As I sit here doing my taxes
Thought I'd procrastinate this year. It hit me like a sledge hammer...When answering my CPAs questionnaire, I see the questions about where I get my health insurance.
It reminds me of why I'm finally pulling the plug and selling my property in California...Why does the government feel it must be involved in my healthcare/insurance? The only reason I can come up with is because it's the final piece in controlling my life. As you may have seen recently - they'll even SWAT team your home and tear your kids from it over this. What kind of world are we living in? What a strange paradigm we're in now... My kids get awards for school attendance every year because they NEVER get sick. I'm starting to dread that award because parents will always corner me (where in our school, like any other, at times 1/5 of the student body is out from sharing the flu) and beg me to tell them how we do it. As your tax man...
It reminds me of why I'm finally pulling the plug and selling my property in California...Why does the government feel it must be involved in my healthcare/insurance? The only reason I can come up with is because it's the final piece in controlling my life. As you may have seen recently - they'll even SWAT team your home and tear your kids from it over this. What kind of world are we living in? What a strange paradigm we're in now... My kids get awards for school attendance every year because they NEVER get sick. I'm starting to dread that award because parents will always corner me (where in our school, like any other, at times 1/5 of the student body is out from sharing the flu) and beg me to tell them how we do it. As your tax man...
1) It added 16,000 IRS Agents
2) It added ZERO doctors
I dunno, but methinks that is NOT a formula for lowering health care costs...
BTW, you know how to drive FRAUD to ZERO in healthcare? (make people pay their own way). You notice there is no big fraud in shoes? (because government and insurance does not buy them). The Big Fraud only shows up when SOMEONE else is paying.
My smarter about such stuff brother (he's an eccentric who;graduated magna cum laude at the University of Alabama and is a retired Lockheed Martin engineer who had something to do with the Stealth Fighter) has advised it is best to do taxes the old-fashioned way on paper and to mail the fed and state extortions 10 days before April 15, That, he says, increases my odds to dodge an audit due to revenue collectors being extremely busy. Been following that advice for 10 years without any problems. Knock on wood.
On the bright side, for me at least, doubling the standard deduction swung me from tax payment to refund on federal tax. I get a big refund on my state tax, because both my military retirement and my IRA have minimums, even though Oklahoma does not tax Social Security, and waives 75% of military retirement. Still, I'd rather give an interest free loan to the state than the feds.
“the questions about where I get my health insurance.”
I don’t know if I did the healthcare form right because I changed insurance in the middle of the year. I understand why we have to show the gov’t we have insurance. If people don’t have money or insurance to pay for medical care, the government is unwilling to let them go without. They turn up at the emergency room, and people are unwilling to have the gov’t just pay a minimal cost to get them off the street and back to their residence. If somehow we’re going to get roped into back-door socialism of paying for their expenses, it makes total sense that people should have to prove they have insurance or money to pay for their care if they get sick.
If we didn’t have this system and really let people go without medicine, I think most people and their families and faith communities would rise up and fill the role of the gov’t. But not all would. I don’t know how many people would rise to the occasion. I definitely agree our current system, where most customers and providers don’t know or care what prices are is really bad. The government has been trying to implement some reforms in this area:
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
It was something the Trump campaign released, and they actually acted on it after they won.
“they'll even SWAT team your home and tear your kids from it over this.”
The rare case where someone is violently arrested for a mistake or technicality like a tax a form are horrific but a really rare peril. I try to support any reforms to stop things like this, but if I spent too much time thinking about it I’d need to be put in a padded room.
“dread that award because parents will always corner me”
They’re a lot of people who are nuts in the world. You never know what weird demons or battles they’re fighting in their private lives. If someone’s obsessed about getting sick, which is a normal part of life, because they want a little gold star from a grade school, they obviously have some issues going on. Or maybe they just aren’t good at making conversation and they see this as a positive thing to make small talk about to get to know people better. In cases where people are truly being neurotic about something like attendance awards and I find out the underlying issue, it’s often something I never would have thought of.
Reiterating what I said: "people are unwilling to have the gov’t just pay a minimal cost to get them off the street and back to their residence...we’re going to get roped into back-door socialism of paying for their expenses "
I can remember growing up when my parents had major medical health insurance for the family, pcp doctors’ offices were located down the street in a section of their residences, and a lot of hospitals were run by catholic or other religious sects. Human benevolence helped out in real emergencies, and people did not take advantage of that.
Entitlement was not the order of the day, and living in a neighborhood was a good thing
I am thinking that perhaps one of the problems now is there are too many people living too close to each other, and their philosophy isn’t based on reason.
My grandparents talked about paying the hospital for delivering my parents. Adjusted for CPI, the amount was similar to the cost of delivering a baby without complications today. It was slightly less, but they had much less ability to deal with complications then, so we get a better deal today. What struck me was their attitude. They didn't earn that much money. They thought nothing of spending close to a month's pay on something critically important the requires a lot of expertise. Now so many people feel like they have a right to those services. The feeling I got from talking to my grandparents was not that they were bragging in any way. WWII was bad. Spending three weeks pay on good experts to deliver a baby was a blessing. As you said, "Entitlement was not the order of the day."
It's remarkably close in my area. There are two hospitals that deliver babies, not counting the less expensive birthing centers that don't have full medial facilities. The hospitals have outrageous list prices, but there are three ways to get lower prices: 1) an insurance policy with negotiated rates, 2) talk to the administrator before service, 3) claim you're struggling to pay after the service when the bill arrives. I was surprised how #3 worked for my in-laws for various services over the years. They didn't threaten to declare BK or anything like that. They just said it was hard to pay, and the providers immediately knocked off most of the bill, apparently settling for what they could get from Medicare. I always negotiated beforehand, but the odd thing I found is I could get a better deal having no insurance than bad insurance. I know this from having various plans over the years.
The whole market, such as it is, is messed up because most consumers and providers have no reason to know or care what the prices are. People think they'd like to turn over handling the buying and negotiating to insurance companies because it's the last thing they want to think about when they're sick. Unfortunately it doesn't work to hand over 20% of your expenses to a company and pay no attention. They end up frustrated.
Maybe it shouldn't have been surprising we paid roughly the same for our kids' delivery as our grandparents. No matter how you try to slice it, you have to pay rent plus equipment plus the expertise of someone who studied a complex subject for many years; and it works out to about the same.
Surplus demand for the Lexus, i.e. waiting lists. More people would want luxury cars b/c they cost less, and fewer people would make them because they're not allowed to charge more.
It would be the end of inexpensive cars.