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.
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Insurance is not "spreading financial risk for unforeseen perils". We know what the potential perils are and buy insurance of certain kinds to protect against our own risk by paying the insurance company to assume it, not to "spread risk". Insurance companies write policies to cover specific categories of loss based on statistical assessments of the risks. If they do it properly they profit after the average premiums and payouts and investments on the assets they accumulate. The insured benefit because the regular costs for the insurance premiums are worth it versus being confronted with impossibly enormous costs in the rare event that it occurs.
No one does it to "spread risks" without regard to trading value for value and his own interests, and no one buys insurance to cover losses he knows or believes he would not otherwise have to pay for. Government 'health care' controlling what doctors and patients can do, what we have to be "insured" for for the benefit of others, and ordering what we cannot do while forcibly redistributing our assets to pay for it all is obscene collectivist statism, not insurance.
Nor is insurance a way for everyone to get someone else to pay for normal maintenance and expected costs, which is impossible for health, home ownership, cars or anything else. Yet that is the switch that has been pulled by government health control trying to sell socialized medicine in the name of the equivalent "someone else pays" consolidated into a "single payer" political scheme it dishonestly calls "insurance". The peddling collectivism in the name of "insurance" is a dangerous fraud.
I reject almost every claim you make above except for this one. I agree PPACA contradicts the very concept of insurance, the very concept of spreading the financial risk of unforeseen perils.
Oh, I missed that and might still need it spelled out even more simply for me to fully get it.
"the Big Pharma attempts to get everyone on their expensive drug trips"
They're attempting to sell their product, and consumers should attempt to get maximum value. That's normal and healthy. Saying "Big Pharma" makes it sound like their customers are victims. All market participant need to try not to be victims.
"my employer gives me a HDHP with a 3700 family deductible"
I don't think you're wrong at all to state it like this, but I personally would avoid the word "give" because it's actually a trade. If they stopped buying those things and/or were late on payroll, you'd rightly be out of there. If you stopped making them money, they'd rightly end the arrangement. You work for company known in the electronics world to pay well for the best people.
"Your people turned it into a GOVERNMENT nightmare"
If you mean me personally, I have never worked in gov't or been involved beyond knowing my representatives and their staff and occasionally lobbying them.
"bros in the hood"
This has nothing whatsoever to do with bros in the hood and your resentment. I obviously don't want corruption, waste, and gov't control of healthcare. I think the way we insured against unexpected medical expenses prior to PPACA were vestiges of WWII-era price controls. That's why companies more commonly buy health plans than houses, groceries, or education for their employees. HMOs, PPACA, employeer-purchased healthcare, and in the broader economy credit cards, all separate people from the reality of doing work for one another in mutual trades. This leads to trying to find tricks to get something for nothing.
That's my broad take on it. If you have specific questions I'll start a new thread. That may help, but we may be at a fundamental difference in that I think the world today is amazingly free and prosperous. I see the racism, people shamelessly milking the gov't, companies (e.g. pharmaceutical companies) overstating their expensive products' benefits, microphones and tracking everywhere, but I don't get the resentment. It seems like we've solved 90% of humankind's problems, and some people are very upset about the remaining 10%. I also absolutely do not think humankind's problems are caused by a group of evil people. So if your starting point is resenting people, outrage at the human problems that haven't been solved, and trying out who's responsible, I can't answer because I reject the premises. I think if someone tells you life's a box of shits, and I'll tell you who's to blame, you should immediately see through the manipulation.
I would definitely start a thread, though, about broad principles or nuts and bolts of insurance. Thanks for following me jumping between the tress and the forest in this msg.
One of the many not unintended results is that government seizing responsibility to pay for the "poor" and direct health care policies, is controlling what everyone must do, cannot do, and most pay for anyway.
Everything limited. By the facts of reality the controls bring with them the responsibility to pay for it and decide what will not be paid for what individuals could otherwise choose. A mandate to "participate" cannot include open-ended utopian desires for no 'side effects' of collectivism and statism.
The "mandate" mentality is a grotesque false alternative to a supposed 'market' in which no one will buy insurance until he needs to be paid at a constantly accumulating net drain on the insurance companies. That is not what insurance is. No insurance company would do that without a government mandate such as the Obamacare 'pre-existing condition' exemption scam; it contradicts the very concepts of insurance and voluntary trade.
