March 20, 2010

Nobody’s Pawn

Filed under: Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 5:41 pm

It was probably inevitable that this would happen, but let me go on record that, as we approach a likely final vote on the health insurance bill, I continue to stand firm in my stance that the bill should not pass, and if it does pass, it should be repealed. By continuing to hold this view even as most of my erstwhile allies fell in line to support a bill that they had, quite justly, likened to a pile of manure a few months ago, I have found myself in company with only a very select few who are ideologically similar to me. Most of those who oppose this thing are on the Republican side of the aisle. However, I’ve never been a fan of the sports team method of conducting politics. No, if the people who agree with me on the ultimate goal (even if they disagree on the reason for their stance) are mostly Republicans, well, so be it. I’m not picky. The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend, but it can be my ally for now. A vote is a vote.

And the fact that most of those same erstwhile allies consider this such an atrocious thing says a great deal about their true priorities. In my not-so-humble opinion, these people are liars to pretend they care about some 30 million without insurance, or people with existing medical conditions (of whom I am one), or a hypothetical 45,000 people who may die a few years earlier than they otherwise would have (yes, it sounds inhuman, but life can be cruel. Many of that figure will die because of cancer. Insured or not, the 10-year survival rates for internal cancers generally are not good). For starters, the bill is an insurance coverage bill and outside of some provisions for community clinic funding, it has nothing to do with health care administered by medical professionals. The typical deductible and co-pays of affordable individual coverage policies—to paraphrase Scarlett O’Hara—might as well be a million dollars if you don’t have that kind of money saved up, and most Americans, unfortunately, do not have that kind of money saved up. The bill doesn’t bring the individual market up to the standards of the group policy market in deductibles and co-pays, not even close.

Some of those lives could indeed be saved, but precious few of these activists are truly interested in saving lives. I can’t entirely fault them; it’s a known quirk of human nature that it is easier not to let death bother one if the numbers are high enough and the incident is remote or distributed enough. I see that 45,000 figure and I don’t even blink. Still, that’s not what I mean here. There are, undoubtedly, some long-term health care activists who see the world from an optimistic viewpoint and want to believe that this bill will help. I will not disdain them, though I think they are tragically mistaken, and nothing I say refers to them. However, most of the people yapping sanctimoniously about this on blogs, Facebook, and political mass e-mails are Johnny-come-latelys to the health care issue, and they are only on it right now because that is what their party and the president are on right now. These activists’ real agenda is only to maintain their partisan majority in Congress this year. They may use the 45,000 or 30 million as a loaded gun against their opponents, but if they get what they want, the devil take those human statistics. I have seen this disgusting little game played before; in 2006 many Democratic candidates invoked the Katrina response and the body count following it, but as I have complained about many a time and documented on this blog, most of them didn’t lift a finger to help those people after assuming office. I see no reason to believe it’ll be any different for the politicians or partisan activists when the true effects, or lack thereof, of their health insurance bill start to come out. Once this thing is over, they’ll move on to something else.

Incidentally, these partisan activists have revealed with their very own words just what they really think of the right of people with chronic medical conditions (like me) to have affordable health care, and it is not encouraging. Some proposals have been floated to initiate the pre-existing condition exclusions immediately but wait to implement any mandate. Such proposals would actually benefit the chronically ill (if they had all the loopholes plugged—keep reading!), you know. But whenever such an idea has been brought up, the partisan activist goons are on it like a pack of hyenas: “We can’t do that! We can’t have the pre-existing condition exclusions without an individual mandate! People might wait till they got sick to buy a policy and it would raise my premiums! Besides, there’s a high risk pool proposed for the interim!” (There are high risk pools already in place in many states. This does not make them affordable or useful for obtaining treatment for costly illnesses. If it did, we wouldn’t be discussing this.)

