With the news today coming out that the most recent Gallup poll stunningly uncovered the fact that Americans want the best health care but don’t want to pay for it, came shock and disbelief albeit only from people that were stranded on a desert. “The poll of 3,026 adults, surveyed Friday through Sunday, has a margin of error of +/—2 percentage points. Some questions, asked of half the sample, have an error margin of +/—3 points.  By 56%-33%, those surveyed endorse the idea of enacting major health care changes this year. Just one in four say it’s not important to them.   When it comes to financing the costs, six of 10 favor the idea of requiring employers to provide health insurance for their workers or pay a fee instead.” from the USA Today Gallup poll.The fact that this survey was actually paid for by a public company was more shocking to me,” said Captain Obvious of I knew it, Florida.  Perhaps the greatest idea came from the Gallup poll writers themselves when they decided to go home for the day and stop asking silly questions.I am a Florida health insurance broker with a solid reputation for encouraging socialized health care and I believe that with or without this reform, the economy is going to collapse on a level not seen before.  Still the costs inherent in continuing down this road of continued privatization is more dangerous to our economy then letting the bloated Washington politicians take their normal kickbacks.  Obviously, I am in the most danger from a Universal health care solution, as my health insurance company would have to close and lose our entire book of business.While considering my abnormal viewpoints with a colleague recently, I was reminded of a terrific book I read called the “Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein, a truly thought provoking book, quite the opposite of a Gallup poll.  Her book is based on historical facts and statistics that were used by the Chicago School of Economics to shock nations into globalization.  This allowed US companies to go into these poor, often battered companies and buy everything from the workers to their public utilities.  The reason why many of these countries were so poor was because they were often “spoiled” by social programs they couldn’t afford.  The IMF and the large corporations would then only loan money to remake the countries if the politicians would agree to open up global trade (which allowed the international companies to go in and buy everything that was attached) and repeal any and all social programs.  Largely, these countries of course suffered immensely worse then before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had gone into the countries and after 5-10 years the local currency etc. would start to gain traction and the economy were modernized into a model of capitalism. The parallel between these countries (mostly Latin American and Middle Eastern) and our country today is that we are on the precipice of a truly awful economic decline and polls like the one by Gallup confirm that we as Americans want everything but won’t sacrifice anything to get it.    Of course the politicians will still promise and deliver these programs to us without regard to cost or anything else as long as they are elected time and again.  And the ugly truth of the book (which is pointedly liberal) is that we going to need to be shocked out of these habits in order to “reset” the economy.  All social programs and anything else that causes deficits and debt will have to be abandoned and then started all over again. As the most productive nation on earth, this future can certainly be avoided by making good decisions like Universal Health Care but cuts will have to be made elsewhere!   But just like after all the recessions that Greenspan avoided by messing with the interest rates (which is causing a larger, more impending crash which will combine all the past recessions as bills from these prior mistakes have never been absorbed, just deferred) and like we are doing again, now by avoiding the current recession and spending money that just doesn’t even exist, this final bill is going to come due.  And it is coming due. And when other countries wake up and stop financing our debts, as they wake up to the notion that is impossible for us to pay them back. When? I have no idea.  But the first part of it is happening already as the dollar continues to decline and China is slowing  its ridiculous purchase of our treasuries.   I am willing to give up my cushy health insurance brokerage for the good of this country and if we all do something painful it can help defray some of the pain that is coming, what are you willing to do?

Popularity: unranked [?]

When the terrorist attacks of 9/11 hit the United States and then suddenly we were plunged into war, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, I don’t remember anyone demanding that the wars be “deficit neutral.”  No one talked about whether we could afford them.  They were things we just had to do.

When George W. Bush proposed giving vast sums to rich people in the form of tax cuts, no one argued that it would be “deficit neutral.”  Rather, it was argued that cutting taxes wouldn’t bring in less tax revenue at all, it would bring us more tax revenue because the economy would grow so much faster. And besides, it was somehow terribly urgent, something we just had to do.

