good news. health care reform passed in house...now for senate.

[Mr. O]

Hope they pass to. 

[C-BLUE]

the senate will never pass that shit. the republicans are all bought and paid and so are a few of the democrats. not hard to figure out.

[Mr. O]

there's still chance.

[Sikotic™]

Honestly, I haven't read the specifics of the bill so I don't know if it is a good thing or not. If it ensures that everyone gets quality, affordable health care, then I am all for it.

[virtuoso]

Honestly, I haven't read the specifics of the bill so I don't know if it is a good thing or not. If it ensures that everyone gets quality, affordable health care, then I am all for it.

Look my friend, I understand where you are coming from but how is a nation which is literally on it's knees dying very quickly in the financial sense, afford this? The only thing keeping America alive right now is the dollar and I have lost count of the number of economists who have stated on the major news programmes that the dollar is completely fucked. I am not defending the insurance company's, I am purely saying that this, if America isn't in a state of ruin already, this will destroy America.

In fact with the rapid rate of decline America will fall into the third world status and when that happens you really will have an ultra hardcore command economy

Furthermore there is....

A dangerous secret to the Baucus health bill
Two in a series: Hidden in the Senate's health-care bill are huge incentives for corporate America to stop covering their workers. If that happens, the deficit could skyrocket.
 
 FIXING HEALTH CARE

    
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Now that the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the health-care bill proposed by Sen. Max Baucus will shrink the federal deficit over the next ten years, its champions are heralding the legislation as a model of fiscal responsibility.

But the CBO's comforting analysis relies on a big assumption that's highly questionable, an assumption that virtually no one on either side of the debate -- politicians, pundits, even economists -- is even challenging.

The assumption is that America's employers will keep providing coverage for their workers. But, in fact, the Baucus bill severely undermines the employer rationale for offering insurance. Economist Michael Tanner of the conservative Cato Institute points out two main reasons.

First, the Baucus bill would substantially increase the costs of coverage, for example by requiring rich benefits packages and coverage for Americans with pre-existing conditions at far less than their actual expense. At some point, employers will decide that the appeal of offering insurance as a tool for recruiting and retaining employees no longer compensates for its soaring cost.

Second, the bill is based on perverse incentives that no one is even discussing. The subsidies it offers to citizens are so rich that if companies were to drop their plans, the majority of workers would get the same lavish coverage, and extra cash in their paychecks to boot. "Those two factors will change the equilibrium," says Tanner. "With the government providing huge credits, employers will feel a lot less guilty about dumping their plans."

In fact, the Baucus bill is practically inviting employers to do just that: It imposes a fine of just $400 per employee on companies that shed their plans.
0:00 /3:00Insurance fight

So what happens if corporate America exits the health-care field? The foundation of the Baucus bill would pretty much collapse. Upper-middle-class earners, who today make $65,000 and up, would suffer the equivalent of a huge tax increase. And the extra revenue the government would collect from those families wouldn't remotely pay for the millions of relatively low earners who would absorb big subsidies in lieu of the premiums their employers now pay.

The corporate exodus from health care would mean that the Baucus plan, far from reducing the deficit, would actually increase it, perhaps sharply.

To understand how the math works, let's examine two typical families of three, the average household size in the U.S. The Smiths earn $43,000 a year, around the U.S. median, and the Joneses make $80,000. As we'll see, the Smiths far outnumber the Joneses, and the extra taxes the Joneses pay won't come close to paying for the lavish tax credits the Baucus bill promises the Smiths.

Here's how the Smiths fare when employer, Acme Enterprises, drops Bob Smith's plan. Say Bob gets insurance worth $13,000, and pays $3,000 himself, with Acme covering $10,000. Since the $3,000 is tax deductible, Bob earns $40,450 a year after paying his share for a lavish plan. Call that $40,450 the "benchmark."

When Acme drops its coverage, his pay should rise by $10,000, less the $400 penalty, or $9,600. That's what Acme needs to pay to stay competitive, even in this weak labor market. Bob is in a 15% tax bracket, so he takes home an extra $8,160 to pay for insurance.

Here's what really counts: Under the Baucus bill, his health-care costs are capped at around $6,000, with the government paying the rest for the coverage Bob will now buy from a private insurer through the exchange envisaged in the Baucus bill.

So Bob gets an effective raise of over $2,100, plus the $2,550 he used to pay out of his own pocket. So he effectively pockets a pay increase of $4,700 -- or 12% -- and keeps his premium plan.

The regime that brought the Smiths good fortune is a disaster for the Jones family. The main reason is that at $80,000, Mike Jones earns too much at Acme to merit a health-care subsidy. Indeed, Mike gets his $9,600 raise, but after paying taxes on it in a higher bracket (30%), he doesn't have nearly enough left over to buy a $13,000 family plan. In fact, he's $4,200 worse off after paying for coverage. That's an effective pay hit of over 5%.

The big tax on people like the Jones family is only the first of the two problems. The second is the lacerating effect on spending and the deficit. The Smiths do pay higher taxes than before, around $1,800 more, in fact. But they're also getting $7,000 in subsidies, so they're imposing a net cost on the system of over $5,000.

By contrast, the Joneses are paying around $2,700 extra in taxes, plus they're absorbing the $400 penalty that Acme pays when it drops their policy. So the Joneses are contributing around $3,000 to to help pay for the Smiths.

Around two-thirds of America's workers earn less than $65,000 a year, and it's those employees who are getting far more in subsidies than they're paying in taxes.

