1)Immigration status does factor into the numbers since they are trying to deceive us with saying 32 million are going to be covered when they have said this bill will not cover illegals, so the real cost is 1 trillion for about half of the 32 million and the coverage really doesn't take place until 2014.
See my comment earlier about an $80 GP visit and $20 worth of antibiotics vs. $10,000 in ER care under EMTALA. That's two orders of magnitude difference and is part of the reason health care is so expensive. If 16,000,000 legal residents can get care at primary physician prices before things get out of hand, they'll never show up in the ER requiring emergency care at ER prices that will eventually filter back to their paying patients.
16,000,000 Illegals are still going to get no basic care, land in the ER, get cared for and those two orders of magnitude are going to get passed on to you. As much as the idea of illegals having recourse to public funds bothers me, covering them would cut back on those expenses and would probably end up cheaper in the long run. And as a side benefit, we'd be able to identify them and get them out of here, which is something we're almost completely incapable of doing now.
2)So your rates HAVE GONE UP by forcing them to cover people that are going to cause them to lose money, this is proof government interference doesn't mean they can fix the issue.
Actually, it doesn't prove a thing, and you're going to break an ankle jumping to conclusions like that, because you don't have all of the facts for my group.
When I was hired by my company in 2003, there were about a hundred of us, mostly aging males. We've since swelled our ranks to about 300, and a sizable percentage of the new employees have been relatively healthy people, many well under age 40. Our rates were reasonably stable -- we even had
reductions for a couple of years -- until they started to rise three years ago. Last year our insurance company came to us and said they wanted an increase in premiums of 20%, which was largely justified by externalities such as rising hospitalization costs. We were able to negotiate the increase down to 13%, which makes me wonder why they couldn't have started there instead of trying to milk us for all we're worth. They're clearly still making a profit with the smaller increase or they'd have dropped us like a hot potato. Whatever the case, it's going to cost north of $16,500 to insure my family this year.
So given that government interference had been in place for seven years prior to 2003, that we've enlarged our pool by a factor of three and significantly reduced its risk level, how do you explain stable rates until 2007 and this year's increase?
3)Yes people will go to the cheaper states which will cause the more expensive states to find ways to lower their rates which means people will be more likely to end up getting it locally, I guess that would be the American people solving the problem instead of asking the government to save them.
If insurance companies are allowed to sell across state lines (and again, I don't have any objections to that), they're going to homogenize their risk pools and rates will be averaged out and applied nationally. The concept of the cheaper state will disappear.
4)It proves having insurance is not the answer affordable medical care is since having insurance did not prevent the majority from going bankrupt.
Sure, and why do we not have affordable medical care? Because insurance companies are in the business of taking in as much in premiums as they can while paying out as little as possible in claims. That lands people in the ER when less-expensive basic care that would have taken care of it is denied. See my comments above about $100 vs. $10,000.
5)I agree that the current tax system favors the poor but you will also not hear an aruement that we need to change it.
I'd be delighted to make that argument: Our current tax system sucks eggs and needs to change. Why I think so, how I think it should be done and why I don't think it will happen any time soon is the subject of an entirely different discussion.
... I was making refrence to all the services he mentioned that are paid for with local or city taxes that are paid through property taxes which even end up getting paid for by renters since the landlord is taking them into consideration.
You're going on the assumption that all local revenues are raised through property taxes, which isn't true in every state. In Maryland, for example, counties tax real estate, but they also receive an income tax levied as a percentage of an individual's state income tax, which is based on federal adjusted gross income. So under the right circumstances, some Marylanders are going to have
zero income tax burden and will still be using public services paid for by others.
--Mark