The proposals I refer to would affect a period of not quite four years, and even if people actually did drop their insurance en masse just because they could (which I do not believe would happen), the sky will not fall in four years, and health insurers could easily take the comparatively small losses out of their own profits rather than hiking everyone’s rates, if they were ordered to do so. Besides, even after the mandate would take place, people could still go naked as long as they paid the fine, which is much less costly than a policy, and these same people could still wait to get a policy… when they got sick. So much for that bogeyman. So no, this is not about fairness to the public at all. In the minds of partisan progressive activists, it’s more important to be “fair” to a parasitic industry that has killed its own customers by proxy than it is to provide health insurance to people who are sick. To them, I have no right to affordable health care; it is a privilege that depends on the behavior of other people. Concern for the chronically ill, my rear. I have so much contempt for the deceitful sanctimony of these people that I can barely express it, and though I do have chronic medical conditions and therefore would be among the people they pretend to care about, I will not be a pom-pom for their partisan cheerleading.

I have had the opinion for quite some time that the worst thing anyone could do, in the view of Democratic Party brass, is to display disloyalty to the party brand. There is no such thing to these people as ideological disloyalty. As I’ve lamented before, they discussed stripping Joe Lieberman of his chairmanship not because he thwarted an investigation into FEMA’s role in the Hurricane Katrina disaster, but because he campaigned for John McCain. Now, we have numerous reports that the White House threatened to make sure that any Democrat who voted against the health insurance package would not receive any party money for re-election. There were no repercussions or threats made when the stimulus act passed last year, nor have there been any such threats for any other piece of legislation that the president wanted. Absolutely none. But it was never implied that the failure of these bills might result in a party changeover in the fall. Now that some people in the pundit and political classes have formed this opinion about this particular bill, opposing it is tantamount to switching party allegiance in their minds.

But to return to topic, my opposition to the bill. It is not just unmitigated contempt for many of the proponents (and pity for the rest, who I think are in for a big disappointment) that is why my opinion is what it is. I also have good reason to believe that the bill can make things much harder for people like me. Right now, if I were to receive a denial letter that said “pre-existing conditions,” I can produce paperwork demonstrating in an open-and-shut case that I am entitled to the insurance claim. I’ve done it before. I can handle my own appeals at minimal cost and time as long as the insurers can still say “pre-existing conditions.” If the bill passed and the regulations took effect in 2014, they wouldn’t be able to say that any longer. But don’t worry; they have a backup plan: They still can send out letters to customers rescinding coverage altogether if they claim it is on the basis of fraud, and to fight a fraud claim, you’ll have to engage legal services. For many, you’ll have to hire a lawyer and fight these vermin in court while you are sick and getting medical treatment. The insurers do this already to customers whom they cannot get on pre-existing conditions but who develop a costly illness that they don’t want to pay for, and insurance company executives have even told members of Congress point-blank that they would continue to do this to customers if the bill passed. Great, just great. Though I’m sure the trial lawyers’ lobby is quite happy.

Incidentally, when this detail is pointed out to these progressive activists that I have been impugning, they get quite upset and insist that such things won’t really happen because it will depend on how regulations are written up and interpreted. (The memories of the Bush Administration deliberately ignoring and defying all manner of business regulations, let alone “legitimately” interpreting them in the most corporate-friendly way possible, seem to have slipped their minds.) The naivete would be truly amazing if I believed it really were naivete; as I have said, though, I think the simple answer is that they do not really care about the chronically ill. They are liars.

I will not be the pawn of a group of people who are interested in my life only as a tool to achieve partisan triumphs. I’ve watched it happen once before, and all I got in return was disappointment and betrayal. Say what you will about the Republican activists; at least they make it plain that they don’t care three straws about people like me. If they decide that they would use us left-wing opponents for their own goals and then discard us, it’s no different from what the progressive activists and politicians would do—except that we can also use them.

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October 7, 2009

An Opt-Out Public Option Lets Red States SENTENCE THEIR PEOPLE TO DEATH by Popular Vote

Filed under: Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 11:11 pm

As we approach the endgame of the health care reform debate in Congress, an idea has been floated recently that might be the worst one I have yet encountered.  Yes, in my book it tops out mandates without a public option, taxing health care policies, triggers, and co-operative plans.  The idea is to have a strong national public option but to allow state governments individually to opt out of allowing their residents to make use of it.  This idea has picked up steam in the “progressive netroots community” (bloggers), with a surge in support on flagship blog Daily Kos, among others.

It is a truly horrible idea, though, and it just goes to show that bad ideas do not only come from Blue Dog Democrats or Tea Party Republicans.  Self-described “progressives” can have them too.

“Progressive” Activists Betray the Legacy of the Civil War:  A United U. S. A.

This is far from the first time that “progressives” have advocated Balkanization of the United States and the breakdown of the federal government in favor of a loose alliance such as that proposed by the Articles of Confederation.  In the lead-up to the American Civil War, many Northern progressives said “Let the South go” rather than fighting militarily to bring seceded states back into the U.S.  These 1860s-era progressives did not really care about the human rights issue of slavery.  Many of them believed that slavery would collapse under its own weight and the South might voluntarily choose to return.  Obviously, history did not take this path, so we do not know how it would have turned out if President Lincoln had followed this advice and war had not broken out.  However, we do know one thing:  African Americans would have remained enslaved for far longer than they were.  Not just living under the iron heel of Jim Crow laws, but actually enslaved.  We also know that, though some aspects of Reconstruction were extremely broken, when that process ended by the “corrupt bargain” of the 1876 election, Jim Crow laws were immediately forced into effect.  That’s what happened when they “let the South go.”  Human and civil rights in the South were eroded.

The legacy of the Civil War was not just the abolition of slavery and the enshrining in the Constitution of voting rights to people (men, at the time) of any race.  Another part of the legacy was the principle that there are certain things individual states cannot do.  The War settled the question of secession and nullification.  If states are part of the U.S., they abide by the laws of the U.S. and cannot deny their residents the protections of the Constitution, the United States Code, and federal programs.

Of course, if a health care reform bill is signed and it allows states to opt out of a robust national public option, this would blow a hole right through that ideal.  Legally, of course; there is nothing in the Constitution that says Washington cannot enact laws with an opt-out clause for states.  But the very existence of this hypothetical opt-out would go against one of the legacies of the Civil War, just as surely as it would go against the legacy of abolition if the U.S. somehow overturned the Thirteenth Amendment through legal means.  For progressives to be advocating this idea is a monumental betrayal.

Death by Popular Vote

It’s not just a betrayal of E Pluribus Unum, either.  This idea is a betrayal of every person in a Republican-dominated state who is in favor of a public option.  It is saying to us that we don’t count.  Here is a direct quote from a popular Daily Kos diary in support of this idea:

(…) I really love the idea of an opt-out public option.

Not because it’s the best idea by any means. A robust single-payer plan would be the best idea. Not because tens of thousands of real Americans won’t die and go bankrupt in states with morally bankrupt legislators. They will.

Our lives are meaningless, then, to the “progressive netroots community” except as political pawns.  The message absolutely could not be clearer.

I know what the residents of my state would probably vote for.  I certainly know what my governor and Legislature would do.  And while I would indeed apportion blame to them if Mississippi denied its residents access to a national public option, I would apportion a great deal more to the ivory tower blue coast “progressives,” and any members of Congress who voted for such a thing, for making it possible and legal for them to do it.

People in the South and other Red areas will die because of this, if it passes, whereas they would not die in Blue states.  This means that a state’s populace would be allowed to sentence people to death, permanent indigence, or bankruptcy by a popular fiat.  Have we sunk so far?  There was massive outrage—MASSIVE, I say—about the idea behind California’s Proposition 8 and the fact that 50% + 1 could deny court-established civil rights to people.  Where did the outrage go?  Or was it only ever present because LGBT people are generally a liberal-oriented group and California was a blue state?

