I love the japanese when they go out and do this:
http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2009/02/12/obama-sex-doll/
Shows that even foreigners understand how harmful the policies of the present adminstration are, when such jokes become acceptable.
Prime’s right, I’m a medical biller for a small company. The biggest and most immediate difficulty we see with Medicare and Medicaid is that because nobody has any choices, ultimately it’s the healthcare provider that gets screwed.
Each year we are forced to accept LESS MONEY for the same services, and each year we are forced to comply with more and more regulations that take more employees to complete. I haven’t had a raise in about four years, and things keep getting worse for my company. We have to change our policies about providing services in order to cut costs, and we have less leeway to write off in order to help our poorer patients, because we just don’t have the money.
On the other side of things, each year we also see an increase in the number of audits that come in from Medicare. Virtually every one of them is spurious, and it requires us to go through a large amount of manpower and paper to respond to. The first and second review steps usually ignore what is being submitted, so the whole thing gets forwarded up the chain a bunch of times on the Medicare end. I have visions of the armies of people employed by the government, whom I’m personally paying out of my own paycheck, required to basically do nothing of consequence. All because the initial number of audits shows up on somebody’s statistical survey as “Medicare fraud averted” or something.
Bottom line from where I sit, the more the government gets involved with private insurance, the more private insurance will come to resemble public insurance, and that’s bad for everyone.
Healthcare inflation is due to productivity differentials (labor intensive sectors see cost increases on top of wage growth) and was just was fast before the government healthcare programs. Problem is, inequality has increased a lot and middle class families (or what’s left of the middle class after manufacturing was outsourced) can’t afford the same standard of living.
Excess inflation in healthcare:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fredgraph.png?g=8kg
But anyway, ignore these facts, back to the thread.
Would the mandate help resolve this situation?
“Interesting. Care to point me to a case where this is done? It’s fine if not; I’m more curious than anything.”
Search around the Bricker amendment controversy in the 1950s.
For court cases:
US v. Pink
Oyama v. California
Seiji Fujii v. California
and Missouri v. Holland
The Holland case is the biggest.
EDIT: nvm
Franchisors warn Obamacare will halve profits
…
Most, said Atlanta Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken franchiser David Barr, presumed that the reports about how hard Obamacare will hit them were overblown. “They had their head in the sand,” he told Secrets.
That is until he pulled out his powerpoint showing how funding Obamacare will cut his–and likely their–profits in half overnight. With simple math the small business folks understood, he spelled out that their only choice is to slash employee hours so they aren’t eligible for company-paid health care or stop offering insurance and pay the $2,000 per employee fine…
Under Obamacare, however, he will have to provide health insurance for all 109 full-time workers, a cost of $444,000, or two and half times more than his current costs. That $315,000 increase is equal to just over half his annual profit, after expenses, or 1.5 percent of sales. As a result, he said, “I’m not paying $444,000.”
My response to the ruling:
