July 15 (Bloomberg) – House Democrats plan to fund the broadest U.S. health-care expansion in four decades by increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, imposing a surtax of 5.4 percent on couples with more than $1 million in income.
You’re scared of “bureaucrats” who might “ration” your health care? Well. I’m terrified health care costs bankrupting my family. That’s reality – not private insurance industry propaganda.
We can all dream that the costs that they are proposing turn out to be the real costs. A 5.4% tax is nothing compared to the true costs that will be impossible to measure due to the new inefficiencies and wealth that will now never come into existence both in health-care and in general.
The demise of what’s left of free-market healthcare is the most frightening spectre that we are confronted with in the first world. Deaths from terrorism will be insignificant compared to those caused by a collapse in medical innovation
Let’s say there are 1.000.000 persons making one million dollar a year in the US. Tax their income at 5,4% and you have 54 billion dollars available, OK? Is this enough to run an universal health care plan? European experience tells no: if Uncle Sam spends, say, 1.000 US $ on each one of its citizens (a very conservative sum given current European expenditures) each year he would need 300 billions a year to break even and expenditures are bound to increase each year as average age increases and costs spiral out of control as with every “public enterprise”. This is very simple math any child can do.
Of course I am not considering a chunck of the economy “going underground” in face of increased taxation, people bringing money abroad etc or simply influential pressure groups saying “no way”.
This is just one of the stunts Socialists, whatever their color, love to pull from time to time. They are still so saturated by the idea of class war that they think it will be enough to fool people all the time.
Ask if he prefers people to be dead rather than bankrupt (typical in the socialized medicine). But of course the government regulation is the real culprit that everyone is forgetting about for some reason.
I wonder though how much of all this is being pushed by the hospitals who want to subsidize the losses they incur with non-paying patients instead of compensating them out of their revenue. Imagine if stores demanded the shoplifting losses to be compensated out of the taxes!