I am a former Democratic Senate staffer, actually, but I would NOT forget that it was the progressive community and Democrats in Congress who allowed townhallers, teabaggers, and insura-cons in my state to sentence people like me to death or bankruptcy.  Want my vote in the future?  Want the votes of any left-of-center Southerners in the future?  Too bad, suckers.  If this idea ends up passing, we will remember exactly who it was that sold us down the river.  We would expect no less from our troglodyte state governments, whom we do not vote for anyway, but we depend on Washington to keep their harmful ideologies somewhat in check.  This idea won’t turn the South blue.  All it will do is royally tick off Southern Democrats and liberal-inclined people.  (Yes, I am a civil libertarian oriented liberal, not that cowardly weasel-word “progressive.”)  It will send the message loud and clear that our lives, health, and finances do not matter because of where we live, that we are not worth fighting for, that we have no inherent value, but are only useful as a body count to make a political point.

I’ve suspected this for some time about the “progressive” community’s real opinion of Hurricane Katrina’s victims, and this idea does not do one thing to dispel this suspicion.  It only reinforces it, in fact.  Apparently, if you live outside of a Blue area, your only value to this part of the “netroots community” is as a part of a body count that they can use to advance a political agenda.  Even if it’s an agenda that you otherwise would agree with, nobody wants their entire worth to be dependent upon their being dead.

In truth, this whole scheme gives the impression of being revenge politics. If you are at all familiar with the left-wing blogosphere, you’ll know that there is a huge amount of resentment over the fact that the South gets more money from the federal government than it pays in. The people who hold this resentment ignore that the entire purpose of social programs and such is to assist the poor, and the South is the poorest region in the country. To them, no one in the South deserves anything because a majority of Southern voters would vote against their having it. They are no different from anti-tax Republicans in that they only want to see “their” tax money go to projects and places that they personally like, and they have a massive grudge against the Southeast. This opt-out idea looks very much to me like they simply love the idea of “getting back at the South” for the tax money that it “stole” from them.

Passing a law with this in it would also send the message that health care is not a fundamental human or civil right in the United States.  If it were either, it would be the responsibility of the federal government to require every state to offer the same health care exchange across the borders.  With the exception of the death penalty, the federal government does not defer to states in the arena of human or civil rights (and it is truly a major problem with the DP that the same crime can get a different sentence not based on the judge and jury, but based on where it was committed).  By letting states opt out, this continues to send the message that health care is a privilege rather than a right.  This is not the message that we want to send!  That is the opposition’s message.

It will not turn the teabag crew in favor of the Democratic Party.  Their people are dying at the hands of insurance gangsters, too; it doesn’t seem to penetrate their skulls.  If anything, all it will do is cement their ideology.  “We don’t have socialism in this state!”

Denying—or letting governors and legislatures deny—people the right to use a social program is not going to turn anyone in favor of that program.  The only thing that will is to deploy it and let people see through experience, either their own or that of people they know, that it is not such a bad thing.  Every parent knows that sometimes they must force a stubborn child to do something, even if the child stamps his foot and DOESN’T WANT TO, because it is good for the child and the child will be grateful for it in the end.

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September 8, 2009

Making It $0.04, Then: Health Care Part II

Filed under: Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 5:44 pm

My previous blog about health care reform and Generation Y did not touch on one specific detail about the prospect of a mandates-only insurance law like the state of Massachusetts has. This follow-up will address that 800-pound gorilla and a bit more.

Let’s take the hypothetical that Congress passes, and the President signs, a bill that requires American adults to purchase a private insurance policy but does not provide a public plan. Let us suppose that noncompliance is punished with a fine that is automatically taken out of one’s taxes, as is done in MA. In that state, you must provide proof of insurance for the entire tax year or, barring extreme poverty, you will get fined for it.

Generations Y and Millennial, which contain the largest number of uninsured, will get hit the hardest by such a law. The bill that proposes this, the “Baucus bill,” would cap the out-of-pocket cost of premiums at 13% of a person’s yearly income. A year’s full-time work at the minimum wage (probably the most common wage for this age group) comes to $14,790 before taxes; you can skim off about 20 percent of that in various taxes, of which perhaps half will be recovered by the following year. (The rest is Social Security and Medicare. Yes, Virginia, there is socialized medicine in America already, but only if you’re older than 65.) I am not sure whether the 13% figure applies to gross income or income after taxes. If it is gross income, that’s $1922.70 a year for insurance premiums, or $160 a month. For net income, it is $1538.16 a year, or $128.18 a month.

