Republicans to Add $230 Billion to Deficit!

Debt-and-spend Republicans: nothing new

and the impact on Real Estate would be?

higher debts result in higher interest rates. What happens when interest rates go up?

So you claim that Republicans increased of the debt from 2000 to 2008 led to higher interest rates and the decline in real estate value between 2000 and 2008? interesting point but you need to support it with some data that describes a buble as a reduction in value.... You have a political agenda and it is stupid of anyone to argue religion or ideology. it will be helpful if rather than cut and paste articles to support your political agenda you will analyze the posting and provide data related to Real Estate. Otherwise you are irrelevant to this site.

relevant enough for you to respond windily and unintellibibly to

So if the law when enacted was deficit neutral, how is it that the law when repealed increases the deficit?

from stealthy 007, the poster who doesn't like ideology:

Socialists- you are missing the point on the effect of unions ( as well as corporate america/ lobby)on our economy, our real estate and our doomed future.

the doormen have doomed us!!!

Also, since the law collected taxes in years 1 through 10 to pay for services in years 5 through 10, then by definition repealing the law will increase the deficit in years 1 through 4, but only because it repealed taxes that were being collected only to make 6 years of spending "deficit neutral".

Please, when politicians play their games with budgets, lets at least do ourselves and our fellow citizens the benefit of calling it out and not falling to the partisan name calling. And I do mean that about both parties.

Not "unintellibibly" ... "unintellimbibly" ... in a manner indicative of the foolishness that arises from excessive sobriety.

sorry typo--meant "unintellimbecilibly"

i was yelling out the window at my doormen while writing

"So if the law when enacted was deficit neutral, how is it that the law when repealed increases the deficit?"

It was NOT deficit neutral, it lowered the deficit by about $100-200B at the time. With updated numbers, they have the above.

Those CBO estimates have been ripped to shreds. You are biased beyond belief if you think the law won't raise the deficit.

"Those CBO estimates have been ripped to shreds."

Citation?

Medicare spending is growing way faster than the economy; *something* has to be done to bend the Medicare cost curve or the deficit will grow out of control. The Health Care law at least starts to do that, although I agree that it's nowhere near sufficient.

"Those CBO estimates have been ripped to shreds."

By who?

Don't forget that we can solve all of the healthcare costs with tort reform. We would reduce costs by a whopping 0.5%!

Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said this afternoon that contrary to claims that Obamacare will reduce the deficit, it will actually increase the deficit by roughly $700 billion dollars.

Ryan said this afternoon at the National Press Club that the only reason a Congressional Budget Office letter claims the national health care law will reduce the deficit--i.e. bring in more revenue through tax hikes and Medicare cuts than it spends on Obamacare--is because "the books have been severely cooked"--not by the CBO but by the Democrats who wrote the bill.

"CBO has to score what you put in front of them," Ryan explained. "And if you put a bill in front of them that ignores the discretionary cost of the $115 billion you need to spend to run this new Obamacare program, that double counts the Medicare savings, that double counts the CLASS Act revenue, that double counts the Social Security revenue, that does not count the "Doc Fix"--you add all that stuff up, net it out, we're talking about a $701 billion hole--deficit."

Paul Ryan's top contributors:

Northwestern Mutual $24,150 $15,150 $9,000
Harris Assoc $18,300 $18,300 $0
Select Medical Holdings $12,000 $12,000 $0
PricewaterhouseCoopers $11,000 $1,000 $10,000
American Hospital Assn $10,500 $6,000 $4,500

Top 5 Industries, 2009-2010, Campaign Cmte
Industry Total Indivs PACs
Retired $311,450 $311,450 $0
Securities & Investment $204,850 $132,950 $71,900
Insurance $202,720 $45,720 $157,000
Health Professionals $183,173 $61,856 $121,317

No bias here... pay no attention to the American Hospitals Association...

socialist pays no attention to substance and facts, as usual.