When the banks tottered and needed to be shored up with taxpayer money to the tune of nearly $1 trillion, there was no way to argue this would be “deficit neutral.”  We might get the money back, we might not.  Whether we could afford it was not the question, we just had to do it to save the banking system.  Similarly, the “Stimulus Bill” was terribly urgent, and something we just had to do, whether we could afford it or not. Then we come to health care reform, and suddenly, it seems, this is where we draw the line.  The president says that health care reform must be “deficit neutral.”  It can’t actually cost us anything in tax funds.  And everyone nods sagely and argues over how to do this. Why? Why is this the one thing that we can only do if we can prove ahead of time that it will not actually cost anything?  Our current system costs us an estimated 44,000 lives and impoverishes millions of Americans every year, and causes untold suffering.  Why is this the one huge national problem that everyone agrees we can’t afford to solve?

Popularity: unranked [?]

Senate Democrats have managed a compromise on a health care bill that is a fraud on the American public, which is increasingly leery about a government-run health care option.Instead of a government health service to provide coverage to individuals not covered by company plans, the Senate bill authorizes the federal Office of Personnel Management to contract with a nonprofit insurer to provide an alternative to private health care plans. (The post office is such a nonprofit – it walks, talks and doles out mediocre service just like the motor vehicle office and Veterans’ Affairs Department.)This public-private plan would have a disproportionate share of participants with expensive pre-existing conditions and chronic problems. Although it would have slightly lower administrative costs than the likes of Aetna or Humana, this adverse selection of clients would compel it to provide inferior service and curtailed benefits – unless the federal government empowered this nonprofit to force doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical and medical device companies to accept significantly lower reimbursements than they do from most private insurers. Inferior patient care is the more likely outcome.Just as with the House bill, private companies will find it cheaper to drop coverage and pay a tax, thus pushing their employees into this public-private option.Ordinary Americans are correct to fear that they will lose their private insurance. Once a few competitors (or even just one large one) in an industry opt to drop their private insurance in favor of paying a tax and pushing employees into the public-private option, other firms must follow or face competitive cost disadvantages.By adding another 31 million people to the health insurance rolls, the Senate and House bills will add another $1,000 to $2,000 to the cost of a private family health care plan. Americans fortunate enough to hold onto to their private plans may not be taxed directly, but they will face a combination of higher co-pays, bigger payroll deductions for health care and lower wages to permit employers to absorb higher costs.Health care will be more expensive and good health care less accessible for many taxpaying middle-class workers.As for out-of-control health care costs, the Senate and House bills “bend the cost curve” all right – in the wrong direction. By increasing entitlements without truly taking on the special interests – tort lawyers, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies – these bills would raise the cost of health care.Americans already pay at least 50 percent more for health care than the French and Germans and perhaps double what the British pay. By pushing health care from 18 percent of gross domestic product to 20 percent, these “reforms” will make the typical middle-class family poorer and the U.S. economy less competitive. More jobs will be lost.That is not health care reform Americans should accept – and the polls indicate they don’t.Sadly, Senate and House Democrats believe they know better than most Americans what is good for them. These elitists don’t know much about effectively managing health care or the economy, and we are all losers for that.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Federal health care reform will increase individual insurance rates significantly in Ohio, especially for younger healthy people, unless reform bills require every American to buy insurance, the region’s leading health insurer warns in a new report    QuantcastProposals currently in the House and Senate could triple rates for a 25-year-old single male, while more than doubling rates for a 40-year-old couple with two children, wrote Anthem Blue Cross & Blue Shield in Ohio.A 60-year-old couple with some health concerns would see rates decline 11 percent, the company said.Those bills are flawed because they don’t require everybody, especially healthy people with lower health costs, to buy insurance, Anthem said.The company, which holds nearly one-third of the market in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, said the bills have loosened the so-called “individual mandate,” or imposed penalties that are far too low. At the same time, the proposals would require insurers to cover everybody who applies.”It’s critical that everyone is part of the pool,” Anthem President Erin Hoeflinger said. “We have seen the impact. If you know you can wait to buy insurance until you’re sick or if the penalty doesn’t equal the premium, people will make the right financial decision for them. But that increases health care costs.”Col Owens, a senior attorney at Legal Aid Society of Southwest Ohio and co-chairman of Ohio Consumers for Health Coverage, agreed that the system would work better if the pool includes everybody. But he said the way to achieve that is through more realistic subsidies that would allow everyone to afford the coverage they need.”If you’re going to stiffen the mandate, you’ve got to have money to allow people to get in,” he said.The numbers are only the latest blizzard of statistics in the fight over health care reform. Members of Congress are debating no fewer than five separate bills. They include some level of individual mandate but with different requirements and different levels of subsidy.A bill from the Senate Finance Committee, for example, would charge penalties starting at only a few hundred dollars for people who did not buy insurance, only a fraction of the cost of an individual policy.Details of the bills are likely to change dramatically before a final bill is produced.According to Anthem’s study, which uses data on real rates in Columbus, the plans would increase the monthly premium for the 25-year-old single male to $157 from $52. The monthly premium for the 40-year-old parents would increase to $737 from $332, while monthly rates for the 60-year-old couple in Columbus would decrease to $648 from $726.It said about half of the increase results from the lack of an effective individual mandate

