Conservative columnist Cal Thomas published an article on September 7 in which he advocated adoption of a plan developed by the Heritage Foundation to amend the tax system, reform government spending, and balance the federal budget.
I read through this very complicated document. The section regarding federal spending on healthcare is so bad that it requires comment. The plan advocates the provision of tax credits that families can use to buy insurance instead of employer-purchased plans, whether they are working or not.
The consequences of such actions would be disastrous!
Here’s why:
Currently, people who are employed and are lucky enough to have a group health plan supplied by their employer are insured regardless of their health history or that of their dependents. The same is true of governmental employees. The same goes for people who are able to obtain Medicaid (which is becoming increasingly difficult) and for people who are able to obtain Medicare.
Private insurance companies operate to make a profit, which is certainly understandable. They use the premiums collected to pay for medical services used by their customers. To the extent that they can collect premiums and not pay for services, they increase their profits. When they provide insurance to members of large groups, they are able to spread the risk of large payouts across many individuals and increase their chances of operating profitably.
For the vast numbers of people who are not eligible for such coverage, individual or family plans are extremely expensive; and if there is any negative health history, these plans are either unaffordable, the relevant health problem is excluded, or the plan provides minimal coverage. Private plans costing more than $1,000 per month all too often pay for essentially nothing. And anyone who has employer-based insurance is subject to the same problem. If they become sick and can no longer work, they lose their employer-based insurance – and if their family is dependent on this insurance, all will become uninsured.
The Heritage Foundation plan addresses none of these problems. It is a ‘you are on your own, sucker’ plan that saves the government money but puts a majority of Americans at risk. Without Medicaid and Medicare, those with significant medical problems would be unable to obtain coverage. The relatively small tax credit or voucher offered by the Republican Heritage Foundation would not fix the problem.
Furthermore, unlike “Obamacare,” no one is mandated to have healthcare insurance. This will reduce the pool of healthy people paying into the system. It leaves people with serious problems – who cannot afford insurance – to use emergency rooms to obtain acute care and no way to pay for chronic treatment.
The devil is in the details! The plan is posted on a website called “Saving the Dream’. Saving the dream? I don’t think so!
Heritage Foundation Healthcare Plan (touted by Congressional Republicans): www.savingthedream.com
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Alan Grayson was right!
Wolf Blitzer asked Rep. Ron Paul a great question at the September 12 CNN/Tea Party Express Republican debate in Tampa, Fla. "What should happen," Blitzer asked, "if a healthy 30-year-old man who can afford insurance chooses not to buy it – and then becomes catastrophically ill and needs intensive care for six months?" When Dr. Paul ducked the question, fondly recalling the good old days before Medicare and saying that we should all take responsibility for ourselves, Blitzer pressed the point. "But, Congressman, are you saying the society should just let him die?"
At that point, the audience erupted in cheers and whoops of "Yeah!"
This was indeed an appalling, mob-mentality moment – more Dark Ages, even, than the crowd applauding Gov. Rick Perry for winning the death-penalty derby at the previous debate. What it clarified was the absurdity of the healthcare positions of all of the Republican candidates. The GOP contenders relentlessly attack "Obamacare" as socialized medicine, but they will not speak of the other two choices available to us: the arguably more socialized system we presently live with or the Blitzer option of letting the uninsured die in the streets.
The first is a system with an individual mandate of the kind included in the Obama bill, or what Romney enacted in Massachusetts in 2006. Under this kind of system, individuals are not given a choice about whether to insure themselves. If they fail to meet the insurance requirement, they pay money, which you can call a fine or a tax, as you prefer. Under this alternative, the costs incurred by Blitzer's young man are not broadly socialized because they are covered by the fine on those who avoid signing up for insurance.
The second option is our current system, or other systems without mandates. In this universe, our hypothetical young man receives at least emergency care because hospitals are required to treat the urgently ill without regard for their ability to pay, thanks to a bill signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986. But the costs of his treatment are not absorbed by the hospitals. They are passed on to consumers, employers, and the government in the form of higher insurance premiums. One 2009 study estimated the cost absorbed by those who are insured for those who aren't at $1,100 per family. This is one of the ways in which the pre-Obama health care system is socialized—indirectly, inefficiently, and unfairly.
The third option is that of the Tampa Tea Party mob: Let the young man die! You can sugar-coat this, as Ron Paul tried to, by suggesting that private charity will step in to help. But we no longer have an extensive system of charity hospitals. If emergency rooms treat the uninsured, whether because of a legal requirement or because they are good Samaritans, they will be passing the bulk of the cost along to the rest of us—and we're back to our current system of socializing the costs of treatments for the uninsured.
