Where do I stand on health care reform? I stand with most Americans–in confusion and suspicion.
View a side by side comparison of the three major health care reform proposal. Go here to see the Kaiser Family Foundation’s assessment. Instead of a thousand pages, it is only 38.
I read it and here are a few of the things that I still don’t like and/or understand about it.
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First of all just because we have President Obama’s plan–remember that he is not the one who writes the plan. Just because he says that is what he wants, President Obama is not in a much better position of getting what he wants from Congress than any other citizen. Therefore, pay close attention to the Senate Bill Descriptions in the center column because that is most likely what we would end up with.
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Require U.S. citizens and legal residents to have qualifying health coverage. Those without coverage pay a tax penalty of the greater of $695 per year up to a maximum of three times that amount ($2,085) per faily of 2.5% of household income. Of course if you are single and earn less than $9, 350 or under $18,700 if you are a couple.
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President Obama’s comments on small business employers is such a mess of what appears to purposeful obfuscation* that I am not able to squeeze my brain around it long enough to fully comprehend exactly what he is saying. Here is the part that I do understand: Small businesses under 50 employees would be exempt from penalties. That much sounds good. *(I make this accusation because I cannot believe that someone as intelligent as the President could not write plainer English.)
Employers with more than 200 employees will be required to automatically enroll employees into health insurance plans offered by the employer. Employees may opt out of coverage. I have some problems with this one. First of all there could be pressure brought to bear by the employer to have employees opt out of coverage–or perhaps pressure to choose their coverage. Who knows? Who is to say that the employer won’t make some crappy deal with some crappy Wall Street health insurance corporation and purchase a crummy plan for the employees–a plan that is cheaper than the fine the employer would pay if he did not comply with the law. Then the employer tells the employees to take the company insurance or else.
There are plenty of employers even today who offer their employees crappy insurance and no better example than Wal Mart. Wal Mart offers various levels of plans, but many opt out of the basic level which might even possibly be affordable to some of its minimum wage workers (the same ones who Sam Johnson voted against raising their wages in 2007).
Why do the opt out? They opt out because their wages are so low that they qualify for Medicaid and thus better medical coverage than the WalMart solution.
And that’s another stick in the eye for the working poor: Even if you earn minimum wage and qualify for Medicaid under today’s law, under this new legislation, if your employer offers even the most pitiful excuse for health insurance coverage, you must take it. You cannot get Medicaid. Democrat leaders and Congressmen often condemn Republicans for their harsh attitudes toward the poor but the Democrats, if there are kinder, it is only by virtue of the larger size of the crumbs that they toss to the poor. The leadership of BOTH parties are so ingrained with the Beltway life that they are oblivious to the needs of the working poor. Many of them would fit in quite well as members of the “Glenn Beck Church of the Unholy Sans Social Justice”.
There was no worse injustice done to the working poor of our nation than what Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress did with the passage of Clinton’s “Welfare Reform Act” which put a time limit of five years on poverty and the length of time that a poor family could receive assistance for its children. This bill was passed a few years after they jerked the rug out from beneath the working poor in America with their globalization schemes and resulting trade agreement–NAFTA, a trade agreement that shipped over 2 million jobs out of our country.
DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN–THERE IS LITTLE DIFFERENCE. VOTE INDEPENDENT. VOTE SOLUTIONS–NOT MORE CONVOLUTED PURPOSEFUL OBFUSCATION AND LEGISLATION FOR THOSE WHO DON’T LIVE ON MAIN STREET
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SO WHAT IS THE SOLUTION FOR HEALTH CARE INSURANCE?
A group of interested citizens need to disregard Congress and BOTH parties and set up a national health insurance pool. Stop trying to get these people to stop playing their games. You can expect them to continue to conduct themselves in their current manner until long after the cows have come home and died.
Call it “the national insurance pool” whatever you want to call it to avoid all the purposeful entanglements and prohibitions that insurance lobbyists have put in place to prevent citizens from doing this. Who knows? Perhaps we will call it “Donations to Doctors”. Perhaps the word “insurance” won’t even be allowed in our literature.
It can be done. We can do this. Stop arguing with Wall Street crooks and mealy mouthed politicians who only care about protecting their own Wall Street portfolios and who will never offer us anything more that the meanest of crumbs (bought and paid for with our own tax money).
Engage wealthy Americans who care about our nation to assist in setting up this national insurance pool. It can be done. It would be set up as private, employee owned company. No person could own more than one share of stock and all stockholders would vote for the board and elect the officers of the company and vote/approve their annual salaries.
This is NOT socialized medicine. It is democracy in action. We the people need to start taking charge of our own solutions because we can to a better job than Congress with their scarcity mentality.