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

To: Sam who wrote (134332)	3/23/2010 2:58:21 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 542961

What choice do most people have right now? The choice is determined by the institution they work for. Now the insurance exchanges will give people more choices than that. I take your point re the range of options offered by employers. But most employer-provided coverage isn't supposed to be affected by this legislation so that's not on the table here. Even if it were, since the employers are doing most of the paying, your liberty is constrained only to the extent that you pay. Be that as it may, I discussed upthread at great length the exchanges and what choices would be available there. To the best of my understanding, you get to choose only the percentage of co-insurance. You can't choose catastrophic only, for example, to get a better price. You can't choose a smaller basket of benefits to get a better price. While you may have limited choice now, there will be fewer options on the exchanges. Which is why I put this in on the less-choice side of the ledger. Some states already constrain policy offerings so their people may not experience reduced liberty but but many do not. There's loss of liberty whenever alternatives are no longer available. I don't see "fewer treatments and other health products" as always a bad thing- I don't disagree, but we were addressing more vs less liberty, not good vs bad. Fewer products definitely means less liberty, even if one might consider that to sometimes be a good thing. For one thing, it won't do anything to constrain the myriad alternative medical remedies that are available today that insurance doesn't pay for. That's outside the scope of this legislation so not a factor here. I don't see this as necessarily following from hcr. Sure it will. A big part of the legislation is to get rid of products that the powers-that-be deem ineffective or not cost effective or unnecessary. Maybe they'll still be available if you pay for them yourself, if enough people are willing to pay for them to create a market for them, but your access to them will be limited. I suppose you could say that higher taxes constrains freedom because you will have less money. You suppose? <g> Since I will no longer be able to deduct medical expenses, for example, I won't have the freedom to use that money for a vacation, instead. Of course raising taxes constrains your freedom. Someone else is deciding where your money is best spent. Again, some might consider that to be a good thing but it is, nonetheless, clearly a loss of freedom.