Paul Ryan's 2008 contributors:

American Bankers Assn $ 12,750
Blue Cross/Blue Shield $ 11,000
Koch Industries $ 10,000

Hmmm, Koch Industires, where have I heard that name from????

2010 contributors, continued:

6 Aetna Inc $20,000
23 American Society of Anesthesiologists $14,000
36 American Assn of Orthopaedic Surgeons $10,000
36 Humana Inc $10,000
American Assn of Orthodontists $10,000
American College of Cardiology $10,000
America's Health Insurance Plans $10,000
National Assn of Spine Specialists $8,817
UnitedHealth Group $7,750
GlaxoSmithKline $7,500
Federation of American Hospitals $7,000 $0 $7,000
American College of Emergency Physicians $7,000
Aurora Health Care $6,724
Cigna Corp $6,400
American College of Surgeons $6,000
American Assn of Neurological Surgeons $6,000

http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cid=N00004357&cycle=2010&type=C&newMem=N&recs=100

All donors who want to see the health care bill repealed.

donors are the most important facts you can look at.

The people who wanted the act to look revenue neutral threw every revenue saving trick they could at it. This is the reason we have a rule that all businesses (and sole proprietors, and rental investors) have to report a 1099 for every transaction over $600 is because there is an estimate it will generate a few billion in revenue. That it will cost the economy 10's of billions or more to generate, and cost the IRS billions more to track and trace, is ignored because the CBO is not charged with scoring those costs.

They also are required to score the savings of the "doc fix" in medicare (the reduction of fees to doctors by 23%) even though everyone knew that there will be another bill to re-enact the higher prices to doctors (this, by the way, "added" about $230 billion in revenue to the scoring of the bill).

That doesn't even mention the new bureaucratic infrastructure put in place by the act. (see here: http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/tx08_brady/pr_100728_hc_chart.html ) I don't care what side you are on, to inflict this amount of bureaucracy on the populace is practically cruel. I would rather have single payer.

If you know don't know how the CBO is required to "score" (figure out the costs) a bill, it pays to find out so you understand how your political representatives (either party) game the system.

Most teabaggers have single payer and they don't realize it. Its called MEDICARE.

I'd gladly spend 230 Billion to cease current spending for 4 TRILLION

you are a complete axx if you don't even know how to discuss a topic in civil company.

LICC: So the CBO's assessment has been "ripped to shreds" by a Republican congressperson. Call me unconvinced. When choosing between a nonpartisan agency and a bitter, political opponent of the act to provide correct information, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to go with the CBO.

FWIW, I think the Health Care solution is pretty crap, too, but it's almost certainly better than the status quo, starts to curb the costs of Medicare, and seems to be the sort of necessary interim step before people realize that some sort of universal health care scheme is ultimately going to be necessary.

Paul Ryan's 2008 contributors:
American Bankers Assn $ 12,750
Blue Cross/Blue Shield $ 11,000
Koch Industries $ 10,000

Oh my goodness, that number is almost approaching $40,000. Almost as much as a retired public employee's pension.

Not nearly. Retired public employees retire closer to 100k, and it is is state/local tax free if they stay in their state.

jordyn, then you don't understand how CBO scoring works. Its guidelines are determined by the Congress that sends it the legislation to review, in this case a far left Congress.

Why don't you review the facts instead of assuming the message is bad because you don't like the messenger?

Barney Frank's top contributors:

1 FMR Corp $72,500 $62,500 $10,000
2 ActBlue $37,687 $37,687 $0
3 Bank of America $23,000 $18,000 $5,000
4 New York Life Insurance $22,750 $12,750 $10,000
5 Weiss Capital $19,200 $19,200 $0
6 Promontory Financial Group $18,450 $18,450 $0
7 Farallon Capital Management $18,000 $18,000 $0
8 Liberty Mutual Insurance $17,500 $7,500 $10,000
9 Manulife Financial $15,400 $5,400 $10,000
10 Wilmerhale Llp $15,300 $15,300 $0
11 Suffolk Construction $14,200 $14,200 $0
12 National Assn of Realtors $13,500 $3,500 $10,000
13 Akin, Gump et al $12,500 $10,000 $2,500
13 NASDAQ OMX Group $12,500 $7,500 $5,000
15 Managed Funds Assn $12,400 $2,400 $10,000
16 Royal Bank of Scotland $12,100 $7,100 $5,000
17 CME Group $12,000 $2,000 $10,000
18 American Bankers Assn $11,000 $1,000 $10,000
18 Credit Union National Assn $11,000 $0 $11,000
20 ACA International $10,000 $0 $10,000
20 AFLAC Inc $10,000 $0 $10,000
20 American Assn for Justice $10,000 $0 $10,000
20 AXA $10,000 $0 $10,000
20 Ernst & Young $10,000 $0 $10,000
20 Independent Community Bankers of America $10,000 $0 $10,000
20 KPMG LLP $10,000 $0 $10,000
20 Laborers Union $10,000 $0 $10,000
20 National Assn of Home Builders $10,000 $0 $10,000
20 National Auto Dealers Assn $10,000 $0 $10,000
20 Natl Assn Real Estate Investment Trusts $10,000 $0 $10,000
20 Pacific Mutual Holding $10,000 $0 $10,000
20 UNITE HERE $10,000 $0 $10,000
20 United Food & Commercial Workers Union $10,000 $0 $10,000

Some corrections: The Joint Committee on Taxation scores bills, not the CBO.

David Brooks:

The health care reform law was signed 10 months ago, and what’s striking now is how vulnerable it looks. Several threats have emerged — some of them scarcely discussed before passage — that together or alone could seriously endanger the new system. These include:

The courts. So far, one judge has struck down the individual mandate, the plan’s centerpiece. Future decisions are likely to break down on partisan lines. Given the makeup of the Supreme Court, this should concern the law’s defenders.

False projections. The new system is based on a series of expert projections on how people will behave. In the first test case, these projections were absurdly off base. According to the Medicare actuary, 375,000 people should have already signed up for the new high-risk pools for the uninsured, but only 8,000 have.

More seriously, cost projections are way off. For example, New Hampshire’s plan has only about 80 members, but the state has already burned through nearly double the $650,000 that the federal government allotted to help run the program. If other projections are off by this much, the results will be disastrous.

Employee dumping. This is the most serious threat. Companies and unions across America are running the numbers and discovering they would be better off if, after 2014, they induced poorer and sicker employees to move to public insurance exchanges, where subsidies are much higher.

The number of people in those exchanges could thus skyrocket, especially as startup companies undermine their competitors with uninsured employees and lower costs. The Congressional Budget Office projects that 19 million people will move to the exchanges at a cost of $450 billion between 2014 and 2019. But according to the economists Douglas Holtz-Eakin and James C. Capretta, costs could soar to $1.4 trillion if those who would be better off in the exchanges actually moved to them. The price of the health care law could double. C. Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, who has been among those raising the alarms about this, calls the law’s structure “unworkable and unfair.”

Health care oligarchy. Since the law passed, there has been a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions, as hospitals, clinics and doctor groups have joined together into bigger and bigger entities. The drafters encourage this, believing large outfits would be more efficient. The downside to this economic concentration is there could be less competition and cost control. In many places, the political power of these quasi-monopolies would be huge, with unforeseeable results. The law bans doctors from starting up hospitals to increase competition.

Public hostility. Right now about 53 percent of Americans oppose the health care law and 43 percent support it, according to an average of the recent polls. Complaints are especially high among doctors. According to a survey by the Physicians Foundation, 60 percent of private practice doctors say the law will force them to close their practices or to restrict them to certain categories of patients.

Given this level of unhappiness, people will blame the Obama law for everything they hate about the health care system. Political opposition was fierce last November, and it could easily shape the 2012 election and lead to changes or repeal.

