Healthcare reform

[ToTheNines]

Originally Posted by PAAATE

All the anti-people, are they all seriously just anti-paying a little more tax to help others and possibly themselves in the future.. Is that all there is to it?

Basically it's well-off people who are afraid the government will screw the whole thing up. The conservative news sources just keep saying how it's going to piss off doctors and make the whole process of going to the hospital take hours longer. Minor negativities really.

[Katie]

Originally Posted by andrewdsz

Im young,im healthy,I've been payin healthcare for 20 yrs for NOTHING. I think i spent over 100K on this but i never ever went to hospital/doctor even once in my life time. If i got sick just get some medicines from the street for five bucks, i dont even see why the hell i need to pay for MYSELF.

Also, i think obama should make this tax payment an OPTION, not a requirement. Right now im paying over 35% tax and i DONT want my tax go higher than 40%. When that dude is on the stage all he does is to make us pay pay pay and make the economy down. 700 billion debt already on this country right now for holy mother's sake. WHO is gonna fill up that hole? We tax payers.

I refuse to pay a single dent on this, if you ask me my personal opinion,not my business.

If someone wanna save his dad go ahead, dont ask ME to pay for you in the form of increasing taxes!!!

I dont care if u think im selfish or not, i dont giv a S, leave my money alone.

It's still hilarious, Cure. I look at tax stuff all day long. its my job. You have to make $357,700 per year as a single person before your federal taxes get to 35%. I'm pretty sure this guy isn't making that kind of money. Most people that post here are gonna fall into the 0-15% range.

I also hope he never gets really sick with a disease like cancer or something like that or never has a car accident or is ever injured or lives to be very old. can't fix that with $5 meds from the pharmacy.

He doesn't realize that HE IS paying for other's health care now. Public Hospitals don't get funding from magic faries. YOUR TAXES pay for them to operate.

My statment from the presidential thread last year still stands. This the f'ing United States of America. We can afford to make sure EVERYONE in this country gets decent health care. This is not a third world country. People in this country should not be dying of treatable diseases because they cannot afford to pay for treatment

I do hope that all our foreign friends looking at this thread realize that not all us Americans are uncaring selfish bastards

[愛]

Originally Posted by andrewdsz

Yes it ****in did. I pay 35% for :
bombs,missles and guns which drop to other country to kill off innocent ppls
"poor" ppl who is freakin healthy and sounded,stay home did nothin but collect wellfares
ppl who have 10 kids and stay home doin nothin but collect government aids
born retards who spent 200k a yr just to keep alive
120 yrs old who is hospitalized for 20 yrs who spent another 200k a yr of us

I paid the government soooo much for nothin myself,and u talkin about government isnt "asking" me a favor? I beg at least 50% of the taxes we paid are not absolutely necessary.

We should have something like 20% the most on taxes, not 40.

[Jester]

Posted by voice actor Maurice LaMarche on his facebook

[ThirdMarioBro]

Originally Posted by Canadian Turtle

One last thing, this constant fear of communism is absolutely ridiculous. Not to bring religion into a political debate, but the right wing Christians who are more often then not hard core capitalists miss the biggest point of the book. Jesus was a socialist, plain and simple.

Yes, but you gotta' realize that 99% of man-made organized religion no longer has any real connection to the teachings of the original Jesus. They re-write their official canon more often than a Trekkie.

Originally Posted by andrewdsz

Im young,im healthy,I've been payin healthcare for 20 yrs for NOTHING. I think i spent over 100K on this but i never ever went to hospital/doctor even once in my life time. If i got sick just get some medicines from the street for five bucks, i dont even see why the hell i need to pay for MYSELF.

I (fortunately) haven't had a need for it either, but I will one day. We all get old, and we all wear out, and sooner or later we all get sick. Easy thing for a young person to say they don't get sick, so why pay for insurance. Let's see what you say in 25 years though. Its easy for young people to complain about having to take care of their seniors, but its also selfish as hell considering how they once took care of us all when we were helpless.