Of the Republican candidates, only Romney clearly supports a version of the first choice: the mandate. To his credit, the bill Romney signed in Massachusetts has led to his state having the lowest percentage of uninsured people in the country. Where his current position falls into absurdity is in its race for a federalist life-raft. Romney now says that states should come up with their own systems, the way his did. But each state having its own healthcare system would be the bureaucratic nightmare to end all nightmares.
And unless you believe all 50 states will embrace individual mandates (and many clearly will not), the costs produced by Blitzer's hypothetical young man will continue to be socialized – or they put him out on the street to die.
Jon Huntsman has moved from the first to the second category. He flip-flopped. In Utah, Huntsman preferred a plan with an individual mandate. But he lost that fight with his legislature. Without a mandate, his bill has been far less effective at covering the uninsured than the one in Massachusetts. Fourteen percent of Utah's population remains uninsured, compared with only 5 percent in Massachusetts. Huntsman touts his system as superior to Romney's because it has no mandate. But the real distinction is that in addition to not doing much for the uninsured, it continues to pass along their expenses to the rest of society.
Newt Gingrich's position is muddle and gibberish, if anyone even cares. Historically, Gingrich has supported an individual mandate. In May, he went on Meet the Press and told David Gregory that health insurance should be required, like automobile insurance. People should either buy it or "post a bond" (a version of a mandate). But then the right wing went nuts, and Gingrich posted a video saying, "I am against any effort to impose a federal mandate on anyone, because it is fundamentally wrong and, I believe, unconstitutional." He flip-flopped and kowtowed to the Teapublicans. But Gingrich will say whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear.
Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann seem to share some version of Ron Paul's libertarian position that death is a great instructor of personal responsibility. Details remain to be worked out around the disposal of corpses and the distribution of orphans. But theirs is definitely not a socialist approach.
It looks as if Alan Grayson (D-FL) was right when he said that the Republican healthcare plan was “die quickly”.
This is an edited copy of "Let Him Die"
from Slate Magazine
At that point, the audience erupted in cheers and whoops of "Yeah!"
This was indeed an appalling, mob-mentality moment – more Dark Ages, even, than the crowd applauding Gov. Rick Perry for winning the death-penalty derby at the previous debate. What it clarified was the absurdity of the healthcare positions of all of the Republican candidates. The GOP contenders relentlessly attack "Obamacare" as socialized medicine, but they will not speak of the other two choices available to us: the arguably more socialized system we presently live with or the Blitzer option of letting the uninsured die in the streets.
The first is a system with an individual mandate of the kind included in the Obama bill, or what Romney enacted in Massachusetts in 2006. Under this kind of system, individuals are not given a choice about whether to insure themselves. If they fail to meet the insurance requirement, they pay money, which you can call a fine or a tax, as you prefer. Under this alternative, the costs incurred by Blitzer's young man are not broadly socialized because they are covered by the fine on those who avoid signing up for insurance.
The second option is our current system, or other systems without mandates. In this universe, our hypothetical young man receives at least emergency care because hospitals are required to treat the urgently ill without regard for their ability to pay, thanks to a bill signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986. But the costs of his treatment are not absorbed by the hospitals. They are passed on to consumers, employers, and the government in the form of higher insurance premiums. One 2009 study estimated the cost absorbed by those who are insured for those who aren't at $1,100 per family. This is one of the ways in which the pre-Obama health care system is socialized—indirectly, inefficiently, and unfairly.
The third option is that of the Tampa Tea Party mob: Let the young man die! You can sugar-coat this, as Ron Paul tried to, by suggesting that private charity will step in to help. But we no longer have an extensive system of charity hospitals. If emergency rooms treat the uninsured, whether because of a legal requirement or because they are good Samaritans, they will be passing the bulk of the cost along to the rest of us—and we're back to our current system of socializing the costs of treatments for the uninsured.
Of the Republican candidates, only Romney clearly supports a version of the first choice: the mandate. To his credit, the bill Romney signed in Massachusetts has led to his state having the lowest percentage of uninsured people in the country. Where his current position falls into absurdity is in its race for a federalist life-raft. Romney now says that states should come up with their own systems, the way his did. But each state having its own healthcare system would be the bureaucratic nightmare to end all nightmares.
And unless you believe all 50 states will embrace individual mandates (and many clearly will not), the costs produced by Blitzer's hypothetical young man will continue to be socialized – or they put him out on the street to die.
Jon Huntsman has moved from the first to the second category. He flip-flopped. In Utah, Huntsman preferred a plan with an individual mandate. But he lost that fight with his legislature. Without a mandate, his bill has been far less effective at covering the uninsured than the one in Massachusetts. Fourteen percent of Utah's population remains uninsured, compared with only 5 percent in Massachusetts. Huntsman touts his system as superior to Romney's because it has no mandate. But the real distinction is that in addition to not doing much for the uninsured, it continues to pass along their expenses to the rest of society.