"We have to pass the law to see what is in it." - Nancy Pelosi

Who could possibly have predicted that a 2200 page bill (and much of the regulations weren't even included, just requirements to create regulatory committees) would have unintended consequences?

LICComment : I'm still waiting for some "facts" to be presented. The David Brooks analysis is a critical analysis that actually contains some facts, unlike the groundless $700 billion figure thrown out by Ryan, but it doesn't quantify the overall impact.

I'll say it again: *something* has to be done to reduce the rate of growth of Medicare spending. The current health care law is a pretty crappy way of doing it, and insufficient, but it beats repeal, which is the only other option on the table so far. (In addition, it would be nice to provide health care to everyone, like most civilized countries manage to do for way less money.)

Nacy Pelois's FULL quote:

"But we have to pass the bill, so you can see what's in it, away from the fog of controversy."

Nice try AvUWS...

"Employee dumping. This is the most serious threat. Companies and unions across America are running the numbers and discovering they would be better off if, after 2014, they induced poorer and sicker employees to move to public insurance exchanges, where subsidies are much higher."

This is not a threat. This was the plan all along in order to have back door single payer. The halthcare bill has had NO unintended consequences. It is working according to plan.

Really? from where I sit you made my point. "away from the fog of controversy"?! Why don't we pass all bills and then argue about them after wards. Oh right, we have a republic with two legislative houses whose job it is to debate these things. Sorry for the snark, but adding the full quote does not diminish the ridiculousness of passing bills like this (and FinReg) without reading and debating them.

For someone who rails against the influence of contributed cash and lobbyists you sure seem to be ok with bills chock full of language they wrote for the legislatures and not read by the voting legislators.

Me, I prefer to read the small print. It seems that is where the real meat usually hides.

"udget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said this afternoon that contrary to claims that Obamacare will reduce the deficit, it will actually increase the deficit by roughly $700 billion dollars."

Whoops.

Listen, I think covering more people is a good thing, absolutely. But lets not pretend that doesn't cost us something.

"Listen, I think covering more people is a good thing, absolutely. But lets not pretend that doesn't cost us something."

Why? Basically every other developed country on Earth manages universal coverage with better results for less money.

jordyn, your last statement is highly debatable and questionable. You should know better. Many studies and experiences have shown that health care in other, single payer, countries is not better than in the U.S. And they are not doing it for less money.

Yes, much less as a percentage of GDP than the US, with much higher satisfaction rates. The US has this odd situation of everyone chanting the mantra "best in the world", while also claiming deep dissatisfaction with their medical care experiences.

Flat-earther.

whose studies LICKdope?
it's well know that our most efficient administrator of healthcare is MEDICARE

im sick of our government subsidizing our crappy insurance companies

my friends mother, who has fast-acting cancer just got put on a 3 month waiting list for an appointment at sloan kettering--chk that anecdote

"Many studies and experiences have shown that health care in other, single payer, countries is not better than in the U.S. And they are not doing it for less money."

I do not want to bag on our healthcare system too much (in some ways it's not as bad as some might say), but these are just incorrect statements. I'd love to see these studies - are they from the Cato Institute or AEI? Single payer is probably going to be the only way to go at some point, but given the political history of this country, that has proven to be an incredibly difficult thing to overcome. Give it a generation or so.

From the National Center for Policy Analysis:

Fact No. 1: Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.[1] Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the U.K. and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

Fact No. 2: Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.[2] Breast cancer mortality is 9 percent higher, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher and colon cancer mortality among men is about 10 percent higher than in the United States.

Fact No. 3: Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries.[3] Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit are taking statins, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease. By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons and 17 percent of Italians receive them.

Fact No. 4: Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians.[4] Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate and colon cancer:

•Nine of 10 middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to less than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).
•Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a pap smear, compared to less than 90 percent of Canadians.
•More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a PSA test, compared to less than 1 in 6 Canadians (16 percent).
•Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with less than 1 in 20 Canadians (5 percent).

