Do you think the health care reform should be repealed? | Personal Finance & Lifestyle | Yakezie Forums

My main arguments against the reform enacted was 1) that it didn't seem to do all that much and 2)the mandate.

I've heard a lot of rhetoric but haven't actually come across anyone that has said that the reforms have actually benefitted them. Plus, insurance rates don't seem to have gone down any. Ours went up (for the first time since we got married) this year.

I've heard a lot of grumbling about the mandate, and not just from Republicans. I have a friend who spends a fair amount of time bashing conservatism and he is solidly against the mandate. For people with lower incomes, insurance winds up being more expensive than the tax penalty!

Hey Edward!

I was shocked when I actually received a refund from my doctor of $45 because the visit was now considered preventative! That is probably not a huge difference, but yay for my $45 back!

My biggest opposition to it is this:

Amendment 10 - Powers of the States and People. Ratified 12/15/1791. 

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

It's illegal.   The federal government absolutely does not have unlimited powers to pass anything it wants to.   It has specifically enumerated powers.  Mandating consumer purchase(or any purchase) isn't in the list.   Telling me how to live my life(beyond not victimizing others) isn't on the list.

The fact that nobody knew what was in the bill before it passed is a sign that all of the signers are idiots and the supporters weren't much better.

The fact that the insurance companies who donated enough to the right parties got waivers is a sign that the bill is about corruption and control, not health care.

We can hold our actual level of care up to any healthcare system in the world and come out ok, by any measurement, as long as it is balanced to an apples-to-apples comparison.

For example:  infant mortality is a common comparison, but it's inappropriate.  In the US, babies are counted alive if they take a breath and have a hearbeat, even if that is done by machine.  In most of the rest of the world, they are counted as stillborn if they are too premature or have too low of a birth weight.

Cost is another bad comparison.  You have to account for government subsidies, and medical-earmarked taxation before you can compare a $100 procedure in the US to a free procedure in Canada.  When you account for availability, the balance tips more.  There are 3-4 times as many MRI and CT scanners per million people in the US as in Canada.  In the US, if the doctor orders an MRI, you get it same-day.  In Canada, the median wait is 2 weeks.

Then, looking at government efficiency in general:  there is no better way to make money disappear than to filter it through the government.  Government agency incentives aren't geared towards efficiency or cost-effectiveness.  They are ultimately geared towards keeping the end user from calling their congress-weasel.  If you don't rock the boat, you don't get fired.

The short version of my opinion of government healthcare:  not a fan.

I agree and/or disagree with many of you.

Here is the single biggest belief I have that supports all of my opinions on healthcare:

Every single person in the world should be able to get quality medical care when they are sick no matter what. Period.

I don't care if you are rich or poor. The color of your skin or your nationality. I don't put any qualifiers on it. Just like clean water, clean air, and freedom of speech, I believe healthcare is a fundamental human right. How we get there, I am willing to debate and discuss. But if you don't believe in that, I am saddened by your selfishness and world view.

Suba @ Wealth Informatics said:

Jason & Edward,

If there is no individual mandate,

1) How can the Government force the hospitals to treat everyone regardless of whether they have insurance or not?

2) How can the Government force the Insurance companies on who they can insure and how much they can charge (I am talking about the clause about not discriminating against individuals with preexisting conditions).

The way I see it, the government can make those mandates to the hospitals and insurance companies without mandating that individuals have insurance. Previously, hospitals already had to treat everyone regardless of whether or not they have insurance. And it was only those who made under a certain amount who didn't have to pay.

The reasoning behind the individual mandate was to bring costs down through increased market competition. So far, it hasn't happened. Instead, it has increased costs for those who didn't have insurance.

I read somewhere that the way to get around the constitutionality of the mandate would have been to increase everybody's taxes by the 10% penalty and then provide a tax credit to those with insurance. But I think we all know that such a scheme would have never passed. But in reality, that's all the mandate is, a tax hike on people without insurance.

Eric – NarrowBridge.net said:

I agree and/or disagree with many of you.

Here is the single biggest belief I have that supports all of my opinions on healthcare:

Every single person in the world should be able to get quality medical care when they are sick no matter what. Period.

I don't care if you are rich or poor. The color of your skin or your nationality. I don't put any qualifiers on it. Just like clean water, clean air, and freedom of speech, I believe healthcare is a fundamental human right. How we get there, I am willing to debate and discuss. But if you don't believe in that, I am saddened by your selfishness and world view.

