I’ve been waiting to see exactly what was going to be in this thing. I’m not sure what the final product is going to look like but I know we’re probably going to see an individual mandate, an exchange program of some kind, subsidies for people who can’t afford insurance and a ban on denying insurance based on pre existing conditions. Anyways, here’s the highlights from the reconciliation bill and the link with more stuff at the bottom.
"UPDATED: The 153-page bill makes a number of changes to the Senate bill. The highlights:
–Increases the tax credits for middle-income families who buy insurance.
–Reduces the penalty for not buying insurance from $750 to $695. But the bill also requires some people to pay a share of their income as a penalty and that number was raised from 2 percent to 2.5 percent.
–It closes the gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage by 2011 and gives seniors who fall into the gap this year a $250 rebate.
–It eliminates the Cornhusker Kickback and covers 100 percent of the increased Medicaid costs of all states until 2016 and decreases each year thereafter.
–Requires that doctors that care for Medicaid patients be reimbursed at the full rate.
–Spends $250 million to fight waste, fraud and abuse.
–Delays and blunts the tax on high-end insurance plans in keeping with the deal Democrats struck with the labor unions. However, it does lower the index at which plans will be taxed, making it likely that more plans will be affected over time.
–Imposes a Medicare tax on unearned income for families making more than $250,000.
Also, the CBO score for this whole thing has been released and:
"The Democratic health care bill would cost $940 billion over 10 years and cut the federal deficit over the next two decades — figures that should help ease the worries of fiscal hawks who have been reluctant about supporting the sweeping measure.
The bill would reduce the deficit by about $130 billion in the first 10 years and by $1.2 trillion over the second 10 years. It will expand coverage to 95 percent of Americans, according to Congressional Budget Office figures released Thursday by House Democrats." Link
From what I’ve read, they’re probably going to vote on it this weekend or the beginning of next week.
How exactly does a bill cost $940 billion over ten years and then reduce the deficit by $130 billion over the same period..?
So it supposedly expands coverage to 95 percent of Americans… This doesn’t solve any of the current problems with increasing prices in health care at all! It’s just going to ship the burden via taxation. This isn’t civilian welfare, this is corporate welfare bigger than TARP and stimulus!
I mean the logic ( and I’m not saying I agree or anything just saying) is that it spreads the risk pool out and gives the government the power to negotiate down costs. So really…I think they’re thinking it’s going to save the federal government on medicare, medicaid and social security. Also, it’s supposed to take a big part of the healthcare spending burden off of families. Does that argument make sense? I don’t think so. But I’m pretty sure that’s the reasoning they’re using.
This health care bill is the least of our worries.
The Dodd financial regulation bill, which will definitely pass, is a nightmare–it’s literally the last step towards socialism. The government gets to take over firms before they actually need any kind of assistance (preemptive). The government also has the ability to create “living wills” for “systemically important” financial institutions. This means that it seizes all assets, and determines how the capital gets reallocated. Furthermore, the FED gets all kinds of powers as the central “systemic regulator.”
But the most devastating part of the bill has to deal with some sort of mandated fund or banking pool, where all banks are forced to enter into some kind of awkward and dangerous arrangement. If a bank fails, then other banks, the systemically important and powerful banks, have to step in and bailout their competitors, with the resources from this fund. It literally consolidates the entire baking system; it’s a forced cartelization (more so than now). When you combine this with the implicit government support the banking system already has, you get an unimaginable degree of moral hazard and conflict of interests. Speculators will employ credit-default swaps, not against single institutions, but against the entire banking system itself.
This literally means that if a certain number of financial institutions go under, the entire banking system will go with them. They are creating a condition which must inevitably fail, and when it does, the almighty and benevolent government will step in and save us from the “irresponsible banksters” and “greedy speculators.”
I didn’t know very much about this Dodd bill, but I think it (and the health insurance bill) are great. They are like trying to douse a fire with gasoline. The state is in its death throes, to which these massive bills will only accelerate. Get your gardens and guns in order, because the crash ain’t gonna be pretty.
Esuric, I admit I haven’t been following the financial regulations track as much as the healthcare reform track but I am definitely familiar with the basics that you’ve discussed and…it’s sort of like sleight of hand you know what I mean? While everyone is focused on healthcare, they’re passing this stuff without all the fanfare and with much less resistance.
But yeah, I think I read that they’re going to have an auto bailout (explicit Greenspan put as opposed to implicit Greenspan put) and I believe some agency is going to have the power to step in and disassemble a bank at any given time under the assumption that they’re “too big to fail” and/or represent a systemic risk (which some of them do.) Am I correct?
It is actually a move toward socialized medicine, wrapped in the word “reform”. Big surprise there I know. The $250 mill to fight “fraud, waste and abuse” is a joke. I have various securities and insurance licenses and have been doing yearly training of “fraud, waste, and abuse” for a while already. I wanted to record the audio from one training thing because how the lady sighed as she repeated “fraud, waste, and abuse” 50+ times was so funny. Alas, it said something about not to be distributed. A lot of these certifications are a HUGE waste of time. For Medicare, they feel the need to tell you what type of food may be served at “educational” versus “sales” meetings. They made the point of educating me on what constitutes a snack, and how various snacks served in concert, say a vegetable tray, hot wings, and a carton of milk, would instead be a “meal”.
I’d also like to add to all this that based on what I’ve been reading, the American people, as a majority, are not behind this plan.
Now I know logically speaking that doesn’t really matter. But from a political point of view, in a democracy, that’s pretty much all that matters. So what I’m trying to say is that even if we couldn’t make the best logical argument against this bill (which we probably can) the polls are still against it.
This is something that clearly should not pass. If it passes, and I think it probably will, it will be political suicide for incumbent Dems in swing and mostly red districts.
I have an account with online license courses in mutual funds and life insurance for Ontario. I barely passed the mutual fund exam for lack of memorizing all of the regulatory trivialities, such as the legal fine amount if you do x. They aren’t really educational courses; just regulatory familiarization. The general public assumes people with licenses know what they are doing. I’m highly skeptical.
Just because the state is killing itself doesn’t mean that when it dies we will get something better when the dust settles. We may just end up with a horrible social catastrophe and nothing else. If the mass of people are unwilling to change their ideas from statism (which is entirely possible) and embrace liberty, things could simply spiral downward. I hope things turn out well in the end, but I am not holding my breath.