they rammed all the other things through... now they are scared for their seats because they see how much the public hates it.

I agree. We need simply change some of the regulations governming insurance companies. the exemptions need to go, but also a few regulations need to go. If you change jobs, you should not lose your insurance, that means that employers shouldn't be forced to give insurance, in fact they shouldn't be ALLOWED to give insurance, instead they should give a special tax free insurance stipend that you apply towards and insurance of your choice. If you change jobs, you just have your new employer apply his stipend towards your insurance, or pay for it yourself

. You shouldn't lose your insurance if you move, if you are really opposed towards allowing insurance to be sold across state lines, you can limit it to existing contracts (that is, if you move you get to keep your insurance in the other state, but you can't buy a new policy in another state than that which you live in).

Finally, you should rein in malpractice. Actually, malpractice needs to be seperated into medical accidents and medical assults. If the doctor carves his initials into your bones while operating (real case) or uses his own sperm instead of your spouse when doing artificial insimination, that is assult... not malpractice. he should immediately lose his license; be arrested, and be tried for assault. Compensation should come from his personal funds too. not an unlimited compensation lawsuit against the insurance company. Actual medical accidents should be insured for treatment (that is, the insurance pays for your medical bills to undo the damage), and maybe a small predetermined "emotional compensation" fixed amount payout. (right now, its just sue for unlimited payout with a sympathetic jury). It really really sucks when those things happen, but currently malpractice insurance is more than 50% of the gross income of doctors. cutting it down some would mean you half the price of medical care.

the whole "have them compete with government insurance" simply is impossible to do right. Because you just KNOW they will funnel tax payer money to the government insurance company, this means that you are already paying for government insurance, so either you pay twice or you switch to government... it is a stealth way to kill private insurance. Sure if the government managed health insurance company was run WITHOUT taxpayer subsidy it would be perfectly legitimate move... but pigs will fly before something like that happens.

While I agree that mostly, every regulation requires an enforcement bureaucracy the size of which bears a direct relationship to the granularity of the regulation.  Highly granular, complex regulation begets big bureaucracy, a bureaucracy which siphons capital from the real economy, contributing nothing, and spawns ancillary private industry devoted, not to wealth generation, but avoidance of the impacts of regulation.  Regulatory simplification may be an oxymoron, but it's our only path to recovery from the mess we're in, IMO.

Don't misunderstand, regulation of things directly relating to basic public health & safety issues - e.g., sanitation, drinking water, transportation, building codes (up to a point) - is necessary and beneficial, having raised our standard of living immeasurably.  Once you get past the basics, though, regulatory bureaucracy just gums up the works.  When it comes to commerce (and the delivery of healthcare services is commerce), simple regulatory principles are better.  The microregulated nanny state is not conducive to either health or wealth.  Again, IMO.  And it is doomed to collapse in on itself, once there is insufficient productive commerce to support it.  Just look at Greece.

I know an industry that is worse regulated then insurance.

Energy futures. Enron was the first, the high gas prices we had until a few months before the 2008 election was due to banks trading oil futures (largest oil trader in the world? JP morgan bank; not exxon mobile like some think). they were rushing out in fear of new regulation, but it didnt happen and prices have been rising since. And natural gas and other energies are still all being traded heavily in futures and causing price hikes / bubbles for no reason at all.

We need to permanently ban the trading of energy futures by anyone who isn't directly involved in production or delivery. The futures market is there so that farmers could sell their stock, not so that bank X, bank Y, and bank Z can buy 90% of global crude oil production for the next 10 years, and then steadily increase the price at which they sell it to refiners.

Banning isn't the same as regulating, though.  Banning doesn't require a compliance bureaucracy, just criminal statutes.

Energy futures, or any futures trading for that matter, isn't an industry. It's just a part of an industry. Let's try and stick to facts here folks. The stock market isn't actually an industry at all, although it is a major part of the economy. Let's not start mixing apples and koala bears.

I disagree with at least part of that. We have a legal system for a reason. If laws are passed that forbid (regulate) insurance companies from cheating their customers we already have a system in place, one entire section of government called the legal system, that can handle it. No need for anything new. Also, getting rid of the anti-trust exclusion for them doesn't require a new government organization. It already exists.

That was my whole point. We can fix a huge part of the problem without creating a new beaurocracy or spending huge amounts of tax money.

err.. I am sorry, but are you really desperate for me trying to declare myself a hard and fanatic democrat that I would think that?

The Republican-controlled congress was an example of good and efficient conservative cut-the-spending while Clinton was in the house. The animosity between the two sides kept things balanced, and Clinton had to be careful about how he would propose budget.

But when Bush got into the house, spending care went to hell, and the budget raised to records. I can't really blame it all on Bush, can't I? What happened to the same people that were so diligent with Clinton?

Looks like a bunch of replies got 'eaten' during today's forum maintenance.

Yea, sorry Cikomyr.  My reply to you got eaten as well.  Don't worry - there were no swear words in it.

Looks like a socialist plot to wipe out some conservative posts!!!

Would be the day if Stardock became socialist.. eh..

All my best arguments, all the debates won - poof, gone!

Some might have said the same about GM - over a year ago.

I think "Bettyinlove" was the socialist saboteur this go round.

Who is BettyinLove?

well, if they get their way nationalizing healthcare, and having already nationalized the banks and auto industry... the gaming industry is low on the list, but it will eventually be nationalized too.

Lotteries are already state run.  They are half way there.