My problem with the idea of healthcare as a fundamental right is that it is something that does not exist in the absence of society. Heck, insurance, doctors, and medicine aren't even concepts that have existed for very long in human history.

Suba,

I'm also writing about the health care reform and its financial effect for the rest of this year because it is so massive.  Here's my first post that I wrote 8 months ago and finally published last week.  The sad part was that I barely had to change anything because things got worse than my projections. 

I have more posts that I haven't published yet discussing the details of how healthcare and the law fall short & its failures along with future costs for the average American.

The law didn't reform anything.  It was designed to raise taxes for the government and they threw in a few nice items like the pre-existing condition and unlimited coverage.  "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." 

Talk to anyone in the entire healthcare industry. There are so many broken things that are not even being addressed that could make a huge difference in costs for us.  For example, government enforced losses on frauds.  Up to 1/3 of Medicare expenses are frauds that the government forces the insurance companies to pay out.  It takes 9 years or more and multiple lawsuits by insurance carriers before the government would shut down frauds and allow them to stop paying the con men. 

Suba, I see it as a cost of doing business. Corporations regularly have all sorts of restrictions placed on them that don't apply to individuals. Corporations aren't allowed to discriminate, but it's perfectly legal for individuals to do so.

Eric, I would think that if any of your examples deserved to be a fundamental right, it would be food. When you are struggling to make ends meet, filling your belly is a much higher priority than seeing a doctor.

Plus there is a big difference between access to healthcare and health insurance. One can have insurance and still not afford healthcare. I think I broke my toe over the weekend. But if I saw a doctor about it, the bill after insurance would be more than I spend in a month on food.

Rights like…. freedom from force & fraud, freedom to defend yourself, freedom to speak your own mind, freedom to choose your own path in life… these rights appeal to me.

These rights are distinct because they do not impose an obligation upon other people. All someone has to do to let you have these rights is to refrain from doing the action that would take those rights away from you. They have to refrain from trying to steal from you, attacking you, etc….

I personally have a problem with "rights" that impose duties and compel others to work in order for you to benefit from those rights. These include the rights to healthcare, education, defense, and whatever you want. This doesn't mean that I'm against these things in general. I believe that, through a voluntary social order, we can have adequate defence, education, and healthcare without having to compel others to provide it through their labour. In fact, the U.S. is falling behind in all of these areas, and only barely manages to keep afloat through massive spending that will eventually bankrupt the country.

In order to have the right to free healthcare, others must be forced to work harder in order to produce the economic surplus to pay off the corrupt system and leave enough left over for you to enjoy that right. Nevermind that your demand will be sky high because you'll treat a free good as if it had no cost, and thus not rationally plan your use of the service. At some point, bureaucrats will have to step in and come up with a thousand rules and regulations so that the system can "sort of" work, as they will decide how long doctors can spend with patients, what procedures should be done, and what's important and what's not important.

I am personally heartbroken when someone can't afford education, or get adequate treatment at a good price. These high prices are due to a broken market, bad incentives, and heavy regulations and restrictions. Good luck to anyone who thinks that adding more of the same is going to help things. We have massive protests where I live because university costs less than $2,000 per student per year in tuition, and the government wants to rise prices to above $2,000 per year. The province's finances are total crap, but it doesn't matter. The culture of entitlement never dies out; it gets stronger as entitlement increases, even against economic reality.

The best way to deal with poverty is to allow people to get things done and stay out of their way, and keep enough order in the system so you can punish the crooks and thieves. Then, you have enough economic surplus that you can easily provide for those that are in true poverty (as opposed to relative poverty). A low taxation rate of say, 10% to 15%, is much better than the situation that exists today. Trying to regulate and strangle the market destroys this surplus and is an ass-backwards way to expanding the sphere of goods and services to people.

Healthcare is getting too expensive!  HMOs are containing costs but at a price to reasonable quality healthcare.  Doctors keep receiving lower and lower reimbursements for services.  The only one who is making out in this system is the insurance companies.  We need a better system.  Obamacare only addresses some of the issues and fails to contain costs.  I remember reading about a major Wall Street firm changing their healthcare to focus on preventive care.  In other words catch diseases early such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease etc by requiring physicals and encouraging employees to see the doctor.  Surprise, their healthcare costs went down!  There is my answer.