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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Travis_Bickle who wrote (51989)	3/5/2008 10:51:22 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542788

Who can afford that? Good question. An even better question, though, IMO, is who can afford to pay enough extra in income taxes to pay that for the fifty percent or so of Americans who pay no income tax and the nearly ninety percent who don't pay enough in income tax to pay their own premiums let alone the premiums of others and all the other stuff for which income tax has been used. That's a really long sentence. Let me try it from another angle. In discussions with a Canadian poster, I tried applying the Canadian model to a US single payer system straight up. My numbers are rough as computed on the back of an envelope by yours truly. The results, though, are shocking. The entire burden of health care would have to be borne by the top ten or so percent or so of tax payers. Even if my rough numbers are off by 100%, we're still looking at three quarters of the country on the dole. And they vote.

To: Travis_Bickle who wrote (51989)	3/5/2008 10:59:42 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542788

Lots of people can afford that. But for many it would impact their lifestyle. I already have insurance, but lets say I needed to pay that much extra (or my employer stopped providing insurance, without giving me more cash, effectively cutting my pay) Well it would be hard, but that's because of the decisions I made based on the fact that I would already have insurance. If I knew that I'd have to pay that much, I could have bought a used car rather than my above average cost (over $30k) new car. And I'm not wealthy, I have a lower income than the average for my area. Which doesn't mean there wouldn't be people who can't afford it, I'm just pointing out you don't have to be rich to afford insurance costing that much. It might have to rearrange spending priorities in ways that some people don't want to do, but I'd push people to change their lifestyle a bit before I'd force the taxpayer to pay for it. (And of course if the taxpayer is paying for it, its not like the cost goes away or can be ignored)