Once again I’m going to avoid going into the ideological aspect of this by avoiding statements/questions like “Why should I pay for some guys health care when he won’t do it for himself?” Or, “We already have Medicare and Medicaid and free clinics, why do we need Universal Health Care?” Mr. Tracy hasn’t limited me to ONLY talking about the Economics side of issues, it’s sort of a challenge to avoid any sort of ideology on my part plus I already cover much of that aspect on different issues on my own site, http://www.mattersofopinion.net/.
With that said, there is a lot of support from people in my age group for a collective health insurance program, and there are quite a few different options that have been mentioned. Once of the most common and most talked about is of course Universal Health Care, where everybody pays extra in taxes and then uses that government run health care pretty much exclusively. It would be similar to Canada and England’s health care programs, and is an idea around the lines of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. The only problem with this is that by no means is it affordable. Back when the government started the before mentioned government welfare programs, the same arguments were used for why we needed them, and the same idea of people paying into it their entire lives and then collecting their money when they needed it was applied to this reasoning. However the money simply has not been there. The plan seemed to make sense: the baby boomers were expected to baby boom themselves and so on and so on with hopes that the money would continue to pile up to pay for these programs. This obviously isn’t the case since the baby boomers, well, didn’t baby boom like previously projected. Also, they didn’t count on the government (BOTH Republicans and Democrats) to start using these funds for other purposes other than what they were originally created for, so the already dwindling amount of funds were dwindled even more so. Lastly, and this applies more so with Social Security than anything, the supposed “trust funds” that were created ended up being a load of BS. The “trust funds” to back up these programs are nothing more than government IOU’s, and have absolutely no solid monetary backing, period. There are a number of statistics for when these three programs will be bankrupt, but the most optimistic that I have found say that they will be completely bankrupt in 2036, which is closer than a lot of people might think.
The other option that is being talked about, and a bit more realisticly (but only a bit) is a government option similar to the way that Fannie and Freddie were created. The government would create (and perhaps manage, those details have not been entirely clear) a health insurance company, basically, to offer lower “more affordable” rates. This may seem like a very good idea, but if you weigh the secondary effects next to the primary effects they simply do not ballance out. Who can offer lower rates than the government? Nobody. Therefore a number of things would happen. More people would leave their own health care to jump on the government option, and many companies would drop their plan and tell their employees to do just that as well. Insurance companies would begin to go under (especially smaller ones) and then the government would, over time, effectively have their government run Universal Health Care only in a more round-about way. It would be sort of like the domino effect. First they would get the health care, then they would have the power to control doctors pay (since that impacts health care costs as well and would almost be a necessety for the government in order to meat the figures of affordibility that they have projected), and more people would stop becoming doctors since, lets face it, if the pay isn’t there who in their right mind would want to go through that much schooling to learn such a specialty? At that point, since we need doctors, the government would have to start forcing people into the profession.
That is of course a bit of an extreme scenario, however less extreme than I think a lot of people realize. The health care debate and how it is handled has the possibility to destroy this economic system. Will it happen? I don’t know. Could it happen? Of course.
There are other ways out there for handling the health care dilema, and one of my favorites is to have Tort Reform. This means to cut down the number of BS law suites that are filed against doctors every year, driving up the cost of health care. Another is to have Medicaid and Medicare reform, and to real in the huge amount of people that currently qualify for these programs, and to bring two programs that at one time had a lot of promise back into the black. My question is this: Why aren’t these options being pursued first? While it is not an ABSOLUTE that Universal Health Care would be disastrous, the odds are leaning in that direction. So why not at least start with the simpler solution that wouldn’t involve raising taxes or hurting our economy at all? It baffles me. But I guess that’s why I’m not a “genius politician”.
With that said, there is a lot of support from people in my age group for a collective health insurance program, and there are quite a few different options that have been mentioned. Once of the most common and most talked about is of course Universal Health Care, where everybody pays extra in taxes and then uses that government run health care pretty much exclusively. It would be similar to Canada and England’s health care programs, and is an idea around the lines of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. The only problem with this is that by no means is it affordable. Back when the government started the before mentioned government welfare programs, the same arguments were used for why we needed them, and the same idea of people paying into it their entire lives and then collecting their money when they needed it was applied to this reasoning. However the money simply has not been there. The plan seemed to make sense: the baby boomers were expected to baby boom themselves and so on and so on with hopes that the money would continue to pile up to pay for these programs. This obviously isn’t the case since the baby boomers, well, didn’t baby boom like previously projected. Also, they didn’t count on the government (BOTH Republicans and Democrats) to start using these funds for other purposes other than what they were originally created for, so the already dwindling amount of funds were dwindled even more so. Lastly, and this applies more so with Social Security than anything, the supposed “trust funds” that were created ended up being a load of BS. The “trust funds” to back up these programs are nothing more than government IOU’s, and have absolutely no solid monetary backing, period. There are a number of statistics for when these three programs will be bankrupt, but the most optimistic that I have found say that they will be completely bankrupt in 2036, which is closer than a lot of people might think.
The other option that is being talked about, and a bit more realisticly (but only a bit) is a government option similar to the way that Fannie and Freddie were created. The government would create (and perhaps manage, those details have not been entirely clear) a health insurance company, basically, to offer lower “more affordable” rates. This may seem like a very good idea, but if you weigh the secondary effects next to the primary effects they simply do not ballance out. Who can offer lower rates than the government? Nobody. Therefore a number of things would happen. More people would leave their own health care to jump on the government option, and many companies would drop their plan and tell their employees to do just that as well. Insurance companies would begin to go under (especially smaller ones) and then the government would, over time, effectively have their government run Universal Health Care only in a more round-about way. It would be sort of like the domino effect. First they would get the health care, then they would have the power to control doctors pay (since that impacts health care costs as well and would almost be a necessety for the government in order to meat the figures of affordibility that they have projected), and more people would stop becoming doctors since, lets face it, if the pay isn’t there who in their right mind would want to go through that much schooling to learn such a specialty? At that point, since we need doctors, the government would have to start forcing people into the profession.
That is of course a bit of an extreme scenario, however less extreme than I think a lot of people realize. The health care debate and how it is handled has the possibility to destroy this economic system. Will it happen? I don’t know. Could it happen? Of course.
There are other ways out there for handling the health care dilema, and one of my favorites is to have Tort Reform. This means to cut down the number of BS law suites that are filed against doctors every year, driving up the cost of health care. Another is to have Medicaid and Medicare reform, and to real in the huge amount of people that currently qualify for these programs, and to bring two programs that at one time had a lot of promise back into the black. My question is this: Why aren’t these options being pursued first? While it is not an ABSOLUTE that Universal Health Care would be disastrous, the odds are leaning in that direction. So why not at least start with the simpler solution that wouldn’t involve raising taxes or hurting our economy at all? It baffles me. But I guess that’s why I’m not a “genius politician”.
Cross posted at http://www.ktracy.com/ and linked at http://www.mattersofopinion.net/