Originally Posted by odupianist

I'm not going to pay for someone else's issues...You can say I'm being selfish....

Already did it for me. Not everybody is fortunate to get the same opportunities as you did. Does that mean they should just die and get out of society's hair? Its easy to say we should all pull ourselves up by our bootstraps when some people have no bootstraps to pull by.

Originally Posted by andrewdsz

Yes it ****in did. I pay 35% for :
bombs,missles and guns which drop to other country to kill off innocent ppls
"poor" ppl who is freakin healthy and sounded,stay home did nothin but collect wellfares
ppl who have 10 kids and stay home doin nothin but collect government aids
born retards who spent 200k a yr just to keep alive
120 yrs old who is hospitalized for 20 yrs who spent another 200k a yr of us

What a selfish bastard. So we should kill the developmentally challenged simply because they can't contribute to society?

Originally Posted by Barkworm

Again, don't you realize that what you so quickly condemn works perfectly fine in most Western European countries? Why shouldn't it work in the USA?

He's a loser who can't spell and probably didn't graduate from grade school considering the fact he brags about getting drugs from the street. Healthy debate is one thing, but this loon doesn't even know basic facts or feel basic human compassion. He's a troll. Ignore him.

Originally Posted by Jester

Posted by voice actor Maurice LaMarche on his facebook

Makes me ashamed to admit this man is my Senator. This is an asshole who was once quoted as saying that women who get abortions (for even the protection of their own health) are on the same level as murderers and should be treated as such. Looking forward to voting against him (again) in 14 months.

[Wingnut]

To think people predicted all of this well over 100 years ago.

[Newton Gimmick]

Just for the record, NOWHERE in Obama's plan or any of the subsequent plans have a "free healthcare" system. It's almost nothing like what they have in the UK or elsewhere.

The plan is to create a government run healthcare system (along with lots of other things) to lower the cost of insurance. But it's not like they're going to stop all private insurance. They're just going to offer another insurance that poor folks can buy into.

That's the deal. Cut and dry.

The reform part of it is that they'll be making a lot of changes to how health care companies can run things, such as online records, lower prescription costs and making it so that people can't be denied for pre-existing conditions.

Under none of these plans will Rose pay for my broken arm, at least not anymore than she already does. What most fail to realize is that we already pay tons to cover the uninsured. Both from taxes and into any insurance premiums we pay. The current plan will reduce everyone's cost of healthcare, even if you don't opt into the Government plan.

It's amazing that people have no issue using their taxes to build bombs, tanks or research Star Wars missiles, but use even a dollar of that for something else and people freak out.

The people who are upset about this issue either A. don't understand it or B. are far more concerned with money than anything else.

Most don't understand and think something else is being sold to them.

A large majority (over 80% in some polls) agree with the ideas being presented when they fully understand them. Unfortunately those who oppose this healthcare reform are much more interested in spreading lies and nonsense, while offering no solutions. The waters are so muddied that most people don't understand it.

I do think we will get healthcare reform passed, but probably nowhere near to the drastic extent this country needs. Baby steps though I guess is progress.

Healthcare should not be a business and once it became one, it's VERY hard to turn that back around.

[Leo656]

This is really long, so I have to split it... sorry...

Part 1

Who even knows what to believe anymore. Some places you hear that people live longer and, on average, get better treatment for cancer and other things here in the U.S., and just as often you hear that the opposite is true, depending on who gives the numbers.

I do know there is a need for affordable health care here. I myself have struggled my whole life with severe sinus infections that sometimes last weeks, and not your little "stuffy nose" kinda thing, I'm talking completely bedridden, lose 25 lbs, spitting blood and coughing out softball-sized phlegm-bombs respiratory sickness. It's gotten less frequent as I've gotten older, but sometimes the severity is worse. Last year I spent a week on a steroid respirator before it cleared up. So it's safe to say I'm in favor of not having to pay $100 or more for a visit to a doctor, or $100 more for antibiotics that don't work much better or more quickly than Advil Cold & Sinus (plug).