Fact No. 5: Lower income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report "excellent" health compared to Canadian seniors (11.7 percent versus 5.8 percent). Conversely, white Canadian young adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower income Americans to describe their health as "fair or poor."[5]

Fact No. 6: Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the U.K. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long - sometimes more than a year - to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements or to get radiation treatment for cancer.[6] All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada.[7] In England, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.[8]

Fact No. 7: People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and British adults say their health system needs either "fundamental change" or "complete rebuilding."[9]

Fact No. 8: Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians. When asked about their own health care instead of the "health care system," more than half of Americans (51.3 percent) are very satisfied with their health care services, compared to only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).[10]

Fact No. 9: Americans have much better access to important new technologies like medical imaging than patients in Canada or the U.K. Maligned as a waste by economists and policymakers naïve to actual medical practice, an overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identified computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade.[11] [See the table.] The United States has 34 CT scanners per million Americans, compared to 12 in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has nearly 27 MRI machines per million compared to about 6 per million in Canada and Britain.[12]

Fact No. 10: Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations.[13] The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single developed country.[14] Since the mid-1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to American residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined.[15] In only five of the past 34 years did a scientist living in America not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States

from the about us section of the website for the National Center for Policy Analysis:

The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization, established in 1983. Our goal is to develop and promote private, free-market alternatives to government regulation and control, solving problems by relying on the strength of the competitive, entrepreneurial
private sector.

seems like they've already reached their conclusion.

Wbottom - in all fairness to the back and forth arguments here, your friends mother, in a single payer system, like many many others, would never see the inside of Sloan Kettering. By definition in a single payer system that also controls or cuts costs, services, particularly the best and most expensive services, will be rationed or cut. In such a system expect to see the politically well connected get in line first.

Our current system sucks. It is not a free market by any stretch of the imagination. But Obamacare was not a fix. Single payer would be sort of a fix (certainly better than anything else we have tried) but there is no way it will look like what people expect in their hopes and dreams with everyone getting to go to Sloan Kettering.

LICC, let's go through these:

Facts No. 1, 2, 4: you'd have to demonstrate that this is mostly due to treatment, rather than genetics, detection rates, etc. We screen like crazy here, which is incredibly costly. Obviously, in lots of cases that can prevent death, but I think there's a happy medium instead of blindly administering tests.

Facts No. 5 and 8: this is based entirely on self-reported health status it seems. I don't think I need to explain to you the dangers of that, especially when you conduct the survey in two different cultures.

Fact No. 6: not sure how they're measuring this, but the "waiting issue" for other health care systems is often overblown, while overlooking that we do quite a bit of waiting ourselves.

Fact No. 7: absolutely true that no system is perfect or absolutely satisfactory to all its people. But there's no way you can infer that this means a single-payer structure is the root of the problem. I highly doubt it is. And when you poll Americans on the same question, they flip-flop like crazy depending on how close we are to an election or how real the perceived threat of change is.

Fact No. 9: yes, we've developed some great medical tech here, but I can tell you that a LOT of the stuff we blow money on is of marginal benefit compared to older, quite reliable technologies, and sometimes even less beneficial. Yet we love anything new and pay insane amounts for that privilege. Not good.

Fact No. 10: there's no reason we couldn't continue the culture of clinical trials in hospitals under a single-payer system. Medicare (which is government run, remember) is actually quite innovative in how it runs itself. The whole private-enterprise is the only way to innovation foolishness has kind of been unmasked recently.

Here are some more...

60% of hospital costs are labor. Not only is labor much more expensive in NYS than the rest of the country, we also staff 15% more people per patient than the national average.

LICC's post is a giant cherry picker.

But jason10006 (how is your lip, by the way?), your post was not?

LICKdope, you actually try to slip an NCPA study by as credible!!