Newt Gingrich's position is muddle and gibberish, if anyone even cares. Historically, Gingrich has supported an individual mandate. In May, he went on Meet the Press and told David Gregory that health insurance should be required, like automobile insurance. People should either buy it or "post a bond" (a version of a mandate). But then the right wing went nuts, and Gingrich posted a video saying, "I am against any effort to impose a federal mandate on anyone, because it is fundamentally wrong and, I believe, unconstitutional." He flip-flopped and kowtowed to the Teapublicans. But Gingrich will say whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear.
Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann seem to share some version of Ron Paul's libertarian position that death is a great instructor of personal responsibility. Details remain to be worked out around the disposal of corpses and the distribution of orphans. But theirs is definitely not a socialist approach.
It looks as if Alan Grayson (D-FL) was right when he said that the Republican healthcare plan was “die quickly”.
This is an edited copy of "Let Him Die"
from Slate Magazine
Saturday, September 10, 2011
U.S. is spiraling into decline
The world leadership of the United States, once so prevalent, is fading fast. Our people no longer have the qualities it takes to lead the world. We once set the standard for industrial might but our manufacturing has been sent to third world countries for the sake of greater profits. We once set the standard for the advanced state of our infrastructure but we have allowed it to crumble while Asia and Europe build better highways and high speed rail. We once set the standards for an excellent education system but we no longer want to support our teachers or rebuild crumbling schools – having led the world in high school completion rates throughout the 20th century, the United States ranked 21st out of 27 advanced economies. Now we lay off teachers due to lack of money, pile too many students into the classrooms, including those who are incapable of learning much, and then expect the teacher and students to excel.
As for the quality of our citizens’ lives, we rank 17th in the world.
The United States is experiencing significant decline. According to the United States College Board, the U.S., once the world’s leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations. Eleven other nations have more 20- and 30-somethings with college degrees.
According to a report from the College Board, the U.S. ranks 12th among developed nations in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. The report said, “As America’s aging and highly educated work force moves into retirement, the nation will rely on young Americans to increase our standing in the world.” The problem is that today’s young Americans are not coming close to acquiring the education and training needed to carry out that mission. They’re not even in the ballpark. In that key group, the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with a college degree, the U.S. ranks behind Canada, South Korea, Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Israel, France, Belgium and Australia.
That is beyond pathetic.
Among high schoolers, the U.S. ranks 15th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math. While the nation struggles to strengthen the economy, the educational capacity of our country continues to decline.
Everybody is to blame – parents who do not discipline nor challenge their children; teachers who do not assign challenging homework or essays because they do not want to grade them; students who sign up for the easy courses in high school so that they are not “burdened” with homework; the educational establishment (teacher colleges and educational researchers) that keeps coming up with kooky ways to teach while ignoring Piaget’s findings on when students can learn what – forgetting the basics and introducing abstract concepts too soon; government leaders who think that all children, regardless of ability, can work on “grade level” by 2014; fundamentalists who demand that religious pseudoscience be taught in the schools instead of religious education being left to the church; the news media that compares the U.S. educational system where everyone, regardless of ability, must be taught in the same classroom to European and Asian schools that separate the gifted from the average from the below average and only test the gifted; and selfish communities who are unwilling to pay taxes to support their schools.
The old saying “you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink” comes to mind.
At a time when a college education is needed more than ever to establish and maintain a middle-class standard of living for the majority, America’s young people are moving in exactly the wrong direction! A well-educated population is crucially important if the U.S. is to succeed in an increasingly competitive global environment. But instead of exercising our minds, we are allowing ourselves to become a nation of the clueless, obsessed with the comings and goings of Lindsay Lohan and Snooki. U.S. citizens are increasingly oblivious to crucially important societal issues that are screaming for attention.
Instead of watching American idol, reality shows, and FOX (faux) “news”, our citizens should be doing something about the legions of jobless Americans, the deteriorating public schools, the debilitating wars, the scandalous economic inequality, the corporate hold on our government, the commercialization of the arts, and the deficits. Why is there not serious and widespread public engagement with these issues? That kind of engagement would lead to creative new ideas and would serve to enrich the lives of individual Americans and the nation as a whole. But it would require a heavy social and intellectual lift that our citizens do not want to do because it requires too much thinking, too much reading, too much participation – too much time. A majority of American citizens prefer to check their brains at the door and allow their fundamentalist, anti-education preachers and FOX entertainment “news” to pour in the “facts”. It is easier to do than to actually have to reason.
These are grim times in the United States. A child drops out of high school every 26 seconds. It is now expected that the educational level of the younger generation of Americans will not approach their parents’ level of education.
We are moving backwards.
What is the matter with us? Whatever happened to the American dream? In some states, the public schools were closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year for budget reasons. Why are we not willing to pay for good schools? We have foolishly applied the brakes to American education because we do not want to pay taxes to support it.