Like many Americans, I do have access to health insurance, through my job, and like many, I choose to not use it. At $80 a week, it just does not fit into my budget right now. To my knowledge, no one at work except the two owners and the three secretaries get the insurance, because only they make enough to afford it.

By the way, if you wanna talk about a real social injustice, try figuring out how a phone-jockeying secretary for a moving company should make SO MUCH more money than they guys that actually break their bodies to pieces doing the job of tossing 500-lb furniture around. They're sweet girls, but c'mon.

But as usual, I digress. S'what I do.

All that said, I'm just not very trusting of the proposed reforms. In part, I'm a bit old-fashioned perhaps, but I just do not believe in government programs. I know it's kind of stupid and does not apply to everyone in every case, but I was raised with an old-school Irish mindset of "if you don't work, you don't eat, and if you want something, you pay for it, period". I don't even believe in welfare, and I have definitely qualified for it at some point over the last ten years, but I would rather bust my ass for the little bit that I have rather than say the government was paying my bills.

Just a bit of history about my own experiences with government programs: When my dad lost his job at Squibb pharmaceutical, we ended up on welfare for about five years starting when I was about seven. For various reasons I've never understood, we were constantly threatened with it being taken away, despite both my parents being out of work. Not willingly out of work, but there was in fact a recession early on during those glorious Clinton years. It got even better when my father, in addition to going into diabetic shock and almost dying, suffered a life-threatening heart attack that required major bypass surgery in which his heart was basically removed and drained while he was kept alive by machines. He's had about a dozen various surgeries since the first in 1993. When he applied for permanent disability, he was REJECTED numerous times on the grounds that he was in fact "not disabled enough". In 1997, he was finally approved, and in-between he worked off the books delivering pizzas and washing dishes in hot restaurant kitchens for a paltry $60 a week, despite doctors advisory that he should not work anymore, ever, that he required ungodly amounts of medication from blood-thinners to painkillers, and that he should avoid places of stress and extreme heat.

And yet, our next door neighbor was getting disability coverage of about $1000 a month and had been for years. She suffered from migraines.

How, I wondered, can a man who almost died repeatedly of diabetes and heart disease be denied government disability payments, while a woman in her mid-30s essentially gets all her bills paid by Uncle Sam b/c she gets bad headaches? And I still have the same concerns today when it comes to any health care that is gov't funded, run, or organized: Who decides who gets what, and why?

(Continued)

[Leo656]

Part 2

Fast forward to today, or about a month ago rather, when my girlfriend and I were homeless. After exhausting all our favors from very non-sympathetic family, we bit the bullet and applied for welfare and homeless assistance. Day one, we didn't get to see anyone. Before I continue, I feel I must add the caveat that I am not a racist, my best friend is black and I'm generally not a racially-motivated person. Anyway, aside from myself and Mary there were only two other white people in the welfare office, and they were there when we arrived at about 12:30-1pm. At 4 or so, whenever they close at these places, we were the only four people who were not called up or spoken to, and had to come back the next day. It just seemed... odd. The next day, to make a long story short, they told us I essentially make too much money for any help. A percentage of my income is cash jobs for contractors, so my paystubs showed less than $200 a week, and we were told that is more than enough money for two people to live and survive on, homeless or not. The homeless aid people were even better, saying the best they could do is get us a couple days at a motel, and after that "your girlfriend is just gonna have to find a job". For the record, she's currently applied at over 60 places; things don't always pop up when you need them to.

So I just said f*ck gov't aid, f*ck welfare, f*ck Section 8, we'll sleep in a car if we have to, but I'm not going to play their rigged game. I believe many government programs are to some degree motivated by racial guilt, slanted towards minorities, and tend to leave people like me to twist because of some belief that, as a white male, if I'm not doing well it must be my own fault, and thus I don't deserve help. A lot of people I work with who've tried getting various forms of aid agree with me, and that includes the minorities, whether they've gotten help or not. My one friend said to me "That's f*cked up that you're homeless and they said you make too much money for help. I make the same as you, and y'know what? I bet they'd help my black ass."