NCPA, heritage fndtn affiliate--known shithole scaife koch front

you really know how to make a complete fool of yourself

stick to the palin script--youll sound much more intelligent

hahahaha

"60% of hospital costs are labor. Not only is labor much more expensive in NYS than the rest of the country, we also staff 15% more people per patient than the national average."

So what's your solution to this? Cut the pay of doctors?

"we also staff 15% more people per patient than the national average.."

No sh*t. Is it any wonder that the best hospitals are all in NY?

Leave the hospitals, doctors and nurses alone.

Most think tanks, liberal and conservative, come up with their conclusions first and then gather research to support their pre-determined conclusion. Citing them is a waste of bandwidth.

"Fact No. 5: Lower income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report "excellent" health compared to Canadian seniors (11.7 percent versus 5.8 percent)."

Your "study" just endorsed SINGLE PAYER health insurance and you do not even realize it. What type of health insurance do seniors in the U.S. have? What type of health insurance do low income Americans have? HINT: THey are both single payer...

"udget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said this afternoon that contrary to claims that Obamacare will reduce the deficit, it will actually increase the deficit by roughly $700 billion dollars."

So what? Paul Ryan is not a neutral source. ONly the CBO score is neutral.

"Sorry for the snark, but adding the full quote does not diminish the ridiculousness of passing bills like this (and FinReg) without reading and debating them."

The bills were most certainly debated. Perhaps you shoudl watch CSPAN. How do I know finreg was debated? Because I was in the Senate the day it was passed in the galley! Judd Gregg was right below me debtating the bill. But if you say the bill was not debtated, then I guess I was imagining things..

bjw..why did you ignore fact#3...which is pretty telling, one might argue, regarding the efficacy of the health care system, given the importance of these drugs in dramatically improving outlook for certain categories of risk patients

socialist can't understand the difference between a system that takes care of people who are unable to take care of themselves, and a system that institutes government control for everyone.

"socialist can't understand" is a common theme on these boards.

The CBO score is not neutral. Another thing that socialist can't understand.

bjw- you seem to be stretching with some of your analysis, which is unlike you. Genetics? If anything, that argument would support the claim that the U.S. healthcare system is better than claimed.

From the WSJ:

Ten months ago, Democrats used a partisan majority to narrowly defeat bipartisan opposition and pass a national health-care program that a majority of the public opposed and continues to oppose today. Gallup reported yesterday that Americans favor repeal, 46% to 40%. Among the worst Democratic abuses was gaming the CBO's budget conventions to make it seem as if ObamaCare "saves" money.

The accounting gimmicks are legion, but we'll pick out a few: It uses 10 years of taxes to fund six years of subsidies. Social Security and Medicare revenues are double-counted to the tune of $398 billion. A new program funding long-term care frontloads taxes but backloads spending, gradually going broke by design. The law pretends that Congress will spend less on Medicare than it really will, in particular through an automatic 25% cut to physician payments that Democrats have already voted not to allow for this year.

The CBO budget gnomes are required to "score" what's on paper in front of them, no matter how unrealistic, and that's the method its Congressional masters prefer. The political class makes believe that CBO's forecasts are carved into stone tablets through divine revelation, but all they really show is that politicians have rigged the budget rules to hide the true cost of entitlements.

Anyone in search of economic or fiscal reality will have to turn to other sources. Two particular ObamaCare heroes are Richard Foster, the chief Medicare actuary with the courage to publish more honest analyses, and Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who is the most fluent scourge of ObamaCare's book-cooking, including in a debate last year in which President Obama had no response to his critique.

We also single out the economists Doug Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO director, and Eugene Steuerle, of the Urban Institute. Both have been voices in the wilderness about the incentives ObamaCare creates for businesses to drop coverage and dump their employees into "free" coverage, which really will "explode the deficit" far more than CBO projects.

