxpayer has had enough, is angry and rightfully so. The Left has no leg to stand on, as far as an honest argument, so it resorts to lies about its opposition. The Tea Party has nothing to do with Barack Obama the man, but everything to do with his Leftist policies and views that are destroying America.

I don't care who you are but it is inappropriate to use sexual references to describe people, many veterans, who don't want the future of America ruined.

I welcome a factual argument and appreciate discourse but do not appreciate your garbage.

For mods, Don't close the thread, but a warning to the offender is appropriate.