So as far as health care or ANY gov't aid, I want proof that every legal citizen would be treated equally based on need, regardless if they were black or white or purple. Everyone except those gargantuan Swedes. Plus, like a lot of people, I'm very skeptical about claims that illegal immigrants would not be covered under any gov't plan. Really? Are these the same Democrats that spend all day and night saying "Let 'em come, who're they hurtin'"? Again, it's not racial, I just have to be very realistic about the drain illegals put on our over-burdened system. In my business, most shadier companies hire illegals for about $5-7 an hour, and that affects the rest of us, because we end up making a lot less than what we generally deserve. A Rutgers Material Services technician can make a salary equal to between $20 and $30 an hour. A mover at a normal moving company makes anywhere from $9 to $13 on average, drivers making up to $18, maybe $20 if they've been doing it twenty years. And the only difference between jobs is that at Rutgers they're worth more simply because it's a guarantee that they cannot hire uneducated or illegal people to work as movers.

So as a rule, I tend to not want anybody in this country having to pay higher taxes for programs to help out people that, legally, shouldn't be here.

Then there's the "competitive" public option idea. Sounds like a great way to keep the insurance companies in line, except for the fact that just about every employer that offers insurance is going to dump their workers into the cheaper "public" plan, and eventually the insurance companies are going to start going under, and then what happens when the gov't option is the only one left? Is it still "competitive" then? It very well could happen; the contractors I work with as owner-operators mostly hate the idea of gov't-run health care, but admit they'd pretty much have to file their employees under the public plan as a cost-saver. My bosses would likely do the same. Kind of takes the steam out of that whole "If you like your plan you can keep it" argument. Maybe some will, but realistically most won't.

I just don't know. I know things need to change. I know insurers are greedy and HMOs are crooked. I just don't know what exactly can be done about it that isn't going to screw things up more in the long run. Any gov't system of care is going to cost billions eventually no matter what anyone says, care will eventually be rationed to offset costs no matter what anyone thinks, and politicians are going to end up using their "compassionate health care system" to squeeze more and more tax dollars out of everyone, because that's what they do.

I wish there were an easy, non-controversial, non-partisan solution, but in the end a lotta people are gonna be pissed no matter what happens. All I know is that more government programs should almost never be touted as a solution, because they never work as promised. We need less government in general, not more, and the fact that a lot of people wish the gov't would just take over the whole shebang shows how sad and screwy the health care system is.

(Oh, and lest I forget, we do now have a place to live. So we're good.)

EDIT: I agree with the end of what Newton said; once something becomes a game entirely based on profit, how can it be fixed? Sadly, it usually can't.

[shredder17]

i am thankful for everyones thoughtful views on the subject. my only problem is the idea that if one is a capitalist they are greedy and unloving. i consider myself a compassionate capitalist that helps the poor with my own income and through my church. i dont believe government should force its citizens to be charitable. i dont make a lot of money but i dont want government over taxing others to give to me, i think thats legal theft. Jesus was not a socialist in the modern political sense, but he did teach his followers to be loving to all people and do everything possible to meet the needs of others. i do have a question though, obama says that healthcare is a moral issue and therefore should be passed. he also says that abortion is a moral issue but then says everyone should have thier own choice in the matter. so if a women kills her baby through abortion she's not considered evil but if i dont want to support a public option i am now evil. what happened to my choice?

[The Stryker]

Wow, Abortion out of f*cking nowhere. Do we really need to bring THAT up?

[Barkworm]

Originally Posted by shredder17

i am thankful for everyones thoughtful views on the subject. my only problem is the idea that if one is a capitalist they are greedy and unloving. i consider myself a compassionate capitalist that helps the poor with my own income and through my church. i dont believe government should force its citizens to be charitable. i dont make a lot of money but i dont want government over taxing others to give to me, i think thats legal theft. Jesus was not a socialist in the modern political sense, but he did teach his followers to be loving to all people and do everything possible to meet the needs of others. i do have a question though, obama says that healthcare is a moral issue and therefore should be passed. he also says that abortion is a moral issue but then says everyone should have thier own choice in the matter. so if a women kills her baby through abortion she's not considered evil but if i dont want to support a public option i am now evil. what happened to my choice?

