Brown-Wyden Healthcare BillFollow

I suppose it's a small step in the right direction, but it's ultimately pointless if the state laws have to meet the same coverage requirements of the federal health care bill. At the end of the day, it's those mandated coverage levels which are the poison pill in the existing bill. The other stuff is really just window dressing.

I thought the "poison pill" was the whole "government takeover" thing and the "this'll cost a trillion-billion dollars" thing.

When Boehner was waving GOP bills around which he claimed were just as good as the Democrats plan but without all that take-over stuff, one would assume it did the same job. Or else Boehner was just full of crap.

 
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 This. 

Edited, Nov 19th 2010 2:17pm by gbaji

So they would be able to substitute one set of burdensome mandates for another?

At the risk of repeating Moe (again), if the federal law requires that any state replacements have the same minimum mandates within them, then the very best that the state laws can do is *not* be worse than the federal law. That's not exactly a great thing.


The GOP bills were intended to be actual bills passed instead of the one the Dems passed. Passing any of them in addition to the existing Dem health care bill is kinda not even remotely the same thing.

There is no free market solution which gives people something for nothing. You are correct. What is your point though?

Are you saying that since the government lies to people to make them think that they can get something for nothing, and then passes a law mandating that they be given something for nothing, that the inability of the free market to do the same dishonest thing is somehow a good reason to keep the lies in place? At some point, the bill for all the "free" stuff our government tries to hand out will come due. I'd rather we use a system which honestly assess what people can afford instead of giving them stuff they can't and lying to them that it's not really going to cost them anything down the line.

Mandates are government take-over and the reason it'll cost a "trillion-billion dollars".

While this is a ****** bill, the idea that it makes health care more expensive in the aggregate is *fucking absurd*. It'd be virtually impossible to change the current system to make it more expensive. Ludicrous price guarantees legislated into government payments to big pharma (who, to some degree, now pays my salary, yes I'm a sell out) maybe. Oh wait, that happened in the last administration.

The current model of expensive private insurance combined with *even more expensive* safety net care for the uninsured along with the current state of tort law is pretty much a perfect storm of shit guaranteed to provide mediocre care at extravagant cost.

I don't see any incentives for people to get regular checkups in there whatsoever. How about a "failure to do so guarantees your rates will be at least 300% the baseline population's average" clause?

Deregulating would allow companies to charge for risk, like other insurance industries. That's an inherent incentive to regular check-ups and health maintenance.

No. The problem is with some people failing to grasp that the most certain result of government mandating costs and coverage is ultimately an *increase* in total cost and a decrease in quality. Your argument is like insisting that the GOP's ideas are bad because they don't involve sticking us in the eye with a sharp stick.

I reject the premise that government can make our health care system "better" by mandating coverage levels and costs. Thus, the absence of such things in the GOP alternatives is seen by me as a positive thing. I thought I'd been abundantly clear about this the last three times in this thread I said it, and the dozens of times I've said it in previous threads.




Yes. Because any coverage mandate requires increases total cost. The very idea that the government should mandate that every single citizen not just have availability to a product, but must be provided with that product even if they can't afford it, is frankly insane. You're just doubling down on insanity is all.




Not doing something monumentally stupid is pretty effective relatively speaking, isn't it?


As I've stated before, the effective plan that conservatives would like to create is to dismantle as much of the government mandated health care system as possible anyway. Unfortunately, it's hard to do this given how many people have already paid into such systems and/or become dependent on them. But that's a pretty stupid reason to just keep expanding the same mistake.



Maybe you did. Has it occurred to you that you just might be completely wrong about the assumptions you hold? Everything you do and say proceeds from some pretty baseless assumptions. You can't seem to shake those assumptions (like the one that says we're all really better off if the government provides health care for us) and that limits your vision. Some of us are able to see the bigger picture though. What you're doing isn't making things better. It's making things worse.


Even doing nothing at all is better than doing something that will hurt us. If all we do is eliminate the new health care bill, without putting a single alternative bill in the field, that's still an improvement. You haven't figured that out yet?

Right! It'll be so much better if we place no standard upon it whatsoever! Then we can just pretend it's better because any benchmarks are POISON PILLS!!


That's right! I totally missed out on a bill that would have magically been just as productive as the Democratic bill... but we can never, ever test it because expecting it to meet any standards is a POISON PILL!!!!

HAHAHAHAhahahahaha...

Your logic is incorrect. Fast food is cheap and convenient yet unhealthy for you in any meaningful quantity. The incentive of saving time and money outweighs the incentive of being healthy in most people. There are countless other examples. Give people a reason that hits them in the pocketbook, they'll respond.

Impulse meal decision: it would cost me about $14.00 to make cheeseburgers, fries and get soda for myself and my family. I could get the same thing from McDonalds for about $10.00. Try again.