So let's imagine the worst: that all 40 million employees covered by expensive corporate plans (that's over 120 million people, including their dependents), lose their coverage. By my calculations, the two-thirds who earn less than $65,000 would cost around $5,000 per family, for a total of $135 billion. The families earning over that number would contribute around $30 billion, and the government would collect another $16 billion from the $400 fine, bringing the extra revenues to $46 billion.

Hence, the extra subsidies, minus the additional tax receipts, would run about $90 billion a year. That would double the figure that the CBO is projecting to around $180 billion, a number big enough to totally erase the shrinkage in the deficit. In fact, it would immensely swell both the spending and the deficit in the years beyond 2019.

It gets worse. Middle-class earners will never tolerate a 5% tax hike. They, too, will demand big subsidies, and Congress is likely to oblige. A new middle-class bailout will quickly swamp all the current budget projections.

Even if employers simply accelerate what they're doing already, in many cases dropping their plans or scaling them back, it's a recipe for higher taxes and bigger deficits. The mystery is why the Baucus plan offers corporate America such a tempting, if not irresistible, invitation to get out.

and it doesn't end there

Health bill's deadly fine print

I am postponing my second column on the direct complicity of doctors and psychologists during the CIA's torturing of terrorism suspects because of the sudden disclosure that, in the influential Senate Finance Committee's health-care bill, there is a dangerous provision that could deny crucial health treatments for Medicare patients.

This is the much-publicized and debated Baucus bill, named for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus. In its news section, the Wall Street Journal reported (Sept. 17) that this bill "breaks a logjam and is likely to form the core of a bill in the full Senate."

During the continuous, extensive coverage of this proposed legislation, there has been only very limited mention – and none I've seen in the mainstream press – of a section that penalizes doctors for Medicare patients who, for at least five years (from 2015 to 2020), authorize total treatments that wind up in the top 10 percent of national annual Medicare costs per patient.

The 1 in 10 Medicare doctors who spend beyond this limit will themselves lose 5 percent of their own total Medicare reimbursements. Considering the already low rates Medicare doctors get – and the president pledges they will get lower – this could be a heavy penalty.

As Burke Balch, director of the National Right to Life's Center for Medical Ethics, says: "This (part of the Baucus bill) means that all doctors treating older people will constantly be driven to try to order the least-expensive tests and treatments for fear they will be caught in that top 10 percent. Note that this feature operates independently of any considerations of quality, efficiency or waste. If you authorize enough treatment for your patients, however necessary and appropriate it may be, you are in danger of being one of the 1 in 10 doctors who will be penalized each year."

There is, however, in the Baucus bill what seems to be an exception to this iron mandate for reducing medical-care costs that indeed is not related to quality of care, while aiming solely at reducing the national debt. There is a section (page 80, the Chairman's Mark) that gives Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services, permission to adjust these strictures for "those physicians who tend to serve less healthy individuals who may require more intensive interventions."

Don't miss the August edition of Whistleblower magazine: "Medical Murder: Why Obamacare could result in the early deaths of millions of baby boomers"

But what is submerged in here is the cold fact that even if a Medicare doctor does apply this permission in treating certain patients, as he considers necessary, the pressures will continue – with regard to his entire cumulative roster of other Medicare patients – to keep very much in mind that he or she may still be in peril of winding up at the end of a year in the punishable top 10 percent of annual Medicare costs per patient.

To bring Balch back into the conversation concerning the actual effects of the 10 percent health penalty on real-life patients, as well as doctors, he points out that this penalty for Medicare doctors "creates a moving target."

"By definition," Balch said, "there will always be a top 10 percent, no matter how far down the total amount of money spent on Medicare is driven." Say that 2015, the top 10 percent is anything over $10,000 per patient. In 2016, most doctors will scramble to hold down the treatments they authorize to avoid breaking that limit."

But the real possibility, as a result, is that the total annual amount of that limit will drop. So next year, doctors will try to avoid being in the penalty box for anything they authorize over $9,500. Burke Balch adds:

"As the process repeats, the next year might be anything over $9,000. The year after that anything over $8,000, and so on. It's a game of musical chairs, in which there is always one chair less than the number of players. No matter how fast the contestants run, someone will always be the loser when the music stops."

But Medicare doctors will not be the only losers. As the doctors struggle to keep abreast of the continually falling limit of the money they can authorize for their contingent of patients, consider what those patients will lose in the quality of their treatment.

(Column continues below)

The bluntest assessment of this approach to health-care "reform" is by National Right to Life executive director David N. O'Steen:

"It takes the telltale fingerprints from the government: Instead of bureaucrats directly specifying the treatment denials that will mean death and poorer health for older people, it compels individual doctors to do the dirty work."

Even if this insidious provision does not survive in the eventual Senate bill, or is excluded from the subsequent House-Senate Conference Committee report on what President Obama will eventually enact into law, its actual existence is a further warning to all of us to pay very close attention to all the health-care "reform" bills before any of them becomes law. For some of us, our very lives may depend on the ultimate statute – not only because of the quality of care we will get, but rather for the nature of our final exit.

An adage that took me many years to understand is that "what the government gives, it can take away." That's why an essential individual responsibility of American citizenship is to keep a close eye on your government at all times.

[Þŕiņçë]

Honestly - What ruined this country, inevitably, is the fact that we ARE democracy. Lets be honest, some people just aren't fucking smart enough to have the privilege of having an opinion on matters. Even though its a very small opinion, you know that t shirt right? Stupid people in large numbers.