None of these refutations are 'name calling'. Nickursis referring to Pelosi as felonious is an understatement of the mentality of the collectivized medicine thugs in Congress, not an excuse to evade everything else that is said. Names are for identification; the felonious thugs in Congress and their supporters don't want to be identified as what they are. The brute force of government control of our health care and therefore our lives is their statist, anti-individualist essence.
The health system isn't "out of control", it is being controlled by government bureaucracy out of control, driving up costs of development, consumer prices and more. Companies have to earn back their development and bureaucracy-imposed costs while they can because government artificially limits patent rights and because other products are being developed over time competing with it in different ways. They also have a right to profit from their own property. Despite that, drug companies routinely provide expensive products at reduced cost to those who can't afford it. Unfortunately that too drives up the costs for others..
As Circ pointed out there are many different products and methods constantly evolving over time to treat the same disease with different approaches and possible side effects. It is your responsibility to compare them and choose what you think is best for you in the face of different tradeoffs, including cost. Advanced medicine is a complex field that cannot provide magical utopian solutions.
Your comment that, I should love it or hate it and approach it on a name-calling level, is a wholly political take on it. I am an actual citizen not involved in policy or talking heads yelling at one another on TV.
I called it a mixed bag from the outset. I agree with eliminating underwriting, the mandate, and with subsidies for the poor. I disagree with the minimum standards of insurance and encouraging insurance-company managed "health plans" and discouraging old-fashioned insurance products. (Let's start another thread if you want to get into the merits of those things and why I don't think PPACA is "fair share" collectivism.)
The whole idea rests on the mandate. If there's no underwriting and people can just buy "insurance" when they're sick, the prices will rise to incredible levels. The politicians have been threatening to dick with it without a coherent plan, and that increases risk, i.e. increases premiums. I seriously think politicians are actually operating on the name-calling level. It's not just for the rubes' benefit. It appears they're actually making decisions that way. It's getting to the point where I wish they get some nerds together to draft legislation and then slap a preface onto it making fun of one another's names so they can get people to pay attention.
I won't pay for the risk that politicians dick with the law such that only sick people buy insurance, which ultimately means responsible people who bought insurance and now have a serious illness will go broke or be bailed out by the gov't. What a disgrace. I think my senators, Baldwin and Johnson, see through the politics and don't want to be a part of this. Johnson had a great article in the NYT about it. Johnson said, "Patients neither know nor care what things cost. We have virtually eliminated the power of consumer-driven, free-market discipline from one-sixth of our economy."
It's a sixth of our economy, and I think discourse will stay at the name-calling level, and they will not be able to fix it. It makes me feel like I'm in the Roman Empire at a time after it had become an Empire, but they still called it a republic.
By chance I was just looking into this scenario last weekend because for the first time in my life I won't have a health insurance contract. Our premiums increased to $1250/mo for a $13k deductible. We're doing some health sharing program that goes by the horrible name "Brother's Keeper". When you dig into the details, though, it's more in line with my views than our PPACA-compliant plans have been. It does not not cover prescription drugs at all, so we are accepting the risk of a rare $100k prescription drug scenario.
People who hate PPACA for political reasons should definitely look into these plans. I agree with a lot of the theory behind PPACA, but I'm not paying $15k a year for a plan designed around hand-holding who I would have to fight if I ever wanted to make a claim. If you hate PPACA, something like "Brother's Keeper" is a good option if you can get past their collectivist language.
"when you get to medical, it gets very, very weird. "
I think you're saying that drug companies sometimes invent the only cure that can save a life, and then they can charge whatever people with that disease can and will pay to stay alive. I think this is actually a rare case. In the case of the epi-pen, the drug itself is very cheap, but they have a patent on the quick-and-easy device to administer the drug. That's important because the drug is life-saving and a few seconds drawing the drug into a syringe matter. Even in this case, it's wrong for customers to see themselves as helpless. What other solutions can they think of to have the drug and syringe at the ready? Are there any other treatments that could be used as a stopgap while prepping a syringe?
Usually (not always) there were good treatments 20+ years ago that are available in generic. Maybe the latest drug is once-a-day dosing, can be taken without regard to meals, and causes less side effects. Customers who have the money and want to spend it on that can do it, while value customers might try the older twice-a-day one that must be taken with meals. Maybe they won't even develop the side effects. Or maybe they'll have a bad reaction to the old drug and decide it's worth it for the new drug.
I just don't accept that pharmaceutical companies have their customers totally over a barrel. I'm sure they see their products as vital and people should spare no expense to buy them, but their customers need to shop critically.
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