This may not sound so bad until you realize that this leaves a single person making minimum wage with either $9909 a year or $10294 a year, and this must cover housing, food, transportation (including auto insurance in most cases), utilities, and perhaps other necessities such as child care. It also must cover all medical bills that this “insurance” is not covering because of deductibles and co-pays.

The only plans that run for less than $128 a month are plans that are not intended to be long-term. They are meant for people who are between jobs and need creditable coverage to avoid getting blasted with a pre-existing conditions clause when they get a job again. They often have expiration dates of a year after issuance. The kind of a plan a minimum-wage worker would afford gets them a ridiculously high deductible (up to $5000) and a horrible co-pay. This sort of policy is worthless. It’s extortion, quite frankly—forcing money out of a person to avoid a punishment, but not offering anything tangible to show for it. People with these policies pay twice; they pay for their premiums and then they pay for the cost of medical care, because the insurance doesn’t cover a bit of it unless they get catastrophically ill.

I defy anyone, anyone in the world other than Ebenezer Scrooge, to suggest that this is a reasonable thing to do to someone making minimum wage. In many cities, it is tantamount to condemning a person to living in a shelter. It encourages people to make very poor decisions in order to have enough household cash to stay out of cardboard boxes: Find a roommate, any roommate, cohabit and therefore risk an unplanned pregnancy, get married when they have no business doing so, etc. Some people will find ways of committing suicide (and decrease the surplus population?) rather than continue with what they believe is a never-ending downward spiral. Forcing vulnerable people into making bad decisions is not good policy.

However, even the most diehard Scrooges of the world surely will not have a word to say about the other horrible aspect of this hypothetical mandates-only insurance law. I am talking about deficit explosions. This is the 800-pound gorilla, the aspect of bad reform bills that I did not touch on in the previous blog. Deficits are popular to talk about these days, and it says something about the insurance industry’s stranglehold on our political system that deficits suddenly don’t get discussed when bills come up that could reap them a mountain of profit.

That 13 percent in the Baucus bill is not a cap on the market cost of a policy. It is a cap on the buyer’s out-of-pocket costs toward buying that policy. You cannot force people to pay money that they don’t have; debtor’s prisons are against the law and I think there might well be blood in the streets if we actually started sending people to jail for nonpayment of “fines” for not being insured. The government, you see, helps out. It makes up the difference by offering subsidies to poor people. There is no proposal to cap the absolute cost of policies, and there is no proposal to cap executive payrolls. Basically, there’s no means to control runaway health insurance costs. This bill, a national version of the failed Massachusetts system, would simply shift the bulk of the expense to the government.

You think the deficit is bad now? Wait till the government has locked itself into paying whatever insurance companies demand. This is what has happened in Massachusetts. I used to live there; the system that they have there has only exploded premium costs, with the state government paying the price for it. Much of the money is paying for garbage—the lousy junk (or more accurately, bunk) insurance policies that are all that’s affordable to private individuals without group coverage. The purpose of business is to make money. That’s neither evil nor good in itself, but it should be taken into account. Government policy telling a particular industry “Charge what you like and we’ll foot the bill” is blatantly stupid.

Sure enough, the most expensive Congressional bills, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, are those that attempt such a thing. The least expensive are those that have a sturdy cost control mechanism, namely a government-administered insurance option.

The main benefit of a public plan would be that NO money going to it would be funneled into the 8-figure salaries and bonuses that have actually driven the cost of health insurance premiums sky-high. It could pay for people’s health care rather than the yacht of some corporate bureaucrat. It is a complete myth that malpractice lawsuits, overuse of medical services, and/or a reckless iPhone-loving generation voluntarily going uninsured are what have caused costs to go up. All of these things undoubtedly happen on case-by-case bases, but the real culprit, pure and simple, is executive greed, just as it was for Wall Street.

