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

To: neolib who wrote (236889)	11/5/2013 8:08:00 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542011

The fact is, medicine has been allowed to become ruinously expensive here because we've never regulated it. Just heard on the radio that you can fly to France and get a hip replacement for $13k, where here it's more like $100k. Let's fly all our hip replacements to France!

To: neolib who wrote (236889)	11/5/2013 9:39:24 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542011

The premiums aren't zero sum. There are additional taxes that pay for a substantial sum of the projected subsidies. The taxes are on a variety of items and institutions--medical devices (deemed fair because they will see a lot more business with the additional insured), tanning salons, hospitals, and others that I am forgetting off-hand. The fact is that the insurance companies are playing the game of "Let's raise the rates as high as we can now, because we will be restricted later on", and of course blaming it on Obamacare, either explicitly or implicitly. In one example given a day or two ago, a guy was told that his rates increased by about $300/month due to the necessity of covering maternity care. This is ridiculous nonsense, as anyone with a brain who hasn't become rabidly opposed to Obamacare will see if he just exercises his brain for a few minutes.

To: neolib who wrote (236889)	11/6/2013 6:25:54 AM
From: Bread Upon The Water	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542011

And one way to start is for the President to make good on his promise through a tax adjustment for the self-employed being forced into higher premium policies. It won't work. The real problem with ACA is that all of its "successes" are based on giving people more than what they pay for. All the success stories reported in the media are just that, and none of them note that if this person got a much better deal than they had before, than someone must be paying for it. What is funny is the dismissing of the 5-6% who are getting reamed as only a small fraction of the population. Fine, but if they are the only ones with cost going up significantly, then its this small fraction that is footing the bill for all the others windfall. Which of course isn't true either. The 5-6% with their increased cost can't support all the others windfalls, so the cost will in fact shortly ratchet up for everyone again. Which will be another dose of reality checking for the ACA. I'm not sure allowing a dollar for dollar tax credit for those 5-6% who face significant premiums increases wouldn't work. For sure, it would work politically and help heal the credibility rift that I see developing with regard to the WH. However, you could be right inasmuch it might open a whole lot of cans of unforeseen worms. (Well, if you bail out this group then what about this group etc.) I do think that this 5-6% probably has far more "clout" than just their numbers as self-employed people by nature tend to be well connected and well versed in civic affairs. And the lingering resentment of a broken promise will continue to haunt the Dems going forward and that is why I think they have to try to address this.