Here's how your take-home pay could change if Trump's new tax plan is passed
Hmm....I keep wanting to believe that a plain 10% "flat Tax" would be the best way to do this, since the looters ARE going to loot, no matter what. All of this "talk" keeps adding up to just making the smoke a different color and making the mirrors more polished. It still is a game where you have to try to "out loot the looters" using all their weird gambits and tricks. There is still way too much money to be taken by keeping the current system, and all the "donations" it causes to be made, to political campaigns.
Previous comments...
They must have better deals with private insurers available to people under 65 and are currently only stuck with government insurance people who are active patients, and the super rich who just write checks for cash and dont use medicare at all. I had some extensive discussions over the phone with them, and their suggestion was to enroll in their concierge family medicine program at $6000 per year ( which I am going to do as soon as they have an opening-4 month waiting list !!) so as to get a referral from their pcp and get into the specialty doctors.
Many of them are HMOs where there is a pcp who makes referrals like you described, but Blue Cross sells plans that are not HMOs. The plans differ in different parts of the country so you will have to do some digging. I don't know what you will find or if the 'concierge family' plan will be the only one. At least you have found something you can use. There are delays getting into them because they generally only take new patients annually, but I don't know if that is related to the 4 month wait you encountered.
If you are willing to cancel yourself out of medicare, you can try one of the private medicare advantage plans, but they seem to require that you stay within some preferred group. Not sure if you get any benefits at all if you go outside the network- I will have to check that out.
The other option is to deny medicare completely and pay all cash for everything.
I currently have a local PCP who offers a concierge plan for $1500 a year for essentially instant access for things PCP's can help with (he isnt a specialist).
The plan I think will work for me to allow me access to mayo's specialists and hospital care will cost $6000 a year and give me access to mayo's PCP and then back door access to their specialists for which they will accept medicare.
Its crazy but I may be able to get this done and have it work for a few years anyway until the government screws up medical care more.
Obama really made medical care here worse then it was. The more the government gets into it, the worse its going to get.
The politicians claim they are "fair" under their false collectivist and altruist moral premises. No one on our side should be promoting any kind of tax and the purpose of taxation today as inherently "fair".
What I see is 98% of all taxes are levied across a large group and end up being for a specific thing or group. For instance, is a tax on gasoline connected to bike paths on roads? Isn't having bike paths and access strictly a bike person issue, and that the car drivers do not have a dog in that fight? Just one example of an unjust tax. Same with all the loopholes and exemptions within the system (which at the huge, monstrous size of the Tax Code alone, is evidence of an awesomely big number). Each is tailored to a specific group or condition.