Popularity: unranked [?]

The state Colorado can’t afford one dollar of new spending, as recent budget troubles have shown. Yet any health care reform that emerges from Congress could dramatically add to the state’s financial obligations.Early, back-of-the-envelope estimates show Colorado’s Medicaid costs could soar under the bills being merged in conference committee.The Senate’s expansion of Medicaid coverage to those at 133 percent of the federal of poverty level and below would add roughly 266,000 Coloradans to the rolls, The Denver Post’s Burt Hubbard showed us as he sifted through Census data.Based on the average payment the state makes for the 481,720 Coloradans already on the rolls, those newcomers would add a staggering $687 million to the state’s costs each year. (The more generous House bill could expand Colorado’s costs by roughly $1.2 billion.)Compare that to a state general fund of $7.5 billion, and there’s reason for immense concern.State officials won’t speculate as to how much health care reform could cost Colorado in terms of extra Medicaid expenses. Medicaid is an enormously complex program with many moving pieces, and Congress is most likely to increase the amount of federal taxpayer dollars that go to offset state costs.But even if Colorado’s obligations to Medicaid increase by 10 percent (or $68 million) of our admittedly rough estimates, the state, which faces a total $1.5 billion budget deficit through the next fiscal year, would be in trouble.The goal of reforming health care can’t simply be the laudable one of universal coverage. Costs must come down — or at least stabilize — for businesses and ratepayers.Yes, some new taxes will be inevitable. The House version would add a 5.4 percent surtax on those who make $500,000 or more. The Senate would add an excise tax on the so-called “Cadillac” health insurance plans. Besides generating needed money, the idea is that the tax would encourage policyholders to consider less expensive plans, helping drive down costs.The House bill provides a public option that the Senate has dropped, and is unlikely to find its way back into a final bill. But the Senate bill includes a provision that would create a national insurance plan to be run as a nonprofit that would be offered in the insurance exchanges both bills would create. Such a plan could help drive down costs and ought to be considered, even though we supported the public option.The House would offer a national insurance exchange, the Senate a state-by-state system. It would seem more likely that a national exchange would create the kind of competition needed to drive down costs.So far, the process has been poisoned by concessions and perks meant to hold lobbyists at bay and to win votes. If these transformational reforms are to be of real value, lawmakers have a lot of work left to do.But as of now, we’re not optimistic.

Popularity: unranked [?]