This post doesn't even make sense. Also, Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. What about that? (actually don't answer that).

[Leo656]

Stryker: Rather than bring it up, would it be more appropriate to, say, "flush it down"?

Wait, is that abortion humor, or miscarriage humor? Can it be both? I hope so. Dead baby jokes rule.

[Barkworm]

Ba-dum-PSH!!!

[ThirdMarioBro]

I see what you did there. lol

[Anarky]

As for the "private insurance will die"-argument, the guy with the economy degree wishes to say something.

Yes, there will be a huge market shift. And yes, some insurance companies will die, namely the ones who are in it for profit only and have grown to need the insane amount of money people pay them. Before they fold, they will most likely be bought by another insurance company that had the ability to adapt better.

Those companies will have to lower their plans, obviously, because otherwise, everyone would go to the government. Either that, or they increase their service and all that. This leads to a better service at the private companies than what you get with the government, more or less at the same price.

This again, will lead to people abandoning the public option and going for the private ones again, because they maybe have a better plan for families with children or people who need extensive dental work or any other kind of social or health-related situation you can think of, while the governmental plan will be a solid, but minimalist general plan. That's what's happened over here. I'm not really unhealthy, so I'm on a general plan with a private company. My ex-girlfriend has a body that doesn't produce estrogen, so she has to eat a handful of pills every day or her body goes into shock. So she's at some other company that have a good plan for hormonal things or womanly issues.

So all in all, this will not lead to a crushing of the insurance business, but rather a diversification. This is good. I'd go for that.

As for the "We'll help all them-there Mexicans, Billy-Bob-Joe!"-thing. You guys do realize that you need to sign a healthcare plan in order to get it? You're not just getting one thrown at you. And normally, you have to deliver proof of income. And if you're insured by your employer, you need a signed contract of employment too. Guess what illegal workers don't have?

Granted, it's not all fun and roses. There will be some abuse. But everything gets abused at some point. People are creative and smarter than most others give them credit for, they find loopholes and all that. There's this awesome quote from the IT-world that goes "Programming is a race: Programmers try to make a system idiot-proof. Meanwhile the universe tries to invent an even bigger idiot."

[shredder17]

the verse that you are talking about is from matthew 19:16-30. jesus is talking to a rich man who is trusting in his riches and goods deeds to enter heaven. jesus challenges the man to get rid of the idol in his life which was his money and then trust and follower christ. there were many rich people in the gospels that jesus never commanded to give away all thier substance because they were not trusting in thier riches and they were helping people. there is nothing virtuous about being poor or rich. the issue is do you put jesus and others before yourself and are you responsible and charitable with all your goods. i am not trying force biblical christianity on anyone here but since it was mentioned i just wanted to make a statement.

[shredder17]

i love humor and i am not angry at some of the comments. but my problem is with the philosophy that there are no limits to humor. a guy will make abortion jokes but then get offended at 9/11, holocost or black slavery jokes. or maybe a joke about his mother that was raped and killed. i believe there should be a limit to humor. do you?

[Barkworm]

Originally Posted by shredder17

the verse that you are talking about is from matthew 19:16-30. jesus is talking to a rich man who is trusting in his riches and goods deeds to enter heaven. jesus challenges the man to get rid of the idol in his life which was his money and then trust and follower christ. there were many rich people in the gospels that jesus never commanded to give away all thier substance because they were not trusting in thier riches and they were helping people.

I wasn't looking for a bible lesson, I know the book better than most people.

[Wingnut]

Originally Posted by shredder17

i believe there should be a limit to humor. do you?

No. You're too late anyway, blue humor has already been invented.

Also, don't talk about the bible in a political thread. Just my 2 cents.