The Conservative Cave
Current Events => General Discussion => Topic started by: satyesu on January 13, 2010, 09:12:41 AM
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besides long wait times for needed surgeries and lack of permission to have them performed?
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besides long wait times for needed surgeries and lack of permission to have them performed?
As if that's not enough?
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Hundreds of billions in debt, new taxes and bureaucracies and the stifling effect on an already depressed economy, and a $200 billion dollar increase in health care costs in the next decade...
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How about because it's unconstitutional?
How about because normal Americans want no part of it?
How about because my health is none of the federal government's business?
How about because socialism was, is, and always will be a complete and utter failure and only those who have this nation's worst interest at heart would even consider "health care" a good idea?
I have other reasons too if you need them in order to make a longer list for publication.
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besides long wait times for needed surgeries and lack of permission to have them performed?
How because letting government have a say in what I do wih my body, when and to what extent IS A REALLY BAD PRECIDENT TO SET?
I thought you liberals didn't like government telling you what you could do with your body, what you could put into your body, etc. etc. ?
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besides long wait times for needed surgeries and lack of permission to have them performed?
The idea of some reform to the health care system is not per se bad. However, the entire approach of this Congress and Administration is hell-bent on taking care of special constituencies (Both voting blocks, and business sector lobbies) under the banner of 'Reform' when the provisions they put into the bill are foreseeably going to make matters worse, and quickly.
I'll just leave aside the entire question of whether this is even in the Federal lane at all, after all Medicare and MedicAid, TriCare, VA, involvement in the management-union process through Federal regulation of collective bargaining all pretty much prove it's futile to take a do-or-die position on that, appealing as it may be to rugged individualists everywhere. However, there are a ton of other legal and practical turds in the punchbowl:
1. Lack of insurance portability/interstate sales: Unlike, say, car insurance, every State has a death grip on health insurance in its own bounds. You can call it a States' rights issue (Which to some extent it is), but it is tremendously inefficient economically. A lot of people benefit from this inefficiency, including the State governments, both personally for important players and institutionally for revenue generation reasons. The people who pay the premiums, however, are definitely NOT benefitting from the arrangement, but are paying the full price for this interference with a free market. The 'Reform' does nothing to fix this entrenched problem.
2. Malpractice insurance/Tort reform: Lawyers will tell you this is totally overblown, and can support it by proving that despite the publicity garnered by a few outrageous cases, the total of malpractice awards does not amount to a Hell of a lot in the big picture. This is actually true, but it's looking at only one surface of a multi-faceted problem. There are huge macroeconomic effects that the Bar totally ignores in this defense of its profession, including the overhead of pervasive, overlapping, and expensive malpractice insurance, and the effect of the theat of legal action rather than concern for the patient in care, testing and risk decision-making. The 'Reform' act does nothing to fix this, either.
3. Cost: Only an idiot or a Democrat would come up with a program that would have to pull in taxes for ten years in order to provide services for six years, and declare it would be solvent through the following ten years and therefore was a fiscally stable and supportable program forever.
4. Forced purchase of insurance: Huge question about where the Hell they can find any authority to do that one. Congress has the power to tax, in support of a specified power of the Federal government (Generally the plenary powers, like commerce and national defense), and it has been stretched to extraordinary lengths in the past, but how they pulled this one out of their collective asses is a mystery to everyone but true-Blue Democrats, who basically believe the Federal government has unlimited autocratic powers of social engineering (As long as it is pursuing programs with which they agree, of course). It would actually be far more legitimate and legally acceptable to establish a pseudo-public option bare bones plan than this (I.e., something akin to auto insurance risk pools, where States compel you to have insurance but prevent bad-but-licences drivers from being frozen out by the auto insurers - this would be a last ditch fallback, available after a citizen proved that he or she had reasonably tried and been denied equivalent commercial health coverage, and like auto insurance risk pool would not be free, though for the truly poor the State MedicAid could roll over into it).
5. Secrecy: There are lots of nuggets buried in the House and Senate bills, it is not clear which ones will survive the conference process and go into a final bill (And, since it's all being done in secret, there is no public trust in the process) it's just too early to say on that. However, issues liek the Lousiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Bribe are big issues in their own right, if they survive, as is the abortion funding and lack of citizenship verification in the variants.
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besides long wait times for needed surgeries and lack of permission to have them performed?
A federal individual mandate to force everyone to buy health insurance is a big problem. I don't think they have that power Constitutionally.
The idea that government should have ANY input or control over our healthcare is also unconstitutional.
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To quote Jefferson:
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated."
--Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1817
Health Care is not SPECIFICALLY ENUMERATED!!!