When this is the educational environment, you can say goodbye to the kind of cultural, scientific and economic achievements that make a nation great. The majority of our citizens read very little, cannot do math without a calculator, and write like uneducated third world hicks. We have increasingly turned our backs on the very idea of hard-won excellence and reward everyone for just showing up.
No wonder Lady Gaga and Snooki from “Jersey Shore” are cultural heroes.
The future of our country looks grim. A society that closes its eyes to the most important issues of the day, holds intellectual achievement in contempt, and is more interested in hip-hop and Lady Gaga than educating its young is absolutely guaranteed to spiral into a decline. The United States needs able and articulate men and women to stand up and reintroduce the American Dream, a dream that is dependent upon higher education.
Once a Leader, U.S. Lags in College Degrees
Closing the College Attainment Gap between the U.S. and Most Educated Countries
As for the quality of our citizens’ lives, we rank 17th in the world.
The United States is experiencing significant decline. According to the United States College Board, the U.S., once the world’s leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations. Eleven other nations have more 20- and 30-somethings with college degrees.
According to a report from the College Board, the U.S. ranks 12th among developed nations in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. The report said, “As America’s aging and highly educated work force moves into retirement, the nation will rely on young Americans to increase our standing in the world.” The problem is that today’s young Americans are not coming close to acquiring the education and training needed to carry out that mission. They’re not even in the ballpark. In that key group, the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with a college degree, the U.S. ranks behind Canada, South Korea, Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Israel, France, Belgium and Australia.
That is beyond pathetic.
Among high schoolers, the U.S. ranks 15th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math. While the nation struggles to strengthen the economy, the educational capacity of our country continues to decline.
Everybody is to blame – parents who do not discipline nor challenge their children; teachers who do not assign challenging homework or essays because they do not want to grade them; students who sign up for the easy courses in high school so that they are not “burdened” with homework; the educational establishment (teacher colleges and educational researchers) that keeps coming up with kooky ways to teach while ignoring Piaget’s findings on when students can learn what – forgetting the basics and introducing abstract concepts too soon; government leaders who think that all children, regardless of ability, can work on “grade level” by 2014; fundamentalists who demand that religious pseudoscience be taught in the schools instead of religious education being left to the church; the news media that compares the U.S. educational system where everyone, regardless of ability, must be taught in the same classroom to European and Asian schools that separate the gifted from the average from the below average and only test the gifted; and selfish communities who are unwilling to pay taxes to support their schools.
The old saying “you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink” comes to mind.
At a time when a college education is needed more than ever to establish and maintain a middle-class standard of living for the majority, America’s young people are moving in exactly the wrong direction! A well-educated population is crucially important if the U.S. is to succeed in an increasingly competitive global environment. But instead of exercising our minds, we are allowing ourselves to become a nation of the clueless, obsessed with the comings and goings of Lindsay Lohan and Snooki. U.S. citizens are increasingly oblivious to crucially important societal issues that are screaming for attention.
Instead of watching American idol, reality shows, and FOX (faux) “news”, our citizens should be doing something about the legions of jobless Americans, the deteriorating public schools, the debilitating wars, the scandalous economic inequality, the corporate hold on our government, the commercialization of the arts, and the deficits. Why is there not serious and widespread public engagement with these issues? That kind of engagement would lead to creative new ideas and would serve to enrich the lives of individual Americans and the nation as a whole. But it would require a heavy social and intellectual lift that our citizens do not want to do because it requires too much thinking, too much reading, too much participation – too much time. A majority of American citizens prefer to check their brains at the door and allow their fundamentalist, anti-education preachers and FOX entertainment “news” to pour in the “facts”. It is easier to do than to actually have to reason.
These are grim times in the United States. A child drops out of high school every 26 seconds. It is now expected that the educational level of the younger generation of Americans will not approach their parents’ level of education.
We are moving backwards.
What is the matter with us? Whatever happened to the American dream? In some states, the public schools were closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year for budget reasons. Why are we not willing to pay for good schools? We have foolishly applied the brakes to American education because we do not want to pay taxes to support it.
When this is the educational environment, you can say goodbye to the kind of cultural, scientific and economic achievements that make a nation great. The majority of our citizens read very little, cannot do math without a calculator, and write like uneducated third world hicks. We have increasingly turned our backs on the very idea of hard-won excellence and reward everyone for just showing up.
No wonder Lady Gaga and Snooki from “Jersey Shore” are cultural heroes.
The future of our country looks grim. A society that closes its eyes to the most important issues of the day, holds intellectual achievement in contempt, and is more interested in hip-hop and Lady Gaga than educating its young is absolutely guaranteed to spiral into a decline. The United States needs able and articulate men and women to stand up and reintroduce the American Dream, a dream that is dependent upon higher education.
Once a Leader, U.S. Lags in College Degrees
Closing the College Attainment Gap between the U.S. and Most Educated Countries
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