Its got everything to do with it. Some programs have to be for everyone, not just the rich or lucky.
As far as these random dollar amounts and scary outcomes, I doubt theres any basis in reality for any of that.
But i'll make a deal with you. I'll be glad to keep paying $1400 for health care if you can arrange to have refunded to me all the taxes I paid for public schools for the 30 years I didnt have kids, and all the taxes I paid for roads built more than 50 miles away from where I live. Oh yeah, and assure me that i'll get all the money out of social security I've put in.
Give me a break! If you're really as healthy as you claim you are, why not just self fund your healthcare, and stop paying the $1400/mo? Better yet, why not just try again with a different carrier and buy a catastrophic plan? That liver issue is a fluke, and I can almost guarantee you an agent could get you covered under a different plan if you persued it. Your child could probably be covered under a Cadillac BCBS blue preferred plan for approx $100 or less per month, and then you wouldn't have to pay the family rate for guaranteed coverage anymore. You've bragged about how rich you are....Why are you wasting so much money on a Cadillac plan? You do have choices. Why should everyone else be financially burdened so you can keep Cadillac coverage that you don't even really need? Maybe healthcare costs would come down if people would stop buying Cadillac plans when they don't even need them. The mentality of purchasing a $1400/mo healthcare plan just so you can have a $100 office visit covered
in case you need to go to the Dr. seems silly to me....especially if you're rich, and can easily afford a high deductible.
I don't think my figures are that unrealistic. I'm using actual data (ie..current cost of Medicaid and Medicare, and current cost of guaranteed issue family coverage to come up with some estimates.) I don't think it's unrealistic to assume that to cover all Americans, we might be looking at another $Trillion in today's dollars. That's how much Medicare and Medicaid cost, and that doesn't even cover half of all Americans.
We are always going to have to have some kind of National Defense budget. Obviously, it's way up there right now, and we might be able to move about 1/2 of it over to a nationlized plan if the war didn't exist, but we can't count on defense spending going down anytime soon, so if Obama really plans to implement a government managed healthcare system in the next few years, we've got to think about how much that's going to cost, and where the money's going to come from, and what kind of impact it's going to have on the economy. If you raise taxes by 10 or 20% to the middle class and rich, unemployment rates
will rise, and that may mean possibly
less income tax revenue for the government. Now, you've successfully punished the rich and at the same time, reduced revenue. What happens after that?
I'll only agree to a nationalized system of coverage if the plan stops at catastrophic coverage with preventive care built in. Anything beyond that is too much, and leaves no responsibility for recipients to share in or save for costs that are neither preventive nor catastrophic.