A private-only reform plan could work, theoretically. Other countries have done it. However, the countries that have pulled it off have regulated their private sectors to the hilt. There are strong cost control mechanisms and in many cases, take-home pay is capped. I don’t think such a system would be the best fit for the United States of America. We are about choices in the marketplace. A government plan is just another choice. If it provides a better product than the private sector, well, that’s the marketplace at work. They would either improve themselves or take the consequences.

I do believe in economic freedom, provided that basic safety of labor, consumers, and the environment has been accounted for. Earlier in the year when people were screaming for Congress to cap executive pay, I was against the idea; I favored a punitive tax on firms that had abused the bailout money. I am against the government placing a cap on the pay of any private sector individual, including those most hated. All legitimate businesses get government assistance, whether in the form of tax benefits or in the much loathed bailouts. In many situations, government contracts jobs out to private businesses, paying them with taxpayer money. Saying “X business should have its salaries capped because it gets money from the government” is a slippery slope, and what the people calling for it actually wanted was a cap on “bad” businesses encoded into U.S. law. This is a bad idea. I am all for highly progressive taxes on the wealthy, but I am unequivocally against dictating a maximum limit for a person’s gross income.

So, a mandates-only bill will drive people who are barely treading water further into financial disintegration, most of whom are the young generation and are already saddled with mountains of debt and a truly atrocious economic situation. It will force them to create more credit card debt as they pile basic living expenses onto their cards out of sheer necessity. (Do you hear the voice of personal experience in this?) It will drive governments into a sea of red ink as they foot the bill for the remainder of whatever outrageously priced bunk insurance policy that the private sector, when guaranteed a captive customer base, will force on people. This is not theoretical, though the theoretical financial estimates of such a proposal back it up too. This has actually happened in the state, Massachusetts, where it has been tried.

There’s a call these days that “some reform is better than none at all.” I most vociferously disagree. There are ways of making the status quo worse, and the Congressional bill out there that does not have a public option definitely does that. It may be bad for the Democratic Party to fail to pass a bill, but the long-term fiscal health of the United States of America takes precedent over the health of a political party.

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September 6, 2009

My $0.02 on Health Care: Beware the Sleeping Giant

Filed under: Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 12:55 am

I’ve avoided saying anything on this blog about the health care debate, not because I don’t have an opinion, but because it seemed to vary on a daily basis about which way the debate was going, and anything I said would be obsolete very quickly unless I updated the blog each day as well (which I don’t have the requisite commitment to blogging to do).  This is likely to be my sole comment on it, and it is to serve as a warning to certain people in politics.

If you pass a health care reform bill that mandates all adult Americans to purchase insurance policies without providing a Medicare-like public option, beware.  Beware the sleeping giant.

I speak of Generation Y, the group of people born in the 1980s.  This is my generation.  It is the generation that, arguably, delivered Barack Obama the White House.  It is also the generation with the most people who are “voluntarily uninsured.”  (The “young invincibles,” as the sneering corporate media dubs us, a phrase that is extremely offensive to those of us in our 20s who do have serious pre-existing conditions, such as yours truly, and already have accepted that our bodies are on a time limit because we get proof of it at every doctor’s visit.)

Yes, of the voluntarily uninsured, a majority of them are young people who (for whatever reason) don’t think they need health insurance yet.  This is true.  This means that my generation has become a convenient scapegoat for those forces who think that the problem is that things cost too much for the insurance industry.  We (I say “we” to refer to Generation Y as a whole, since I am obviously not part of the “we” who can voluntarily forgo health insurance) are blamed for the rise in premiums, since we aren’t there to share the costs with everyone else.  The fact that the health insurance industry has raked in record profits lately seems to have escaped the minds of these people, but there you have it.  A mandate from the government to buy insurance would hit my generation the hardest.

And let me tell you, the Democratic Party will not like the result.  In all the calculations by the White House and the Blue Dog members (not least of which appear to be calculations about how much money they will lose from the industry in donations if they support real reform), the effect of waking up the sleeping giant of Generation Y and its successor, the Millennials, seems to have been lost.