LICC, you may not buy it, but I don't think it's stretching. Besides, there are plenty of other points made there. I'm not sure why you're so hell-bent on completely discrediting the notion that single payer can work and work well.

bjw- single payer means government involvement and control over people's lives. It goes against my principles of individual responsibility and freedom. And I believe there are much better ways to provide widespread, affordable healthcare.

Instead of employer tax credits, give individual tax credits for purchasing health insurance. Institute malpractice tort reform. Allow for more competition nation-wide, with effective and smart regulatory standards and requirements. And for the small percentage of the population that are uninsurable, set up government subsidies. I think this would reduce costs, cover more people in a better way, and not blow a hole in government budgets.

"single payer means government involvement and control over people's lives. It goes against my principles of individual responsibility and freedom."

So then your going to turn down Medicare when yoru 65?

"Institute malpractice tort reform."

Which will reduce costs by a grand total of 0.5% according to CBO.

"Instead of employer tax credits, give individual tax credits for purchasing health insurance."

I understand the rationale behind the idea, but it's probably one of the worst ideas I've seen kicked around in healthcare reform discussions. Giving people, especially those that most need care, yet another burden to worry about in their lives ("shopping" for health insurance) is not a good way to improve health and lower costs. It would probably make things worse. Having a healthy population is arguably the single biggest factor in having a robust, healthy economy. It's really a no-brainer that the government should proactively protect its population in this way. There are plenty of other things we can leave to private enterprise and free markets.

Health care tax credits - hey that is ALREADY part of Obama care for those making up 4X the poverty level.

But it would only work on a mass scale IF insurers were required to charge everyone the same for insurance AND all people, regardless of age or health, were required to actually USE the credits.

If people could keep the differnece between the credit and the actual plan, that would lower the cost curve - IF insurers were required to offer minimum care.

All similar to what we now have.

bjw, I completely disagree. You are advocating that government decide what kind of healthcare a person should receive. I believe in a free society where people make their own decisions about their personal lives. Government's role should be to take of things the private sector cannot (military, sanitation, police, infrastructure), enforce contracts and laws, and regulate to ensure a fair and level playing field. It should not be to engage in private market functions.

LICComment, why should sanitation be on the list, but not health care?

LICC, the government could certainly insure very basic healthcare. Anything beyond that, we could have private coverage (France does this, and they have one of the better systems). I also believe in a free society, but how much value are you getting out of "making your own decisions" on healthcare? We can put the same people who are making the vast majority of healthcare decisions (doctors, not you) under this very same single payer system, so these "personal liberty" concerns are a lot of hot air, IMHO. If you really are that concerned about "making your own decisions," why not privatize police, military, and sanitation? I know it's hard for people who have had the anti-socialized medicine credo beaten into their heads to get past this, but it's really not as much of a change/stretch as you might imagine.

Sanitation can most certainly be handled by the private sector, as it is now. Ever hear of Waste Management? Unless you live udner a rock, I'm sure everyone here has seen their green trucks on a regular basis.

My healthcare plan has 2 simple components:

1. Import prescription drugs from Canada

2. ALlow people under 65 to buy into Medicare with their own money. If you want lower price health insurance, you can buy Medicare. IF you want to overpay, your more than welcome to go with a private insurer.

And my third step would be to increase the supply of doctors by opening up more medical schools. Currently, more than half of all med school applicants are rejected by every med school they apply to. The govt. should take away the AMA's monopoly when it comes to medical school accredidation.

Just tho show how biased these D.C> think tanks, I found this HEritage Foundation report about how drug importation from Canada won't save any money:

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/07/debunking-the-myths-of-drug-importation

I then wanted to see whether this report was genuine or propaganda for their corporate donors. I found my answer:

2006 Heritage Foundation Founders

Pfizer Inc.
PhRMA

http://www.heritage.org/~/media/Financial%20PDFs/AnnualReport06.ashx

I do have to give Heritage credit for being honest though. At least they advertise that they are a mouthpiece for Corporate America right on their website.