She (?) was a spammer. In one of the older threads I made a remark that her (?) account would be going away (as this person spammed an article). Well the day of the crash, Jafo responded to that article and gave an affirmative to my old comment. So it sounded like there was a correlation between the spammer and what happened to JU. Just a theory on my part.

Lotteries aren't games... they are a voluntary tax on the mathematically challenged.

Ok, split bugs bunny there will you!

Nationalised?

We really don't have the same definition of "nationalisation", ya know. The way I see it, the state put them under tutelage because of their mismanagement, with all the intention of putting them back into business on the mid-term, when it will be sure that thousands of americans won't loose their job because of the greed of the higher-ups.

And as far as I know, hospitals will still be runned by their private administration. Insurance business will be more competitive, but will still try to rival the government's alternative. This is a freaking long shot from socialised medicine, my good friend. You will still even be less socialised than the U.K...

Few people manage to pack so many wrong statements in so few words.

Taken over by government, the government now owns them; the government dictates what they do. Up to and include the president of the USA firing the CEO of GM.

The government doesn't know how to run anything, what exactly are they going to teach them?

The banks failed because the government forced them, by law, to make bad loans. The auto industry was being laden with union contracts that force its labor to be nearly twice as expensive as its competition; this is combined with laws protecting the environment and workers which also raise costs. It is not a bad thing to have such laws, but it requires protective tariffs, for years we had such tariffs. They were lifted (too quickly), without lifting the costly restrictions and regulations... this made companies uncompetitive. There was also an element of "mismanagement" there, because they did not invest enough in development of technology to keep up with the Asians manufacturers. That was many years (15+) ago with completely different management, in fact, the current management has been catching up to the Asians very rapidly and doing a great job in this regard; every year the gap got smaller.

Even if it is their intention to eventually privatize those companies, it doesn’t change the fact that they did nationalize them.

Then they find new jobs. Oh wait, they can’t! nationalizing companies and spending like crazy has devastated the market so everyone is losing jobs.

Besides which, chapter 11 would have meant the end of the unions and sustainable employment with those companies, not the loss of jobs. They would have still needed many employees. Once costs would be under control, they might have even more jobs offered.

See the retort to “because of their mismanagement”

Sigh… ok let’s do this.

If the government tells them exactly how to run it in a 2000 page law and via a variety of future legislation AND most importantly, “best practices” dictated by the government, then no, it isn’t run by their private administrators. It is run by the government with private puppet management.

Everyone going bankrupt is not “more competitive”… if you use taxpayer money to fund insurance, there will be only 1 insurance company, the USA. Which will cost more and provide less… the rich might (and current bills do ban it) be able to still buy their private quality insurance for much more money. But that wouldn’t really help much since the healthcare industry would be ravaged (not just the health insurance), meaning there isn’t care even if you can pay for it. Doctors will not be able to get away with only treating people with private insurance and rejecting all government patients.

This WILL become socialized medicine really quickly. In fact, that is their whole points, various democrats publically stated that this is the plan.

Only difference between this and the UK, is that this is a stepwise process that will take a few years to transition to full socialism… also unlike the UK, this still doesn’t have tort reform, because democrats are getting too many bribes from trial lawyers.

As you notice in the original post, it just collapsed in Israel. It is in the same sorry state in Canada and Europe, and it has failed in the USA when tried by individual states (such as Hawaii and Massachusetts; and I hear a third one too, but I haven’t had time to look that one up).

What he said!  Very good!

I will add for Cikomyr that much of the rhetoric he has been hearing is just a bunch of lies.  The largest health insurer in the US is the Federal Government.  The highest rate of care rejection from insurance companies is - the federal government (almost twice as high as the largest private insurer).  The highest incident of fraud and waste in any insurance plan is - the federal government!

I cannot comment on the nuances of the Canadian health system other than to quote the anecdotal stories we hear about.  But accepting what you have said about it at face value, I can tell you unequivocally that the USA federal government is not the Canadian central government.  The malfeasance of the feds down here is apparently unparalleled in the western world. (that does not mean I buy the previous statement, but just accepting that other governments are more altruistic).  And it all has to do with power.  They got it, they use (abuse) it.

You do not feed a cancer to make it go away.  And that is what this latest abortion of a law is all about. Concentrating more power in the hands of the feds, and making sure there is more waste, fraud, denial of services (up to and including the death panels - see oregon Cancer victim) and exhorbitant costs.

It will not make things better here, it will make them worse, and that is the plan, so they can get their real law - socialized medicine - through and finally destroy the health system of the US completely.

I think the root of the health care problem lies in the Medicare/Medicaid BIg Government entitlement programs.

Which is why I am dismayed by some of the contradictorian nature of your average conservatives in the U.S.. By your account, there isn't a larger hive of scum and villany than the Federal Government's administration. You are effectively saying that the average U.S. public servant is less moral than the average Canadian civil servant. I find it hard to swallow, as I don't believe americans are a more morally broke people than the Canadians, but let's step from that point from one second.

If they are so morally bankrupted, yet you still trust them to have tools to spy into homes based on what THEY claim is justifiable. You believe them when they give reasons why your country should go to war, and why the Israeli governemnt isn't that bad of a people. You trust the government on so many levels. Why the difference in trust between what the government is allowed to do when it comes to national security (& others) and everything else?

Seriously. We don't trust our own government (who, as we established, is runned by more moral people than in Washington) by a long shot when it comes to spying on its citizen. You aren't close of seeing a Patriot Act on our ground, yet we trust them to runs other elements.

This.. is contradictory, to say the least.