My generation put these Democrats and this President into power.  I have to admit that I was never on board with hope and change; I was always skeptical and cynical about that rhetoric.  But many of my generation actually did believe it.  More importantly, they believed in it. They saw candidate Obama as a person who was in touch with them and could actually represent them. I can say with near certainty that forcing this generation to send their money to the bloodsucking private insurance industry, in exchange for junk policies (which is all that will be offered at the rates that Generation Y can actually afford—keep reading), will drive these new voters into cynical apathy or possibly even into the arms of the Republican Party.

The AFL-CIO recently completed a report on the economic state of young workers.  Their findings were that my generation (and to an extent, Generation X) can barely afford their bills, if at all; that a third of us still live with parents because of necessity; that if we lost our sources of income, a huge majority of us would have no more than a month’s worth of living expenses saved up; and that we have the worst health benefits, sick/vacation packages, and retirement benefits of any age group.

THIS is the generation that the Democrats in Congress and apparently, the President, would force to enrich the health insurance industry.  Generation Y cannot afford it. However much CNN and its ilk may want to pretend that my age cohort has a large number of uninsured because we would rather pay out for iPods, the truth is that we don’t have it because a great many of us have crappy jobs (if any) with crappy wages and worse, no benefits.  I am exceedingly grateful to be in the portion of my generation that does have at least mediocre health insurance that covers my pre-existing conditions and a deductible that wouldn’t require me to tap into the cash line of my credit card to pay.

If we get a mandates-only health insurance bill out of Washington, where is the money going to come from to pay for the premiums, I ask?  Government subsidies?  Try getting government subsidies as a young person unless you are a single parent or living in a box.  I’ve tried.  The proposed subsidy program in one of the many health care bills, the one that does not have a public option, is about at this level.

Will it be like in Massachusetts, where you must provide proof of insurance to the state tax commission come tax day, and if you cannot provide it for all 12 months, you get a fine automatically taken out of your rebate?  That’ll go over well.  What if such a law would mean that a tax rebate became a tax liability, a liability that one could not pay?  Are we going to put people in jail for failure to send money to a private industry?  The Republican town hall disruptors scream about “fascism,” but if that’s not actual fascism, I don’t know what is.  If this is what we end up getting, you can toss me a tea bag and count me as one of them.  I strongly suspect I will not be the only liberal-turned-”teabagger” if this is what passes.

Incidentally, the cost of insurance premiums in Massachusetts has shot through the roof since “Romneycare” was enacted.  So much for mandates alone being an effective way to lower costs.

If the Democrats pass Romneycare-turned-national, they will lose Generation Y and the Millennials.

Obama’s going to make a statement on Wednesday about his vision for health care reform.  About time.  I hope he’s taken to heart the lesson that there are few real leaders in Washington, DC, and that Congress is used to 8 years of being threatened and intimidated by a consummate bully of a President to the extent that they have apparently forgotten how to lead.

A mandates-only bill is what I am against.  What I am for is a little harder to articulate.

I am in favor of a public health care option that is administered like Medicare—something that every American would be eligible for but that was not mandated and did not have automatic enrollment.

Call be a libertarian, but I am not in favor of “universal coverage” in the sense that 100% of the population would have “insurance” (whether public or private).  I think that if you are an adult, you have comprehensive and affordable options available to you, and you don’t want coverage, that should be your right—as should paying your own medical bills.  I am in favor of making good insurance affordable to everyone who wants it, and to all children regardless of what their parents want.

I am against caps on malpractice settlements.  What’s your eyesight worth to you?  What about your limbs?  What about the life of a loved one?  You see the problem with this.

I am in favor of passing a law allowing people to sue their health insurance providers.

I am in favor of having a strong federal committee to regulate the private insurance industry, but I am concerned about it becoming corrupted whenever a President or a Congress came in that didn’t want the insurance industry regulated.  Any means of making this committee robust rather than subject to the partisan whims of the time, I would be in favor of.

I am in favor of decoupling health insurance from employment.  If employers want to offer a group policy, that’s fine, but I do not support automatic enrollment of employees.

And with the exception of my tort reform opinion, I don’t see what’s so controversial about any of this.  But then, I’m not taking in thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.

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