Health care – reactions

March 22, 2010Jon Brooks Comments Off

And so it is done.

The health care bill is on its way to President Obama for his signature, at which point it becomes the law of the land. Then, this week, the Senate will take up a series of changes that Democratic House members demanded in exchange for passing the Senate bill.

Reaction from our two go-to sites on reader health care commentary:

User comments on Ezra Klein’s policy blog on the Washington Post

A lot of Democrats voted for the Iraq war and then when things didn’t go as planned, they claimed that “Bush Lied” as a way to explain their vote. A few years from now when this health care legislation causes health care costs to soar and the deficit to explode, these same Democrats will claim that Obama lied and point to his speech tonight to prove it.
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1) No government healthcare program, here or in any other country, has even remotely stayed in the neighborhood of what it was originally projected/guessed to cost. Many overshoot by factors of 5 or 10. So talking about what this “will” cost in 2028 or even 2016 based on its proponents is dubious at best. Everyone knows those figures are stage managed just to get the law passed, because afterwards we’re stuck with it even as it skyrockets.

2) This bill is just the thin edge of the wedge, not the end of the story. President Obama has been candid when before sympathetic audiences that this is just the first step towards single-payer and government control over the entire healthcare system. We’ve left base camp, but we’re nowhere near the summit — yet. Costs to get there will fall somewhere between hilarious and ludicrious. Nobody seems to know what comes after ‘trillion’ but we’ll find out soon.

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People seem to act as if extending coverage to 32 million uninsured is like letting everyone into their private country club. As if they don’t crash it anyway.

In other words, I think it’s important to note what health care those newly 32 million Americans would normally consume if left uninsured. Do they just disappear when they get sick? Do they simply get better on OTC medications? Or are they somehow immune to all diseases and illnesses?

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-$437 billion dollar federal income tax increases. What few realize, it is actually the single largest tax increase in U.S. history. I am surprised this hasn’t been discussed more, because their are 7 tax increase provisions in the bill that will damn near bankrupt the middle class.

-forces businesses to provide full coverage insurance to all employee’s whether full time or part time (about $8,000 a year each). Not many will be able to survive that.

-severe expansion of Medicaid no state can afford. On average, every state must double income taxes to to stay solvent. Texas alone has scored it at $27 billion. Iowa, will be roughly $400 million more annually. California… Already not solvent, but the state will go into default within just a few months.

- must have full coverage health insurance for the right to exist… just to be alive…. This is called servitude.

- expansion of the IRS… It is provisioned in the bill to hire 16,000 more IRS employee’s to enforce the financial aspects and enforce compliance under threat of criminal prosecution.

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The President and the Democrats have painted the insurance companies as the source of all evil but it is the medical delivery system that has to be reformed so that coverage can be extended to all, not the “rapacious” insurance companies. The bill is almost entirely medical insurance company “reform” when what we needed was medical delivery reform.

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From the New York Times Health Care Conversations site

I woke up this morning and what has changed for me? I still have the same health insurance, pay the same rates, go to the same doctor, have the same drug plan and the same deductibles. I estimate that for 80% of the population, that is the same. The only changes we may be affected by are we can no longer be dropped for a pre-existing condition or lifetime limit, and if we are wealthy enough, pay a very small amount more in taxes.

I am not sure how or when this government take over of my health care will occur, maybe before we find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

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Yesterday, the President and Congress opened the pathway to universal health care, an ideal first called for about 100 years ago by President Theodore Roosevelt. This is truly historic event benefiting the economic security of all Americans.

What is sad is that so many media folks are not much more than Spiro Agnew’s nattering nabobs of negativism. Columns today in the New York Times are filled with predictions of troubles ahead like lawsuits or states rights claims. Lawsuits and states rights claims as well as patently false demagoguery describe the opposition to social security, medicare and medicaid both before and after enactment. The same is true for civil rights.

None of the opposition efforts were successful. Indeed, social security and medicare are, today, popular and well-supported programs.

Do we really need the negatiivism?

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It’s all the wrong direction. We have just lost at least one freedom! Slavery has beed reintroduced to the country, without one shot being fired. A great man once said “Give me liberty or give me death” We have just made a mockery of his words! The chains may be soft,but they are what they are! Liberty lost for a little temporary comfort alto, I believe the country is in for a rude awakening!

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It is a start. If the measure now clears the Senate, it will serve to break the inertia of the status quo.

All appreciate that the legislation is not perfect. There are going to be problems. But by ending the status quo, we are now free to begin devising a wiser and more modern approach to delivering care.

As for criticism that the measure will harm Democrats in the November elections, I am hopeful it will not. Such a tremendous entitlement expansion will obviously benefit millions, and the credit will go to the Democrats. Republicans who debunk such entitlements will soon face the same counterforce that challenges changes to the Medicare program. Arguing opposition will very shortly reflect poorly on the Republicans. They have a choice — either come on the right side of the effort to reform, or remain stuck in shifting arguments in favor of the (breaking) status quo.

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I live in Costa Rica. A third world country, and yet we have universal health care here. Longevity here is equal to, if not greater than, the U.S. Costa Ricans scratch their heads wondering how a great Country like the U.S. does not cover all its people. I am proud to be an American, although years ago I came to Costa Rica in part because I could not be insured in the U.S. due to the fact that insurers perceived that an operation I had had which was voluntary surgery was a preexisting condition. I know my story is repeated a million times by others. Thank God for Obama.

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The health-care legislation as passed is a mammoth concession to the health insurance industry, the right wing of the Democratic Party, and a slap in the face to poor women of limited economic means vis-à-vis reproductive health!

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It’s pretty simple: We have no problem blowing through trillions of dollars to invade and occupy foreign lands and kill thousands of American soldiers along the way. Republicans sell this to us as “A Strong America”. But when you talk about a simple idea of healthcare for our own citizens, suddenly it’s un-American and the great un-doing of a strong America? Absurd. As much as I’m not a fan of Democrats the Republicans take the cake on stupidity.

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This vote was about preserving the Democratic and Obama brands and grabbing at the holy grail of the Democratic party going back decades–universal coverage. To heck with the costs, let’s just soak the “rich.” It wasn’t about the prudent changes in health care policy that most experts say are needed–the focus should be on reforming the structural problems that have caused the cost problems, and only secondarily on who pays.

Is there any mystery about what insurers are going to do now? They’re going to start jacking up premiums to bankroll the costs associated with the new mandated coverages. That means every Democratic politician, from now till the end of time or Obamacare, whichever comes first, will be responsible for insurance costs. That ought to make retaking Congress a lot easier, if not in 2010, then probably by 2012. Their Trojan horse hope, of course, is that when the inevitable happens and health care costs start to bankrupt the country that we’ll panic and let Washington, as the money of last resort, regulate the robber-baron insurance companies out of existence and go to single-payer.

The best that can be said about this monstrosity is that it’s remarkably unwise, particularly at this point in the economic cycle. In fact, while it’s an unpopular sentiment in official Washington these days, the whole thing is just remarkably un-American.

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It’s a start toward healthcare armageddon and then real reform. Hopefully employers will stop offering it as a benefit because it’s become so expensive and more people will be mandated to buy their own policy. Then there will be such an outrage that we will finally get a single payer system which
is what we really need.

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I heard a lot of young people on C-Span asking why they should have to buy health insurance when they are young and may not need it. For years I’ve heard senior citizens ask why they should have to pay for public schools when their children are grown. Now we see how these questions are related. Health care for the elderly is the flip side to education for the young. When young adults buy health insurance they are also returning a favor to all those older folks who supported their public school education. It’s a beautiful thing!

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